When we talk about the Israel lobby, we have to talk about the emotional energy that binds it. We must talk about the fact that Americans for Peace Now, a good organization with fair ideas about Israel/Palestine, has remained on the board of AIPAC throughout the expansion of settlements over the last 20 years. How did that happen? It happened because Peace Now was bound by tribal loyalty. It could not step outside the Jewish family and challenge the family from a new spot, outside the tribe. So even as it worked against the settlements in noble public statements, it lent its body to the Zionist Organization of America and AIPAC itself, which fostered the colonies.
The stepping-out is finally beginning. Jews are stepping outside the tribe and challenging the tribe in the company of others. Here's a little about my story.
Ten years or so ago I went to a 92d Street Y event (the liberal Jewish New York institution) where a bunch of important Jews were on stage, and they touched on the intermarriage issue. The intermarriage fears had just kicked in bigtime. A small guy in the audience stood up and asked a really smart question about intermarriage. Basically: Can you imagine the Knights of Columbus having a meeting where they announced that you couldn't marry a non-Italian? We'd say that was racist. You have to approach this issue in a different way…
I was a reporter covering the event and his question really opened my mind. After it ended I ran through the crowd to introduce myself to the small guy. He had to get a train to the suburbs. He was a big lawyer. Wicked smart, he had enormous responsibility at his firm. But with a very nice air about him. A somewhat long-suffering shambling air familiar from Jewish shtik, the neurotic guy. We had a drink at a sports bar and talked about everything, including intermarriage. He wasn't intermarried, but he could imagine why others might choose that. In fact, he'd seen a good match at his own firm broken up by the Jewish guy's family on that ground. And the breakup caused a ton of pain.
A beautiful friendship began. I really liked this guy, still do. We'd see each other every few months. I remember just before the dot.com bubble burst, in '99, he looked around at the Chinese restaurant we were in and said, What do you see around us, Phil? Look at everything you see here, and everything on the street–was any of it made on the internet? No. It's a craze. It's not making any money.
He encouraged my work in some ways. I wrote about intermarriage then, for the New York Observer, and one day the American Jewish Committee had me in for a session with a Long Island rabbi where we debated Jewish exceptionalism. My friend who I'll call F came. So did my mother and my sister. I'm not sure how I handled myself. I tended to get lawyerly and simian and intense in arguments then. But F was there, and supportive. Three or four of my mom's six kids had married out, so she's tough and shrewd about the issue, but I can't say my vehemence on the issue made her happy. My sister married out, but I think she too has her concerns. The future of the Jews! She worries about that, even though she agrees intellectually with stuff I'm saying. So even as I argued, I felt guilty about my Jewish family.
Throughout my friendship with F, I avoided the Israel topic. There was a feeling that: You know what you're talking about when you write about intermarriage–hey, you intermarried–but Israel is for the big boys. Leave it alone. F said that in a lot of different ways. He had been to Israel once himself, years ago, but his wife was involved in Jewish institutions. Slowly, he was becoming a big Jew. And he told me to stay away from Israel.
Michael Kinsley has described this relationship in his own way. When he accepted a junket to Israel many years ago, and people got upset with him, Kinsley said, I'm not corrupted by that; I don't think about their opinion for one second. I think about my old friend Marty Peretz's opinion! A wise honest statement. And there you have the same relationship as Peace Now and AIPAC. Truly one of the greatest journalists of our generation, in Mike Kinsley, utterly fairminded and creative, was obedient on this issue to an extremist, Peretz.
I did the same thing. I deferred to the elders. I knew Eric Breindel in college, and I said, Let him handle foreign policy. I had several college friends who made their way high in journalism but deferred to Breindel's wisdom. Eric had authority because he was the son of Holocaust survivors; and he was a raging Likudnik. About the same time as he fell in with Menachem Begin, so did two other guys I knew in college, Doug Schoen, who is incredibly street smart, and Mark Penn, who's got real vision; those guys did polling for Menachem Begin. So they were engaged in Israeli policy, and shoulder to shoulder on the colonization effort. Mark Penn whose dad once sold Kosher meats in New York.
There was a familial energy around all this. A sense that we all knew one another and were members of the tribe–even Harvard guys in the meritocracy. We deferred to the people who studied the issue, rightwing Zionists.
And there was a familial energy around my relationship with F. I deferred to him. I agreed: Leave Israel to the elders. Once he said to me, If you really want to understand the issue, the
most fairminded guy is Dennis Ross. Read his book, The Missing Peace.
Bernard Lewis, too; he understands the Arab world.
Then 9/11 happened, and the Iraq war. F supported the Iraq war, vigorously. And many times I've told the story on this site of how my own close relative said to me, "Philip, I demonstrated against the Vietnam war, but my Jewish newspaper says this war could be good for Israel…" That would have been the Union for Reform Judaism and Reform Rabbi David Saperstein's Religious Action Center. They were all for the war.
Iraq changed everything for me. I thought, This Jewish family that I have deferred to has lost its intellectual marbles because of Israel. It took a while for me to realize that. Bit by bit, I saw how even the "liberals" like my friend F, or Ken Pollack, or Peter Beinart, they were all in bed with the neocons, because the neocons were their hawkish family members who had the answers.
Once again: APN giving power to the ZOA by staying on the AIPAC board.
It took a lot for me to break openly with F. He was a good guy, a nice guy. And he was in my life. He felt Jewish responsibility for me. He pressured me. He always said, "You have all this mishigos about your family"– the emotional familial questions that I am so open about here because I'm all for transparency–"you shouldn't bring that nuttiness to the Israel/Palestine issue." He wasn't that different from other friends of mine, big New York editors, who said, "Stay Jewish, Phil," jokingly.
Or once: "Phil, we're not calling this column 'Outside the Tribe.' Because you're a Jew. You're in the tribe."
They were all my tribal minders. A lot of them are great guys. I love some of them. But I felt controlled by them. I felt their hands on my shoulder. And they were wrong. All of them think that Arabs are basically inferior, and don't deserve a right to a state, or that they have sacrificed that right or not qualified for it. A right that the Kosovars have, and the Pakistanis, and Indians, and that Abraham Lincoln said that Negroes had too– Palestinians had lost by attacking Jews. They placed their Jewishness before their Americanness, and it took them down the wrong path.
I'm an emotional person, and my attitudes were formed in a close-knit academic Jewish family by tribal affinities. The truth is, I've only been able to break with my tribal minders because of other Jewish company. It's taken finding smart Jews, smarter Jews actually, the ones who helped form Jews Against the Occupation years ago on the simple shocking principle that the refugees had a right to return–it took finding them to make my way to a better place. We need Jews in that place. We don't need tribal enforcers.
