Right Web

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Declaring itself to be "the most influential group on the issue of U.S.-Israel military relations," the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) is a rightist Washington-based advocacy and research institution that promotes "strategic cooperation" between the United States and Israel on everything from the promotion of missile defense and mutual security strategies, to terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction to "rogue" nations.

JINSA was initially founded in the mid-1970s to serve as a study group aimed at “learning the lessons” of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, including how to ensure that the United States backs Israel in the event of a future conflict. In the late 1970s, the group evolved into a "defense education group" connected to military-industrial elites. Since that time, JINSA has become closely tied to the neoconservative advocacy community, operating as a 501(c)(3) organization that receives most of its funding through private donations, including from what it claims are 17,000 paid members.

According to JINSA’s website, the group is "committed to explaining the need for a prudent national security policy for the United States, addressing the security requirements of both the United States and the State of Israel, and strengthening the strategic cooperation relationship between these two great democracies… JINSA communicates with the national security establishment and the general public to explain the role Israel can and does play in bolstering American interests, as well as the link between American defense policy and the security of Israel.”[1]

In January 2012, the Jewish daily Forward reported an upheaval among JINSA’s leadership. The report claimed that the firing of former executive director Shoshana Bryen, a longstanding member of right-wing “pro-Israel” factions, helped prompt “several conservative icons to quit the group’s advisory board in protest,” including James Woolsey, Michael Ledeen, and Richard Perle. Although there was no hint of ideological disputes within the group’s top ranks, the paper suggested that JINSA was struggling to maintain its unique position within a crowded beltway neoconservative establishment. “The recent crisis,” it added, “is a result of a messy transformation of power in the group’s top ranks and a struggle to maintain relevance and funding at a time of shrinking budgets and growing competition from other Jewish causes.”[2]

JINSA’S current president is David Ganz. Its board of advisers is led by David Steinmann, who has headed the rightist William Rosenwald Family Fund. JINSA's previous president was the late Norman Hascoe, a financier and former engineer who was at once included on the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans. Its past chairman was the late Mark Broxmeyer, a New York-based real estate mogul.

JINSA's board of advisers includes a passel of hawkish and neoconservative foreign policy elites as well as a number of retired military officers, including Anne Bayefsky, retired Adm. David Jeremiah, former ambassador Max Kampelman, and leading neoconservative writer Joshua Muravchik. In addition to the recently departed Woolsey, Perle, and Ledeen, past advisers have included Dick Cheney, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, Kenneth Timmerman, Shoshana Bryen’s husband Stephen, and the late Jeane Kirkpatrick and Jack Kemp.

Discussing JINSA's influence—as well as that of another like-minded group, the Center for Security Policy—journalist Jason Vest compared the two groups and their overlapping advisory councils to the Committee on the Present Danger (CPD), a Cold War-era letterhead group that in the 1970s championed rolling back détente and implementing a confrontational anti-Soviet agenda. Wrote Vest: "Just as the right-wing defense intellectuals made CPD a cornerstone of a shadow defense establishment during the Carter administration, so, too, did the right during the Clinton years, in part through two organizations: the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA) and the Center for Security Policy (CSP). And just as was the case two decades ago, dozens of their members have ascended to powerful government posts, where their advocacy in support of the same agenda continues, abetted by the out-of-government adjuncts from which they came. Industrious and persistent, they've managed to weave a number of issues—support for national missile defense, opposition to arms control treaties, championing of wasteful weapons systems, arms aid to Turkey, and American unilateralism in general—into a hard line, with support for the Israeli right at its core."[3]

Observers regard JINSA as a core player in the so-called Israel Lobby in the United States, including realist scholars Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer who, in their controversial 2006 paper "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy," highlighted JINSA as one of several influential policy institutes that constitute the "think tank" arm of the “Israel Lobby.” They wrote: "Over the past 25 years, pro-Israel forces have established a commanding presence at the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution, the Center for Security Policy, the Foreign Policy Research Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Hudson Institute, the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis, and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). These think tanks are decidedly pro-Israel, and include few, if any, critics of U.S. support for the Jewish state."[4]

Activities

According to its website, JINSA's core annual activities include "sponsoring a trip for retired United States Flag and General Officers to Israel and a study program in Israel for cadets and midshipmen from the Naval Academy, the Military Academy at West Point, and the Air Force Academy. JINSA also arranges interchanges between Pentagon officials and Jewish community leadership and sponsors lectures and conferences at the national military academies and leading national security think tanks. These programs are aimed at facilitating dialogue between security policy makers, military officials, diplomats, and the community at large to increase the understanding of national security issues."

In addition to its regularly published opinion and reporting pieces appearing on its website, JINSA maintains a number of publications. These include the Observer, "a quarterly review of U.S.-Turkey-Israel cooperation" copublished by JINSA and the Assembly of Turkish American Associations; the Journal of International Security Affairs, a biannual academic-style journal edited by Ilan Berman, vice president of the American Foreign Policy Council (AFPC) and a contributing expert for the Israel-based Ariel Center for Policy Research; and the Islamic Extremism Newswatch, a rundown of media stories covering the activities of everyone from the Palestinian Liberation Organization to al-Qaeda.

Of these three publications, only the Journal of International Security Affairs appears to be regularly published. The journal’s Fall/Winter 2011 edition, which included an assessment of the U.S. “war on terror” since the 9/11 attacks, contains a variety of hawkish viewpoints and critiques of the Obama administration’s handling of regional developments. In a piece called “Calling a Spade a Spade,” Walid Phares, an anti-Islamic commentator and advisor to Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign, attacked the administration for “[finding] itself on the sidelines of the pro-freedom struggle taking place in the Middle East and as a promoter of Islamist orthodoxy,” charging that the administration has “steadily drifted toward engagement with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, as well as with the ostensibly ‘moderate’ wings of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Taliban.”[5]

Similarly citing the administration’s efforts to engage Islamist organizations and its supposed “distancing” of itself from Israel, an entry by conservative Pajamas Media columnist Barry Rubin concludes, “To say that Obama policy in the Middle East has been disastrous is not a partisan or ideological statement but merely a recounting of the facts.”[6] Finally, a submission by Lt. Gen. William Boykin takes a more paranoid tack in hyping the so-called “sharia” threat at home. “There is ample evidence of the intentions of the Muslim Brotherhood in America,” he writes. “They have stated openly that they are here to force sharia on American society. … [W]e are unequivocally losing the [war] on sharia.”[7]

Evolution

JINSA plays a unique role. Whereas other more traditional lobbying groups, like the highly influential American Israel Public Affairs Committee, focus on influencing congressional figures' votes on legislation critical to U.S. support of Israel, JINSA works on military-to-military ties between the countries and pays special attention to weapons issues—especially missile defense—while maintaining close ties to the military-industrial complex.

According to journalist Mark Milstein, the broad contours of JINSA's work were originally crafted by Ledeen, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and the husband and wife team Stephen and Shoshana Bryen. In 1979, Stephen Bryen replaced Ledeen as JINSA's executive director, after Ledeen and other early directors had successfully worked to distance the organization "from the rest of the pro-Israel establishment, and methodically [create] close ties with the U.S. defense community." Ledeen later was implicated by some Reagan officials for having helped facilitate what would become the Iran-Contra scandal. According to Milstein, under Bryen, JINSA became "fully operational, finally shedding its study group title in December 1979." When Bryen left JINSA to take a post in the Reagan administration, where he helped shape a hawkish pro-Israel line within the administration, he handed the reigns of the organization over to his wife in 1981.[8]

Wrote Milstein: "Bryen became a consultant for Richard N. Perle, the Reagan administration assistant secretary of defense-designate. After Perle was confirmed by the Senate, Bryen was named deputy assistant secretary of defense in charge of regulating the transfer of U.S. military technology to foreign countries. Critics at the time cited the placement of Bryen in one of the most sensitive positions at the Pentagon as evidence of the tilt in U.S. policy toward Israel under Reagan. 'They don't say no anymore to Israel at the Pentagon,' said a former high-ranking Defense Department official. 'Israel is the 51st state.' It was during the Reagan era that U.S. economic aid to Israel rose to $1.2 billion annually, and military aid to $1.8 billion annually. Bryen had a role in choosing not only what U.S. weaponry Israel would be allowed to purchase with those funds, but also what sensitive U.S. military technology would be made available to Israel for use in its own burgeoning arms industry."

Many individuals with defense industry backgrounds and affiliations have served on JINSA's board of advisers and have been involved in numerous contracts with Israel. Leon Edney, David Jeremiah, and Charles May, all retired U.S. military officers, have been consultants to Northrop Grumman, which has built Israeli ships and planes. JINSA advisers May, Paul Cerjan, and Carlisle Trost have also worked for Lockheed Martin, which has sold F-16s, flight simulators, and rocket systems to Israel. Trost has served as a member of the board of General Dynamics, whose subsidiary Gulfstream has a $206 million contract with the Pentagon.[9]

Immediately after 9/11, JINSA joined other neoconservative-aligned groups like the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) in calling for an expansive U.S. military response that would not be limited to attacking al-Qaeda. In a September 13, 2001 press release entitled "This Goes Beyond Bin Laden," JINSA joined a chorus of neoconservatives in and out of the Bush administration, like former Pentagon number two Paul Wolfowitz, in arguing that Iraq should be a target of the war. It argued: "A long investigation to prove Osama bin Laden's guilt with prosecutorial certainty is entirely unnecessary. He is guilty in word and deed. His history is the source of his culpability. The same holds true for Saddam Hussein. Our actions in the past certainly were not forceful enough, and now we must seize the opportunity to alter this pattern of passivity." Among its recommended list of actions for the U.S. government were: "Halt all U.S. purchases of Iraqi oil under the UN Oil for Food Program and ... provide all necessary support to the Iraq National Congress, including direct American military support, to effect a regime change in Iraq"; "revoke the Presidential Order banning assassinations"; "overturn the 1995 CIA Directive limiting whom the United States can recruit to aid counterterrorism in an effort to boost our human intelligence"; "demand that Egypt and Saudi Arabia sever all remaining ties with Osama bin Laden, including ties with Saudi-sponsored nongovernmental organizations and groups abroad that raise money for bin Laden and other terrorist organizations"; "suspend U.S. military aid to Egypt while reevaluating Egypt's support for American policy objectives"; and "reevaluate America's security relationship with Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States unless both actually join in our war against terrorism."

Each year, JINSA awards its favorite policy or military elite the Henry "Scoop" Jackson Distinguished Service Award. The award honors "those leaders whose careers have been distinguished by the principle that is the foundation of JINSA's work: the belief that the United States requires a strong military capability for both its own security and for that of trustworthy friends and allies. This was the cornerstone of the late Senator Jackson's visionary policy and it guides JINSA today. Senator Jackson helped define our mandate and our programming is designed to further it." Among the recipients have been Sen. Jon Kyl (2010), Sen. John McCain (2006), Paul Wolfowitz (2002), former Rep. Curt Weldon (1999), Sen. Joseph Lieberman (1997), Dick Cheney (1991), and Jeane Kirkpatrick (1984).[10]

Funding

As other hawkish, “pro-Israel” organizations have competed with JINSA for funds in recent years, the organization may have struggled somewhat to maintain its past levels of support. According to its Form 990 filings posted on guidestar.org, the group reported around $2.7 million in donations for 2009, down from $3.5 million the previous year. JINSA posted net losses of approximately $153,000 and $176,000 in 2009 and 2008, respectively.[11]

Between 2001 and 2004, JINSA received nearly $8 million in gifts, grants, and contributions. Thomas Neumann, JINSA's executive director since 1991, once boasted: "We receive 99.9, no, 100% of our funding from private donations." He added, "We receive no money from Israel or any defense contractors." At the time of his comments (1991), donors included Ronald Lauder (of Estee Lauder cosmetics), DC lobbyist Donald Agger, Atlantic Research Corporation (a defense contractor), the Smith-Kogod family, the Air Force Association, the Armed Services Foundation, and Friends of the Israeli Defense Forces.[12]

According to data collected by MediaTransparency. org, between 1998 and 2005, JINSA received nearly $200,000 from several major rightist donors, including the Smith Richardson Foundation, which gave a $100,000 grant to JINSA in 2003 aimed at facilitating exchanges between U.S. and Israeli law enforcement officials involved in combating terrorism threats. Another regular JINSA donor is Irving Moskowitz, a California magnate whose controversial donating activities include aiding right-wing settler groups in the Occupied Territories. According to the 2005 Form 990 of the Irving I. Moskowitz Foundation, the bingo magnate donated $20,000 to JINSA in 2005 for "work against Islamic funded terrorism." Former JINSA president Norman Hascoe was also a substantial donor, having given hundreds of thousands to JINSA through his Hascoe Family Foundation, which remains active today.[13]

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