The endorsement by Pat Robertson of pro-abortion candidate Rudy Giuliani this week is widely seen as a sign that the evangelical Christian vote, which has scared the bejesus out of a lot of people in blue states for the last 30 years, is losing its monolithic power. Yay!
But I want journalists to start talking about the religious left– the Israel lobby– and its effect on the Democratic party and our foreign policy. For the lobby also has a strongly religious component, and it’s more important now than the religious right.
One reason journalists don’t talk about the religious left is that we blue-state Jews are a completely familiar quantity in journalistic culture (unlike the Christian right, which has horns) and we Jews have been among the champions of secularism: the separation of the religious and political spheres. And if you’re a secularist, well–you can’t very well be a religious voter, can you?
This idea is simply not very well examined. The problem in the Israel case is that a lot of people who behave like good secularists, decrying the influence of the anti-gay-rightsers in the Kerry vote in the heartland in ’04, are themselves voting or giving money on the basis of a politician’s support for a religious state, overseas. I’ve run into sophisticated liberal New Yorkers who go haywire about the evangelical vote then tell me that the Bible gives the Jews a passport to the Holy Land. Sorry, that ain’t secularism. And some secular Jews who loudly proclaim that they don’t believe in God come out with a devotion to Israel that verges on the religious–especially when you consider that oftentimes they’re talking about a place they’ve never been to.
Last night Saifedean Ammous alerted me to the fact that Alan Dershowitz is keynote speaker at a secularists conference today in New York. I wonder how Dershowitz can call himself a secularist. Not when much of his activities are aimed at preserving support among the American public for a Jewish state that discriminates on a religious basis. At his Brandeis speech earlier this year, trying to rebut Jimmy Carter, Dershowitz referred to the pre-1967 Israeli borders as "Auschwitz borders." Afterward he told me that this was an Abba Eban line; but I would note that in Lords of the Land, the great new book on the settlements, the authors say that the religious settlers used these very words "Auschwitz borders" in their rhetoric– to justify the illegal expansion.
Ammous, himself a secularist, takes the analysis further:
Zionist Americans are (commendably and understandably, since many
of them are not Christian) amongst the fiercest advocates for
secularism in America and have done good work, intellectually and
politically, to cement secularism here. It’s ironic that they
are the ones working hardest to prevent secularism from ever taking
place in the unHoly land, where they are comfortable in supporting
everything and anything racist and discriminatory that the Israeli government does. The same
people who (rightly) get outraged over the display of a
cross on public land in America, have no problem defending the Israeli
government banning non-Jews from purchasing land, or building
religiously-segregated roads.When I argue with Z
ionist Americans,
I tell them "How would you feel if I was a Christian missionary from
Palestine spending billions of dollars to strengthen the religious
right to establish God’s Kingdom in America and set-up religious rule
that does to American non-Christians what Israel
has done to Palestinian non-Jews: Ethnic
cleansing of the majority with no right-to-return; second-class
citizenship for some of the remaining non-Christians with a ban
on purchasing land and restrictions on who you can marry; and illegal
military occupation without citizenship for the rest, along with walls,
Bantustans, segregated roads, a stifling siege that controls all your
contacts with the outside world, and extrajudicial unaccountable
murder…"No one exemplifies this hypocricy
more than Alan Dershowitz. He has written some important work on
secularism in America and is one of its fiercest defenders, but is also
perhaps Israel’s most unrelenting and dogmatic defender. Dershowitz supports secularism in the country in which his
religious group is in the minority, but supports religious
discrimination in the country in which he is in the majority. He’s no
different from Pat Robertson
who wants a Christian nation in America where Christians are a
majority, but opposes Islamic rule in Sudan, where Christians are a
minority…
