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The Israel-based Ariel Center for Policy Research (ACPR) is a hardline advocacy and research institute founded in 1997 that espouses a Likud Party line on Israeli security, arguing on its website that the "peace process" is " a paradox whereby a minuscule democracy is being forced to provide its totalitarian enemies—scores of times its size—the only thing it lacks: territory. " It maintains that any peace effort that "will force Israel to its pre-1967 borders, i.e. losing those territorial assets critically needed for the very existence of the Jewish State, will not be but a recipe for war."

With a small staff whose main objective is publishing the online journal Nativ (a Hebrew word meaning "path"), the center's other key activity is funding scholars who support its vision of Mideast affairs. Among its "contributing experts" are a number of U.S.-based researchers aligned with the U.S. pro-Israel right and the neoconservatives, including Meyrav Wurmser and Anne Bayefsky of the Hudson Institute; Ilan Berman, vice president of the American Foreign Policy Council; Rachel Ehrenfeld, head of the Center for the Study of Corruption; Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy; and Irving Moskowitz, a California casino magnate who has underwritten settler groups in Israel and supported a number of neoconservative outfits, including the American Enterprise Institute. Also included on its list of contributing experts are a number of former Israeli military and civilian leaders, including the Likud's Benjamin Netanyahu, the former prime minister.

The center is led by a board of directors and an advisory council, which includes the likes of William Van Cleave, a Reagan administration defense official who is closely associated with an enduring clique of hawkish elites who first banded together in the late 1970s to form the Committee on the Present Danger, an advocacy group that championed an aggressive posture toward the Soviet Union. ACPR's leadership also includes Louis René Beres , a professor of international relations at Purdue University and a columnist for the right-wing Washington Times; Moshe Arens, a Likud Party member and former Israeli defense minister; and Yossef Bodansky, an influential Capitol Hill figure who headed the 1998 Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, which fanned fears of Saddam Hussein's purported proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and warned of impending widespread violence throughout the Middle East (see Yossef Bodansky's 1998 House testimony, "The Iraqi WMD Challenge—Myths and Realities").

The center's publication, Nativ, was originally established in 1988 (before the Ariel Center was founded) as a publication focusing, according to its website, "on a wide variety of topics, ranging from the fascinating phenomenon of the Jewish left wing self-hatred to the conceptual failure of the Israeli ballistic missile defense system (the Arrow)." It claims that its initial "fundamental assumption ... was to rescue the Israeli public discourse from the abstract, theological plane and to transform it into a constructive discussion based on a foundation of data and facts." To achieve this, it aimed to influence the "upper-echelon" of policy elites in the country. However, despite the fact that it has counted among its editorial board members several former Israeli officials—including Netanyahu, Moshe Arens, Ariel Sharon, and Uzi Landau—the magazine claims to have failed in its mission because "once [these officials] donned the mantle of Prime Minister or government minister they favored short-term political considerations over long-term strategic aspects" (see "Welcome to Nativ Online," Letter from the Editor).

Nativ's pages are typically filled with hardline opinion and analysis pieces that echo the views of the Ariel Center and its associates. For example, its September 2006 issue included an article by Arens titled "To Clean Out the Stables and Prepare for War," which ridiculed Israeli leadership for its performance during the 2006 war in Lebanon and argued that the only serious approach should be destroying Syria . Wrote Arens: "Over the last decade and a half, ever since the foolishness of the Oslo Accords, everything has been done to erode the nation's resolve, its strength, and its belief in the justness of its path. Contributing to this phenomenon has been a media mobilized to the insane idea of 'peace' and a 'new Middle East,' various intellectuals who depicted peace as being just around the corner and prevented by the 'occupation,' which, if it were only to end, the End of Days would arrive immediately and Islam would lovingly accept the Jewish state."

In the same issue was an article by Ariel Center contributing expert David Bukay, which argued that the 2006 war in Lebanon was the "first stage of the free world's war against the Muslim evil axis"; and an article by Hebrew University professor Raphael Israeli titled "The Smoking Gun Did Not Go Up in Smoke," which argued that WMD might still be found in Iraq.

The Ariel Center's other activities and associated programs include the Hatikvah Educational Foundation, which runs full-page ads in Israeli and U.S. newspapers, including the Washington Times; producing documentary films; publishing books; and organizing conferences around the world on themes such as Islamic Fanaticism and Latin-American Implications, Islamic Terrorism and American Response, and anti-Semitism. Speakers have included Daniel Pipes, the neoconservative founder of the Middle East Forum, who spoke at a May 11, 2001 Ariel Center conference in Bilkent, Turkey, on the "Turkish-Israeli Strategic Cooperation."

The center's financial backers have included the Tel Aviv-based Arison Foundation and the New York-based Friends of the Ariel Center for Policy Research. The Arison Foundation was founded by deceased Israeli billionaire and Carnival Cruise line founder Ted Arison, who before his death in 1999 was regarded as the "world's wealthiest Jew" (see "Ted Arison, World's Wealthiest Jew, Dies in Tel Aviv," Jewish News Weekly of Northern California, October 8, 1999). The Ariel Center received its founding grant from the Arison Foundation in 1998 (see "Welcome to Nativ Online," Letter from the Editor).

The Friends of the Ariel Center for Policy Research is a 501(c)(3) non-profit based in Brooklyn, New York, whose primary purpose, according to its 2005 Form 990 tax return, is "to support an academic policy and research center in Israel, and to produce, print, and publish research papers and studies." Its total assets as of 2005 were more than $2 million, of which it gave some $260,000 to the Ariel Center in that year.

Please note: IPS Right Web neither represents nor endorses any of the individuals or groups profiled on this site.