Harold Meyerson has a great oped in today’s Washington Post which makes several of the same points we have been making on this site – American Jews’ belief in liberalism and equality is beginning to outweigh their support for Israel. Meyerson:
But why the waning of American Jewish identification with Israel over the past few decades? At its birth, and for several decades thereafter, Israel commanded virtually consensual support among American Jews. But for the past 42 of its 61 years, Israel has ruled over Palestinians who are citizens neither of Israel nor of a Palestinian state. They are — a condition that should be familiar to Jews — stateless. The blame for their statelessness is surely their own as well as the Israelis’, but in time, the Israeli role in the Palestinian disaster has eroded American Jewish identification with Israel.
By every measure, American Jews remain intensely committed to liberalism and to universal and minority rights. As a democratic state rising on the ashes of the Holocaust, Israel once embodied those values to its supporters, but 42 years of occupation have rendered Israel a state that tests those values more than it affirms them. Its most fervent American Jewish backers, to be found disproportionately among the Orthodox, identify with it for reasons that are more tribal than universal. All of which has created the political space for President Obama to try to craft a resolution to one of the planet’s most venerable and dangerous disputes.
Two points. First, although Meyerson focuses on the Jewish community, I think it is actually the declining support for Israel among American more broadly that is opening political space for Obama. While the American Jewish community is clearly an important voice on this issue, it is also important that the issue not be left to Jews alone. The US send over $3 billion a year to Israel which makes this an issue for all Americans. American support for Israel seems to be dropping across the board and this is important.
Second, Meyerson draws a distinction between pre-1967 Israel and post-1967 Israel. This is common and understandable to degree, but ultimately misguided. Israel was not a flourishing democracy before the 1967 occupation. The first and most important example of this is the Nakba and its aftermath which went virtually unacknowledged outside the Arab world, especially in the Jewish community, for decades. Following the displacement and dispossession of the Palestinian people in 1948, Israel held the Palestinians who remained inside Israel under martial law until 1966. The reason this history has not determined the US perception of Israel is because it is not widely known, and there is certainly an ongoing effort to keep it that way. Stories like Exodus helped sanitize Israel’s history for Western audiences and helped create the liberal image that Meyerson refers to when he says “Israel once embodied those values to its supporters.” What the ongoing occupation that begun in 1967 has done is make that illusion impossible to sustain.
As Israel’s history becomes more widely known it can be expected that widespread US affinity for Israel will continue to fall, along with support for sustaining the one-sided “special relationship” that the US has maintained with Israel for so long.
