What AIPAC Doesn’t Want Discussed in Court

A very interesting Gershom Gorenberg post makes the case that AIPAC has bigger worries in the much-delayed trial of two former AIPAC staffers accused of passing classified info to the media and the Israeli government than the actual fate of the defendants. In particular, he makes the point that a trial might reveal the extent to which AIPAC was working hand-in-hand with the Netanyahu administration back in the 1990s to help subvert the peace process.

That, in turn, is a reminder of a crucial policy error from that period that we can ill-afford to repeat, namely the Clinton administration’s habit of acting in public as if the Netanyahu government was more reasonable than they really new it to be. There was a lot of private frustration, but for essentially political reasons very little of that frustration was allowed to seep out into public view. In the end, that approach didn’t achieve very much substantively and helped wreck U.S. credibility in the Arab world.