I need to say more about Chuck Schumer, who played a critical role in the destruction of Chas Freeman. In fact, Schumer bragged that he had talked to the White House about Freeman—reportedly going to Rahm Emanuel.
Someone who was once friendly with Schumer tells me: “Schumer is a lad from Brooklyn, and deep down he is a Labor Zionist. He admires Ben Gurion, and Israel is very important to him. So important that back in the 70s when some of us were talking about who we admire, one of us said, the Vietnamese revolutionary leaders, and he said, ‘the founders of Israel.’
“His view has surely enlarged since then. He is a gregarious man. I am sure he is concerned with his Haitian constituents and feels a connection to them, too. But there is an inertia in his world view. He has a genuine passion for Israel and now it is combined with the fact that it guarantees him a lot of campaign contributions.
“What about all the disturbing reports from Israel today? He would say, ‘I don’t live there, so I can’t judge. I don’t make decisions for them. I give them all the support they need so that they can look after their safety.’”
So we are talking about a politician with real Zionist feeling and a typical Jewish sense of the exceptionalism of other Jews halfway around the world. And it is astonishing to me that the media can even discuss the Israel lobby without addressing the issue of this powerful man’s religious investment. Remember how they harped on George Bush’s being born again?
Imagine for just one moment that a senator closely associated with the religious right had helped force out a presidential nominee who took the wrong line on abortion. Can you imagine the hue and cry in the media? The liberal media would go insane with rage. It would be all over the Rachel Maddow show and Keith Olbermann too and Brian Lehrer on WNYC.
There is really no difference in the case of Schumer, except that his religious engagement is Jewish. And when Chas Freeman says that the Israel lobby took him down out of an adherence to the will and interests of a foreign government, an honest exploration of Freeman’s charge must in the end entail an exploration of American Jewish identity. In 1995, Freeman himself addressed the claims of Israel on American Jews when he told an interviewer for the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training (adst.org), “There has been, historically, a sense that it’s better not to put ardently pro-Israeli American Jews to the test by putting them in the middle of U.S.-Israeli relations, where they will anguish over where their duty lies.” The reason the Times used not to send Jews to cover Israel/Palestine.
I would emphasize that Schumer’s investment is not unusual: Virtually every Jew in America with any communal life at all has been inculcated to some degree with Zionist ideas—the “secular religion,” per Dershowitz; to be anti-Zionist is to be anti-Semitic, says the American Jewish Committee—and has either gone along with it, in the great majority of cases, or agonized and had to form a reasoned opposition or criticism of it, as I have. I bet that Rahm Emanuel, the gameplayer nonpareil, has never thought twice about his Zionism, which was as natural to him as the fact that his father was a member of the Israeli terrorist organization the Irgun; and so when Israel was under attack in 1991, Rahm ran over there to serve on a civilian base, in uniform. And while most American Jews have never been to Israel, a majority of us say that Jerusalem must never be divided: again, a nationalist-religious belief, which they have not examined, or been forced to examine.
There are many Jews in our public life who have struggled to reconcile Zionist ideals with Israel’s behavior. Eric Alterman is a good example. He’s a liberal Jew who is also a Zionist. And he is, to his great credit, upfront about his investment; he is doing a forum on an alternative Jewish Israel lobby on Monday night. Now I disgree with Alterman on many issues around Israel; but at least he says, I’m a Zionist, the Jewish state is important to me. I think such a view is irreconcilable with liberal democracy in view of what Israel has become; but that’s another conversation.
Dan Fleshler is a blogger and author who understands his Zionism. Jeremy Ben-Ami is a political activist for J Street who has examined his Zionism. And so is Shaul Magid of Indiana University, who challenges Zionist thinking in this week’s Forward.
These people have all examined their religious commitment to a nationalist ideology in the light of Israel’s behavior. And what I am saying and I am sure I’m repeating myself, but it doesn’t matter, this bears repetition, is that our public life is filled with Jews with similar types of religious/tribal inscription who have never interrogated themselves about that investment, or more important, had to answer publicly about it. Neocon extremist Daniel Pipes also bragged about helping to bring down Freeman. Pipes believes in an unending war with Islam. How is Chuck Schumer’s Jewish identification different from Pipes, whom he supported to be on the United States Institute of Peace? I’d like to know.
We will get nowhere on the Middle East American policy, until Jews, who are so central in the life of the establishment, speak honestly about these social/emotional/political investments, or are compelled to do so by, for instance, journalists. Any fair examination of Chas Freeman’s assertion that the Israel lobby puts adherence to the wills and interests of a foreign country over the American interest will not be complete without such an examination. And Jewish intellectual life, post-Iraq-disaster and the neocons, will remain broken.
