Americans for a Safe Israel - excerpt from Lee O'Brien, American Jewish Organizations and Israel, 1986

This page is an extract, reproduced with permission, from Lee O'Brien, American Jewish Organizations and Israel, Washington DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1986.

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• Year established: 1971
• Chairman of the Board: Herbert Zweibon
• Director: Peter Goldman
• Address: '147 East 76th Street, New York, NY 10021
• Publication: Outpost (newsletter)

General Background, Role and Structure

Americans for a Safe Israel (AFSI) stands out among pro-Israel organizations for its hard-line positions. Unlike the Jewish Defense League and its offshoots, which tend to be shunned by the Jewish establishment, AFSI is accepted as a legitimate force representing a political trend that exists in the U.S. and in Israel. This acceptance is crucial to AFSI's basic role: not only to articulate an extremist line, but to provide constant pressure on others, especially within the Jewish community, to move to the right. In the words of AFSI, ‘We encourage other organizations and movements to take stronger stands in support of Israel, and we have had substantial success in this area.’

Politically, AFSI advocates virulent anti-Communism and militant Zionism in the tradition of Jabotinsky. AFSI is against any withdrawal from the occupied territories and supports the building of further settlements; it considers U.S. policy ‘appeasing’ and anti-Israel; it opposed the Camp David Accords and the Sinai withdrawal and still considers Egypt an enemy; it strongly supported the invasion of Lebanon, and it believes that

‘the existence of a strong Israel is an absolute condition for the security of the United States and Western interests in the Middle East, providing a brake to Soviet expansion and Arab imperialism.’

When established in 1971, AFSI described itself as a ‘think-tank of professors and other experts in international affairs.’ It has an executive committee, a national council, and an academic advisory committee composed of professors from around the country. Among its most active members are chairman Herbert Zweibon, director Peter Goldman (former director of Joseph Churba's Center for International Security in Washington and of the Denmark-Israel Association of Copenhagen), Herut supporter Rael Jean Isaac, and Rabbi Avraham Weiss (of the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale and Yeshiva University).

Israel Support Work

In its early years, AFSI focused on publishing attacks against its ‘enemies.’ One of these was a scathing diatribe against the American Friends Service Committee for its alleged anti-Israel and pro-PLO position, entitled ‘The Friendly Perversion, Quakers as Reconcilers: Good People and Dirty Work.’ Another was the attack against Breira by Rael Jean Isaac.

Today AFSI no longer bills itself as a think tank, but as a membership organization whose activities include publications, press conferences, press releases, demonstrations, radio and television appearances, and media monitoring. In 1982, AFSI coordinated the coalition to protest ‘America's increasing abandonment of Israel,’ which culminated in an April 1982 demonstration in Washington.

In February 1983, it sponsored an Israel delegation that came to the United States to campaign against the Reagan plan; among the delegation members were the right-wing settlers Rabbi Eliezer Waldman of the Kiryat Arba city council and Yigal Kutail, executive director of the ‘renewed Jewish community in Hebron’, who also used their visit to solicit for more settlers from America.

AFSI itself has actively participated in Israel's settlement drive as the agent for the sale of Palestinian land on the West Bank exclusively to American Jews. Following the invasion of Lebanon, they demonstrated against NBC News and produced the widely distributed video file called ‘NBC in Lebanon: A Study of Media Representation.’ Likewise, they sponsored a five-month campaign against the Boston Globe for alleged anti-Israel bias; the campaign culminated with a ‘Ban the Globe Day’, which resulted in a meeting between AFSI and the Globe's publishers and editors. AFSI has also used its newsletter, Outpost, to solicit American volunteers for the Israel Recruitment Drive, aimed at offsetting the workforce shortage caused by the continued Israeli occupation of Lebanon.

Relations with the Jewish Establishment

The special role of AFSI, however, is found in its targeting of American Jewish organizations and leaders. A 1982 Jerusalem Post article noted that ASFI was established ‘in reaction to what its founders perceived to be the dominance of liberal and dovish attitudes towards Israel among American Jewish intellectuals.’ In the same article, AFSI director Peter Goldman accounted for Jewish criticism of the Lebanon war by saying that ‘the American liberal media overplay the importance of noisy and unrepresentative Jewish intellectuals’ and accused American Jewish leaders of having ‘lost touch with American Jews who by and large support the Israeli operation.’ AFSI chairman Herbert Zweibon exhorted such leaders to realize that Israel is facing ‘big business corporations and the left dominated media, both of which want to encourage the U.S. to abandon Israel. Without a more forceful reaction to their efforts, the American Jewish community is in danger of committing the same sin of silence it committed during the Holocaust.’

AFSI engages in many attacks against the ‘Liberal trend,’ not simply in alternative groups such as Breira, but in mainstream organizations as well. A favorite target is Seagrams' owner Edgar Bronfman, head of the World Jewish Congress, whom AFSI dubs the ‘Whiskey King’ and accuses of siding with the PLO against Israel when he calls for negotiations over the West Bank and Gaza Strip. An especially virulent attack by Rael Jean Isaac appeared in AFSI's November 1982 Outpost under the title, ‘The American-Jewish Congress and the Union of American Hebrew Congregations: Self-Destructiveness in the Organized Jewish Community.’ The article expressed outrage and horror that these two groups had joined a coalition for nuclear freeze with such ‘anti-Israel organizations’ as the American Friends Service Committee, the Mobilization for Survival, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, and Clergy and Laity Concerned. According to Isaac, the nuclear freeze movement constitutes a double threat because its members are ‘bitterly hostile to Israel’ and because it ‘would weaken the ability of the United States to withstand global Scwiet designs, including its designs on the Middle East.’ Isaac asserts that the AJCongress and UAHC are not ignorant of this but act from baser motives: These Jewish organizations support the freeze because, lamentably, there are Jewish leaders whose primary goal is maintaining the purity of their ‘liberal credentials,’ whatever the cost to Jewish interests. Currently fashionable in trendy liberal circles, the freeze above all offers Jewish organizations the chance to cooperate once more with mainline Protestant bureaucracies whose stream of hostile pronouncements against Israel have soured relations in the last decade. Jewish leaders can now hope to relive former days when they could march together with Protestant clerics in good cause.

Another AFSI criticism is leveled against what it considers the Jewish establishment's appeasement of the American administration. AFSI's responses here have included the coalition to stop the American ‘abandonment’ of Israel and an attack on AIPAC and other groups that spoke at all favorably of the Reagan peace initiative. Indeed, AFSI went so far as to demonstrate against the Reagan plan at a UJA dinner that featured Secretary of State Shultz as the keynote speaker.

Funding

AFSI enjoys a tax-exempt status under the Internal Revenue Code. According to its 1981 IRS return (Form 990), AFSI's total revenue for that year was $84,219 (compared to $7,000 in 1977; AFSI's total revenues have been doubling annually since 1977). Total expenditures were $78,563, of which 56 percent went for program services, including about two-thirds for advertising; 29 percent was attributed to professional fundraising fees. In July 1982, at the height of the war in Lebanon, WZO-American Section granted AFSI $5,000 ‘to assist in the cost of publication of this organization.’