Remember Pete McCloskey and his challenge to Pombo? And his principled stand in endorsing Jerry McNerney? Well this is not the first example of McCloskey's principled courage. He not only ran against Nixon in 1972, but he dared take on the power of AIPAC. The background and the story:
"Israel receives about one-fifth of all the foreign aid that the U.S. dispenses to needy countries. All countries with one exception receive their aid in instalments. Israel, however, gets special treatment. Its money is delivered each year in a lump-sum payment, up front. (Congressional critics point out that Israel can thus earn interest on free money.)
Moreover, Israel is the only aid recipient that does not have to account in detail for the ways in which the money is spent. It is even allowed to use 25 per cent of its annual allocation of approximately $3 billion to subsidize its own defence industry. These unusually generous terms are the direct result of intense lobbying by AIPAC and its friends."
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"By the early 1970s, McCloskey had gained a reputation as a proponent of human rights, and, as a critic of the war in Vietnam, he was the first politician to call for Richard Nixon's impeachment. His record was widely respected.
While his opposition to the Vietnam War was never a liability for him, another position he took proved to be his downfall. From his own personal experience, McCloskey had seen that war was an ineffective and inefficient method of solving international problems.
That meant that one of the items on his agenda was the Middle East. McCloskey's position was essentially that Palestinian militancy, and use of terrorist action to get attention, was fed and nurtured by the policies of the very government that complained about it -- Israel.
He called for a halt to Israel's expansion into territory that had been intended by the United Nations as land for a Palestinian state.
He advocated the implementation of UN resolutions, which defined Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territory as illegal and he called for their removal.
McCloskey believed that he was being consistent with his own government's position, which was that the settlements were illegal, provocative and impediments to peace. They would, he contended, only provoke more terror in the future. But he soon realized that he had committed the cardinal political sin. He had offended AIPAC.
He sealed his fate by putting his money where his mouth was.
To pressure Israel to comply with the United Nations resolutions, McCloskey put forward a controversial resolution. He moved that the United States withhold $150 million in aid to Israel.
That was the amount that Israel was spending to subsidize the settlement activity. While many Congressmen agreed with him, including many Jewish American members, it was to be Pete McCloskey's last political hurrah. Under pressure, he withdrew his amendment.
Nevertheless, AIPAC mobilized against him and accused him of fostering anti-Semitism; AIPAC had lobbied hard and successfully to make sure the amendment never saw the light of day. It then poured resources and funds into his opponents' election campaigns and Pete McCloskey, marine hero, on the right side of every other issue, was consigned to the history books."
