At AIPAC, Effort To Shift Focus Back To Agenda: Iran, Foreign Aid, Capitol Hill Relationships

[Purveyor]

WASHINGTON (JTA) -- Let’s get past this U.S.-Israel relationship thing, so we can get on with important stuff, like the U.S.-Israel relationship. That seemed to be the message this week at the annual policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

With a record 10,000 people and both the U.S. and Israeli leaders in attendance -- plus 67 U.S. senators and 286 members of the U.S. House of Representatives at the gala dinner on Monday night -- this AIPAC parley was the biggest and in many ways the most impressive ever.

After the bickering last week between President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, AIPAC leaders were keen to focus on what they had hoped would be the headline-makers for this conference: Yanking the public’s attention back to Iran after months of distraction by the so-called Arab Spring, and bludgeoning the Palestinian Authority with the threat of isolation if it presses forward with its inclusion of Hamas and its quest for statehood recognition at the United Nations in September.

The other agenda item for the AIPAC crowd was trying to make sense of how to foster support for Israel in a U.S. electorate that is changing more rapidly and dramatically than it has in generations.

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http://www.jta.org/news/article/2011/05/23/3087839/aipac-leaders-want-to-get-past-the-shouting-sand-back-to-the-lobbying