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AIPAC: so 2008?

Here at FP, we watched U.S. Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. John Kerry‘s speeches at the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference. We parsed the response to the two-state solution proffered by both. We considered their call for a settlement-freeze. We read about Netanyahu’s reception. Israel and Palestine — and AIPAC especially — ...

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586115_090505_aipac5.jpg
586115_090505_aipac5.jpg

Here at FP, we watched U.S. Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. John Kerry‘s speeches at the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference. We parsed the response to the two-state solution proffered by both. We considered their call for a settlement-freeze. We read about Netanyahu’s reception.

Israel and Palestine — and AIPAC especially — tend to be tinder-box issues, and we expected to find ourselves amid some policy or defense discussion (flamewar?) in the blogosphere.

Oddly, what we noticed most was the sound of crickets.

Why the silence? Barack Obama isn’t speaking (the big reason for last year’s spike), The Israel Lobby is old news, there’s relatively little violence between Israel and its neighbors, and the Israeli elections are over; plus, no one has yet said anything too contentious. The issues that make AIPAC’s conference hot are, for the moment, relatively cool.

An extremely unofficial measurement of the response — Google Trends — seems to bear the observation out.

Annie Lowrey is assistant editor at FP.
Tags: Foreign & Public Diplomacy, Israel, Media, Middle East and North Africa, Palestine, U.S. Foreign Policy

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