In the Chicago Tribune, a Brit Tzedek rabbi, Arnold Jacob Wolf, says that the American Jewish community’s failure to speak up for the peace process now is "shocking." Wolf says that yes, American Jews have been skeptical of the peace process for many years but now is the time to put those fears aside and sign up. The moment may pass. It is the same urgency expressed by IPF at its conference last month and by Olmert and Ramon. And by Walt and Mearsheimer in the LATimes, when they say now is the time, or Israel will become an apartheid state.
Myself, I think there is something rotten in the state of American Jewry. Realistic Dove has a brilliant post on this point. He describes the surreal Jewish groupthink that undermined Howard Dean 4 years ago when he dared to say that the U.S. should be more "evenhanded" in its policies in the Middle East.
In late October, 2003, I sat in a New York City boardroom with about
twenty American Jews and listened to two of Howard Dean’s campaign
aides [who]…had come to New York…to trot out Dean’s pro-Israel credentials and shore up Jewish support
during what they judged to be a major crisis in his Presidential
campaign.It’s worth reviewing precisely what Dean said, because there should
have been nothing controversial about it. The intifadeh was raging.
Yasser Arafat was holed up in his battered Presidential compound in
Ramallah, besieged by the Israelis under Ariel Sharon, who refused to
negotiate with the Palestinian Authority until it clamped down on
terrorist cells. In early September, when asked if the U.S. should push
for negotiations, Dean said, “I don’t believe stopping the terror has
to be a prerequisite for talking…I don’t find it convenient to blame
people. Nobody should have violence, ever. But they do, and it’s not
our place to take sides.” The following week, he told the Washington
Post that the U.S. should be “evenhanded.”Dean got creamed by his Democratic rivals –Kerry and Lieberman–, by
Democratic Members of Congress, by still unidentified people (probably
Republican operatives) who jammed the phones and e-mails of Jewish
organizational leaders with venomous messages, by the Republican Jewish
Coalition and by a few right wing Jews like Dov Hikind. Their message:
“Howard Dean advocates that the U.S. not always take Israel’s side, in
each and every circumstance…How shocking!”The meeting I attended included three or four board members and
supporters of left-of-center American Jewish organizations along with a
motley group that included other professionals, grad students and
staffers from other Jewish groups. We were handed a document with red
meat, pro-Israel, anti-terrorist statements that had been made by Dean
over the years. We were reminded that he had said that his positions
were actually closer to those of AIPAC than Americans for Peace Now. The experience was unsettling, almost surreal, because I knew for a
fact that at least a half dozen people in that room AGREED with Dean.
They wanted the U.S. to be an honest broker and wanted the Bush
Administration to persuade Israel to talk to the Palestinian Authority.Yet no one at the meeting expressed support for what Dean had said.
No one lamented the treatment he had received, or discussed how Dean
could make his case without alienating potential supporters. My
recollection is that that they just asked polite questions about the
candidate’s views on Arafat and Israel’s tough response to the
intifadeh. They bought into the assumption that Dean’s only problem was
that he had committed a terrible political blunder and needed to fix
it, quickly. [Weiss’s emphasis] …No one was willing to imply or say that it was the
political system that had blundered and needed to be fixed, that the
prevailing rules of political rhetoric had to change so that
politicians like Dean could say what the people in that room actually
believed.I wanted to point out that Dean was, in fact, conveying a message
most American Jews agreed with, according to polls, but couldn’t get a
word in before the aides had to leave. There were different cliques in that room, and many of us had either
not met each other or had met only casually. So it is likely that one
reason no one came to Dean’s defense was sheer me-too-ism, a worry
about sticking necks out too far or offending strangers.
I applaud Fleshler for his honesty and openness. When I said that Walt and Mearsheimer were ringing in an era of Jewish soul-searching, this is precisely what I was hoping for. I differ with Fleshler in one respect here. He makes Jews too irresponsible. He says that "the prevailing rules of political rhetoric [have] to change." Yes, but who has set those rules? Who had the power to set those rules? The body of the Jewish community/leadership is responsible for those rules. Am I blaming the Jews? Yes I am. We Jews are not potted plants; we are responsible, as we are responsible for the neocons acting in our names, or the general indifference to Arab suffering. Reform American Jewry now…
