Before we start, we should briefly discuss how AIPAC got founded. The Washington Post has a timely article on the events that led up to the organization’s creation.
In the fall of 1953, Eisenhower briefly suspended the delivery of U.S. aid to Israel after it violated the terms of a U.N.-brokered armistice agreement with Syria by venturing into a demilitarized zone to try to divert the waters of the Jordan River. Eisenhower and Dulles resolved to use their leverage to get Israel to back off. However, Israel and the United States apparently agreed to keep Eisenhower’s action quiet in hopes of a quick resolution.
But on Oct. 15, 1953, all hell broke loose. News spread that a special Israeli army unit had struck into the Jordanian-occupied West Bank and committed a massacre in the Palestinian village of Qibya, killing more than 60 civilians indiscriminately in retaliation for the murder of a Jewish woman and her two children in Israel on the night of Oct. 12.
The strike reflected Israeli policy. Ever since the end of the 1948 war, Palestinians had frequently crossed the so-called “Green Line” into Israel. Most had been driven or had fled from their homes in what was now Israel and simply wished to return. But some committed violence against Israelis. Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion had fixed on a policy of reprisals — military assaults, intentionally disproportionate, on local Arab populations — as a response to any such attacks. After the Oct. 12 killings, Ben-Gurion and top colleagues chose nearby Qibya to suffer retribution. — www.washingtonpost.com/...
For those who believe Mapai led governments were humane and faultless, this should give you pause. AIPAC was created to control the fall-out from this massacre, and ensure the US Congress remained supportive of Israel, exactly as it had in 1948, when several senators threatened to withhold Marshall plan aid from European countries that did not vote for the proposal to partition Palestine. Senators and Congressmen engaged in other forms of arm-twisting to corral votes from Latin America for the partition plan, a history that has largely been forgotten.
That history has been so conclusively erased that Schumer, Pence and Haley can ascend a stage at AIPAC and tell the world that Palestinians are to blame for all that ails the 12 million people living between the Jordan and the sea.
Many wonder: “Why don't we have peace in the Middle East?” even though a majority of Israelis want peace and believe like I do and most of you do, that there should be two states, a Jewish state and a Palestinian state. — www.policyconference.org/...
This assertion is of course false. Only 46% of Jewish Israelis (the people Schumer is referring to) support a two-state solution. That support drops even further when territorial concessions are enumerated. This is not, of course, going to stop Schumer, who then lists all the ways he believes Palestinians, and solely Palestinians are responsible for the “lack of peace”.
In Schumer’s view, nothing Israelis do can ever be un-peaceful. From arresting 12 year old children and harshly interrogating them in military jails, to systematically demolishing Palestinians houses, it’s all in the pursuit of “peace”.
And as a reminder, we should note that moving the US embassy to Jerusalem is something Chuck Schumer has advocated for virtually his entire career. Schumer advised the Trump administration to make it happen, knowing full well it would deeply undermine the very “two state peace plan”, he claims to hold so dear.
Now, let me tell you why – my view, why we don't have peace. Because the fact of the matter is that too many Palestinians and too many Arabs do not want any Jewish state in the Middle East. The view of Palestinians is simple, the Europeans treated the Jews badly culminating in the Holocaust and they gave them our land as compensation.
Of course, we say it's our land, the Torah says it, but they don't believe in the Torah. So that's the reason there is not peace. They invent other reasons, but they do not believe in a Jewish state and that is why we, in America, must stand strong with Israel through thick and thin. We must, because that is the reason, not any of these other false shibboleths why there is not peace in the Middle East.
— www.policyconference.org/...
So both Schumer and Pence believe Jewish Israelis have a divine right to Palestine. Because it says so in the Torah. Schumer goes further, and tells us there would be peace if Palestinians believed in the Torah and therefore in Israeli’s divine and exclusive right to the villages and towns Palestinians lived in till 1947.
Sadly, most Palestinians do not believe it is god’s command that they be made homeless and stateless. They do not believe Israeli soldiers have a divinely given right to persecute and harm Palestinian children. Chuck Schumer ascended that stage to tell AIPAC that this Palestinian refusal to submit is why there’s no peace. And to demand that Americans stand “strong with Israel” as it continues in its quest to get Palestinians to submit.
What then separates Israel from every other middle-eastern state that is ruled by a religious/ethnic group that oppresses all others in territory it controls? A number of these countries are ruled by people or clans who believe god gave them the land and wishes them to violently assert that right over every other group living there. Perhaps that similarity is why there is a burgeoning Israeli-Saudi alliance. And just as most of Washington looks the other way when the Saudi regime persecutes Sh’ia and bombs Yemen, we are encouraged to look the other way when Israel bombs Gaza and persecutes Palestinians.
How then, is AIPAC different from any other lobbying organization for any other oppressive Middle-Eastern regime?
But I digress, Schumer continued:
First, we must pass and highlight the Taylor Force Act, which will bring an end to American dollars that directly benefit a Palestinian Authority until it ceases making payments to the families of terrorists, stops calling the martyrs, stops giving them parades.
My friends, this is not just about funds to the Palestinian Authority. Too many believe that this Palestinian Authority is moderate and really wants peace. The Taylor Force Act will confront the world to – will confront the dark, which will force the world to confront the dark truth that the Palestinian Authority, every day, actively aids and abets terrorism. We will pass the Taylor Force Law and that will show the world what the Palestinian Authority is actually doing. That while Israel justifiably defends its borders, the PA celebrates and compensates terrorists as martyrs. — www.policyconference.org/...
I doubt Chuck Schumer will ever demand that Israel cancel payments to soldiers and settlers who kill Palestinian civilians, or prosecute war criminals in its cabinet, or rename Israeli streets that commemorate terrorists. In Schumer’s view, when Netanyahu orders “assassinations” of entire extended families in Gaza, or Naftali Bennett orders UN compounds be shelled killing dozens of people (and later boasts about it), that is merely an example of “defense”.
What else happened at AIPAC?:
Nikki Haley said he wanted to attend the opening of the Jerusalem embassy:
At this year’s conference, like fans at a concert of one of their favorite bands, the 18,000 AIPAC activists were already fired up and ready to hear her greatest hits. And sure enough, a relaxed and confident Haley took the stage, leaping up for the first of what would be twelve standing ovations over the course of her 20-minute speech, in which she repeatedly praised Israel and bashed the United Nations – and painted herself as a feisty champion of the Jewish state. — www.haaretz.com/...
David Friedman, US ambassador to Israel claimed it’s “blasphemous” to say Israel is against peace.
Friedman criticized the distinction between being "pro-Israel" and "pro-peace," saying that people in Israel who don't support peace "simply do not exist."
"If you support Israel, you must by definition support Israel living in peace with its neighbors," the ambassador said.
"It's no less than blasphemous to suggest that any Jew or Christian is against peace," he added. His words were seemingly an implict attack on left-wing Jewish groups such as J Street, which describe themselves as "pro Israel and pro peace." — www.haaretz.com/...
Israeli cabinet ministers attended a pro-settlement event to declare that Israel can’t survive without settlements.
There was a deeply ironic session on freedom of the press in Israel:
In other, everyday news: