

Students from the University of California, Santa Barbara’s Hillel at the 2010 AIPAC conference (Photo: Santa Barbara Hillel)

The Israel lobby “is recruiting black students as moral shields to make the case for Israeli impunity.” So says Seth Freed Wessler in a piece in Colorlines on efforts by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) to influence black college students’ opinions about Israel.

One story serves as a lesson in how AIPAC and the Israel lobby work. Wessler opens his article:

When Vincent Evans arrived as a bright-eyed first-year at Florida A&M, the country’s largest historically black university, he knew he wanted to get involved in politics. So when an older student leader approached him one afternoon after a student government meeting to ask if he wanted an all expenses paid trip to D.C., Evans jumped at the opportunity. The trip, it turned out, was sponsored by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, the country’s most powerful pro-Israel lobbying outfit. Israel is under growing attack from Palestinian and international activists who call the country a racist apartheid state. In response, its staunchest U.S. lobby is recruiting black students as moral shields to make the case for Israeli impunity. At historically black colleges and universities (known as HBCU’s) around the country, AIPAC is finding and developing a cadre of black allies to declare there’s no way Israel can be racist. In his four years in college, Evans traveled to D.C. at least 10 times on AIPAC’s dime. He and a small group of other student leaders from his school joined hundreds of others from around the country, including other HBCU students, for AIPAC’s semi-annual Saban Leadership Seminar.

And when Evans graduated, he began to work for the Democratic Party:

Evans insists he “never felt with AIPAC that I was being used.” And the multiple trips he took to D.C. and the extensive political training he received paid off. After graduating from college in May 2011, Evans got a job working for the Democratic Party in Tallahassee.

It’s a smart move on the part of AIPAC. They know that the political power of blacks and Latinos will continue to grow in the years ahead. And so they start young, cultivate these students, and turn them onto hasbara talking points. Four years later, these AIPAC-groomed students, some of them blacks and Latinos, go on to work for establishment institutions.

Wessler’s reporting also brings to mind this video of AIPAC’s Jonathan Kessler explaining how the lobby works in the context of the 2010 Berkeley divestment vote: