My post about Masa raised the dual-loyalty issue, and this seemed a good time to repeat myself and offer a number of instances in which the issue has come to my attention in the last year or so. Here goes:
–Harvard Yiddishist Ruth Wisse says at the Center for Jewish History that young American Jews should consider themselves part of Israel’s "army" and just give up a couple of years of their lives to fight as advocates here, particularly against Arab voices on campus. To his credit, Eric Alterman (a board member of "J Street," the alternative lobby) identified this as a call to dual loyalty.
–John Judis of the New Republic bravely states on TNR’s website that many American Jewish organizations "make dual
loyalty an inescapable part of being Jewish in a world in which a
Jewish state exists." You will find that the link in my original post no longer goes to that text on the TNR site. Does that make my post the only record of this courageous statement?
–A friend of mine returns from the birthright trip and shows my family photographs of his tour, including a visit to an Israeli army base where the kids meet Americans who have joined the IDF. As I recall, some of the visiting kids got to handle guns. The U.S. is at war. Has any of these able-bodied kids set foot anywhere near an American base?
–The New England Patriots’ owner’s wife says her sons can fight for Israel, not the U.S.
–At a Columbia U. event featuring the awe-inspiring Israeli group, Breaking the Silence, Rachel Glaser, a rep for Zionist Organization of America, attacks the Jewish sponsors of the presentation, saying it was OK for such a show to go on in Israel, but "Outside of Israel, you’re playing with fire." I.e., Jews have to stand together and manipulate American opinion in favor of Israel.
–A writer at Huffington Post, having read Bush Middle East adviser Elliott Abrams’s 1997 statement that outside of Israel, Jews must "stand apart from the nation in which they live" (printed in Walt and Mearsheimer’s book, reported by me years ago in the Observer), says that Abrams should be investigated by the Senate so as to determine whose national interest he was putting first, Israel’s or the U.S.’s.
–Dual loyalty is obviously a major issue in the AIPAC espionage trial, which keeps getting put off.
I’ve never called on anyone to be prosecuted or investigated for dual loyalty, though I’d sure like to be there to hear the testimony. I don’t have any evidence of treason. Also it is not illegal to have dual loyalty, especially since the Supreme Court allowed an American-Israeli artist to come back here and vote in a landmark decision some 40 years ago.
What I’ve said again and again is that I find all the invocations of loyalty to Israel confusing and inappropriate. But as Judis said, this is now part of Jewish identity. At Jimmy Carter’s speech at Brandeis a year or so back, Jewish kids wore blue and white, the colors of the Israeli flag, to protest him. A lot of the kids on Masa’s promotions appear to be similarly indoctrinated. On the Sabbath, synagogues offer a "prayer for the state of Israel" and put banners out on their lawns saying, "We Stand With Israel." The merging of U.S. and Israeli interests is most concerning in public life. I always wonder why the American Enterprise Institute slips $96,000 a year to Dore Gold, a neocon and former Netanyahu ambassador, as a "scholar" in Jerusalem, and his services are rarely evident in AEI events. Or why Richard Perle and David Wurmser of AEI could write a paper for Netanyahu urging him to end the peace process and then go to work in Bush’s Administration–which claimed it was for the peace process.
I never thought about this stuff till Iraq happened and my country stepped off its path. Why? Why did we invade an Arab country that did not attack us, and occupy it for many years, causing untold misery, and causing our soldiers to become the targets of suicide bombers? One reason was a climate of dual loyalty, and the confusion it helped to foster among some advocates for the war about what is the American national interest.
