Peretz and Goldberg Get Obama to Renew the Balfour Declaration

I’m still mulling Marty Peretz’s longish phone conversation with Obama about Israel, also Jeffrey Goldberg’s longish interview with the candidate. One of the weird things about both conversations is the sense that Goldberg and Peretz are extracting a promise from Obama to the Jewish community. Indeed, Goldberg establishes himself as a Jew who is a guardian of Jewish "worry". In a sense, neither is that interested in what Obama really thinks–both men behave less like journalists than petitioners, trying to get Obama on the record expressing his support of the Jewish state as an answer to the Jewish problem. "I’m curious to hear you talk about the Zionist idea. Do you believe that it has justice on its side?" Goldberg asks. Then: "Do you think that justice is still on Israel’s side?"

The whole thing feels like a reprisal of the Balfour Declaration, 91 years on, with Peretz and Goldberg reenacting the roles of Chaim Weizmann and Lord Rothschild, and Obama playing the role of the British ruler. Here’s why the analogy fits, and why it is actually helpful in understanding Israel/Palestine:

The Balfour Declaration was the short note signed by British foreign secretary Arthur Balfour in 1917 promising a homeland in Palestine to the "Jewish people." At that time, the British were the lords of the liberal west, as we are today. They were about to take over the Middle East–that is if we won the world war–and there is considerable evidence that the English saw Jews as crucial to doing so. The Royal Institute of Chatham House–England’s Council on Foreign Relations–was to say after the war, in Tom Segev’s retelling, "London had been inundated with reports from all over the world, asserting that the sympathy of the Jews was vital to winning the war. The Balfour Declaration, the institute resolved, had indeed been a means to victory. The fact was that other countries had also competed for Jewish support, the report noted." As I recall from my reading, England feared that if he didn’t get what he wanted in London, Weizmann would go to Germany. And don’t forget, Weizmann was a chemist, whose invention of acetone was essential to the development of modern munitions. The British were keenly grateful to the Jews for their learning, as American society is today.

I am trying to convey the fact that Jewish support was extremely meaningful to leaders then– as it is in Obama’s mind today, in his war. Jewish finance was essential to the workings of the modern state (here I always point to Benjamin Ginsberg’s book, The Fatal Embrace), and western powers had no illusions on this score. Because of Jewish rage over the pogroms, Jewish bankers in the U.S. had starved Russia of funding during the Japanese-Russian war of ‘03, helping to defeat Russia–truly a great moment in my people’s history and a legitimate flexing of Jewish lobby muscle in the name of human rights. Many big Jews lobbied for the Balfour Declaration. In this country, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who had turned Zionist a few years before, worked on Woodrow Wilson to echo the Balfour Declaration in 1918.

In my analogy, Peretz is Lord Rothschild, the money guy, and Goldberg is Weizmann, the intellectual. The statements by Obama seem as forcible to me as Balfour’s elliptical note of 1917. And clearly, to judge from Goldberg’s comments, the sense of Jews as being imperilled is just as strong in his mind as it was for Weizmann–and therefore, the necessity of a Jewish state to afford Jews protection.

That is where the analogy falls down, and indeed why Peretz and Goldberg’s actions seem to me anachronistic, backward. It is more than 60 years since the Holocaust; there are no pogroms. The U.S. has proved itself time and again to be a safe place for Jews, more than safe, notwithstanding the Jewish "worry" that Goldberg invokes. In the early 20th century, Rothschild and Brandeis felt answerable to the dispossessed Eastern European Jews. But who are Peretz and Goldberg worried about? The Israelis. And in Israel we can see the 110-year-long unfolding of Herzl’s vision of political Zionism; and how have things worked out? The Palestinians are dispossessed and stateless, in violation of the Balfour Declaration’s guarantee that their political rights would not be prejudiced–for as any Israel lobbyist can tell you, the Palestinians have again and again, for more than 60 years, shown themselves unworthy of the right of self-determination that we see as legitimate when it is Kosovars or Irish or Pakistanis or South Africans, violent as those people’s national struggles have been.

And still the Palestinian grievance has grown in the mind of the world to the point that the U.N. is now using the word "Nakba," to recognize the Palestinian dispossession, and to the point that Zionism’s legitimacy is being openly questioned– in Europe, at the U.N., throughout the Arab world, and even in some editorial pages here. So the Balfour Declaration must be renewed, inked again by the leader of the latest imperial power.

Unless Israel reforms and until the U.S. stops enabling it, powerful Jews will have to keep on extracting Balfour Declarations for a long time.

Related posts:

1. Herzl quotation of the day. Anticipated the Balfour Declaration as result of ‘money-givers’
2. ‘Le Monde’ is revisionist on Balfour Declaration
3. Marty Peretz on Louis Brandeis and Walter Lippmann
4. Even Balfour supported equal rights for Palestinians
5. Obama Vs. Goldberg (Or, Why the Jewish Experience of the U.S. Civil Rights Struggle Is Israel’s Only Hope)