October 1992, Page 62, 63

Jews and Israel

By Sheldon L. Richman

Washington Jewish Week Wrangle

Did the American Israel Public Affairs Committee recently flex its muscles to force out the managing editor of Washington Jewish Week because he didn't toe the AIPAC line? This is the substance of a charge published by Robert I. Friedman in the August 4 issue of the Village Voice.

According to Friedman's account, Andrew Silow Carroll was forced out of WJW, which has wide readership among Jewish federal government employees, after an AIPAC staff member operating under cover witnessed Carroll's appearance at a May 1991 picnic sponsored by dovish Jewish groups, including the New Jewish Agenda and Tikkun magazine. During the picnic, Carroll appeared on a panel dealing with the pro-Likud American-Jewish establishment.

Friedman wrote that Carroll took an anti-Likud position, but also warned his listeners against defining themselves as anti-Israel. Carroll's remarks were heard by the AIPAC "mole," who later wrote a memorandum characterizing Carroll as anti-Israel. Friedman added that the editor's name was then put on AIPAC's enemies list. According to Friedman, this was not Carroll's first run-in with AIPAC. Earlier, the lobbying group tried to pressure him to reassign WJW senior writer Larry Cohler, a widely read investigative reporter, so that Cohler would no longer write about AIPAC. "When Carroll refused," Friedman wrote, AIPAC's legal counsel David Ifshin (who is a former campaign director and now legal counsel to the Clinton campaign) "warned Carroll that he would re-examine Cohler's previous stories about AIPAC for evidence of libel. Nothing ever came of the threat."

The anti-Carroll memo was widely distributed to show the existence of forces intent on destroying Israel, wrote Friedman. One person who received the memo was Richard Schifter, recently retired assistant secretary of state for human rights, who is a member of the WJW board of directors. Schifter complained to his friend, WJW owner Leonard Kapiloff, about stories critical of Israel. "Soon after Schifter's visit," wrote Friedman, "Carroll was demoted, and last June, he resigned rather than stay on as a reporter."

Friedman quoted Carroll as saying: "The publisher's son told me Schifter was looking for my ass. I think that AIPAC gave Schifter his marching orders, but Kapiloff denies it." Friedman wrote that Kapiloff declined comment, and Schifter, a senior foreign policy adviser to Bill Clinton, denied a role in Carroll's dismissal.

According to Friedman, however, "a Jewish colleague who recently met with Schifter says that when he asked what happened to Carroll, Schifter pulled the unflattering memo from his desk drawer." Schifter began writing a column for WJW after Carroll left the newspaper.

Friedman places this story in the context of a broad AIPAC effort to "stifle legitimate debate and dissent about Israel." He described this elaborate effort, which is implemented by a "stealth unit" of AIPAC, through the eyes of former AIPAC researcher Gregory Slabodkin, who gave a similar earlier account in the July issue of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

Friedman's Village Voice story set off a flurry of articles in the Jewish press. The Aug. 13 Washington Jewish Week's article asked in its headline, "Was former WJW editor target of AIPAC 'spying'?" The story, by Larry Yudelson of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, said that the existence of the anti-Carroll memo was confirmed by Steven Rosen, AIPAC's foreign policy director. But Rosen said it was not written by AIPAC's policy analysis division, but rather from an account by a former intern who happened by the picnic.

WJW wrote that Rosen "acknowledges giving the memo to board members of the newspaper as evidence that the paper's managing editor at the time, Andrew Silow Carroll, 'sought to bring down the organized Jewish community.'" The story stated that shortly after the memo was given to the board, Carroll was made a subordinate of a new editor and stripped of his editorial-writing and story-assignment duties. Carroll soon left.

The new editor, Linda Gordon Kuzmack, was later dismissed. But the WJW article states Kapiloff denied changing Carroll's status because of the AIPAC memo. "I had no knowledge of AIPAC's memorandum," Kapiloff said. "I brought in an editor above Andy purely on the basis that the Jewish Week was not growing during his tenure. . . It was no demotion. Andy kept his same position and salary."

Kapiloff said that while he has had disagreements with Carroll, "There's nothing in his history which leads to such a memo, a memo that demeans him. Had I known of his memo, I would have come to Andy's defense as I have with another reporter for the last six or seven years. . . I believe that Rosen owes Andy Carroll and the WJW an apology and AIPAC should reprimand him severely."

Rosen said he did not try to verify the memo's contents. In the Baltimore Jewish Times, Rosen said his intention was to change WJW's editorial policy, not its staff. Yet, he wrote, "Keeping the paper in the hands of the 'alternative' crowd was unhealthy." Rosen also acknowledged trying to discredit Carroll by giving the memo to a Washington Post reporter who was writing about AIPAC.

Schifter has denied dealing with AIPAC on the matter, despite the fact that Rosen said he gave Schifter the memo and the Voice reported that he received it. The WJW article says the memo "appears innocuous" and seems to confirm Carroll's claim that he spoke on the panel as an analyst, not as an advocate.

Carroll and WJW free-lance columnist James David Besser, who also was on the panel, said their remarks disappointed the audience. The memo does not report that Carroll criticized the audience for not contributing time or money to Israel or the Jewish community.

According to the WJW story, Rosen conceded that Carroll's remarks "were not particularly extreme, except that he talked in an us-versus-them way against the organized Jewish community." To this Carroll replied, "When I talk to fellow Jews, I often use the word 'we.'"

Rosen also did not like the fact that Carroll identified AIPAC with the "right." The WJW story also contained a denial by AIPAC that its opposition-research effort (described extensively in the Washington Report's July issue) is anything more than a collection of public positions concerning the Middle East.

The WJW story quoted AIPAC spokeswoman Toby Dershowitz as saying, "People need to know what's being said on issues of concern to us." AIPAC Executive Director Tom Dine issued a statement saying that AIPAC does not "conduct field investigations of anyone, ever, nor do we engage in any kind of covert intelligence-gathering." Rosen also denied that AIPAC keeps files on people.

Several Jewish American leaders defended AIPAC's research operation, saying that it is unrelated to "McCarthyism," to which it has been likened by some critics. An article in Forward, a New York Jewish weekly, on the Carroll matter took a more partisan tone. Headlined "Anti-Israel Source Gave 'Voice' AIPAC Story," the staff-written article said the Voice's source was former AIPAC staffer Slabodkin, whose allegations about AIPAC's secret intelligence unit "first appeared in a virulently anti-Israel newsletter [sic] called the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs." Forward said it was given access to the AIPAC files, a random review of which turned up only newspaper clippings. It also said that the AIPAC newsletter Activities, which the Voice characterized as "an enemies list update mailed in plain envelopes to 400 Jewish leaders and activists in the U.S. and Israel," is actually a compilation of quotations in full context from public figures. An AIPAC source told Forward that Activities would now be identified as a lobby publication.

The controversy comes at a time when AIPAC is facing unprecedented pressure from Israeli sources. After the Labor victory in the Israeli elections, the party-related newspaper Davar called for Dine's resignation for his alleged pro-Likud bias. And Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin recently blasted the lobby for unnecessarily inflaming U.S.-Israel relations.

Dine conceded that Rabin was unhappy with the conflict over the loan guarantees for immigrant absorption, but said the meeting with the prime minister was mostly constructive. As a former Israeli ambassador in Washington with extensive insider's knowledge of how the capital operates, Rabin is said to believe that the pro-Israel lobby should not play a central role in U.S.-Israel relations. He also is said to believe that the White House, not Congress, should be the focal point of the relations.

Sheldon L. Richman is the senior editor at the Cato Institute.

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