In our latest Just World Podcasts episode @helenacobban reflects on her interview with a former Exec. Director of #AIPAC. He was having second thoughts about his work there. Listen to the whole episode here and read an excerpt below: buzzsprout.com/2366/976358-st… #StandWithIlhan
"A few years ago, I got the chance to write a short profile for @thenation, of a man called Tom Dine. From 1980 through 1993, Dine was the Executive Director of AIPAC, which since its founding in the post-“Suez” era had focused on... thenation.com/article/confes…
building and keeping rock-solid support for Israel in the legislative branch. Those were the years, in the mid-1980s, when Ross and Indyk were founding their WINEP think-tank, with lots of support from AIPAC.
When I was interviewing Dine in the late aughts, he expressed some wonder at the amount of access he had enjoyed, during his years as head of AIPAC, to leaders in all the branches of government.
He also reflected on the fact that WINEP’s success in, in effect, capturing so much power within the executive branch changed the dynamic of pro-Israel organizing in Washington, considerably.
“AIPAC,” he told me at one point, “had been founded on the idea that if there were another Suez-type confrontation between the executive branch and Israel, then this time Congress would be able to weigh in on Israel’s side much more strongly and effectively than they did in 1956.
But by the 1990s, the pro-Israel side had won control of the executive branch as well, regarding Middle East affairs, so everything became a lot simpler from then on.”
For the record, I should note that Tom Dine is one of a small number of former, high-level AIPAC staffers who, after leaving the organization, had some second thoughts about the things they’d done while they were still in it.
These people generally only express their regrets very discreetly. But from what I’ve been able to learn by talking with such “recovering AIPAC-ers”, their regrets generally track closely with the fact that over that whole period they were inside and then outside AIPAC...
...the politics of the State of Israel were veering sharply to the right. The people who lead AIPAC today are far more in sync with the aggressive and expansionist policies of Benjamin #Netanyahu than Tom Dine or other “recovering AIPAC-ers” like MJ Rosenberg ever were."
To hear the rest, listen to the podcast episode by clicking the link below or finding "Just World Podcasts" on iTunes, Soundcloud, or wherever you find your podcasts: buzzsprout.com/2366/976358-st… #IStandWithIlhan
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