On Feb. 21, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) issued a laconic statement condemning Otzma Yehudit (Jewish Power), a radical right-wing party. The pro-Israel lobbying group was reacting to the recently announced alliance between Otzma Yehudit and the national religious party HaBayit HaYehudi that has been endorsed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu ahead of April 9 elections. Netanyahu is hoping that the alliance will save the two parties from missing the vote threshold for entering the Knesset.

Avigdor Liberman, chair of Yisrael Beitenu, described AIPAC's unusual statement as an expression of “genuine alarm.” Liberman, whose party advocates the “voluntary” transfer of Israeli Arabs to other states, knows that the powerful pro-Israel lobbying group in Washington rarely attacks Jewish politicians who espouse Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Arabs. In fact, when Liberman was appointed foreign minister, in 2009 and 2013, AIPAC’s leadership remained mum. When Liberman called on Israelis to boycott Arab businesses in Wadi Ara, the leaders of the Jewish, pro-Evangelist lobby did not utter a word. So what made them deviate from their long-standing official policy of non-intervention in Israeli politics and from their non-official support of Israel’s pro-settlement political right?

The answer appears to lie in AIPAC’s tweet stating that it “has a longstanding policy not to meet with members of this racist and reprehensible party.” That said, however, some of AIPAC’s best friends are racists.

In 2007, AIPAC invited no less a racist than the evangelical preacher John Hagee to address its annual convention. That would be the same John Hagee who suggested in his book “Jerusalem Countdown” that Hitler was sent by God to drive the Jews back to Israel in order to fulfill a biblical prophecy. The Holocaust, Hagee has also opined, occurred because “the Jews rebelled and denied the true God.” Thousands of pro-Israel activists cheered the man who said that “it was the disobedience and rebellion of the Jews” that had led to the Jews’ trials and tribulations over the centuries and that the Jewish Rothschild family was part of a global economic conspiracy.