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YIVO Betrays Its Purpose, and Denies History of Israel Lobby

A friend just got the latest YIVO bulletin, which is not available at the Yiddish institute’s website, and reports the following:

It includes a full page diatribe against
Walt-Mearsheimer that concludes that W and M "presented a one-sided
version of Israel
and Midde east history by manufacturing fictional argumemts for the
sole purpose of supporting and furthering anti-semitism throughout the
United States and the world."

 
Unbelievable.  YIVO is
a scholarly institution whose goal is to preserve the language and
culture of Eastern European Jews.  In joining this debate in this way
they are enlisting the 6,000,000 Jewish martyrs in the AIPAC cause, as
if millions of the 6,000,000 weren’t socialists, communists, and
anti-zionists along with Orthodox Jews, Zionists, assimilationists, etc.

 
YIVO has nothing to do with Israel.  And they are willing to forego donations from all those who do not believe that endless war is in the best interests of Israel

It is dismaying to me because Yivo is the place where these things ought to be discussed openly. But Martin Peretz is a leading figure on Yivo’s board, and he has helped to sacrifice the institution’s scholarly purpose to one of essentially dual loyalty.

A year or so back in the Yivo bookshop, I bought a little volume called "Solidarity and Kinship: Essays on American Zionism," published by the American Jewish Historical Society in 1980. In the book is an essay by Abba Eban about the foundation of the Jewish state that emphasizes the "decisive" role of American Jewy, which even armed the fledgling country in defiance of American laws against sending arms to Israel. I bring this up because Eban makes no bones about the Israel lobby.

Truman would not have supported partition were it not for the "pressure and influence … brought to bear on presidential decisions." Eban says that following the outbreak of violence in late ’47 in the wake of the U.N. vote to divide Palestine, the U.S. government sought to retreat from its support for partition, but that the levers of "influence" were brought to bear. Eban describes a crucial $25,000 gift made by Jews to Truman’s vice presidential aspirations in ’44 and says that in ’48 again American Jews helped Truman to finance his campaign at a "desperate" time.

"No historian would question the judgment that without the support of American Jewry, Israel’s emergence out of vulnerability and weakness into sovereignty and successful resistance could not have been conceived," Eban writes. "[This] extraordinary solidarity and kinship…enlarged Israel’s power beyond the limited dimensions of its space and size."

This isn’t really history, it’s current affairs: obviously, this sort of "pressure and influence," to quote Eban, continues to this day; but when non-Jews dare to speak of it they are smeared as antisemites. Or libeled, as they are in this case, as fiction writers. Some day Yivo will have scholarly conferences on the Israel lobby and dual loyalty. Alas that will have to wait till the issues become truly historical.

Meantime, the left will have to conduct the discussion. Lately the estimable blogger Tony Karon wrote that Walt and Mearsheimer got it wrong about
the Israel lobby because they failed to recognize the "deeply-entrenched
[pro-Israel] tropes in U.S. political and civil society — tropes
which now function quite independently of the lobby’s interventions." I
don’t think he’s right about those "tropes." As Eban says, the State Department wanted to cut and run on partition after it proved that it would produce endless strife in Palestine. Even Truman was going wobbly. Yes there are militarists and Christian Zionists who play a role in the policy-making. But the realest trope is the lobby itself, which has been around now for over 60 years…

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