Richard Witty and I have been emailing one another about the Israel lobby definition issue; and I will post that exchange soon. But this a.m. he jumps the gun and asks me a bunch of very socratic questions. As if to deny there is any such thing in the word lobby apart from an antisemitic accusation. Richard, I must say I find your tone casuistic. There is a real problem here in American politics, signified by the incident I have mentioned in which Adam Schiff, a liberal congressman representing Obama, could say a critical word about the settlements (colonies by any true measure) before a Jewish audience in Ohio. If you think this is a problem of antisemitism, you’re simply mistaken. It’s a problem in our politics. They are broken. The widespread view that the settlements are a hateful appendage to American politics has no voice in our politics. And it is dragging this country down in the world.
So I begin with that obvious moral issue. And then I try and say what is causing it. Your questions are all very smart. It is interesting that Bronfmans were on both sides of the lobby per Walt and Mearsheimer. Yes W&M did say loose coalition. It is true that the lobby has morphed. It is true that APN is part of the lobby and dissent both. Fine. So many contradictions!
And still there is a force that causes Schiff to say these horrifying things. And that force is alive on the left in our politics!
I say, let’s have more info. more and more. Let us talk about this terrible force in our politics that keeps Americans from openly attacking the settlements. You seem to be saying, Shut up. And god knows I felt the same way when there were terrible forces in our politics that were against women’s rights and gay rights, coming out of religious opposition. And I did not say, Oh there are some evangelical Christians who like gays, I said, let us get the fundamentalists out of our politics, or anyway let us counter them and identify them. And I did not call for the persecution of the fundamentalists.
I sense an enormous Jewish defensiveness in your comments. You have spoken openly of my financial difficulties that I told you about in conversation. Fine, I have no problem with that. Public/private issues are not some giant wall for me. Well I know that you have some personal exposure to Holocaust narratives and that they are important to you. And I would urge you to understand that the Holocaust was in its history and we are in a new moment in history. I urge you as a fellow Jew to look at this moral blot in our politics right now, in which racist and apartheid policies far away in another country, as geographically distinct from us as France or North Korea or Iran, cannot be condemned by our politicians out of fear and (Chuck Hagel) intimidation, and try and say why it is there, why is this happening. Rather than erecting rhetorical palisades…
Jim Haygood puts his finger on the most important issue for me as a leftwing Jew. Here in America we have had one democratic liberation after another in our lives, from the civil rights struggle to gay rights, to women’s lib. Democracy democracy democracy. And then, out of some autochthonous atavistic impulse, American Jews are supposed to put all that aside when they come to minority rights in Israel/Palestine. And they do it, that is the problem!
Richard will say I am generalizing. Yes I am. There are many notable exceptions. But I will point to two non-exceptions. Joe Lelyveld (son of the Israel lobbyist Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld) in the pages of the NYRB, and Terry Gross on Fresh Air last year both rejected Jimmy Carter’s use of the word apartheid. Two liberal American Jews, saying that word was wrong, and shouldn’t be used. I heard Terry go after Carter on her show for using the word in his title, and Lelyveld more rabbinically picked the word apart in the NYRB.
Well last week Israel Policy Forum, which is yes, both inside and outside the lobby I am working against–is claimed by the lobby and is also resisting it, which I know is hard to get your head around, but is true–held a splendid conference call with David Kimche, a former Foreign Ministry director under Begin I believe, Likud, who said that the checkpoints and separate roadways (roadways for "Jews," Kimche said, disputing CAMERA’s assertion that these roads are for Israeli Arabs too) in the West Bank are bad for Israel– even, Kimche said, "apart from the apartheid implications."
Kimche is simply another Israeli who uses the word apartheid, as many tormented Israelis do, to describe the apartness that the separate roadways and walls are used to establish (as opposed to pure security). But that word is not allowed in the U.S. discourse, and the ban is enforced by liberal Jews here.
We don’t have to live there. Israel is a weak state unable to lift itself out of that cycle of violence. And if there is one thing we Jews here can do, in a very powerful state, which has absolutely respected our minority rights as it has progressed into modernity, is to apply those American lessons to Israel, to help Israel/Palestine as liberal Americans. In Gross’s deference to Israel, in Lelyveld’s, I discern the Jewish idea of aliyah. That Israel is somehow higher ground spiritually. When actually it is a militarized state in a crisis, where all identity, Jewish and Arab, is now shaped by violence.
