Right Web

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The Emergency Committee for Israel (ECI) is a pressure group launched in July 2010 to promote a militarist, “pro-Israel” U.S. agenda. ECI has run attack ads that target politicians deemed “soft” on terrorism and who criticize Israel-centric U.S. policies. It also publishes open letters to political figures and hosts a website that provides information about political races and highlights key issues of concern via-a-vis Israel.

According to its website: “The Emergency Committee for Israel seeks to provide citizens with the facts they need to be sure that their public officials are supporting a strong US-Israel relationship. The Committee’s mission is to educate the public about the serious challenges to Israel’s security and about what elected officials in this country are doing and should do in order to meet those challenges.”[1]

The group’s first act was to run a controversial attack ad in July 2010 targeting the track record of U.S. Senate candidate Rep. Joe Sestak (D-PA), which insinuated that he supported terrorists.[2]

In December 2010, ECI issued a peculiar public letter to Sens. Charles Schumer and Carl Levin excoriating the two senators for writing a letter to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) urging the lobby to support passage of the New Start Treaty. ECI claimed that that letter was “a disgrace” because it allegedly implied a threat to AIPAC. “We’ve rarely seen Senators stoop to this kind of public bullying. AIPAC “cannot afford to stand on the sidelines?” What threat do you mean to convey by this statement?” It added, “Is it your position that if the Senate does not ratify START in the lame duck session, Russia will be justified in violating UN sanctions against Iran, or in selling Iran air defense missiles? If not, why do you appear to give the Russian government such a justification? Is that the action of true friends of Israel, or true opponents of a nuclear Iran?”[3]

Unlike earlier neoconservative-led endeavors that reached out to hawkish elements in the Democratic Party—like the Project for the New American Century—ECI is a decidedly right-wing affair. ECI board members include William Kristol, editor and founder of the Weekly Standard and cofounder of the Foreign Policy Initiative; Rachel Abrams, a right-wing blogger who is married to notorious Iran-Contra veteran Elliott Abrams; and Gary Bauer, a well-know Christian Zionist who leads the lobby groups American Values and Keep Israel Safe and serves on the executive board of John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel.

ECI’s director is Noah Pollak, an apparently rising star in the neoconservative firmament who has worked for Commentary, the Middle East Forum, and the Sheldon Adelson-supported Shalem Center in Jerusalem.[4] According to one observer, Pollak frequently uses Twitter to make arguments that seem taken from the talking points of the Israeli Defense Forces.[5]

Additional ECI principals include Michael Goldfarb, a former writer for the Weekly Standard who is vice president of Randy Scheunemann’s Orion Strategies[7]; and Margaret Hoover, a long-standing Republican Party figure who served under Karl Rove during the George W. Bush presidency and initially owned the domain name used by the website. Hoover is the great granddaughter of Herbert Hoover and a right-wing pundit and blogger.[8]

ECI was briefly housed at Orion Strategies.[9] There was also speculation about whether Orion, which has represented Sarah Palin, has also advised ECI. In an email exchange with Salon’s Justin Elliott, Goldfarb wrote: “I'm on the record as an adviser to ECI and its no secret that I work at Orion, where the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq sign is still proudly displayed on the front of the building. ECI will be opening an office next week, but given the urgency of our cause, getting an office sorted out seemed less pressing than exposing Joe Sestak's anti-Israel record.”[10]

Commented the Inter Press Service’s Jim Lobe: “So, apart from Goldfarb’s advisory status and a temporary letterhead, there may yet may be no formal connection between ECI and the firm that advises Sarah Palin on 'national and international' issues — the same firm that acted as one of many of Ahmed Chalabi’s 'useful idiots,' including Bill Kristol, Elliott Abrams, and Gary Bauer. As Matt Duss at Think Progress suggested this week, with advocates like these, the emergency in Israel that the Emergency Committee was apparently created to address can only become more dire.”[11]

The group first debuted in early July on CNN when Campbell Brown (the spouse of neocon wonk Dan Senor of the Foreign Policy Initiative) interviewed Pollak. Asked whether Israel and the United States were on the “same page,” Pollak thought not but that “there is a developing consensus that something needs to be done and that it would be very, very bad if the Iranians went nuclear.”[12]

In a subsequent interview with the Jerusalem Post, Pollak justified the group’s creation, saying, “We will not rest until there is a pro-Israel group representing every pro-Israel person on earth.”[13]

Asked how ECI differed from other “pro-Israel” groups, Pollak said: “Well, for starters, ECI is pro-Israel. Our purpose is to address three major threats to the U.S.-Israel alliance in the context of the American political debate: the Iranian nuclear program and Iran's sponsorship of terrorist groups; the campaign to delegitimize and isolate Israel; and the hostility of the Obama administration to the traditional closeness of the two nations. At bottom, we believe that the turn against Israel is a rejection of America's special role in the world as a defender of liberal democracies. We will do great damage to our own national soul if we allow ourselves to become cynical participants in the international lynching of the Jewish state.”[14]

William Kristol provided an equally banal reason for the group’s raison d’etre in comments to Politico, saying, “We’re the pro-Israel wing of the pro-Israel community.”[15]

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