Abdeen Jabara
Last night in icy rainy Brooklyn there was a discussion and party for Jack Ross's new book Rabbi Outcast, sponsored by the wonderful group Brooklyn for Peace. First Ross read a brilliant essay about the role of Jewish nationalism in American Jewish life, and then there were responders.
I am going to pull out three important statements from last night's hoe-down. The first is a speech by Abdeen Jabara, the legendary Arab-American lawyer and activist (and a great soul if ever there was one). The second is from Jack Ross himself on the Iran threat. The third is from Leonard Rodberg, a professor at Queens College, speaking on anti-Semitism as the context for the rise of Zionism in the U.S.
1. Jabara on how Gaza has vindicated Elmer Berger.
Jabara was a friend of the late Berger and said, "I think Elmer Berger would be tremendously enthused by what is happening today." Jabara can say as much because of two different events in Israeli history.
After the 1967 war, the Zionists felt incredible “hubris and joy.” And anyone who questioned the Zionist narrative experienced “tremendous pressure.”
"I had come back from a year in Lebanon and opened a law practice in Michigan, and Americans celebrated the Israeli victory as the Israelis themselves did."
Berger never wavered. He never changed. And he paid for that resolution. (Another speaker, Leonard Sussman, said that Berger's opposition to the '67 War led to his being forced out of the leadership of the American Council for Judaism).
Fast forward to the attack on Gaza of 08-09. The picture was entirely different, Jabara said. The frontline states were no longer a threat. Egypt had a treaty with Israel, so did Jordan. The Arab countries were in disarray. The US controlled the Gulf States. The situation looked entirely bleak to the Palestinians, and the loss of life in Gaza was incredible.
"I think more than anything else, anti-Zionism got a shot in the arm because of Gaza. Because it revealed the Zionist project was not about creating a safe home for the Jews. It was expansionist, and brutal, and persecutory, and the Palestinians were isolated.
“There was no one to support them. I think that’s the difference.”
(Alas these are not complete notes. I was sitting next to Jabara as he spoke. The tremendous compassion for the Palestinians being pounded to smithereens in '08-'09 with no one not even our great president-elect to speak up for them was moving. I think we sometimes forget what a gamechanger this has been inside the American discourse, and the Jewish one.)
2. Jack Ross statement on Iran.
"As for current events in Zionism.... well, it is all about desperation. Now it is about desperation to start some kind of war with Iran.
"The Israeli obsession with Iran is not rational and cannot be understood in rational terms. Iran is simply a scapegoat for all of Israel’s problems."
3. Leonard Rodberg's statement on the postwar context of anti-Zionism.
Rodberg grew up in Baltimore (where he went to the rival high school to mine) and was bar mitzvah'd by anti-Zionist rabbi Morris Lazaron. In fact, Rodberg was briefly himself a member of the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism because of his relationship to Lazaron.
The context for the American Jewish relationship to Zionism was anti-Semitism, he said. On one side that produced "a concern about dual loyalty." The appeal of anti-Zionism drew on a fear that if a Jewish state were established, it would undermine the credibility of Jewish patriotism in the eyes of other Americans, and so foster a wave of anti-semitism. Remember, this was the time of the Gentlemen's Agreement.
And the opposition to the anti-Zionists-- and therefore the appeal of the Zionists-- well, Rodberg said that anti-Zionists were seen after the war as "standing in the way of the Jewish remnant finding a place in the world." The decimated Jews of Europe could only go to South America, and to Palestine. The anti-Zionists were seen as denying them that out.
"In 1948 my rabbi was thrown out of the congregation and replaced. I never saw the ACJ presence again....
"Today, Israel is the embodiment of American Zionism. But in '45 there was a moment of real anxiety about the identity of Jews in America."
I see from the archives, Phil, that you have written often about Rabbi Elmer Berger. And with good reason. He is a genuine hero whose integrity and heart will only shine brighter as the years go on.
After one of your posts, I watched this video: Harold Hudson Channer in conversation with Rabbi Berger.
link to youtube.com
Is Ross the man you were riding around with in the illegal settlements?
Prof Cole (Informed Comment) and Micheal Scheuer (Non Intervention) both have worthwhile reads up
GOP Candidates Harm Israeli Security by Pushing for Impractical “Greater Israel”
“”I think more than anything else, anti-Zionism got a shot in the arm because of Gaza. Because it revealed the Zionist project was not about creating a safe home for the Jews. It was expansionist, and brutal, and persecutory, and the Palestinians were isolated.”
I agree Gaza was a major turning point in public opinion on Israel. In all the years I folllowed this since 2001, that is when I saw the most overwhelming outrage expressed about Israeli actions.
Will that prevent them from doing it again…. maybe it has already, but maybe it won’t always.
Ross also is brilliant in his nutshells.
“”The Israeli obsession with Iran is not rational and cannot be understood in rational terms. Iran is simply a scapegoat for all of Israel’s problems.”
I am guessing he has elsewhere expanded on this beauty by pointing out that Israel is based on the forever will be enemies of Jews beliefs in zionism. So there will always be a enemy, always another one up next. Exhausting to contemplate.
“I am guessing he has elsewhere expanded on this beauty by pointing out that Israel is based on the forever will be enemies of Jews beliefs in zionism. So there will always be a enemy, always another one up next.”
Yes, exactly. This is the essence of Zionism and, to a very disconcerting extent, the essence of much of Jewish identity: there is always an enemy. The fact that there are no more enemies of Jews than there are of other minorities escapes examination. What about African-Americans? What about Muslims? What about Hispanics? The idea that that Jews are the object of greater numbers of hate crimes — pseudo-statistics from the ADL notwithstanding — is ludicrous. By the way, what if we were to speak of hatred of (non-Jewish) white minorities? Such hatred is by no means dead.
Let’s face it: racism and bigotry abound. It’s a sad fact.
In America, Jews are hardly the only targets, or even the most significant ones. They’re only the most significant targets in their own mythology.
Bigotry and racism are horrible. We need to fight the most significant forms of racism and bigotry in the U.S. and the West in general: islamophobia, anti-African racism, anti-Hispanic racism, and general anti-brown racism. These are the kinds of racism we see in U.S. society today. Anti-Semitism exists, of course, but it is so much less significant than most of these other forms of hate that corrode the American body politic today.
Excuse me for stating the obvious. That’s my specialty.
Another obvious thing: the stats on hate-crimes in the USA are stats on crimes reported by the claimant as a hate crime. I’ve never seen stats on judicially found hate crimes–has anyone? In the USA, if a crime claimant is white and not Jewish (still the national majority demographically except for the newest generations of Americans), there is comparatively very little hate-crime knee-jerk reaction due to our school indoctrination
Right, I posted the FBI stats on hate crimes (and links) on here in one of the threads for 2009 and 2010 last week.
There were 2750 hate crimes against blacks and 900 against Jews in 2010.
I was going to say the same thing, American, but you praised Ross’s nutshells in a nutshell more eloquently than I could!
Ross — what a mind. Wow.
gazacalling….
You probably understand all this about Israel already, but teta posted some exceptional links to knowledgeable people describing the crux of Israel.
link to mondoweiss.net
The gist of which is what the US is doing is telling a paranoid schizophrenic (Israel) that he is right, he has enemies everywhere.
And arming him up so he can kill all those he imagines as enemies.
“The decimated Jews of Europe could only go to South America, and to Palestine. The anti-Zionists were seen as denying them that out.”
This is probably true, but SO VERY illogical, since the cure for this problem (after removing Palestine as a possible destination) would be OPEN UP USA, which of course didn’t happen. In other words, Zionism (Palestine) was the EASIER PATH, not the BEST PATH. I’ve read that over the lifetime of Israel, most Jews seeking to relocate wanted to come to USA, so USA’s immigration refusal policy was itself a COLONIZING policy, since it made Palestine more desirable.
By October 1947, the US State Department had almost completed a plan for the USA and the British Empire to absorb the 300,000 Jewish DPs. When leaks tipped off the Zionist leadership, Zionist agents began spreading rumors that the number of Jewish DPs was much greater than 300,000.
I don’t have the link at hand but memory says the US took in about 400,000 Jews after WWII, UK and others took in some but fewer than the US.
If my figure is correct and I think it is, that is about equal to the number of the first post war wave of Jews into Palestine in ’46 or 47.
I believe these stats were at HistoryMaster, someone can look it up if interested.
Not to worry, pabelmont–now the US immigration policy is adverse to European Christians, while back then it was favoring them.
L’Encyclopédie de l’histoire du Québec / The Quebec History Encyclopedia
article by Claude Bélanger, Department of History, Marianopolis College
Why did Canada Refuse to Admit Jewish Refugees in the 1930′s?
The rise to power of Hitler in early 1933, and the establishment of Nazism in Germany, led in the remaining years of the 1930′s to a set of increasingly severe measures against Jews that were to end, in the course of the Second World War, with the Holocaust, an attempt to annihilate an entire people and in which an estimated 6 million European Jews were to die. In the 1930′s, the boycotts initiated in 1933 and 1934, the Nuremberg laws (1935) and Kristallnacht (1938) gave clear signals to the Jews of Germany that they should leave the country and seek asylum elsewhere. The main problem they faced was that few countries were prepared to accept large numbers of refugees. For its part, Canada only admitted around 5,000 Jewish refugees in the 1930′s. What explains such a low number?
1. A first factor was the impact of the Great Depression. The 1930′s brought misery to Canadians as low wages and high rates of unemployment became the norm at the same time as prices remained comparatively high. Unemployment reached about 30% in 1933, and the percentage was even higher for certain categories of workers, or in certain regions. For example, the rate of unemployment among the young males between the ages of 16 and 24 of Quebec City reached 46% in 1936-1937 if we are to trust the result of a survey conducted by the local chapter of the Association catholique de la jeunesse canadienne. It should be borne in mind that unemployment insurance did not yet exist in the 1930′s. As well, Canadians had always been conditioned to think of immigration as essentially serving the economic interest of Canada. Immigration had been supported by ordinary Canadians to the extent that the immigrants “knew their place”, that they contributed to the Canadian economy, that is that they settled on farms in the great western prairies of Canada, that they were not seen as competing for the often scarce industrial jobs of Canada. When the job market contracted, few in Canada were prepared to support the entrance of any large number of immigrants. These could only be seen as potentially entering Canada to compete for jobs and depressing wages further. Governments were accutely aware of these feelings and adjusted the system accordingly. Thus, in 1907, in 1913, and again in 1919-1921 – all years witnessing economic strains in Canada – steps had been taken to reduce immigration. As time passed, Canadian governments became increasingly effective at regulating immigration and matching it to the impulses of the economy. In this respect, the Great Depression was to decimate immigration in Canada. Its first impact can be measured by looking at the rapidly rising number of deportations of immigrants that occured during the Great Depression. If immigrants lost their job, which was frequently the case since they were the last to be hired, they were ruthlessly deported from Canada. Between 1930 and 1934, 16,765 immigrants were deported from Canada as having become “public charge”; by 1935, the number of deportations had reached more than 28,000. These numbers were several times the rate of deportation seen in the 1920′s. As time passed, the grounds for deportation became more and more varied: one could be deported for union activities, or for membership in the Communist Party, for medical reasons or for petty charges of criminality, such as vagrancy, a not uncommon charge during the Great Depression. The ruthless application of deportation shows to what extent immigration was unpopular in the country during the depression years. In this context, immigrants found few friends in Canada. The first few years of the Great Depression saw several restrictive regulations adopted by the Canadian government (P. C. 1113 in 1929; P. C. 659 and 1957 in 1930 and P. C. 695 in 1931). The net effect of these regulations was that, by 1932, only Americans, British subjects and agriculturalists with enough capital to start farming in Canada could be admitted. In the process, the number of landed immigrants into Canada had gone from 166,783 in 1928 to 14,382 in 1933 (and was to continue to decrease until 1937). Thus, Jews attempted to enter Canada in the 1930′s at a time when the country had nearly entirely closed its doors to immigrants and when immigration was likely at its most unpopular level since Confederation. As historians Robert Bothwell, Ian Drummond and John English put it in their book entitled Canada, 1900-1945: “For Canadians, the Great Depression was the overwhelming fact of the decade (p. 295).”
2. Another problem for Jews was that Canada did not have a refugee policy. Essentially, the country did not distinguish between refugees – who clearly would require special considerations, if not the total suspension of the ordinary rules – and regular immigrants. Consequently, refugees were required to follow all the regulations that were imposed on ordinary immigrants. How could a Jewish refugee from Germany who had been dispossessed of all his worldly possessions show he could support himself in Canada? Canada had admitted some groups of refugees in the XIXth century (Hutterites and Mennonites for example) but only because these were farmers who came as a block settlement at a time of intensive western development, and who otherwise qualified under Canadian Immigration Law. Other groups, such as Armenians for example, had been largely denied asylum in Canada (see Isabel Kaprielian-Churchill, “Armenian Regugees and their Entry into Canada, 1919-1930″, Canadian Historical Review, Vol. LXXI, No. 1 (Spring 1990): 80-108). Only after the Second World War did Canada begin to develop a refugee policy. The absence of a generous and sensitive refugee policy in Canada during the Great Depression was hugely felt by Jews in the 1930′s.
3. A particularly important factor in the plight of Jewish refugees was the widespread presence of Anti-semitism in Canada. This factor cannot be ignored or underestimated, although its impact is also sometimes overestimated. Historian David Rome wrote in Clouds in the Thirties (Vol. 11, p. 510): “The reluctance of the Canadian government to admit Jewish refugees in any great numbers was a fair reflection of public opinion [...] which was a strong Anglo-Saxon nativism permeated with Anti-semitism”. Thus, even when Jews would have had the means to support themselves in Canada, they were often refused entry. For instance, after Kristallnacht (1938), the Canadian Jewish Congress was prepared to sponsor the coming, and guarantee the financial support of 10,000 Jewish refugees to Canada. Yet, the government of Canada rejected this proposal. The reason was simple: not only was immigration unpopular in the context of the Great Depression, but, as well, Anti-semitism was rife in Canada. The social exclusion of Jews was common in the institutions of English-speaking Canada while a vociferous anti-semitic discourse was heard in Quebec, spearheaded by the home-grown Nazi movement of Adrien Arcand, and legitimized by some members of the Catholic clergy and, otherwise, respectable newspapers such as Montreal’s Le Devoir. Thus, Jews had few friends in Canada and many enemies. In Quebec, for the most part, Jewish immigration was unwanted because any immigration was unpopular and Jews were seen, especially by the ultramontane nationalists, as a threat to the Catholic values of the province. Furthermore, for decades, the Federal Government had conducted an aggressive immigration policy oblivious to the bilingual and bicultural character of Canada, not sufficiently concerned with Quebec’s wishes, hopes, goals and aspirations. The net result was to make Quebecers suspicious of the Federal Government, and of immigration in particular. Quebec’s federal politicians – Rinfret, Cardin and, especially, Lapointe – voiced in cabinet these anti-immigration views and their opposition to the admission of Jewish refugees.However, Quebecers were plainly not alone in the country in expressing anti-Jewish feelings. Still in 1946, a full year after the end of the war and of the disclosure of the horrors of the holocaust, a poll conducted by the Canadian Institute of Public Opinion showed that 60% of Canadians approved of the exclusion of Jews from Canadian immigration. The factor of Anti-semitism having been raised and its importance underlined, it should not be considered as the only factor at play. In the period of 1891 to 1931, tens of thousands of Jews entered Canada despite the existence of Anti-semitism. It alone could not keep Jews out of Canada. However, compounded with the other factors presented above and below, it made it virtually impossible for Jews to find refuge in Canada in the 1930′s.
4. The lack of an international sympathetic response to the Jewish refugees is also a factor to consider. Until the Evian Conference of 1938 no concerted international action in favour of the refugees was attempted. Even after the Conference was held, little changed. While several countries did noticeably better than Canada in admitting refugees (others did even less), none can be said to have had a really favourable position to the Jewish refugees and to have had a generous policy; the closest to generosity were Argentina (63,000) and the United States (102,000). Had the rest of the world mounted a significant response, Canada might have been shamed into following a similar course. In the context of the 1930′s, few countries could point an accusing finger to other countries.
5. The negative response in Canada to Jewish refugees is also a clear indicator of the lack of influence of the Jewish community in Canada. Here we touch a rather interesting point. Antisemites were fond of accusing Jews of controlling the government and the economy (or the world, as claimed by the more extreme antisemites of the time). Yet, Jews were unable to have their brothers and sisters of Germany accepted in Canada. Clearly, this was because as a group of fairly recent immigrants they, in fact, had little influence in Canada. There were only three Jewish members of Parliament and the Jewish community trusted too much that they could achieve results through quiet diplomacy.
6. Still, if Canada had had a different federal government, the response might have been more positive. However, Mackenzie King was not a Prime Minister to forge ahead and challenge public opinion. On the contrary, he made it a habit of never straying too far from popular desires. From time to time, Mackenzie King expressed sympathy with the plight of the Jews of Germany, especially from 1938. He was not a rabit antisemite, as some ill-informed commentators have written. He had built his public career on identifying properly the prevailing wind of public opinion. He was forever cautious, identifying the welfare of the country with the health of his government. Anything that threatened the position of the government he led must be rooted out as the welfare of the country would suffer if his government had to be replaced. Appropriately, he was extremely concerned with the maintenance of national unity, with keeping Quebec and the rest of the country working in the same direction. On the question of immigration and Jewish refugees, the electors of Canada were clear: the doors should remain closed. King was not about to do otherwise.
7. The very magnitude of the problem probably also contributed to the difficulty in solving it. As Hitler enlarged progressively “his country” by annexation (Austria, Sudetenland, etc.) more and more Jewish refugees were created. Where would it end? Many Canadians seem to have reflected that if a boatload of refugees was allowed to land, many more would evidently follow? Many thought – and the Director of the Canadian Immigration Branch, Frederick Blair, was among them – that “the line must be drawn somewhere”, and that it would be best not to admit any at all.
Thus, a web of complex factors brought about Canada’s poor response to the desperate appeal of the Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany. In responding so negatively, the government of Mackenzie King followed the lead of his predecessors who had never developed a refugee policy. He was not about to create one for a group that faced so much prejudice and discrimination in Canada. He faced little pressure from the international community, or from ordinary Canadians, to adopt a different policy. Unfortunately, during the Great Depression, too many people were hurting and were not in the mood to pay much attention to the problems of others…
© 2006 Claude Bélanger, Marianopolis College
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Would the reasons in the U.S differed drastically from those given here for Canada? patm
See William Rubinstein’s “The Myth of Rescue” for a corrective to some of this. The first chapter is on-line, at the NYT, plus a review, which admits Rubinstein’s case, too grudgingly, against the author’s first inclinations, which says something.
link to nytimes.com
“The decimated Jews of Europe could only go to South America, and to Palestine. The anti-Zionists were seen as denying them that out.”
(a) So how come some of them ended up in Australia?
(b) The anti-Zionists weren’t denying them the South America option. There was a lot more room in South America, decent climates, teeny bikinis (perhaps not so teeny in 1947), lively music, and tangy food. Why bother with Palestine?