AIPAC – lobbying for which side?
AIPAC – lobbying for which side?

Last year it was one thing. This year it’s something else.

AIPAC and other such groups are having a fit because people dubbed “right-wing extremists” are being allowed to join Netanyahu’s coalition.  

To fatten up his base for the April 9 elections, the prime minister will take anyone so long as they are not retired generals.
To fatten up his base for the April 9 elections, the prime minister will take anyone so long as they are not retired generals.

Makes sense. But not to AIPAC’s leaders…who, if they are indeed a “powerful lobby” in favor of Israel, may yet be a more powerful lobby against Israel.

They’re hysterical over Netanyahu’s maneuver. If you think I’m exaggerating, listen to this:

“The views of Otzma Yehudit [the so-called right-wing extremists] are reprehensible. They do not reflect the core values that are the very foundation of the State of Israel.”

(The murder of Ori Ansbacher from the hand of a Palestinian Muslim terrorist – how’s that for reprehensible?)

So that’s this year’s high anxiety. The pushback has been swift, even from Netanyahu himself, which I’m posting here so that we won’t have to bother with the details.

Rather, let’s get back to last year when around the same time we learned what this means, CORE VALUES, as defined by AIPAC.

Thus spoke AIPAC’s top man, Howard Kohr: “We must all work toward the future, two states for two people. One Jewish with secure and defensible boundaries [well thanks for that, Mr. Kohr] and one Palestinian with its own Palestinian flag and its own future. Today that dream seems remote. This is tragic.”

That’s how Jews dream? For a Palestinian flag flying over Israel?

Not my dream. But who am I? AIPAC has more than 100,000 members. So It’s me against the world and the world is winning.

Do they all dream the same dream – A Palestinian flag flying over Israel? Do they all share these “Core Values?”

If so, we can only say it in Yiddish – “siz och und vey.”

The Ramallah lynching of Dec. 12, 2000, two Israelis hacked to death at a PA police station – such is the symbol of the Palestinian flag, which AIPAC loves so much and lobbies for all Israelis. Not for themselves, of course, nor for AIPAC’s own sons and daughters, a flag drenched in Israeli blood. We’re in America. Not our problem.

Last year around this time, I wrote about it in better English here, in the column titled “To Moses or to AIPAC.” Read that one. If you ask me, it is one of my best, so far as this topic, because last year I was innocent and this year I am jaded. I mean, from Jewish leadership I expect nothing but the worst.

(You will recall that the Jewish leadership bravely followed Moses but then dispersed when Moses approached Pharaoh’s door.)

The danger of it is that AIPAC is not some looney left-wing group that can be dismissed as radical.

No, these are the machers, the doers, the Establishment…and when they talk, Congress listens. Or did, before the coming of the Islamists into the Democrat Party.

We know that Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will be marching through Congress waving the Palestinian flag. Already this is so.

Who in the world expected this from AIPAC, which bills itself the American ISRAEL Public Affairs Committee?

Perhaps a name-change is in order.

New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.

He is the author of the international book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal.” His latest is the newsroom drama “News Anchor Sweetheart.”  His Inside Journalism thriller, “The Bathsheba Deadline,” is being prepared for the movies. Contemporaries have hailed him “The last Hemingway, a writer without peer, and the conscience of us all.” Website: www.jackengelhard.com