AIPAC and Israel

The Rosen-Weismann Scandal Sheds Light on the Complex Relationship Between the Lobby and Israel

Nathan Guttman

It all began with a phone call. On July 21, 2004 Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, two senior staff members of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), telephoned Naor Gilon, the political officer at the Israeli embassy in Washington, DC. Rosen and Weissman gave Gilon detailed and disturbing information they had just received from a source deep inside the Pentagon: Iranian militants were planning to abduct and kill Israeli agents operating covertly in the Kurdish region of Iraq. What none of the men on the phone knew was that their Pentagon source—Larry Franklin—had been ensnared by an FBI investigation into leaks of classified information. He was co-operating with the probe, and the two AIPAC employees had fallen into a trap.

This chain of events is at the core of the federal indictment against Rosen and Weissman. Rosen, 63, and Weissman, 54, are the first two civilians to be prosecuted under the rarely used Article 793 of the 1917 Espionage Act, which makes it a criminal offense to obtain national defense information even if one is not a government employee and even if the information is transmitted orally. Their trial is scheduled to begin in August, and Franklin, who has since signed a plea agreement with the prosecution and has been sentenced to more than 12 years in prison, is expected to testify against the two former lobbyists. Despite their claim that this kind of information exchange is a daily routine in the Washington lobbying world, AIPAC fired both men in an effort to distance itself from what it prefers to call “the Franklin affair” but is known in Washington parlance as “the AIPAC affair.”

The fallout from the case, which sheds considerable light on the complex, sometimes troubled relationship between Israel and AIPAC, has the potential to redefine the way that the Jewish state and the storied lobby operate in Washington. It is an alliance that has endured rough spots over the last three decades, say current and former Israeli officials and AIPAC employees, many of whom requested anonymity.

Despite frustrations on both sides, one cannot do without the other. For activists in the pro-Israel lobby, the state of Israel, no matter what policy it pursues, must be protected at any cost. For Israel, AIPAC is much more than a cheerleader: It is a vital instrument to ensure America’s ongoing support.

“We need you more than ever,” former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told AIPAC members at their 2005 annual gathering. Several years earlier former Prime Minister Ehud Barak thanked AIPAC activists for “speaking out loud and clear” and his predecessor, Benjamin Netanyahu, had done the same a year earlier. Newly elected Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said this spring, “Thank God we have AIPAC, the greatest supporter and friend that we have in the whole world.”

The pro-Israeli lobby was established in 1951 by the late Isaiah “Si” Kenen as the American Zionist Committee for Public Affairs—and renamed AIPAC in 1954. Kenen viewed his small lobbying operation as a means to enlist the growing pro-Zionist sentiments of the American Jewish community in an effort to assist the state of Israel. The fresh memory of the Holocaust and the inability of U.S. Jews to push their government into action fueled the creation of the new group. The mild-mannered Kenen said he wanted to counter American “petro-dollar diplomacy,” meaning the pro-Arab tilt of the State Department and Pentagon, which viewed the oil-rich Arab states as the most important interest in the region. Kenen hoped that lobbying Congress directly could help Israel overcome the reluctance of the State Department to assist the young state.

Kenen ran AIPAC as a one-man show. In his book Jewish Power, J.J. Goldberg writes that “over time, Kenen became something of a legend.” Kenen, who “knew how to get along with people,” based the lobbying operation on his personal ties to Jewish and pro-Jewish lawmakers. When that was not enough, he made use of his hand-written list of “key contacts,” which Goldberg describes as “several hundred Jewish community leaders around the country who were able and willing to get their representatives on the phone.”

Lobbying for Israel was much simpler then. Kenen once said he did not spend much time on Capitol Hill because “there is so much support for Israel that I don’t have to.” He maintained good ties with both Democrats and Republicans, focusing on those in leadership positions, and relied on them to convey the needed message on Israel. Author Hedrick Smith writes in his book The Power Game: How Washington Works, of one instance, after the Yom Kippur War erupted, when Israel needed immediate American support. Kenen took a draft resolution directly to Senators Hubert Humphrey, a Democrat, and Hugh Scott, a Republican, and it passed within days.

Kenen spent much of his time establishing AIPAC’s Near East Report, which covered important developments in the region. The publication was the arena in which Kenen clashed with the late columnist Rowland Evans, whose column “Inside Report,” co-written with Robert Novak, was syndicated nationwide. Kenen complained that Evans had falsely reported on an Israeli request for increased U.S. financial aid. After weeks of writing on the issue, Evans finally agreed to retract his story, and Si Kenen went into history as the Jewish leader who laid the cornerstone not only for pro-Israel lobbying but also for media surveillance on behalf of the Jewish state.

By the time Kenen stepped down as executive director in 1974, the lobby had 17 employees. Morris Amitay, a former State Department official and congressional staffer, took over after Kenen. “We were lean and mean,” Amitay says of AIPAC at the time. Believing that the issues AIPAC deals with are too complex for a lay-leadership board, Amitay tried to keep the organization “staff-run,” as he phrases it.

In short order, AIPAC ballooned into an über-lobby, exceeding Kenen’s and Amitay’s wildest dreams, with an annual budget of over $40 million and 100,000 members from across the United States. In a recent survey of congressional staffers, AIPAC was listed as the second most effective lobby in Washington, after only the AARP. According to AIPAC, its annual policy conference is one of Washington’s largest gatherings of lawmakers, topped only by the President’s State of the Union address. Guests this year included two-thirds of the House, half the Senate, and Vice President Richard Cheney. “All of us share a fundamental belief—that the freedom and security of Israel are vital interests to the United States of America,” Cheney told the cheering AIPAC members, and he made the next day’s headlines by stating that “all options are on the table” when it comes to Iran’s nuclear program.

Up until the early ’80s, AIPAC and Israel enjoyed a relatively stress-free relationship. AIPAC concentrated on congressional lobbying, making sure that Israel received its foreign aid package and working to thwart U.S. arms deals with Arab countries that would endanger Israel’s qualitative military edge in the region. Meanwhile, Israel focused on the executive branch—the White House, State Department and Pentagon—on policy issues and regional problems.

The first point of friction between Israel and AIPAC was the lobby’s decision, led by new recruit Steve Rosen, to begin lobbying not only Congress but the executive branch as well. Rosen, who joined AIPAC in 1982, opened the doors of the executive branch to pro-Israel advocates and established himself as the go-to man on any policy issue having to do with the Middle East. This shift in tactics irritated Israeli diplomats and foreign ministry officials, who considered the executive branch their exclusive turf.

Born and raised in New York, Rosen grew up in a communist-friendly household. He began drifting from his liberal roots after college while teaching political science at the University of Pittsburgh. The young professor who had attended rallies against the war in Vietnam gradually adopted more conservative politics. His strong identification with Israel developed after a visit there following the Yom Kippur War. He told The New York Sun that the Israeli people “stood tall and proud,” and compared them favorably to what he described as the neurotic Woody Allen-esque Jews he grew up with back home. Rosen’s academic career took him from Pittsburgh to Brandeis, where his students included the young Thomas Friedman, now The New York Times foreign affairs columnist. Eventually Rosen joined the Rand Corporation. From there, he was recruited by AIPAC to be director of research.

Rosen stood out in the Washington scene not only for his direct and sometimes undiplomatic use of language, and for his unorthodox lifestyle—he has been married six times and now lives with his first wife—but rather for his numerous high-level contacts. A profile in The Forward called the white-haired lobbyist a “rainmaker” and a “master of the art of schmooze.” The same story, published over a year ago, went on to describe Rosen’s “confrontational and abrasive demeanor,” his “secretive method of operation” and his “overreaching power.”

He made use of his gifts both inside and outside the organization. He forged friendships with decision-makers in the executive branch and with many of AIPAC’s donors and board members. In the process, he may have amassed more power than any lobbyist in the capital, even venturing beyond advocacy to policy-making. In 2003, for example, Rosen—who was one of the initiators of the law that imposed sanctions on Iran and Libya—met secretly with a senior staffer from the House of Representatives and with the son of Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi in Europe. That meeting paved the way for Libya’s agreement to give up its nuclear program in return for the lifting of American sanctions.

Rosen’s idea of lobbying the executive branch came on the heels of one of the group’s greatest failures. In 1980, the Carter administration agreed to sell five advanced surveillance planes, known as AWACS, to Saudi Arabia. Israel claimed such a deal would endanger the regional balance and must be opposed, and AIPAC urged Congress to block the sale. When Ronald Reagan became president, he supported the deal, placing him at loggerheads with AIPAC. Although AIPAC failed to prevent the sale from going through, the lobby emerged with a new reputation as a major powerhouse in Washington.

The loss led AIPAC, under the leadership of Tom Dine, a liberal Democrat who had been chosen to head the organization during the Carter years, to transform itself from a Washington-based advocacy group to a grass-roots membership organization. The lobby also decided to take Rosen’s advice and start working the executive branch as well as Capitol Hill. Not everyone embraced this decision wholeheartedly. Morris Amitay, former executive director of AIPAC, is cautious in his appraisal of the effectiveness of lobbying the executive branch. “It can be all right, as long as it does not divert resources from the main effort in Congress.” he says. Regardless, from that point on, AIPAC lobbied both branches, and the results were dramatic.

It wasn’t just AIPAC that was changing. Since Israel’s founding, Labor has been the dominant party. But in 1977, Menachem Begin’s Likud party came to power and the government began actively promoting Jewish settlements in the West Bank and Gaza. This was the first of many swings between Labor and Likud, the former seen as the party of territorial compromise and the latter as the party of “greater Israel.”
The new Likud government wanted AIPAC to support settlements but AIPAC declined to take a stand. “When Begin and [then] Shamir asked AIPAC to support Jews’ right to live in the territories, it didn’t happen,” says Morton Klein, head of the Zionist Organization of America, who is a member of AIPAC’s executive committee and a settlement supporter. “AIPAC never supported the settlements, claiming that its board was divided on this issue.”

In 1983, after Begin stepped down, a national unity government ruled for four years, with Labor’s Shimon Peres (1984-86) and Likud’s Yitzhak Shamir (1986-92) taking turns as prime minister. “It was difficult enough to shift from Labor to Likud, and then it was even harder to shift back,” says a former activist who was involved with AIPAC at the time. “The Israelis never understood that we can’t make the switch as fast as they do. We had to build a new leadership.”

This led to a much more serious clash in 1987 after Shamir replaced Peres as prime minister. Without consulting Shamir, Peres—then foreign minister and the leading figure in Israel’s peace camp—flew to London for a secret meeting with Jordan’s King Hussein. Knowing that Shamir would not approve, he signed a secret agreement with Hussein under which Israel would agree to withdraw from most of the West Bank and Jordan would sign a peace treaty with Israel.

Peres knew that the only way to win Shamir’s approval would be for his secret accord to receive America’s blessing. So he flew to Washington to meet with Reagan’s secretary of state, George Schultz. At the same time, he dispatched his adviser Nimrod Novik to brief AIPAC’s leadership on the accord. According to former employees who attended the event, one of the staffers at the meeting phoned a Shamir aide and leaked Peres’ secret plan to him. Shamir made it clear he would not support the accord. Sources in AIPAC claim that Novik had many meetings with Jewish groups in Washington and that it is “silly” to blame AIPAC for the leak.
Schultz decided it would be best not to get involved, and the London accord died. AIPAC’s relations with Peres soured, although the lobby maintained excellent relationships with other Israeli leaders, such as Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s ambassador to the United Nations from 1984 to 1988. “Bibi had this great ability to talk like an American and to think like an American,” a former AIPAC employee recalls. Netanyahu forged bonds with Christian evangelicals and became a close ally of future House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Although the Clinton administration later staunchly supported Labor governments, Netanyahu viewed the U.S. Congress as a place to advance the Likud agenda when the party was out of power.

In 1991, Israel, trying to absorb hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, asked the United States for $10 billion in loan guarantees. The George H. W. Bush administration agreed on the condition that Israel not use the money to build in the territories. Prime Minister Shamir refused. Though AIPAC believed it would have little impact, Israeli diplomats in Washington went to work and managed to get 70 U.S. senators to sign a letter in support of the loan guarantees. “In this case, AIPAC understood the administration much better than Israel,” says David Twersky of the American Jewish Congress. Moshe Katsav, then an Israeli cabinet minister, came to Washington and blamed AIPAC leaders for not pressuring the administration to approve the loans.

In 1992, Shamir was defeated for re-election by Labor’s Yitzhak Rabin, a hero of the 1967 war who enjoyed strong public support in the face of Israeli disenchantment with Likud. Rabin flew to Kennebunkport, Maine, for a meeting with President Bush and secured the loan guarantee by promising not to use the money to build settlements.

Never a fan of American Jewish organizations, Rabin went on to Washington, where he could barely contain his anger at AIPAC. “You’ve aroused too much antagonism,” Rabin told stunned AIPAC leaders in 1992, referring to their role in the dispute between Shamir and Bush. Though the meeting was held behind closed doors, Steven Rosenthal, in his book Irreconcilable Differences? The Waning of the American Jewish Love Affair with Israel, provides an account of Rabin’s attack: “You make too many enemies for yourselves and your record is poor.”

Rabin also accused AIPAC of being pro-Likud and undermining Labor. He was upset about the London Accord incident and about reports from Labor officials who complained that they did not receive as warm a welcome as Likud members when visiting the American capital. He threatened that AIPAC would no longer be Israel’s main lobbying arm in the United States, a threat he later retracted after talking with several moderate board members.

One former AIPAC official who took part in the discussion confirms that Rabin was furious. But he stresses that the prime minister did not ask for AIPAC to support Labor, only to stop lobbying the executive branch. Another former official claims that what infuriated Rabin was his perception that AIPAC was helping Republicans in Congress who wanted to undermine President Clinton. Though the reasons for the clash remain in dispute, the bottom line is clear: Rabin was displeased with AIPAC’s actions and wanted to diminish its role in U.S.-Israel relations.

The next day, during a meeting with the leaders of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, Rabin was less agitated, but he reiterated his policy regarding the pro-Israel lobby: “Israel will make its own decisions when it comes to peace and settlements.”
“This was the first sabra prime minister Israel had ever had and he wanted to cut loose from the ancient Jewish notion of shtadlanut [Jews lobbying the courts of power in medieval times],” says M.J. Rosenberg, who once worked for AIPAC and is now with the Israel Policy Forum, a dovish Jewish organization that advocates for a peace based on a two-state solution.

In September of 1993, Rabin stunned Israel supporters in the United States, and indeed the world when he flew to Washington to sign the Oslo Accords and shake hands with Yasser Arafat in the White House Rose Garden. The Israeli decision to talk to the Palestinian Liberation Organization as part of the Oslo negotiations, accept Arafat as a partner and commit to withdrawing from the territories shocked AIPAC’s leaders. “Howard Kohr [deputy director at the time and now AIPAC’s executive director] phoned me from Rabin’s office in Jerusalem and said, ‘Hold on to your chair,’” recalls a former high-ranking official at AIPAC. “The only thing I could say when I heard about the agreement was, ‘Oh, my God!’”

Within hours AIPAC staff began to prepare position papers for board members to explain the new Israeli policy and convince them to support it. “It was a hard sell,” says the former official. Until that day, the lobby had played a leading role in blocking American ties with the PLO. AIPAC had been responsible for the “Levine amendment,” which set strict conditions for the United States when negotiating with the PLO. AIPAC leaders viewed the amendment as a major boost for Israeli policy.

AIPAC publicly voiced support for Israel’s decision to move toward a peace accord with the Palestinians. But in practice, it focused its efforts on legislation limiting American assistance to the emerging Palestinian Authority. AIPAC disagrees with this portrayal of events. “AIPAC was actually supporting the Palestinians getting money as long as they lived up to their obligations,” insists a current AIPAC employee who asked not to be identified. “We were the only body working in Washington to get money for them.”

In 1995, Rabin and AIPAC clashed again, this time over a bill that called for the U.S. Embassy to be moved from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Neal Sher, a Democrat, was then AIPAC’s executive director, with Howard Kohr as his deputy. As Sher tells it, it is a tale in which domestic politics influenced foreign policy to yield legislation that neither Israel nor the United States wanted.

It began when Republicans, led by House Speaker Gingrich, saw the embassy move as an opportunity to gain support from Jewish voters and hurt the Clinton administration at the same time. Rabin and Israel were hesitant, fearing that such a move would hinder the Oslo peace process. Israel, however, could not publicly disagree with a bill intended to bolster the international recognition of Jerusalem as its capital.
As a result, Sher says, AIPAC decided to take a middle road—to support a non-binding resolution in Congress in favor of the embassy relocation. But Republican Senator Bob Dole had just announced his intention to run for his party’s nomination for president in 1996. He was to speak at AIPAC’s 1995 annual policy conference in Washington, at which Rabin was the keynote speaker. A few days before the conference, Dole decided to introduce a bill calling for the relocation of the embassy. For Dole, this was clearly a way to reach out to Jewish voters, especially since he had previously opposed a similar bill presented by Democratic lawmakers.

According to Sher, it was the conservative Kohr who encouraged Dole to introduce the bill, despite the fact that the lobby had decided not to endorse it. In essence, says Sher, Kohr forced AIPAC and Rabin to support a bill that they did not want. “My first instinct was to fire Kohr on the spot,” he says, but he didn’t. For the Clinton administration, the bill, which passed in both houses with huge majorities a few months later, was a cause for alarm. Moving the American embassy to Jerusalem would thrust the United States into the midst of the most contentious issue between the Israelis and the Palestinians: the future of Jerusalem.

“This was all done for American domestic politics, not anything else,” Sher concludes. But the Jerusalem Embassy Act made little difference on the ground. President Clinton later issued a waiver postponing its implementation. George W. Bush did exactly the same when he became president, though he had vowed during the 2000 campaign to begin moving the embassy as soon as he took office. The bill’s only vestige is the need to sign such a waiver every six months.

M.J. Rosenberg of the Israel Policy Forum sees parallels between the Jerusalem Act debate in 1995 and current discussions on legislation to cut off aid to the Hamas-led Palestinian Authority. He claims that in both cases, Israel would have preferred to see a more moderate approach, but domestic American political issues forced AIPAC to take a harder line than the Israeli government. AIPAC sees the event as a case in which Congress ran ahead with legislation that the lobby simply could not resist. “How could we possibly not support that?” says an AIPAC staffer looking back at the events.

In a statement issued by spokesman Josh Block, AIPAC says that it is inaccurate to suggest that there are differences between the lobby and Israel on issues of policy. “Some with particularly left or right views promote a false, revisionist history for their own purposes,” Block says. “The fact remains that AIPAC represents the centrist consensus views of the overwhelming majority of Americans who stand behind Israel in its search for peace.”

Once the second intifada began in 2000, relations between AIPAC and Israel improved: AIPAC lobbied actively in the United States to support Israel’s struggles against terrorism. But friction resurfaced in 2004 when Ariel Sharon presented a plan for unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and several settlements in the West Bank. Once again AIPAC was taken by surprise.

“There was a crisis, but not a deep one,” says one former senior employee, who was confronted by angry AIPAC members threatening to leave the organization if it supported withdrawal. “I told them,” he says, “that they are entitled to have a different view and that I myself don’t always agree, but that it is up to the people of Israel to decide what risks they are willing to take.”

AIPAC put out a memo in favor of disengagement, but it took almost a year to translate that support into action. It wasn’t until the 2005 policy conference that AIPAC endorsed the plan and supported a watered-down congressional resolution that praised Sharon’s decision.

To date, there is no clear answer to the question of what led the FBI to investigate AIPAC’s relationship with Larry Franklin. There are three schools of thought. One is that the Bush administration asked the FBI to target leaks and that Franklin, who didn’t keep his ties with the lobbyists a secret, was an easy target. Another is that the FBI had been following Israeli diplomats ever since Jonathan Pollard, a civilian analyst for the U.S. Navy, was convicted of spying for Israel. The third is that AIPAC itself was a target because it had grown so powerful.

Whatever the reason, AIPAC fired Rosen and Weissman, claiming they had breached the lobby’s guidelines by accepting classified information from Franklin. It wasn’t an easy decision for Kohr, executive director since 1996. He was recruited to AIPAC from the Republican Jewish Coalition by Steve Rosen, and was close to him, both personally and ideologically.

The firings are seen as an attempt to save the organization from being dragged into the case, but the episode has already forced AIPAC to be much more cautious in its dealings with Israel. These largely symbolic attempts reached their climax at the 2005 annual policy conference, where for the first time organizers decided to sing only “The Star Spangled Banner” and skip “Ha’Tikva,” the Israeli national anthem, which traditionally followed. This drew harsh criticism from the Jewish press and Jewish activists. At the 2006 annual conference “Ha’Tikva” was back, with 5,000 AIPAC members singing it at full blast.

Israel, too, has made an effort to distance itself from the Franklin affair for fear of damaging its relationship with the United States. Ever since the Pollard case, Israel has done its best to maintain its image as a trustworthy ally. Israeli prime ministers have explicitly directed intelligence services not to spy in the United States and Israel has tried to avoid—though not always successfully—clashes between the military establishments of both countries over arms sales.

Israel claims that Naor Gilon’s meetings with Franklin and his conversations with Rosen and Weissman were no more than standard procedure for a Washington-based diplomat. Gilon and the two other Israeli diplomats mentioned in the indictment have returned to Israel and have refused to testify in the trial or to provide the defense with depositions.

Israel has a fairly small operation in Washington, with only three diplomats in charge of the political department and two responsible for dealing with Congress. To get its issues before Congress, Israel relies heavily on AIPAC. The lobby reaches every politician in his or her home state and in Washington, and has a personal relationship with nearly every foreign affairs staffer on the Hill. In essence, Israel has outsourced its political outreach in the United States to AIPAC, counting on the lobby to ensure aid, backing in the conflict with the Palestinians and support for Israeli defense projects.

The relationship can be legally tricky. The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA) requires that any lobby working in the service of a foreign entity must register with the Department of Justice and be subject to routine reporting of its actions. This means that AIPAC is not allowed to receive money, guidance or requests from Israel’s government if it wants to continue to avoid FARA registration.

The fear of FARA is present during any conversation between Israeli diplomats and AIPAC officials. Israelis are always happy to receive information that comes through AIPAC from its connections in Congress and the administration, but are much more cautious the other way around.

“We have a way to talk,” says a former Israeli diplomat who dealt with AIPAC and Congress. “We make sure not to use phrases like ‘We would like you to do so and so,’ but rather, ‘It is in Israel’s interest that so and so will take place.’”

“We do not represent Israel,” stresses a former AIPAC staffer, “and if they [the Israelis] speak to us in a language of guidance we stop them on the spot.” This former staffer says this rarely happens, but another former staff member recalls slamming the phone on an Israeli official from the Shamir government who asked him to “create a firestorm” in Congress over the Reagan administration’s plans to begin a dialogue with the PLO.

“The main problem with the Israelis,” says this former staffer, “is that they think we are working for them.” The other former staff member adds, “This is a schizophrenic relationship—on the one hand they [the Israelis] want to control us, and on the other hand they want us to be out of control and do things they can’t do themselves.”

Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Daniel Ayalon, says that Israel always views AIPAC as an American organization and treats it as one. Ayalon says there are clear lines that are never crossed with AIPAC or any other organization. “We keep on working with AIPAC in all aspects and in all intensity as in the past,” he adds. “Nothing has changed.”

The friction between moderate Israeli governments and AIPAC has had one unexpected outcome about which both parties are pleased: American focus on Iran’s nuclear program.

The attention to Iran arose out of the clash between Rabin and AIPAC. After his 1992 visit, Rabin developed an idea that would harness AIPAC’s power to the benefit of Israeli policy, while keeping the lobby as far as possible from the peace process. According to senior Israeli officials and former AIPAC officials, Rabin made the group’s leadership aware of Iranian attempts to acquire nuclear weapons, an issue that at the time was off the U.S. radar screen. “Rabin put us on the Iranian issue,” a former official recalls.

AIPAC pursued its new mission tirelessly. Within a year it became the loudest voice in Washington against Iran. The lobby pushed for the Iran Lybia Sanctions Act, which called for sanctions against the two countries because of their nuclear programs and pushed the administration to take a tough stand. Israeli governments have been pleased with the role AIPAC has played in the Iranian issue and credit its work as one of the reasons that Iran now tops America’s national security agenda.

AIPAC put its best people on the Iran issue: policy director Steve Rosen and the Middle East specialist Keith Weissman. The two made it a point to get to know anyone who had anything to do with Iran. This vigorous pursuit is what led them to Larry Franklin, setting off the chain of events that may well end at U.S. District Court in Alexandria.

If the Rosen-Weissman case goes to trial, it is likely to draw unwanted attention to the lobby and its relations with Israel. Former executive director Neal Sher says that AIPAC has much to fear from the facts and testimony that will be disclosed. “After that,” he says, “those who are active against AIPAC can take the testimony and go with it to the Department of Justice with a request to change AIPAC’s status [to that of a Foreign Agent].”

It is worth noting that the Department of Justice does not see the case as a FARA issue, and is not investigating any alleged breach of the foreign agents act. But that is not to say that AIPAC is in the clear.

In a 10-page letter to AIPAC board members, sent this February, Neal Sher warns that the FARA issue is the lobby’s “most significant concern.” If it is forced to register as a foreign agent, Sher wrote, that would “effectively be the death knell for the organization.”