Steve J. Rosen - Rosen at AIPAC

Rosen At AIPAC

In 1982, Rosen left RAND to join AIPAC, where he served until 2005 as Director of Foreign Policy Issues and was particularly involved in communication with the executive branch including the State Department and the National Security Council.

Rosen is regarded as having been a major contributor to the growth of AIPAC's influence on Middle East policy during the past quarter century. The New York Times (August 31, 2004) said, "Mr. Rosen, AIPAC's director of foreign policy issues, is...one of the group's most influential employees, with wide-ranging contacts within the Bush administration and overseas." The Washington Post (May 19, 2005) said, “Rosen has been a mainstay of AIPAC and the architect of the group's ever-increasing clout." National Public Radio called him “A larger-than-life figure" (May 20, 2005) who “helped shape AIPAC into one of the most powerful lobby groups in the country” (September 30, 2005). Ha'aretz said (April 22, 2005), “In the eyes of many, he is AIPAC itself.”

In particular, “Rosen helped pioneer ‘executive-branch lobbying,’ a style of advocacy that was not widespread when he began it in the mid-1980s, but is now a routine complement to the more traditional lobbying of Congress” according to the Washington Post, April 21, 2006. The Nation said Rosen is “a brilliant and, some say, ruthless bureaucratic infighter at the country's premiere Mideast lobbying group, who was emboldened by his long relationships with figures in and around the Bush Administration and the Washington scene to behave almost as an unofficial diplomatic entity in his own right” (July 14, 2005). “The special relationship between the US executive branch and AIPAC was the triumph of twenty years of work by…Rosen” (May 20, 2005)

Rosen’s early work with the executive branch was focused on expanding military cooperation between the United States and Israel. Rosen authored reports like The Strategic Value of Israel (1982) and Israel and the U.S. Air Force (1983). Columnist William Safire (New York Times, September 13, 1981) and Times defense correspondent Drew Middleton (November 22, 1981) credited one report written by Rosen with helping to launch the U.S.-Israeli dialogue that resulted in the Strategic Cooperation Agreement during early the Reagan years. The Washington Post later said (June 14, 1991): “ helped convince key members of the Reagan administration that the Jewish state was a U.S. ‘strategic asset’ in the struggle with the Soviets… Rosen helped encourage more cooperation than the two countries had ever enjoyed.” A New Yorker profile (July 4, 2005) said: "Rosen used his contacts to carry AIPAC’s agenda to the White House. An early success came in 1983, when he helped lobby for a strategic cooperation agreement between Israel and the United States, which was signed over the objections of Caspar Weinberger, the Secretary of Defense, and which led to a new level of intelligence sharing and military sales." The New York Times said (July 6, 1987), "AIPAC cannot take sole credit… But Mr. Rosen has reportedly worked to flesh out the strategic cooperation…Despite initial opposition in the Pentagon, the relationship has become institutionalized.” President Ronald Reagan praised AIPAC’s involvement in helping to build the strategic relationship, in a May 13, 1988 open letter: “Probably none is more important than the developing strategic cooperation between Israel and the United States. We could not have been nearly so successful in building this new tie between our countries without your inspiration and strong support.”

A major focus of Rosen’s efforts in the 1990s was Iran. Rosen—and his codefendant in the AIPAC/Franklin case Keith Weissman—were among the first to advocate a strategy of graduated American economic sanctions for leverage against Iran’s alleged involvement in terror and its purportd acquisition of nuclear weapons capabilities. Milestones in this campaign were President Bill Clinton’s March 14, 1995 Executive Order banning Conoco from investing in Iranian oil and gas production; his May 8, 1995 Executive Order extending this to all U.S. companies; passage of the Iran and Libya Sanctions Act (ILSA) in the Senate on December 18, 1995, to pressure foreign companies not to invest in Iranian oil and gas production; and Clinton signing ILSA on August 4, 1996. The Executive Orders and ILSA (later the Iran Sanctions Act) were the foundation of a Bush Administration effort to get multilateral cooperation for stepped up economic pressure to end the Iranian uranium enrichment program.

Another key issue in Rosen’s work for AIPAC, was U.S. policy toward the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Rosen was an ardent proponent of the view that U.S. recognition and relations with Palestinian organizations should be conditioned on their renunciation of terror and violence, their willingness to make peace with Israel, and their compliance with signed agreements. Rosen also argued, in a 1985 AIPAC monograph titled The Importance of the West Bank and Gaza to the Security of Israel, that U.S.-brokered negotiations over territory and borders should include provisions to secure Israel from terrorist and conventional threats that might arise in areas coming under Palestinian control, if the Palestinians did not live up to their commitments. At the height of the Palestinian peace process in the 1990s, he was criticized by followers of Israel’s leading dove, Yossi Beilin, for expressing doubts that the Palestinians would honor their commitments to live in peace with Israel. Yet he was also criticized by some on the pro-Israel right for his advocacy of the view that, though friends may have doubts, Israel’s policy toward the Palestinians should be decided by its elected government, not by pro-Israel organizations abroad. AIPAC-watchers often describe Rosen as a “security hawk” in the pro-Israel spectrum, though he did not in principle oppose territorial compromise or a two-state solution if the necessary conditions for Israeli security could be achieved and if it was the policy of the elected government of Israel to pursue these objectives.