Hillary Clinton is slated to speak at AIPAC's annual policy conference, which begins this weekend. Her Democratic opponent, Bernie Sanders, is not.
That relative level of interest in the country is shown in privately financed travel records. During her eight-year tenure as a New York senator, Clinton approved nine trips to Israel, including two for herself, for a grand total of $57,569.
Meanwhile, Sen. Sanders (I-Vt.) has approved 49 trips but none to Israel, according to records publicly available for the past 16 years of his Senate tenure.
Sanders, who is the only Jewish candidate for president, lived on a kibbutz for several months in 1964 and in his own words, has visited Israel on "a couple of occasions." Sanders is still the only candidate to not be confirmed as a speaker for the conference. A petition urges him not to attend in the interest of an Israel-Palestinian peace deal.
Clinton is a more natural ally to AIPAC. One of Clinton's approved trips for her senior defense and foreign policy adviser, Andrew Shapiro, was paid for by the American Israel Education Foundation. The AIEF is the 501(c)3 charity foundation for AIPAC, which has spent nearly $98 million on 41,367 trips since January 2000.
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) went on one trip personally and approved two others for staffers. The trips all were sponsored by Secure America Now and cost $56,124. The Texas junior senator also traveled to Helsinki, Kiev, Tallinn and Warsaw during that trip.
Republican front-runner Donald Trump made headlines when he announced his plan to skip a planned Fox News debate on Monday to address the conference. The move prompted Ohio Gov. John Kasich to also withdraw and eventually forced Fox News to cancel the event.
The AIPAC Policy Conference is billed as the largest gathering of America's pro-Israel community, with more than 15,000 pro-Israel Americans and more than two-thirds of Congress expected to attend. Tablet Magazine calls the conference "the Jewish equivalent to the Oscars or the Grammys - the big, buzzy annual event everyone talks about before it happens and gossips about afterward."
