"There Is a Jewish Hope for Palestinian Liberation. It Must Survive. "Omar and Tlaib Are Condemned in the US for Saying What Prominent Israelis Are Saying "Supporting Palestinian rights is antisemitic because Israel wants it to be"""
Emotionally driven reactions from Washington won’t prevent future violence. Dismantling the Gaza prison could.
October 13, 2023, 6:33 PM
By Ian S. Lustick, an emeritus professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Paradigm Lost: From Two-State Solution to One-State Reality.
Brian Stauffer illustration for Foreign Policy
The astonishing spectacle and intimate horrors of the attack by Hamas and Islamic Jihad against Israelis make it even more difficult than usual to understand why it occurred and how it can be prevented from happening again. There is simply no escaping the gut punch of seeing or hearing people of all ages—including children, teenagers, the elderly, and the disabled—being brutalized, riddled with bullets, or dragged into captivity.
The terror and pain of the victims and the agony of their families—whose appearances, accents, and life stories are so familiar to U.S. and European audiences—make it supremely difficult to undertake effective analysis.
These are real, natural, and undeniable reactions. The emotional and moral truths they reflect are crucial to an effective response. But their very intensity is dangerous.
To prevent the monstrousness that has been unleashed on innocent Israelis from happening again and again, along with the retribution innocent Palestinians suffer as a result, we must not rely on the certainty of our revulsion; we must identify and remove the causes of the attack.
I refer not to the specific calculations, decisions, and deployments inside of Gaza that produced this specific bloodletting, but to the machine of institutionalized oppression, hate, and fear that comprises the real infrastructure of violence. The drive shaft of this machine is the horizonless immiseration, imprisonment, and trauma inflicted on the masses of people living in what Israelis refer to as a “coastal enclave.”
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Palestinian youth throw stones toward an Israeli tank near the fence separating the southern Gaza Strip town of Khan Yunis and the Israeli settlement of Ganei Tal on Sept. 6, 2005Roberto Schmidt/AFP via Getty Images
Coverage of the Oct. 7 attacks has focused on their brutalityand their uncanny similarity to events half a century ago along the Suez Canal and in the Golan Heights that shattered then-prevalent myths of Israel’s omniscient intelligence services and its fully professional and in-control military. But this time, the shock of failure is even more unnerving since the blow was delivered against civilians inside Israeli territory, not on military units stationed inside occupied territories.
Today, what is at stake is not whether the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) are better off facing enemy Arab states directly or with demilitarized zones in between. What is being challenged is the entire idea of Israel living a “normal” life as a Jewish-Zionist “villa” protected by walls of concrete, steel, and fear against the dark Middle Eastern jungle that surrounds it.
If we really do want to know and address the causes of the butchery we have witnessed, and which we are otherwise bound to witness again, we must shift our frame of reference.
The fanaticism and bloodlust of the militants who carried out the attack and perpetrated war crimes—along with their leaders’ calculations, tactics, ruthlessness, mobilization skills, and readiness to die—are not products of a special Palestinian and Muslim prowess or innate evil.
They are what can—and perhaps inevitably will—happen when masses of human beings are treated as the 2.3 million human beings living in the Gaza Strip have been treated for decades. Nor can the event be explained by the undeniable incompetence, hubris, and apparent negligence of the Israeli government and its security apparatuses. Given enough time, any system designed to contain explosive and steadily increasing pressures will fail.
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Palestinians driven from their homes by Israeli forces flee via the sea at Acre during the 1948 Palestinian exodus, known in Arabic as the Nakba. PIctures of History/Universal Images Group via Getty Images
Anyone who tells a story knows that most of the work of the telling isdone in the choice of where the story begins.
If the story of this attack begins on the holiday and Sabbath morning of Oct. 7, it becomes a 9/11 tale of innocent victims exposed to the unprovoked violence of barbarians. The plot then unfolds as the struggle to overcome the shock of a devastating blow, and then to defeat and punish the aggressors on behalf of an outraged humanity.
But if the story is seen as starting in 1948, when it was the grandparents of Gaza refugees who lived in the areas to which their armed descendants returned so briefly and violently, then the moral of the story and the requirements of a satisfying end to the narrative change drastically.
Before the declaration of Israel as a state in May 1948, the apron of land surrounding Gaza contained dozens of Palestinian Arab towns and villages, the largest of which was al-Majdal—what is now the entirely Jewish city of Ashkelon.
When, on Nov. 29, 1947, the United Nations General Assembly voted .. https://embassies.gov.il/MFA/AboutIsrael/Maps/Pages/1947%20UN%20Partition%20Plan.aspx#:~:text=On%2029%20November%201947%20the,annihilation%20against%20the%20Jewish%20state. .. to divide Palestine into a Jewish state and a Palestinian Arab state,this whole area—including Gaza, its surrounding areas, and parts of the Negev Desert—was designated to be included within the Arab state. But the U.N. failed to provide money, troops, or administrators to implement its decision. Abandoning Palestine to chaos, the British, who had ruled the territory for more than 20 years, pulled their forces out of city after city, region after region. As they did so, Jews and Arabs plunged into an atrocity-filled civil war over which areas would fall under Jewish or Arab rule.
The result of this civil war, of battles between Israel and the expeditionary forces of Arab states that invaded Palestine in May 1948, and of increasingly systematic Israeli campaigns to expel Arab civilians from territories that were to have been the Arab state, was the displacement .. https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2017/5/23/the-nakba-did-not-start-or-end-in-1948 .. of 750,000 Palestinians; 200,000 of them found shelter in a narrow wedge of coastal Palestine occupied by Egyptian troops—what became known as the Gaza Strip. Israel’s refusal .. https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_Making_of_the_Arab_Israeli_Conflict.html?id=WCN0MQEACAAJ&redir_esc=y .. to allow those who fled or were expelled to return to their homes, and its subsequent destruction of their villages, towns, and neighborhoods, turned these displaced persons into refugees.
Ruled or dominated by Egypt from the 1949 Armistice until 1956, by Israel from October 1956 to March 1957 .. https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/ben-gurion-address-to-knesset-on-the-results-of-sinai-campaign-march-1957 , by Egypt again from then until June 1967, and by Israel since then, the strip’s refugee population immediately swamped its original inhabitants. Fierce resistance against the Israeli occupation in the early 1970s led to policies implemented by Ariel Sharon, who later became Israel’s prime minister, that bulldozed a grid of roads through densely packed neighborhoods, killed hundreds of Palestinians, and crushed the radical Palestinian guerrilla organizations that were entrenched in the refugee camps.
Left: Youths plant a Palestinian flag in the street and throw rocks in Gaza during violent demonstrations during the First Intifada on Dec. 14, 1987. Sven Nackstrand/afp via Getty Images
Right: A child holds up a portrait of PLO leader Yasser Arafat during the First Intifada on Dec. 22, 1987. Derek Hudson/Getty Images)
Seeing Muslim religious identification as less threatening than Palestinian nationalism, the Israeli authorities then offered support to the Gaza branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, so that by the time of the first Palestinian intifada, or uprising, which began in late 1987, the Brotherhood could create Hamas (officially the Islamic Resistance Movement) to rival the PLO as the vanguard of the Palestinian struggle.
It may seem odd that Israel had a hand in creating its nemesis, but not quite so odd if one takes note of public comments made before the October attack—by both Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Bezalel Smotrich, the minister of finance who is largely in charge of West Bank settler affairs—that the nationalist Palestinian Authority (PA), with its ambition to build a Palestinian nation-state alongside Israel, should be seen as the real enemy .. https://www.newarab.com/analysis/how-israels-far-right-engineering-pas-collapse , compared to Hamas, whose threat to the PA’s political position made it, in their eyes .. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pB16PMEPuiM , a valued asset .. https://lobelog.com/israeli-right-keep-hamas-in-power/ .
[So yet again, see we see Israel leaders seeing not religious affiliation as the real enemy, but Palestinian desire to gain - as promised by the powers that were after WW11 - an independent state. See: Origins and Evolution of the Palestine Problem: 1917-1947 (Part I) During the period of the Mandate, the Zionist Organization worked to secure the establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine. The indigenous people of Palestine, whose forefathers had inhabited the land for virtually the two preceding millennia felt this design to be a violation of their natural and inalienable rights. They also viewed it as an infringement of assurances of independence given by the Allied Powers to Arab leaders in return for their support during the war. The result was mounting resistance to the Mandate by Palestinian Arabs, followed by resort to violence by the Jewish community as the Second World War drew to a close. https://www.un.org/unispal/history2/origins-and-evolution-of-the-palestine-problem/part-i-1917-1947/]
More than anything else, the Oslo Accords of the 1990s reflected a new Israeli government strategy of relying on what it hoped would be the tractability and greed of PLO leaders, rather than on the relative passivity previous governments had (mistakenly) associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. Yasser Arafat and the leadership of the PLO were allowed to return to Palestine from their exile in Tunisia with the understanding that they would suppress popular hostility to Israel in return for a state, or a statelet, they would rule. But Israel more or less doomed that idea by refusing to allocate enough authority to Arafat and his “interim” government to enable it to build legitimacy among Palestinians.
Since the signing of the Oslo Accords, the continued expansion of settlements in the West Bank, the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and the explosion of violence associated with the Second Intifada (which began in 2000) have destroyed any prospect of a negotiated two-state solution—the once abhorred and then widely embraced, but no longer attainable, vision of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip that would provide Palestinians with sufficient realization of their aspirations to end the Arab-Israeli conflict.
In 2002 and 2003, Sharon’s government put Arafat’s headquarters in Ramallah under siege and then “transferred” him to France, where he died the following year.
----- [Again see: And so it was done.
WASHINGTON: Winston S. Churchill III, grandson of the famed British prime minister, recalled last October at the National Press Club here a telling encounter he had had in 1973 with the hawkish Ariel Sharon, now the Israeli prime minister, about Zionist objectives. “What is to become of the Palestinians?” Churchill asked. “We’ll make a pastrami sandwich of them,” Sharon said. Churchill responded, “What?” “Yes, we’ll insert a strip of Jewish settlements in between the Palestinians, and then another strip of Jewish settlements right across the West Bank, so that in 25 years’ time, neither the United Nations nor the United States, nobody, will be able to tear it apart.” http://www.mafhoum.com/press4/116P51.htm
In 2005, hoping to rid itself of the headache of having responsibility for Gaza’s large, impoverished, and hostile refugee population and to isolate it from the West Bank, Israel evacuated .. https://www.haaretz.com/2015-08-06/ty-article/the-gaza-disengagement-as-reported-by-haaretz/0000017f-f6de-d887-a7ff-fefe870a0000 .. its military and 9,000 settlers from the Gaza Strip. It also refused to negotiate with Palestinian representatives about any arrangements for relations between the strip and Israel following the withdrawal.
When Hamas then won the Palestinian legislative elections of 2006, Israel, with U.S. support .. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2008/04/gaza200804 , responded by a failed coup attempt to forcibly replace it with rule of Gaza by Fatah. Hamas then defeated Fatah forces in Gaza and secured its political ascendancy there, leading Israel to seal off Gazans from Israel, even as some official Israeli maps .. https://www.gov.il/en/departments/general/israel-within-boundaries-and-ceasefire-lines .. refrained, and still refrain, from designating Gaza as outside of its international borders.
Gaza became a resource-starved and overpopulated open-air prison, forced to rely on Israel for food, water, electricity, trade, mail delivery, access to fishing, medical care, or contact with the outside world. From then on, Israel has effectively treated Hamas as the prisoner organization responsible for preventing the inmates—none of whom have been placed on trial, and all of whom have life sentences—from harming Israel or Israelis.
Israeli soldiers stand guard by the fence along the border with the Gaza Strip in southern Israel on Dec. 7, 2021. Menahem Kahana/afp via Getty Images
As in any prison, correctional authorities distinguish between inmates individually regarded as criminals and worthy of punishment and the organization representing these inmates, which can be a useful and reliable partner. And as in any prison, the wardens select “trusties” among the prisoners for rewards and to serve as informers. Thus, for example, are small but varying numbers of carefully screened Palestinians in Gaza allowed, under conditions of general “good behavior” in the facility, to leave its confines to work for wages in Israel, returning every night to prison.
The remarks cited above by Israeli ministers, preferring Hamas to the PA,help explain the fact that no Israeli government has relied more completely, or explicitly, on Hamas as an instrument with which to administer Gaza than have the recent Netanyahu governments. Satisfied that its Iron Dome anti-missile defenses and its sophisticated and expensive underground barrier had neutralized Hamas’s ability to hurt Israel by launching rockets over the prison walls or tunneling under them, Netanyahu formed an image of Hamas as having been domesticated.
Thinking about the present in this way is necessary if future violent revolts are to be prevented. The bitter reality is that Gaza is Israel’s problem because, like it or not, Gaza is a part of Israel. Though most governments and the media have been referring to the fighting as an interstate war, it is not.
Israel neither recognizes Gaza (or Palestine) as a state nor Hamas as a legitimate governing authority over its inhabitants. Instructively, Israel’s initial response .. https://www.cnn.com/middleeast/live-news/israel-news-hamas-war-10-13-23#h_7853a23dcfe0d12c37ff45032b59ea21 .. to the attack was to shut off all electricity, food, medicine, and water to the entire area. No state can do those things to another state, but it can do it to a territory it surrounds and dominates.
Thus, before rejecting as outlandish the idea of Gaza as a crowded Israeli prison, consider that what goes on in Israeli prison cells and yards—such as in Beit She’an, Ashkelon, or Megiddo, where most of the inmates are Palestinians—is controlled not by the wardens but by Palestinian prisoner organizations. Those familiar with the Israeli criminal justice system know this is true, and none would imagine saying that these prisons are not located in Israel. In just this sense, the 140-square-mile prison known as the Gaza Strip, whose internal affairs are dominated by Hamas, is also within Israel.
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A young Palestinian protester climbs a fence during a demonstration on the beach near the maritime border with Israel in the northern Gaza Strip on Oct. 8, 2018. Said Khatib/AFP via Getty Images
Everyone knows how brutal escaping prisoners can be, how ruthlessly prison revolts are crushed, and how many inmates uninvolved in the violence suffer as a result. We have seen the former, and we are now seeing the latter. But prison revolts are also seen as graphic signs of how ineffectively, cruelly, or counterproductively the prison was being run. They lead, often if not always, to prison reform or, in some cases, prison closure.
Indeed, this is what is needed in the case of the Gaza prison. Israel must decide: If it doesn’t want Gaza, it must let the United Nations take it over and assist it—with Israeli reparations, Gulf money, and international security assistance—toward the best future it can achieve.
If Israel wants to keep Gaza, it must, as an often-ignored part .. https://www.timesofisrael.com/trumps-conceptual-maps-show-israel-enclave-communities-future-palestine/ .. of former U.S. President Donald Trump’s plan for Palestinians advocated, open up lightly inhabited regions in the northern Negev region of Israel to hundreds of thousands of Gazans whose ancestral homes were once located there and extend equal rights to all to participate in the life of the state that rules them. Ultimately, this means, and will require, equal citizenship for all.
There are now more Arabs than Jews .. https://www.timesofisrael.com/jews-now-a-minority-in-israel-and-the-territories-demographer-says/ .. living between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. The problems of how they live together, and what living together eventually means for the name and the character of the state they share, are daunting. But such problems are better than those we have today, and they are better than those we will have tomorrow if the policies followed continue to address only the horror of the catastrophe and not its causes.
Ian S. Lustick is an emeritus professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Paradigm Lost: From Two-State Solution to One-State Reality.
"There Is a Jewish Hope for Palestinian Liberation. It Must Survive. "Omar and Tlaib Are Condemned in the US for Saying What Prominent Israelis Are Saying "Supporting Palestinian rights is antisemitic because Israel wants it to be"""
I don't know J.J. Goldberg at all. Just wandered into it and felt the loooooong read may be interesting to some others too.
Inside the American Jewish Establishment
By J.J. Goldberg
Introduction: American Jews and Their Politics
History will record that as the twentieth century drew to a close, American Jews were facing a political crisis unprecedented in its scope and nature. For the first time in their three and a half centuries as a community in America--and perhaps for the first time since the dawn of the Jewish Diaspora, two thousand years ago--the Jews had no greater enemy than themselves.
[...]
It is a fact that American anti-Semitism currently is at a historic low by most essential yardsticks. Hostility toward Jews, as measured in opinion polls, has dropped to what some social scientists consider a virtual zero point. Private discrimination against Jews in jobs, education, and housing has all but disappeared. Government action against Jews, the staple of European anti-Semitism for centuries, is almost inconceivable in this country. With a few important exceptions--the rise of some prominent anti-Jewish radicals in the black community, plus a troubling increase in anti-Jewish vandalism--anti-Semitism virtually has vanished from American public life.
By contrast, the percentage of Jews who tell pollsters that anti-Semitism is a "serious problem" in America nearly doubled during the course of the 1980s, from 45 percent in 1983 to almost 85 percent in 199O.
"The American Jewish community today is comfortable, secure, but lacking in self-confidence," the conservative social critic Irving Kristol wrote not long ago. "It shows frequent symptoms of hypochondria and neurasthenia. It is a community very vulnerable to its own repressed anxieties and self-doubt."
This hypochondria is emblematic of another, larger gap in current-day Jewish perception: the gap between the Jews' self-image of vulnerability and the reality of Jewish power.
Any serious description of American Jewish politics--the exercise of power by and within the Jewish community--must inevitably be colored by this perception gap. The gap runs like a crack through the base of the edifice called the Jewish community. Coursing up through the structure, it becomes a yawning chasm of ignorance and mutual incomprehension, dividing the Jewish community's leaders from their presumed followers.
The nature and workings of Jewish power politics are the major theme of this book. That chasm forms the minor theme: the fault line between the activists who conduct the Jewish community's business and represent its interests to the larger society, and the broader population of American Jews, who are almost entirely unaware of the work being done in their name.
Within this fault line lies the crisis of American Jewish politics. How long can leaders claim to lead when followers do not follow?
If American Jews bridle at the notion of "Jewish power," they have good reason. It is true that Jewish history for two thousand years has been told as a gloomy tale, replete with recurring themes of fear and persecution. And it is true that throughout these centuries, the image of the "powerful Jew" has figured prominently in anti-Jewish agitation.
For most of the last two millenia, Jews lived as a tiny, hated minority in Christian Europe. They were regularly restricted in their places of residence, in their work, and even in their rights of marriage and procreation. They were repeatedly accused of manipulating economies, poisoning wells, sacrificing children, and, of course, murdering God. On these pretexts they were subjected to recurring cycles of violence, mass expulsion, and mass murder.
The entire Jewish population of Germany was expelled from its native land in 1182; the same happened in England in 1290, in France in 1306 and again in 1394, in Austria in 1421, in Spain in 1492, and in Portugal in 1497. The Black Plague of 1348 touched off a continent-wide frenzy of murderous assaults on Jews. The Crusaders, en route to claim the Holy Land, slaughtered more Jews than Saracens. The Ukrainian Cossacks, rising up under Bogdan Chmielnicki in 1648 to throw off their Polish overlords, killed more Jews than Poles.
Even if Adolf Hitler had never been born, anti-Semitic violence still would be one of the greatest stains on the history of Christian Europe.
[...]
At this point, the reader might be forgiven for thinking that something is wrong here. A quarter-century, let alone a half-century, seems more than enough time for a population as sophisticated as American Jewry to absorb so profound a transformation. Having narrowly survived utter extermination, a despised, persecuted minority becomes the toast of Pennsylvania Avenue within a generation. How could this go unnoticed by, of all people, the subjects themselves?
The answer is complicated. American Jewry's collective myopia results from a combination of historical factors. Any one of these factors might have skewed perceptions. Together, they have produced a massive failure to communicate.
First and most important among these factors is Jewish assimilation. During the same quarter-century in which the Jewish community was transformed from weakling into powerhouse, the individual American Jew underwent a metamorphosis no less sweeping. Fewer Jews were joining synagogues or donating to Jewish charities. Growing numbers were marrying outside the faith. Community leaders interpreted the statistics in cataclysmic terms, warning that Jews were on the verge of disappearing of melting into the general American population.
As chapter 3 will demonstrate, this doomsday prediction is almost certainly wrong. It is based partly on false statistics, partly on preconceptions and misinterpretations. Year after year, the vast majority of American Jews--the ones who supposedly are disappearing--continue to attend synagogue once or twice annually, join their families for Passover and Hanukkah, and send their children for Bar and Bat Mitzvah training.
Jews are not disappearing. Why they are doing is losing interest in the institutions of organized Judaism. [...] No less important, a large minority of Jews is undergoing no such metamorphosis toward individualism. A sizable bloc--perhaps one fifth to one quarter of all American Jews, or 1 million to 1.5 million persons--is traveling in the opposite direction. They are becoming steadily "more Jewish" than before. More Jewish, in fact, than any large group of American Jews ever was: more traditionalist, more observant of Jewish ritual, more attentive to Jewish group interests, and steadily more alarmed over the backsliding ways of their 4 million "assimilated" brethren. And, not coincidentally, ever more suspicious of Gentile intentions toward Jews. [...] This "committed" minority provides much of the professional leadership for the broader Jewish community. Not surprisingly, then, the noncommunication between the Jewish leadership and the Jewish majority grows steadily more pronounced as the two subcommunities drift further apart.
There is another factor, much older than assimilation, that blinds American Jews to the reality of their own power. It is the enduring myth of Diaspora Jewish powerlessness, and the corollary myth of craven, ineffectual Jewish leadership. These myths work to make the reality of modern Jewish power invisible by rendering it simply incredible.
In traditional Jewish folklore, the Jews were helpless pawns, buffeted me'evel leyom tov--from mourning to celebration--by the vagaries of cruel despots, benign protectors, and Divine Providence itself. "Bechol dor vador omdim aleinu lechaloteinu," reads the liturgy of the Passover festival: "In each generation they rise up against us to destroy us, but the Holy One, blessed be He, saves us from their hand."
There was little room in this cosmology for independent Jewish political action. At best, Jews could appeal to God for salvation by "repentance, prayer, and charity," as the Yom Kippur liturgy urged them to do. But as long as they were exiled from their ancient homeland, their fate was in the hands of others.
Reality did not quite match the myth. The centuries of Diaspora produced a long line of Jewish political figures: diplomats, power brokers, and even the occasional warrior-hero. Jewish communities throughout history were nearly always autonomous, self-governing enclaves. True, they had widely varying degrees of independence and security. Most lived under severe restrictions, but some dealt with their neighbors on a near-equal basis. The great Jewish community of Babylonia was governed for a thousand years by a descendant of King David known as the exilarch, who was a minister of the royal court. The Jewish communities of medieval Poland and Lithuania elected a shtadlan, or ambassador to the Polish court, who often dealt with the nobility on a near-equal basis. Many Renaissance princes appointed "court Jews" to manage their finances; some of these appointees wielded extraordinary power on the Jewish community's behalf.
These episodes of political success left few traces on the modern Jewish memory. Few Jews today have heard of the exilarchs. Those educated American Jews who know the terms shtadlan and "court Jew" usually associate them with groveling beggars or corrupt, self-serving parvenus.
The oblivion that has overtaken the political figures of the Jewish past is due partly to their ultimate failure. Jewish life in premodern Europe enjoyed many intervals of ease, but in the end it fell into a spiral of humiliation and persecution, descending through the century-long nightmare of czarist Russia to the horrors of the Second World War. Like politicians of every time and place, the political leaders of medieval Jewry came to be tarred, in retrospect, with the final failure of the system they served.
Equally important, the Jewish political tradition came out the loser in a long struggle for historical memory. The victor was a rival power-center in Jewish life: the rabbinate. Where the Jews' political leaders confronted Jewish minority status with pragmatism and compromise, the rabbis taught resignation and prayer. Unable to offer even partial comfort here and now, they promised a glorious messianic redemption in the end of days.
In some ways, then, the power politics of modern American Jewry represents the rebirth of a Jewish tradition that has lain dormant for three hundred years, since the collapse of the medieval Polish empire.
Between then and now, under a succession of Ukrainian Cossacks, Russian czars, and Nazi stormtroopers, a durable mythology has taken root. This mythology survives today in American Jewish folk memory. In it, Jews are utterly powerless and must live by their wits. Compromise is useless or worse. Politics is made of messianic visions and apocalyptic goals. Some of these visions, like Zionism and socialism, may occasionally become reality.
In this mythology, those wealthy and powerful Jews who operate in the gray world of compromise and deal-making are only looking out for themselves. Formal spokespersons for the Jews--rabbis, shtadlans, community officials--are hapless buffoons, too dim to realize the futility of their task.
The American Jew's political myopia is rooted in an Old World tradition of dashed hopes and messianic dreams. But in the New World the Jews created mythologies of their own.
As Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg demonstrated in his illuminating 1988 historical essay, The Jews in America: Four Centuries of an Uneasy Encounter, the American Jewish community was founded and populated largely by the poorest and least educated Jews of Europe. Someone with a strong attachment to Jewish values did not travel halfway around the world to settle in an untamed wilderness without rules or boundaries. A good Jew stayed at home. Rebels, adventurers, and losers came to America.
Three main immigrant waves created American Jewry: Portuguese Marranos in the colonial era, German Jews in the mid-nineteenth century, and Russian Jews in the early twentieth. Each wave consisted of Jews who wanted to escape the world they knew. They were fleeing both from the Jewish community and from the Gentile society surrounding it, Hertzberg wrote. "[T]he immigrant Jews ... felt betrayed by the societies, the governments, the rabbis, and the rich Jewish leaders who had cast them out, or, at the very least, had failed to find room for them.... They would not allow the very people who had betrayed them in Europe to exercise authority in America."
To be sure, these immigrants recreated a Jewish community in America. But it was a Jewish community with a difference. This was a new world, where religion was disestablished. Churches had no legal hold over believers; likewise, the Jewish community had no hold over Jews. It was defanged. Over time, Jews developed a new mythology of an organized American Jewish community led by well-meaning bumblers.
No one ever summed up the mythic image of inept Jewish leadership better than the late author-activist Paul Jacobs. In his 1965 memoir Is Curly Jewish? he offered an imaginary crisis that captured the layperson's picture of the three best-known Jewish agencies: the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith (ADL), American Jewish Committee (AJC), and the American Jewish Congress.
"A fanciful way of describing the work of these groups," Jacobs wrote, "is that some guy walks into the toilet of a ginmill on Third Avenue, New York, and while he's standing at the urinal, he notices that someone has written `Screw the Jews' on the toilet wall." A quick phone call is made and "an ADL man rushes down to the bar" to dust the wall for fingerprints. The ADL checks the prints against its files of 2 million known anti-Semites, then publishes a photo of the wall in its next bulletin, saying it shows anti-Semitism is on the rise and "everyone should join B'nai B'rith." Next to arrive would be the representative of the American Jewish Committee, who would look around, then announce plans for a major academic study of "anti-Semitic wall-writing since Pompeii." AJC would also publish a booklet proving that a Jew had invented the martini, to be distributed in bars nationwide. Then the American Jewish Congress would arrive, throw up a picket line outside the bar, and petition the Supreme Court to bar the sale of liquor "to anyone making an anti-Semitic remark."
The most powerful myth surrounding American Jewish power is one shared by Jews and Gentiles alike. It is the mistaken equation of Jewish politics and Middle East policy: the notion that the Jewish political agenda begins and ends with Israel, and conversely, that Israel's support in Washington largely results from Jewish political power.
"Washington is a city of acronyms, and today one of the best-known in Congress is AIPAC," former Representative Paul Findley wrote in the opening of his 1985 book They Dare to Speak Out: People and Institutions Confront Israel's Lobby. "The mere mention of it brings a sober, if not furtive look, to the face of anyone on Capitol Hill who deals with Middle East policy. AIPAC--the American Israel Public Affairs Committee--is now the preeminent power in Washington lobbying."
Findley's book is the most famous of a host of studies that appeared in the 1980s and early 1990s, attempting to document the Israel lobby's stranglehold over American foreign policy. Others include The Fateful Triangle, by Noam Chomsky (1983); Taking Sides, by Stephen Green (1984); The Lobby, by Edward Tivnan (1987); and The Passionate Attachment, by George and Douglas Ball (1992).
What these books share is an underlying assumption that U.S. support for Israel is misguided and runs counter to American interests. By this reasoning, some force must exist that is powerful enough to subvert U.S. foreign policy according to its will. That force is the Jewish lobby; without it, the United States would not support Israel.
The Balls make their case with a summary of Jewish clout that is actually not far off the mark:
The clout that Jewish Americans exercise in American politics is far incommensurate with their population....
[...]
But the reality of Jewish power and its effect on America's Middle East policy is much more complicated than the simple conspiracy theory laid out by these overwrought critics. If the equation were as simple as the Balls suggest--Jewish money and activism create Jewish clout, which creates U.S. support for Israel--then U.S. support would be fairly consistent over the five-decade period since Israel became a state.
That is not the case. Washington provided little aid and no weaponry to Israel during the new nation's first and most vulnerable decade. America's ties with Israel grew slowly during the 1960s, partly because of Jewish involvement in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, partly because of Lyndon Johnson's admiration for Israel and its then-prime minister, Levi Eshkol.
In fact, the strong U.S.-Israel alliance as we now know it, with its huge arms sales and multibillion-dollar aid packages, commenced under Richard M. Nixon, a Republican president elected with almost no Jewish backing. Every president before him had attempted a posture of evenhandedness in the Middle East, maintaining friendship with both Israel and its sworn enemies. Nixon dropped the attempt at balance and declared Israel for the first time to be a "strategic asset" in the Cold War. On his watch, the United States replaced France as Israel's main arms supplier. American aid to Israel skyrocketed from $300 million to $2.2 billion per year, making Israel the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid. U.S.-Israel relations became big business. That made Israel's allies important players in Washington power politics.
In the years since Nixon first engineered America's massive commitment to Israel, the Jewish lobby has grown exponentially in reputation, access, and influence. AIPAC, the Jewish community's main foreign-policy lobbying organization, has grown from a three-person office into a well-oiled organization with a staff of 150 and a budget of $15 million. Jewish membership in the U.S. Congress has tripled.
Over the last two decades, the United States has established a government office to hunt down and expel Nazi war criminals, has made Jewish emigration from the Soviet Union a central foreign-policy goal, and has overseen the exodus to freedom of ancient Jewish communities in Syria and Ethiopia. In May 1991, Washington even brokered a one-day ceasefire in the bloody Ethiopian civil war, for the sole purpose of permitting Israeli airplanes to evacuate that nation's twenty thousand Jewish tribespeople in an unprecedented twenty-four-hour airlift. And, of course, America created a Holocaust museum, a $168 million memorial to Jewish suffering in Second World War Europe, built by congressional mandate (with private money on federal land) in the midst of the Smithsonian complex on the Mall.
Did American Jewish clout create the U.S.-Israel alliance? One could as plausibly argue the opposite: that the U.S.-Israel alliance created contemporary American Jewish political power.
The real story of Jewish power is more complicated than either scenario. America under Richard Nixon moved toward Israel for its own reasons of Cold War politics and military strategy; domestic Jewish influence was only a secondary incentive.
The Jewish lobby was already in existence. It had been around for decades. Long before Nixon's presidency, it had played a leading role in reshaping the U.S. consensus on civil rights, church-state relations, immigration, and much more.
The forging of a U.S.-Israel alliance did not give birth to American Jewry's political establishment. But it thrust the Jewish establishment upward into a dizzying new political stratosphere. It transformed the Jewish community's political agenda. It forced America's most resolutely liberal constituency into an unfamiliar alliance with the mostly Gentile Cold Warriors of the national security establishment. And it made American Jewry a force on the international stage.
Other factors were working on the Jewish community at the same time, reinforcing the process of politicization and empowerment. Most important was the direct fallout of Israel's lightning victory in the Six-Day War of 1967. That victory touched off a wave of nationalist passion among Jews in America and around the world.
Across the ocean, the Six-Day War sparked an unexpected and dramatic rebirth of Jewish fervor among the 2 million Jews of the Soviet Union, who defied communist repression and broke a half-century of silence. In turn, the Soviet Jews' struggle for freedom inspired a broad-based popular movement among American Jews. And the American Jewish campaign for Soviet Jewry, in turn, reinforced the newfound coziness between the Jewish community's leaders and the American right.
The political reality of Jewish community life today is that a powerful machine has arisen in the last quarter-century to advance Jewish interests. It is far more powerful than most Jews realize, though not half so powerful as their enemies fantasize. Like any big bureaucracy, it operates within clear constraints and often makes mistakes; yet it has proved itself capable of making despots quake and halting armies in their tracks. A complex mechanism, it is incongruously made up of bodies whose very names bring a condescending smile to Jewish lips: B'nai B'rith, Hadassah, United Jewish Appeal, Anti-Defamation League. Groups like these are the engines--more precisely, the wheels in the engine--of Jewish power in America today.
[...]
The emergence of American Jewry as an independent power is not without its ironies. The basic idea of Zionism, the moving vision behind the creation of Israel, was that a Jewish state would give a voice to a voiceless people and return Jews to the stage of history after centuries of helplessness. American Jewish power has turned the Zionist idea on its head.
In August 1987, for example, when Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Shamir paid a state visit to Romania, his agenda included bilateral trade, tourism, Romanian assistance to Soviet Jewish emigres, and Romanian mediation in the Israel-Arab dispute. In return, the Jerusalem Post reported, Romanian president Nicolae Ceausescu planned to ask Shamir to use his influence with the American Jewish community to improve Romania's ties with Washington.
A month later Israeli foreign minister Shimon Peres, in New York for the U.N. General Assembly, met with the foreign minister of Turkey. Briefing the press afterward, Turkey's U.N. ambassador explained that Peres wanted Turkey to help Israel improve its ties in the Islamic world, and Turkey wanted Israel to put in a good word for it with the American Jewish community.
The purpose of this book is to explore the workings of Jewish power politics in contemporary America. We will examine the structure of the organized Jewish community, the issues that drive the Jewish communal agenda, the internal politics of the major Jewish organizations, and the complicated relations between the Jewish community leadership and the masses of American Jews. We will look at various sources of Jewish clout, including fund-raising and media influence.
Readers looking for confirmation of their favorite myths will likely be disappointed. They will find no meaningful Jewish control of the media or high finance, numerous though Jews may be in those industries. They will find precious little clandestine Israeli action to subvert Congress or American public opinion.
For that matter, they will find little of the glitter that graces the daily gossip columns, and surprisingly few of the celebrity names that are most often associated with American Jewish power, such as Michael Milken, Michael Ovitz, Barbara Walters, and Barbra Streisand. These are powerful people, and they are Jews, but they do not represent Jewish power in America. The power of any group is the ability of its members to work together and change the world around them to suit their needs and purposes. That is what is meant by American power or black power, the power of the tobacco industry or of the Roman Catholic Church. Some Jewish celebrities will appear in this narrative because they participate in that process. Most do not.
On the other hand, readers accustomed to examining Jewish political activity will find surprisingly little evidence of hapless, bumbling, or corrupt Jewish leaders betraying their grassroots constituencies. Instead, readers will find a community bureaucracy that is reasonably efficient and fundamentally well-meaning, as big bureaucracies go.
However, readers also will find a Jewish political system that is in trouble, shaken by the sweeping changes in the world around it. These troubles partly are the aftermath of success: in a world where embattled Israel is signing peace treaties, where oppressed Jewish communities from Moscow to Damascus are stepping into the light of freedom, what battles remain? Without threats, what will rally Jews to the flag?
At the same time, the current malaise in the Jewish community reflects the dangerous uncertainties facing all political systems today, as the world enters the uncharted waters of the twenty-first century while clinging to the outdated maps of the twentieth.
[...]
In the real world, political work goes on whether or not the public takes an interest. The only difference is whether the end result reflects the public's will or the will of a small minority. For this reason alone, Jews are invited to find out what is being done in their name. And other Americans are invited to read on and find out what their neighbors are up to.
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