- Philip Weiss, a Jewish critic of Israel who is forthright
about the power of the Israel lobby, reviews (http://tinyurl.com/WeissLobby
) a supposed bombshell piece ("The Failure of the American Jewish
Establishment" by Peter Beinart) criticizing the Israel lobby in
the "New York Review of Books."
-
- (http://tinyurl.com/BeinartJewishLobby)
-
- Weiss writes that the "The piece is undoubtedly
important, because the New York Review of Books has power." However,
he also points out the article's serious shortcomings. For example, it
is silent on Mearsheimer and Walt's analysis of the Israel lobby. Weiss
writes: "[Peter] Beinart's piece is avowedly parochial. And it is
also very smart in many places. Maybe it represents a break with [ultra-Zionist
liberal] Marty Peretz? Yes: I hope he reaches the Jews, as I hope that
J Street gets Jewish congressmen to stop speaking in tongues. But can you
have any larger moral authority if you don't talk about the massacre in
Gaza and the Kent-State treatment by the Israeli army of Palestinian demonstrators?
Beinart won't go near either of these truths."
-
- Peter Beinart has been very much an establishment pro-Zionist,
pro-war liberal, who edited the pro-Zionist "New Republic"
from 1999 to 2006. Quoting from Wikipedia:
-
- "For the December 13, 2004 edition of The New Republic,
Beinart wrote an article titled 'A Fighting Faith: An Argument for a New
Liberalism,' in which he argued that liberals should draw upon the anti-totalitarianism
liberalism of the early cold war to develop a distinctive strategy against
jihadist terrorism. New York Times columnist [neocon] David Brooks called
'A Fighting Faith' 'the most discussed essay of the postelection period.'
-
- "Beinart spent 2005 as a guest scholar at the [liberal]
Brookings Institution , where he turned his essay into a book, 'The Good
Fight: Why Liberals-and Only Liberals-Can Win the War on Terror and Make
America Great Again' (HarperCollins, 2006)."
-
- So after being a war liberal, supporting the policy of
the neoconservatives, Beinart is seemingly making something of a change
with his essay, "The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment."
(http://tinyurl.com/BeinartJewishLobby)
-
- But this change, as will be pointed out, is more superficial
than real.
-
- Beinart's major concern is that most young Jews do not
identify with Zionism, and that liberal Jews especially reject Zionism.
"Among American Jews today," he writes, "there are a great
many Zionists, especially in the Orthodox world, people deeply devoted
to the State of Israel. And there are a great many liberals, especially
in the secular Jewish world, people deeply devoted to human rights for
all people, Palestinians included. But the two groups are increasingly
distinct. Particularly in the younger generations, fewer and fewer American
Jewish liberals are Zionists; fewer and fewer American Jewish Zionists
are liberal."
-
- Beinart wants a new type of Zionism that will attract
youthful liberals. He writes that "there is a different Zionist calling,
which has never been more desperately relevant. It has its roots in Israel's
Independence Proclamation, which promised that the Jewish state 'will be
based on the precepts of liberty, justice and peace taught by the Hebrew
prophets,' and in the December 1948 letter from Albert Einstein, Hannah
Arendt, and others to The New York Times, protesting right-wing Zionist
leader Menachem Begin's visit to the United States after his party's militias
massacred Arab civilians in the village of Deir Yassin. It is a call to
recognize that in a world in which Jewish fortunes have radically changed,
the best way to memorialize the history of Jewish suffering is through
the ethical use of Jewish power."
-
- It is apparent that Beinart's position on Zionism is
quite similar to his earlier position on the "war on terror."
Then he wanted to draw liberals over to the "war on terror"
and not leave it under the control of the neocon right. Now he wants to
draw liberals over to the support of Zionism, which is currently controlled
by the right. Note that in both cases he has wanted to maintain the underlying
policies and just make them fit better into the liberal worldview.
-
- To what degree does Beinart really want to liberalize
the fundamentals of Zionism? As he revealed in a debate with the more hardline
Zionist Jeffrey Goldberg
-
- (http://tinyurl.com/beinartliberal), he is fundamentally
concerned about a strategy to protect Israel, not fairness for the Palestinians.
Beinart declared: "I'm not asking Israel to be Utopian. I'm not asking
it to allow Palestinians who were forced out (or fled) in 1948 to return
to their homes. I'm not even asking it to allow full, equal citizenship
to Arab Israelis, since that would require Israel no longer being a Jewish
state. I'm actually pretty willing to compromise my liberalism for Israel's
security and for its status as a Jewish state. What I am asking is that
Israel not do things that foreclose the possibility of a Palestinian state
in the West Bank, because if it is does that it will become--and I'm quoting
Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak here--an 'apartheid state.'"
-
- Note that Beinart is far from being devoted to basic
liberal principles. He does not even want Arab Israelis to be equal citizens-a
fundamental principle of modern democracy. Beinart, in short, acknowledges
that he puts the preservation of the Jewish nature of the Israeli state
above basic liberal principles. And Beinart only is asking "that
Israel not do things that foreclose the possibility of a Palestinian state
in the West Bank." He does not say Israel must abide by UN resolution
242 and turn over control of the West Bank to the Palestinians so as to
enable them to have a viable state.
-
- Beinart, in short, does not seem to be concerned about
the effects of Israel's actions on the Palestinians but rather on the image
of Israel. If widely perceived as a "apartheid state," Israel
would become an isolated, pariah nation like the former white-ruled South
Africa. So although Beinart wants to make Israel attractive to liberals,
what he seems most concerned about is not liberal principles but the
optimal way of protecting Israel. Israel has to maintain at least the
semblance of liberalism in order to both attract Jewish liberals and maintain
legitimacy in the world.
-
- Beinart's view of the value of liberalism for Israel's
security is quite on the mark. For one thing, liberal Zionists, because
of their positive image of being fair to the Palestinians, can be more
effective than hard-line rightist Zionists in combating real critics of
Israel. As gatekeepers they can serve to prevent any type of criticism
that is stronger, and likely more telling, than their own, tepid variety.
The most efficacious rhetorical ploy to shield Israel and the Israel
lobby from criticism is the lethal charge of anti-Semitism, which liberal
Zionists have not only tolerated when wielded by others but, in fact, are
wont to use themselves. The esteemed J Streeter Michelle Goldberg, for
instance, described my book, "The Transparent Cabal" as "subtle"
anti-Semitism.
-
- http://www.publiceye.org/magazine/v24n2/book-transparent-cabal.html
-
- http://home.comcast.net/~transparentcabal/reviewrebuttle.html
-
- If liberal Zionists were actually sincere about opening
the subjects of Israel and the Israel lobby to real debate, they would
have to act to eliminate this silencing tactic.
-
- In his analysis of the new J Street lobby, Mark Bruzonsky,
an actual Jewish critic of Israel, describes the current emergence of
liberal Jewish criticism as simply a tactic orchestrated by the Zionist
leadership to better advance Israel's interests in the Age of Obama, with
liberalism once again regnant after the hiatus of the Bush years. "The
Israeli/Jewish Lobby story has long been one far beyond AIPAC in fact,
though you would not know it from the J Street approach," Bruzonsky
writes. "In the past thirty years it has spun off multiple organizations
with different portfolios, different targets, different styles, but one
overall goal -- nurturing the U.S. 'Special Relationship' with Israel and
making sure massive amounts of political, military, and economic support
for the Jewish State keep flowing through multiple pipelines and mechanisms
no matter what."
-
- http://www.middleeast.org/10-29-09.htm
-
- But whether the emergence of liberal Zionist criticism
of Israel and the Israel lobby is an intentional strategy orchestrated
by the leaders of Zionism in the US and Israel to better advance the interests
of the Jewish state, or whether it represents the spontaneous movement
of liberal Jews still ultimately loyal to a Jewish state, is of no major
importance in terms of bringing about a peace solution that is fair and
acceptable to the Palestinians. The objective fact is that the liberal
Zionists will not help to bring about a fair solution to the Palestinian
issue and that it will actually impede any real efforts to make US Middle
East policy less pro-Israel.
-
- It would seem to be an unstated assumption that the solution
of the Israel/Palestine issue must revolve around the opinion of American
Jews. But why must this be the case? This issue is not one that only
involves Jews-such as a question pertaining to the Jewish religion-but
rather an issue that has a major impact on all Americans, as well as other
peoples of the world. Gentiles who make up the overwhelming majority of
the American population should not be too fearful to speak frankly on the
subject. Are pro-Zionist Jews really so powerful that they can destroy
the careers of all gentiles who dare to differ with them on this subject?
Undoubtedly, they can destroy the careers of some, but there are many
gentiles participating in the blackout of truth regarding Israel and the
Israel lobby who would not suffer serious hardship. And, of course, if
large numbers of gentiles dared to speak out they could not all be harmed.
Moreover, if the Israel lobby's power became publicly discussed, it would
by that very fact be weakened. Obviously, the power of the Israel lobby-which
extends far beyond a political lobby-cannot be limited if it cannot be
discussed truthfully.
-
- Undoubtedly, it would be beneficial if more American
Jews made telling criticisms of the policies of Israel and its lobby, but
American gentiles cannot afford to simply wait for Jewish individuals to
come forth to rectify America's one-sided policy in the Middle East. Matters
in that region are so serious and so fraught with incalculable peril for
the United States and for the world as to make this passivity unconscionable.
-
- Rather, American gentiles themselves must dare to step
forward and speak out. The purpose is not to condemn Israel or its American
supporters, but simply to tell the truth. The peace and security of the
United States and the world depend on it.
-
-
- Best,
-
- Stephen Sniegoski
-
- Transparent Cabal Website:
-
- http://home.comcast.net/~transparentcabal/
-
- Amazon listing of The Transparent Cabal:
-
- http://tiny.cc/zNV06
-
-
-
- _________________________________________________________
-
- http://mondoweiss.net/2010/05/ny-review-of-books-spots-t
he-israel-lobby-through-a-glass-darkly.html#comments
-
- http://tinyurl.com/WeissLobby
-
- 'NY Review of Books' goes after the Israel lobby, Jewishly
-
- by Philip Weiss on May 17, 2010
-
- The NY Review of Books has an important piece in its
forthcoming issue on the idea that the American Jewish establishment has
rigidly sided with Israeli leadership and abandoned liberal American values
and endangered the Zionist project. I.e., the New York Review is slamming
the Israel lobby from a Jewish place. Or giving it a friendly slap--the
word "lobby" is never used. The author is Peter Beinart:
-
- [Comments by Beinart cited by Weiss]
-
- "In Israel itself, voices from the left, and
even center, warn in increasingly urgent tones about threats to Israeli
democracy. (Former Prime Ministers Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak have both
said that Israel risks becoming an "apartheid state" if it continues
to hold the West Bank. This April, when settlers forced a large Israeli
bookstore to stop selling a book critical of the occupation, Shulamit Aloni,
former head of the dovish Meretz Party, declared that "Israel has
not been democratic for some time now.") But in the United States,
groups like AIPAC and the Presidents' Conference patrol public discourse,
scolding people who contradict their vision of Israel as a state in which
all leaders cherish democracy and yearn for peace.
-
- "The result is a terrible irony. In theory,
mainstream American Jewish organizations still hew to a liberal vision
of Zionism. On its website, AIPAC celebrates Israel's commitment to "free
speech and minority rights." The Conference of Presidents declares
that "Israel and the United States share political, moral and intellectual
values including democracy, freedom, security and peace." These groups
would never say, as do some in Netanyahu's coalition, that Israeli Arabs
don't deserve full citizenship and West Bank Palestinians don't deserve
human rights. But in practice, by defending virtually anything any Israeli
government does, they make themselves intellectual bodyguards for Israeli
leaders who threaten the very liberal values they profess to admire....
-
- "Not only does the organized American Jewish
community mostly avoid public criticism of the Israeli government, it tries
to prevent others from leveling such criticism as well. In recent years,
American Jewish organizations have waged a campaign to discredit the world's
most respected international human rights groups."
-
- The piece concludes with good sociological insight and
a call on American Jews to revive Zionism among the young, based on liberal
anti-Sheikh Jarrah principles:
-
- [Comments by Beinart cited by Weiss]
-
- "This obsession with victimhood lies at the
heart of why Zionism is dying among America's secular Jewish young. It
simply bears no relationship to their lived experience, or what they have
seen of Israel's.... The year 2010 is not, as Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed,
1938. The drama of Jewish victimhood-a drama that feels natural to many
Jews who lived through 1938, 1948, or even 1967-strikes most of today's
young American Jews as farce.
-
- " But there is a different Zionist calling, which
has never been more desperately relevant. It has its roots in Israel's
Independence Proclamation, which promised that the Jewish state 'will be
based on the precepts of liberty, justice and peace taught by the Hebrew
prophets,' and in the December 1948 letter from Albert Einstein, Hannah
Arendt, and others to The New York Times, protesting right-wing Zionist
leader Menachem Begin's visit to the United States after his party's militias
massacred Arab civilians in the village of Deir Yassin. It is a call to
recognize that in a world in which Jewish fortunes have radically changed,
the best way to memorialize the history of Jewish suffering is through
the ethical use of Jewish power.
-
- "...What if American Jewish organizations brought
these young people [protesting Sheikh Jarrah] to speak at Hillel? What
if this was the face of Zionism shown to America's Jewish young?"
-
- A few thoughts:
-
- --The piece is undoubtedly important, because the New
York Review of Books has power. Maybe now Rick Hertzberg of the New Yorker
will write about the Sheikh Jarrah protest he attended. David Remnick will
move further left on the issue. More centrist American achievement Jews
will finally come out against the colonization program and even the East
Jerusalem messianism, because they realize it won't hurt their careers;
Robert Silvers of the NY Review is saying the water is safe. Moshe Halbertal
is at the Sheikh Jarrah protests, so is Bernard Avishai; they have helped
to move the left-center, and good for them.
-
- --The piece demonstrates the fact that the NY Review
is a follower not a leader. All these ideas have been expressed before
in Jewish life. Haaretz has expressed them, Jerry Haber at Magnes Zionist
has expressed them, Rebecca Vilkomerson at Jewish Voice for Peace, Cecilie
Surasky at JVP, Richard Silverstein, Daniel Fleshler, I could go on and
on. Max Blumenthal has been a siren on the fact that Jewish-American liberal
values are being corrupted by Israel's militarism. Tony Judt said verbatim
four years ago that American Jewish leadership thinks it's 1938 and they're
nuts. The New York Review turns to none of these intellectuals who have
done the tilling of the hard ground. It turns to one of George Bush's useful
idiots, to echo Judt, in Beinart, a man who helped push the U.S. to war
in Iraq and who worked for AIPAC during the 2008 election and has evidently
bethought his attachment.
-
- --Beinart and the NY Review nowhere credit Walt and Mearsheimer
here. The NY Review has never reviewed their bombshell book. But their
ideas are remarkably similar to the ideas that Beinart is straining through
his latke strainer, four years on. Walt and Mearsheimer are for the two-state
solution, or were. Again, followership. Mike Desch has talked about the
disastrous role of Never-again-ism in our foreign policy. Yes the Review
has an enormous effect inside Jewish life, but does official Jewish life
have a damn clue about where the conversationhttp://tinyurl.com/BeinartJewishLobbyis
now? No, they are following the conversation...
-
- Beinart's piece is avowedly parochial. And it is also
very smart in many places. Maybe it represents a break with Marty Peretz?
Yes: I hope he reaches the Jews, as I hope that J Street gets Jewish congressmen
to stop speaking in tongues. But can you have any larger moral authority
if you don't talk about the massacre in Gaza and the Kent-State treatment
by the Israeli army of Palestinian demonstrators? Beinart won't go near
either of these truths.
-
- http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/jun/
10/failure-american-jewish-establishment/?pagination=false
-
- http://tinyurl.com/BeinartJewishLobby
-
-
- The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment
-
- by Peter Beinart
-
- In 2003, several prominent Jewish philanthropists hired
Republican pollster Frank Luntz to explain why American Jewish college
students were not more vigorously rebutting campus criticism of Israel.
In response, he unwittingly produced the most damning indictment of the
organized American Jewish community that I have ever seen.
-
- The philanthropists wanted to know what Jewish students
thought about Israel. Luntz found that they mostly didn't. "Six times
we have brought Jewish youth together as a group to talk about their Jewishness
and connection to Israel," he reported. "Six times the topic
of Israel did not come up until it was prompted. Six times these Jewish
youth used the word 'they' rather than 'us' to describe the situation."
-
- That Luntz encountered indifference was not surprising.
In recent years, several studies have revealed, in the words of Steven
Cohen of Hebrew Union College and Ari Kelman of the University of California
at Davis, that "non-Orthodox younger Jews, on the whole, feel much
less attached to Israel than their elders," with many professing "a
near-total absence of positive feelings." In 2008, the student senate
at Brandeis, the only nonsectarian Jewish-sponsored university in America,
rejected a resolution commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the Jewish
state.
-
- Luntz's task was to figure out what had gone wrong. When
he probed the students' views of Israel, he hit up against some firm beliefs.
First, "they reserve the right to question the Israeli position."
These young Jews, Luntz explained, "resist anything they see as 'group
think.'" They want an "open and frank" discussion of Israel
and its flaws. Second, "young Jews desperately want peace." When
Luntz showed them a series of ads, one of the most popular was entitled
"Proof that Israel Wants Peace," and listed offers by various
Israeli governments to withdraw from conquered land. Third, "some
empathize with the plight of the Palestinians." When Luntz displayed
ads depicting Palestinians as violent and hateful, several focus group
participants criticized them as stereotypical and unfair, citing their
own Muslim friends.
-
- Little Bookroom / Paris and Her Remarkable Women
-
-
- Most of the students, in other words, were liberals,
broadly defined. They had imbibed some of the defining values of American
Jewish political culture: a belief in open debate, a skepticism about military
force, a commitment to human rights. And in their innocence, they did not
realize that they were supposed to shed those values when it came to Israel.
The only kind of Zionism they found attractive was a Zionism that recognized
Palestinians as deserving of dignity and capable of peace, and they were
quite willing to condemn an Israeli government that did not share those
beliefs. Luntz did not grasp the irony. The only kind of Zionism they found
attractive was the kind that the American Jewish establishment has been
working against for most of their lives.
-
- Among American Jews today, there are a great many Zionists,
especially in the Orthodox world, people deeply devoted to the State of
Israel. And there are a great many liberals, especially in the secular
Jewish world, people deeply devoted to human rights for all people, Palestinians
included. But the two groups are increasingly distinct. Particularly in
the younger generations, fewer and fewer American Jewish liberals are Zionists;
fewer and fewer American Jewish Zionists are liberal. One reason is that
the leading institutions of American Jewry have refused to foster-indeed,
have actively opposed-a Zionism that challenges Israel's behavior in the
West Bank and Gaza Strip and toward its own Arab citizens. For several
decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their
liberalism at Zionism's door, and now, to their horror, they are finding
that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.
-
- Morally, American Zionism is in a downward spiral. If
the leaders of groups like AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents of Major
American Jewish Organizations do not change course, they will wake up one
day to find a younger, Orthodox-dominated, Zionist leadership whose naked
hostility to Arabs and Palestinians scares even them, and a mass of secular
American Jews who range from apathetic to appalled. Saving liberal Zionism
in the United States-so that American Jews can help save liberal Zionism
in Israel-is the great American Jewish challenge of our age. And it starts
where Luntz's students wanted it to start: by talking frankly about Israel's
current government, by no longer averting our eyes.
-
- Since the 1990s, journalists and scholars have been describing
a bifurcation in Israeli society. In the words of Hebrew University political
scientist Yaron Ezrahi, "After decades of what came to be called a
national consensus, the Zionist narrative of liberation [has] dissolved
into openly contesting versions." One version, "founded on a
long memory of persecution, genocide, and a bitter struggle for survival,
is pessimistic, distrustful of non-Jews, and believing only in Jewish power
and solidarity." Another, "nourished by secularized versions
of messianism as well as the Enlightenment idea of progress," articulates
"a deep sense of the limits of military force, and a commitment to
liberal-democratic values." Every country manifests some kind of ideological
divide. But in contemporary Israel, the gulf is among the widest on earth.
-
- As Ezrahi and others have noted, this latter, liberal-democratic
Zionism has grown alongside a new individualism, particularly among secular
Israelis, a greater demand for free expression, and a greater skepticism
of coercive authority. You can see this spirit in "new historians"
like Tom Segev who have fearlessly excavated the darker corners of the
Zionist past and in jurists like former Supreme Court President Aharon
Barak who have overturned Knesset laws that violate the human rights guarantees
in Israel's "Basic Laws." You can also see it in former Prime
Minister Ehud Barak's apparent willingness to relinquish much of the West
Bank in 2000 and early 2001.
-
- But in Israel today, this humane, universalistic Zionism
does not wield power. To the contrary, it is gasping for air. To understand
how deeply antithetical its values are to those of Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu's government, it's worth considering the case of Effi Eitam.
Eitam, a charismatic excabinet minister and war hero, has proposed
ethnically cleansing Palestinians from the West Bank. "We'll have
to expel the overwhelming majority of West Bank Arabs from here and remove
Israeli Arabs from [the] political system," he declared in 2006. In
2008, Eitam merged his small Ahi Party into Netanyahu's Likud. And for
the 20092010 academic year, he is Netanyahu's special emissary for
overseas "campus engagement." In that capacity, he visited a
dozen American high schools and colleges last fall on the Israeli government's
behalf. The group that organized his tour was called "Caravan for
Democracy."
-
- Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman once shared
Eitam's views. In his youth, he briefly joined Meir Kahane's now banned
Kach Party, which also advocated the expulsion of Arabs from Israeli soil.
Now Lieberman's position might be called "pre-expulsion." He
wants to revoke the citizenship of Israeli Arabs who won't swear a loyalty
oath to the Jewish state. He tried to prevent two Arab parties that opposed
Israel's 20082009 Gaza war from running candidates for the Knesset.
He said Arab Knesset members who met with representatives of Hamas should
be executed. He wants to jail Arabs who publicly mourn on Israeli Independence
Day, and he hopes to permanently deny citizenship to Arabs from other countries
who marry Arab citizens of Israel.
-
- You don't have to be paranoid to see the connection between
Lieberman's current views and his former ones. The more you strip Israeli
Arabs of legal protection, and the more you accuse them of treason, the
more thinkable a policy of expulsion becomes. Lieberman's American defenders
often note that in theory he supports a Palestinian state. What they usually
fail to mention is that for him, a two-state solution means redrawing Israel's
border so that a large chunk of Israeli Arabs find themselves exiled to
another country, without their consent.
-
- Lieberman served as chief of staff during Netanyahu's
first term as prime minister. And when it comes to the West Bank, Netanyahu's
own record is in its way even more extreme than his protégé's.
In his 1993 book, A Place among the Nations, Netanyahu not only rejects
the idea of a Palestinian state, he denies that there is such a thing as
a Palestinian. In fact, he repeatedly equates the Palestinian bid for statehood
with Nazism. An Israel that withdraws from the West Bank, he has declared,
would be a "ghetto-state" with "Auschwitz borders."
And the effort "to gouge Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] out of
Israel" resembles Hitler's bid to wrench the German-speaking "Sudeten
district" from Czechoslovakia in 1938. It is unfair, Netanyahu insists,
to ask Israel to concede more territory since it has already made vast,
gut-wrenching concessions. What kind of concessions? It has abandoned its
claim to Jordan, which by rights should be part of the Jewish state.
-
- On the left of Netanyahu's coalition sits Ehud Barak's
emasculated Labor Party, but whatever moderating potential it may have
is counterbalanced by what is, in some ways, the most illiberal coalition
partner of all, Shas, the ultra-Orthodox party representing Jews of North
African and Middle Eastern descent. At one point, Shas-like some of its
Ashkenazi ultra-Orthodox counterparts-was open to dismantling settlements.
In recent years, however, ultra-Orthodox Israelis, anxious to find housing
for their large families, have increasingly moved to the West Bank, where
thanks to government subsidies it is far cheaper to live. Not coincidentally,
their political parties have swung hard against territorial compromise.
And they have done so with a virulence that reflects ultra-Orthodox Judaism's
profound hostility to liberal values. Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, Shas's immensely
powerful spiritual leader, has called Arabs "vipers," "snakes,"
and "ants." In 2005, after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon proposed
dismantling settlements in the Gaza Strip, Yosef urged that "God strike
him down." The official Shas newspaper recently called President Obama
"an Islamic extremist."
-
- Hebrew University Professor Ze'ev Sternhell is an expert
on fascism and a winner of the prestigious Israel Prize. Commenting on
Lieberman and the leaders of Shas in a recent Op-Ed in Haaretz, he wrote,
"The last time politicians holding views similar to theirs were in
power in postWorld War II Western Europe was in Franco's Spain."
With their blessing, "a crude and multifaceted campaign is being waged
against the foundations of the democratic and liberal order." Sternhell
should know. In September 2008, he was injured when a settler set off a
pipe bomb at his house.
-
- Israeli governments come and go, but the Netanyahu coalition
is the product of frightening, long-term trends in Israeli society: an
ultra-Orthodox population that is increasing dramatically, a settler movement
that is growing more radical and more entrenched in the Israeli bureaucracy
and army, and a Russian immigrant community that is particularly prone
to anti-Arab racism. In 2009, a poll by the Israel Democracy Institute
found that 53 percent of Jewish Israelis (and 77 percent of recent immigrants
from the former USSR) support encouraging Arabs to leave the country. Attitudes
are worst among Israel's young. When Israeli high schools held mock elections
last year, Lieberman won. This March, a poll found that 56 percent of Jewish
Israeli high school students-and more than 80 percent of religious Jewish
high school students-would deny Israeli Arabs the right to be elected to
the Knesset. An education ministry official called the survey "a huge
warning signal in light of the strengthening trends of extremist views
among the youth."
-
- You might think that such trends, and the sympathy for
them expressed by some in Israel's government, would occasion substantial
public concern-even outrage-among the leaders of organized American Jewry.
You would be wrong. In Israel itself, voices from the left, and even center,
warn in increasingly urgent tones about threats to Israeli democracy. (Former
Prime Ministers Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak have both said that Israel risks
becoming an "apartheid state" if it continues to hold the West
Bank. This April, when settlers forced a large Israeli bookstore to stop
selling a book critical of the occupation, Shulamit Aloni, former head
of the dovish Meretz Party, declared that "Israel has not been democratic
for some time now.") But in the United States, groups like AIPAC and
the Presidents' Conference patrol public discourse, scolding people who
contradict their vision of Israel as a state in which all leaders cherish
democracy and yearn for peace.
-
- The result is a terrible irony. In theory, mainstream
American Jewish organizations still hew to a liberal vision of Zionism.
On its website, AIPAC celebrates Israel's commitment to "free speech
and minority rights." The Conference of Presidents declares that "Israel
and the United States share political, moral and intellectual values including
democracy, freedom, security and peace." These groups would never
say, as do some in Netanyahu's coalition, that Israeli Arabs don't deserve
full citizenship and West Bank Palestinians don't deserve human rights.
But in practice, by defending virtually anything any Israeli government
does, they make themselves intellectual bodyguards for Israeli leaders
who threaten the very liberal values they profess to admire.
-
- After Israel's elections last February, for instance,
Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice-chairman of the Presidents' Conference,
explained that Avigdor Lieberman's agenda was "far more moderate than
the media has presented it." Insisting that Lieberman bears no general
animus toward Israeli Arabs, Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation
League, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that "He's not saying expel
them. He's not saying punish them." (Permanently denying citizenship
to their Arab spouses or jailing them if they publicly mourn on Israeli
Independence Day evidently does not qualify as punishment.) The ADL has
criticized anti-Arab bigotry in the past, and the American Jewish Committee,
to its credit, warned that Lieberman's proposed loyalty oath would "chill
Israel's democratic political debate." But the Forward summed up the
overall response of America's communal Jewish leadership in its headline
"Jewish Leaders Largely Silent on Lieberman's Role in Government."
-
- Not only does the organized American Jewish community
mostly avoid public criticism of the Israeli government, it tries to prevent
others from leveling such criticism as well. In recent years, American
Jewish organizations have waged a campaign to discredit the world's most
respected international human rights groups. In 2006, Foxman called an
Amnesty International report on Israeli killing of Lebanese civilians "bigoted,
biased, and borderline anti-Semitic." The Conference of Presidents
has announced that "biased NGOs include Amnesty International, Human
Rights Watch, Christian Aid, [and] Save the Children." Last summer,
an AIPAC spokesman declared that Human Rights Watch "has repeatedly
demonstrated its anti-Israel bias." When the Obama administration
awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Mary Robinson, former UN high
commissioner for human rights, the ADL and AIPAC both protested, citing
the fact that she had presided over the 2001 World Conference Against Racism
in Durban, South Africa. (Early drafts of the conference report implicitly
accused Israel of racism. Robinson helped expunge that defamatory charge,
angering Syria and Iran.)
-
- Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International are not
infallible. But when groups like AIPAC and the Presidents' Conference avoid
virtually all public criticism of Israeli actions-directing their outrage
solely at Israel's neighbors-they leave themselves in a poor position to
charge bias. Moreover, while American Jewish groups claim that they are
simply defending Israel from its foes, they are actually taking sides in
a struggle within Israel between radically different Zionist visions. At
the very moment the Anti-Defamation League claimed that Robinson harbored
an "animus toward Israel," an alliance of seven Israeli human
rights groups publicly congratulated her on her award. Many of those groups,
like B'Tselem, which monitors Israeli actions in the Occupied Territories,
and the Israeli branch of Physicians for Human Rights, have been at least
as critical of Israel's actions in Lebanon, Gaza, and the West Bank as
have Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
-
- All of which raises an uncomfortable question. If American
Jewish groups claim that Israel's overseas human rights critics are motivated
by anti- Israeli, if not anti-Semitic, bias, what does that say about Israel's
domestic human rights critics? The implication is clear: they must be guilty
of self-hatred, if not treason. American Jewish leaders don't generally
say that, of course, but their allies in the Netanyahu government do. Last
summer, Israel's vice prime minister, Moshe Ya'alon, called the anti-occupation
group Peace Now a "virus." This January, a right-wing group called
Im Tirtzu accused Israeli human rights organizations of having fed information
to the Goldstone Commission that investigated Israel's Gaza war. A Knesset
member from Netanyahu's Likud promptly charged Naomi Chazan, head of the
New Israel Fund, which supports some of those human rights groups, with
treason, and a member of Lieberman's party launched an investigation aimed
at curbing foreign funding of Israeli NGOs.
-
- To their credit, Foxman and other American Jewish leaders
opposed the move, which might have impaired their own work. But they are
reaping what they sowed. If you suggest that mainstream human rights criticism
of Israel's government is motivated by animus toward the state, or toward
Jews in general, you give aid and comfort to those in Israel who make the
same charges against the human rights critics in their midst.
-
- In the American Jewish establishment today, the language
of liberal Zionism-with its idioms of human rights, equal citizenship,
and territorial compromise-has been drained of meaning. It remains the
lingua franca in part for generational reasons, because many older American
Zionists still see themselves as liberals of a sort. They vote Democratic;
they are unmoved by biblical claims to the West Bank; they see average
Palestinians as decent people betrayed by bad leaders; and they are secular.
They don't want Jewish organizations to criticize Israel from the left,
but neither do they want them to be agents of the Israeli right.
-
- These American Zionists are largely the product of a
particular era. Many were shaped by the terrifying days leading up to the
Six-Day War, when it appeared that Israel might be overrun, and by the
bitter aftermath of the Yom Kippur War, when much of the world seemed to
turn against the Jewish state. In that crucible, Israel became their Jewish
identity, often in conjunction with the Holocaust, which the 1967 and 1973
wars helped make central to American Jewish life. These Jews embraced Zionism
before the settler movement became a major force in Israeli politics, before
the 1982 Lebanon war, before the first intifada. They fell in love with
an Israel that was more secular, less divided, and less shaped by the culture,
politics, and theology of occupation. And by downplaying the significance
of Avigdor Lieberman, the settlers, and Shas, American Jewish groups allow
these older Zionists to continue to identify with that more internally
cohesive, more innocent Israel of their youth, an Israel that now only
exists in their memories.
-
- But these secular Zionists aren't reproducing themselves.
Their children have no memory of Arab armies massed on Israel's border
and of Israel surviving in part thanks to urgent military assistance from
the United States. Instead, they have grown up viewing Israel as a regional
hegemon and an occupying power. As a result, they are more conscious than
their parents of the degree to which Israeli behavior violates liberal
ideals, and less willing to grant Israel an exemption because its survival
seems in peril. Because they have inherited their parents' liberalism,
they cannot embrace their uncritical Zionism. Because their liberalism
is real, they can see that the liberalism of the American Jewish establishment
is fake.
-
- To sustain their uncritical brand of Zionism, therefore,
America's Jewish organizations will need to look elsewhere to replenish
their ranks. They will need to find young American Jews who have come of
age during the West Bank occupation but are not troubled by it. And those
young American Jews will come disproportionately from the Orthodox world.
-
- Because they marry earlier, intermarry less, and have
more children, Orthodox Jews are growing rapidly as a share of the American
Jewish population. According to a 2006 American Jewish Committee (AJC)
survey, while Orthodox Jews make up only 12 percent of American Jewry over
the age of sixty, they constitute 34 percent between the ages of eighteen
and twenty-four. For America's Zionist organizations, these Orthodox youngsters
are a potential bonanza. In their yeshivas they learn devotion to Israel
from an early age; they generally spend a year of religious study there
after high school, and often know friends or relatives who have immigrated
to Israel. The same AJC study found that while only 16 percent of non-Orthodox
adult Jews under the age of forty feel "very close to Israel,"
among the Orthodox the figure is 79 percent. As secular Jews drift away
from America's Zionist institutions, their Orthodox counterparts will likely
step into the breach. The Orthodox "are still interested in parochial
Jewish concerns," explains Samuel Heilman, a sociologist at the City
University of New York. "They are among the last ones who stayed in
the Jewish house, so they now control the lights."
-
- But it is this very parochialism-a deep commitment to
Jewish concerns, which often outweighs more universal ones-that gives Orthodox
Jewish Zionism a distinctly illiberal cast. The 2006 AJC poll found that
while 60 percent of non-Orthodox American Jews under the age of forty support
a Palestinian state, that figure drops to 25 percent among the Orthodox.
In 2009, when Brandeis University's Theodore Sasson asked American Jewish
focus groups about Israel, he found Orthodox participants much less supportive
of dismantling settlements as part of a peace deal. Even more tellingly,
Reform, Conservative, and unaffiliated Jews tended to believe that average
Palestinians wanted peace, but had been ill-served by their leaders. Orthodox
Jews, by contrast, were more likely to see the Palestinian people as the
enemy, and to deny that ordinary Palestinians shared any common interests
or values with ordinary Israelis or Jews.
-
- Orthodox Judaism has great virtues, including a communal
warmth and a commitment to Jewish learning unmatched in the American Jewish
world. (I'm biased, since my family attends an Orthodox synagogue.) But
if current trends continue, the growing influence of Orthodox Jews in America's
Jewish communal institutions will erode even the liberal-democratic veneer
that today covers American Zionism. In 2002, America's major Jewish organizations
sponsored a large Israel solidarity rally on the Washington Mall. Up and
down the east coast, yeshivas shut down for the day, swelling the estimated
Orthodox share of the crowd to close to 70 percent. When the then Deputy
Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz told the rally that "innocent
Palestinians are suffering and dying as well," he was booed.
-
- America's Jewish leaders should think hard about that
rally. Unless they change course, it portends the future: an American Zionist
movement that does not even feign concern for Palestinian dignity and a
broader American Jewish population that does not even feign concern for
Israel. My own children, given their upbringing, could as easily end up
among the booers as among Luntz's focus group. Either prospect fills me
with dread.
-
- In 2004, in an effort to prevent weapons smuggling from
Egypt, Israeli tanks and bulldozers demolished hundreds of houses in the
Rafah refugee camp in the southern Gaza Strip. Watching television, a veteran
Israeli commentator and politician named Tommy Lapid saw an elderly Palestinian
woman crouched on all fours looking for her medicines amid the ruins of
her home. He said she reminded him of his grandmother.
-
- In that moment, Lapid captured the spirit that is suffocating
within organized American Jewish life. To begin with, he watched. In my
experience, there is an epidemic of not watching among American Zionists
today. A Red Cross study on malnutrition in the Gaza Strip, a bill in the
Knesset to allow Jewish neighborhoods to bar entry to Israeli Arabs, an
Israeli human rights report on settlers burning Palestinian olive groves,
three more Palestinian teenagers shot-it's unpleasant. Rationalizing and
minimizing Palestinian suffering has become a kind of game. In a more recent
report on how to foster Zionism among America's young, Luntz urges American
Jewish groups to use the word "Arabs, not Palestinians," since
"the term 'Palestinians' evokes images of refugee camps, victims and
oppression," while "'Arab' says wealth, oil and Islam."
-
- Of course, Israel-like the United States-must sometimes
take morally difficult actions in its own defense. But they are morally
difficult only if you allow yourself some human connection to the other
side. Otherwise, security justifies everything. The heads of AIPAC and
the Presidents' Conference should ask themselves what Israel's leaders
would have to do or say to make them scream "no." After all,
Lieberman is foreign minister; Effi Eitam is touring American universities;
settlements are growing at triple the rate of the Israeli population; half
of Israeli Jewish high school students want Arabs barred from the Knesset.
If the line has not yet been crossed, where is the line?
-
- What infuriated critics about Lapid's comment was that
his grandmother died at Auschwitz. How dare he defile the memory of the
Holocaust? Of course, the Holocaust is immeasurably worse than anything
Israel has done or ever will do. But at least Lapid used Jewish suffering
to connect to the suffering of others. In the world of AIPAC, the Holocaust
analogies never stop, and their message is always the same: Jews are licensed
by their victimhood to worry only about themselves. Many of Israel's founders
believed that with statehood, Jews would rightly be judged on the way they
treated the non-Jews living under their dominion. "For the first time
we shall be the majority living with a minority," Knesset member Pinchas
Lavon declared in 1948, "and we shall be called upon to provide an
example and prove how Jews live with a minority."
-
- But the message of the American Jewish establishment
and its allies in the Netanyahu government is exactly the opposite: since
Jews are history's permanent victims, always on the knife-edge of extinction,
moral responsibility is a luxury Israel does not have. Its only responsibility
is to survive. As former Knesset speaker Avraham Burg writes in his remarkable
2008 book, The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise From Its Ashes, "Victimhood
sets you free."
-
- This obsession with victimhood lies at the heart of why
Zionism is dying among America's secular Jewish young. It simply bears
no relationship to their lived experience, or what they have seen of Israel's.
Yes, Israel faces threats from Hezbollah and Hamas. Yes, Israelis understandably
worry about a nuclear Iran. But the dilemmas you face when you possess
dozens or hundreds of nuclear weapons, and your adversary, however despicable,
may acquire one, are not the dilemmas of the Warsaw Ghetto. The year 2010
is not, as Benjamin Netanyahu has claimed, 1938. The drama of Jewish victimhood-a
drama that feels natural to many Jews who lived through 1938, 1948, or
even 1967-strikes most of today's young American Jews as farce.
-
- But there is a different Zionist calling, which has never
been more desperately relevant. It has its roots in Israel's Independence
Proclamation, which promised that the Jewish state "will be based
on the precepts of liberty, justice and peace taught by the Hebrew prophets,"
and in the December 1948 letter from Albert Einstein, Hannah Arendt, and
others to The New York Times, protesting right-wing Zionist leader Menachem
Begin's visit to the United States after his party's militias massacred
Arab civilians in the village of Deir Yassin. It is a call to recognize
that in a world in which Jewish fortunes have radically changed, the best
way to memorialize the history of Jewish suffering is through the ethical
use of Jewish power.
-
- For several months now, a group of Israeli students has
been traveling every Friday to the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh
Jarrah, where a Palestinian family named the Ghawis lives on the street
outside their home of fifty-three years, from which they were evicted to
make room for Jewish settlers. Although repeatedly arrested for protesting
without a permit, and called traitors and self-haters by the Israeli right,
the students keep coming, their numbers now swelling into the thousands.
What if American Jewish organizations brought these young people to speak
at Hillel? What if this was the face of Zionism shown to America's Jewish
young? What if the students in Luntz's focus group had been told that their
generation faces a challenge as momentous as any in Jewish history: to
save liberal democracy in the only Jewish state on earth?
-
- "Too many years I lived in the warm embrace of institutionalized
elusiveness and was a part of it," writes Avraham Burg. "I was
very comfortable there." I know; I was comfortable there too. But
comfortable Zionism has become a moral abdication. Let's hope that Luntz's
students, in solidarity with their counterparts at Sheikh Jarrah, can foster
an uncomfortable Zionism, a Zionism angry at what Israel risks becoming,
and in love with what it still could be. Let's hope they care enough to
try.
-
- -May 12, 2010
-
- Peter Beinart is Associate Professor of Journalism and
Political Science at the City University of New York, a Senior Fellow at
the New America Foundation, and Senior Political Writer for The Daily Beast.
His new book, The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris, will be
published in June.
-
-
- ______________________________________
-
-
- http://www.middleeast.org/10-29-09.htm
-
- J STREET - The New Smiling Zionist Lobby (Part 1)
-
- bio
-
- by Mark Bruzonsky*
-
-
- [Washington, DC - 29 October 2009] AIPAC, The American
Israel Public Affairs Committee, has done its job for more than half a
century. The Israeli Zionists, including those who masterminded the new
J Street creation, appreciate that and know it will continue pushing and
enforcing, threatening and intimidating. The Big Bad Cop is not going
away, and in fact is more powerful than ever.
-
- Still, the Israeli Zionists, themselves of somewhat different
shades, also know that different times call for different measures and
different tactics. They know as well that different people respond to
different approaches and that the great majority of American Jews are liberal,
not conservative and certainly not neocon, and are solidly behind Obama.
They know as well that liberal American Jews are increasingly uneasy about
an Israel too much in the negative news and a "Jewish Lobby"
too harsh and exposed.
-
- And so, with the new J Street, it's not so much that
they are hedging their bets, rather they are simply playing all sides of
the street. It's a high-stakes political game that has been going on for
some time actually, J Street the latest big twist.
-
- After the 1982 war the Israeli Zionists and their American
Jewish minions realized it was time to seriously start diversifying. AIPAC,
the Capitol Hill giant, then created the Washington Institute for Near
East Policy (WINEP), which became it's media and think-tank arm. Years
before, JINSA, The Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, had
been spun off to to deal with the Pentagon. Other organizations, including
ADL (seriously misnomered as the Anti-Defamation League) and the Conference
of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, were further bulked
up to deal with the White House and State Department. Jewish/Zionist
officials were pushed into other branches of the U.S. government not so
visible but quite important, including the Treasury Department, the CIA,
Voice of America (VOA), and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/EL).
Many major magazines and media organizations became controlled, and in
some cases bought outright, by Zionist personalities -- a few biggies like
Marty Peretz, Mort Zuckerman, Bill Kristol, and Norman Podhoretz actually
publicly stating they were pledged to help and defend Israel.
-
- The Israeli/Jewish Lobby story has long been one far
beyond AIPAC in fact, though you would not know it from the J Street approach.
In the past thirty years it has spun off multiple organizations with
different portfolios, different targets, different styles, but one overall
goal -- nurturing the U.S. "Special Relationship" with Israel
and making sure massive amounts of political, military, and economic support
for the Jewish State keep flowing through multiple pipelines and mechanisms
no matter what.
-
- The post 9/11 world, on top of the "Peace Process"
collapse, presented new dangers, challenges, and opportunities for further
Zionist expansion and diversification in the U.S.
-
- AIPAC, JINSA, WINEP, ADL, and the Presidents Conference,
especially in combination, have been wildly successful; but even so they
have become more and more associated with the Jewish Neocons and the more
hard-line Zionists. The same for the American Jewish Committee (AJC)
and the World Jewish Congress (WJC) which now play different roles with
different constituencies in Europe, in foreign capitals, and with the media.
-
- The more centrist and greatly shrunken "liberal"
Zionists needed new front groups of their own, and "liberal"
American Jews needed to be given some less hard-line and less antagonistic
organizations to absorb their monies and energies -- as well as to prevent
any tough-minded, truly independent, and non-Zionist-controlled movements
from taking root.
-
- J Street is the latest Zionist ploy, no matter what kinds
of false challenges about its bona fides are out there.
-
- Needed for critical historical context is a quick review
of other Israeli Zionist doings in Washington in more recent years.
-
- Right after 9/11, via Ariel Sharon's billionaire friend
Haim Saban, the Israeli/Jewish lobby infiltrated the Brookings Instituttion,
created the Saban Center, and turned it over to the same man who had first
led WINEP years before, Martin Indyk. Walla! The Good Cop, 'left wing',
Democratic Party "think-tank" had come into being. Meanwhile
Martin's buddy, Dennis Ross -- now in the Obama White House working in
tandem with the other big-time Zionist operative, non other than Chief
of Staff Rahm Emanuel -- was again put in charge at WINEP. He had been
on leave for a long "Peace Process" run in both the Bush 41 and
Clinton Administrations where he also worked closely with Indyk as well
as Aaron Miller, now dispatched to another controlled think-tank, the Woodrow
Wilson International Center for Scholars..
-
- Then a few years ago, aware how the powerful yet shrinking
American Jewish community was being challenged on the edges by churches,
students, and activists, the Zionist machine realized it needed to expand,
block, and counter even more. Walla! Energized by legions of Bible Thumping
Fundamentalists, Christians United For Israel (CUFI) was midwifed directly
by AIPAC and has quickly become a major political/financial force. The
CUFI conference a few months ago was far larger and more powerful than
J Street, filling the Washington Convention Center and drawing not only
the Israeli Ambassador but also the Prime Minister by satellite. It's
a marriage of convenience of course, putting aside long-time severe ideological
and religious differences; but even so a very potent and astute one.
-
- The Israeli Zionists were not content however to feed
and energize the hard-liners and right-wingers among them, especially as
they realized they were now entwined with the modern-day Christian Crusaders
led by John Hagee.
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