Aipac and the Michigan Senate race: How the Israel lobby became toxic

"A lobby is like a night flower: it thrives in the dark and dies in the sun.” So said Steve Rosen, former foreign policy director of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (Aipac) in a memo to a fellow staffer. Rosen would later be fired amid a major scandal involving espionage in passing classified US information to Israel.

Rosen was correct about the danger to a lobbying organisation that publicity poses. But in December 2021, Aipac decided to test that theory by creating two political action committees (Pacs) that enabled it to take part directly in political campaigns.

The results were mixed, and Aipac recently announced that it was closing one of the Pacs it had set up.

Aipac had been an advocacy organisation, promoting Israel’s interests, but it did not fund campaigns directly, nor did it endorse or fund political candidates.

In many ways, that made it more effective. It could do things like issue a congressional report card which rated every member of Congress’s support of Israel. Then other groups that were actual Pacs could use those reports to decide which candidates they should be contributing to.