From time to time commenters on this blog say that American Jews are risking anti-semitic retaliation because of their unwavering and selfish support for Israel. I don’t like this line of argument. It seems vicious, or a veiled threat. Yes, the Jewish leadership has been selfish in its unending contempt for Palestinian human rights; but I see hope that the next generation of Jews will lead my tribe out of the parched desert of parochialism.
That said, it appears that Henry Kissinger and Hannah Arendt, both German-born Jewish Holocaust survivors, expressed the attitude I find lamentable. Let’s go to the videotape.
A historic volume of Arendt’s Jewish writings was published last year. She was an unbelievable writer. In 1952, mourning her dear friend Judah Magnes, the founder of Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who often opposed political Zionism, she wrote that his stature had only grown in the four years since he died:
Magnes was the conscience of the Jewish people and much of that conscience has died with him–at least for our time. Magnes’s protest rose from the Zionist ranks and its validity lay in this origin. He raised his voice primarily on moral grounds, and his authority was that he was a citizen of Jerusalem, that their fate was his fate, and that therefore nothing he said could ever be blamed on ulterior motives. He was a very practical and a very realistic man; it may be that he, like the rest of us, was also inspired by fear for coming generations of Jews, who may have to suffer for the wrongs committed in our time. But this was not his primary motive. He passionately wanted to do the right thing and had a healthy distrust of the wisdom of our Realpolitiker; and if fear did not really touch him, he was very sensitive to shame. Being a Jew and being a Zionist, he was simply ashamed of what Jews and Zionists were doing….
It has happened that the last years of his life coincided with a great change in the Jewish national character [foundation of state of Israel and "flight," Arendt believed, of the Arabs]. A people that for two thousand years had made justice the cornerstone of its spiritual and communal existence has become emphatically hostile to all arguments of such a nature, as though these were necessarily the arguments of failure. We all know that this change has come about since Auschwitz, but that is little consolation. [italic emphasis is Arendt’s; bold is mine]
Beautiful. Safe travels, Hannah.
Now the Realpolitiker himself: Kissinger. First, a little explanation. In his history of the peace process, The Much Too Promised Land, Aaron David Miller writes of Kissinger’s exasperation with the Israelis in 1975, when the U.S. was trying to get Israel to disengage from the Sinai. This was a tortuous process, in good measure because of the Israel lobby in the U.S. Kissinger, who was then sec’y of state, felt doublecrossed by Israeli Prime Minister Rabin and attributed
"Rabin’s refusal to make concessions… to domestic politics, which, he
observed scornfully, was really all there was to Israel’s foreign
policy." Kissinger meant that Rabin was able to call on Jewish allies here in order to nullify Ford Administration policy. Indeed, at that time, when President Ford, fed up with Israeli intransigence, said that the U.S. was reassessing its Middle East policy (Miller reports), the "reassessment provoked a furious response": a letter signed by 76 senators, which Miller says he believes AIPAC had drafted–warning Ford that he must be responsive to Israeli needs. A letter delivered, a Maryland senator wrote, "although no hearings had been held, no debate conducted, nor had the administration been invited to present its views"!
Kissinger worried that Israel’s hardline hijinks would cause the U.S. to lose power to the Soviet Union at an upcoming Geneva conference and endanger Anwar Sadat in Egypt. These were not trivial risks. He warned the Israeli negotiating team:
"’That’s my nightmare–what I now see marching toward you. Compared to that, 10 kilometers in the Sinai is trivial.’ Harold Saunders [then deputy assistant secretary of state] recalls that after Kissinger unloaded on the Israelis, the secretary of state confided that Israeli shortsightedness concerned him seriously: ‘Well, you know when they act like this I worry about the future of my son as a Jew in America.’"
Arendt fled a German internment camp in 1940. Kissinger lost 13 members of his family in the Holocaust.
