An Argument Over What Zionism Has Done to Jewish Identity

You don't just have a "problem with identity politics";
you also have a problem with your identity, and this is distorting
both your politics and your values. A small example is
your embarrassingly silly apology to non-Jews for wishing me a happy
new year.

Speaking of being "naive," I must challenge you again re your
dark comment on Jewish charitable giving. Should Jewish donors to great
institutions (like Harvard or Columbia, as you indicated) be disallowed
from making large gifts because this might advance the "Israel lobby"? Or should donors be compelled to keep on giving if they are unhappy with certain policies of the object of their largess?  

 

Jews have a long history of being vilified and oppressed for
allegedly being too powerful. Nothing could be more grotesque than the
greatest military power in the world, circa 1940, attacking a
defenseless and increasingly stateless minority on the basis of the
Czarist secret police forgery known as the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion." Most of American Jews
were so cowed by antisemitism in the US in the 1930s and '40s that they
did not raise hell on behalf of Jews being systematically slaughtered
in Europe. (The Jewish-owned NY Times notoriously buried news reports
of the Holocaust in its back pages and never editorialized on this huge story, except to argue against "privileges" for Jewish refugees.)
This shameful history is part of what motivated Jews to
uncharacteristically court power in the post-WW 2 era. It you want to
reduce Jewish concerns for their fellow Jews to "tribalism," you
should say the same about Arab and Muslim concerns for the
Palestinians, or African Americans regarding manifestations of racism.
 

But you and your readers are so confused and ideologically
rigid that you keep on attacking me and other progressive Zionists,
even as you praise the efforts of J Street, Daniel Levy and other
individuals and groups in our camp. Prof. Sternhell, the victim of the
right-wing terrorist attack on him, is in fact a progressive Zionist.

 

Professors Mearsheimer and Walt have tried a lot harder than you
to reassure Jews that they are not antisemites and are not really
anti-Israel. In some ways, their critique of AIPAC is similar to our
own. As I've told you before, they are factually mistaken in conflating
the neocons with mainstream Jewish organizations, in reducing the
neocons to Zionist Jews, and in thinking that Israel's security was a
prime motivation for the Bush administration
to go to war in Iraq. As I've told you before, the Bush administration
tried to sell the war to American Jews with this argument but mostly
failed in this regard. Jews are more opposed to this war than
most non-Jews and they remain much more to the left and with the
Democratic party than most other sectors of the population. An old joke
that remains largely true is that Jews are prosperous like
Episcopalians, but vote like Puerto Ricans. Neocon propaganda and
racist scaremongering about Obama have had an impact on the Jewish
community, but it's still at least 60% Democratic.

 

Now Weiss again. First some of the easier issues. I have never said that Jewish donors should not give to Harvard. You keep missing the point. The point is simply that it is a fact of American establishment life that Jews are extremely important as givers to elite institutions and to political campaigns. Period. The Washington Post said some years ago, more than half the Democratic Party giving is Jewish. I bet it's more now. And a significant part of Republican giving too, if you look at Freedom's Watch, which seems to be the only game in town for them. Jewish success is a large fact of the American establishment. You can wave the Holocaust and the Protocols all you want at me. While I agree that this plays an important role in Jewish identity and assertiveness–never again-ism–it simply has nothing to do with my factual point. The Milton Himmelfarb line about Episcopalians/Puerto Ricans is cute but it is now 30 years old. The Jewish presence in American public life is more conservative than it's ever been. Though I agree that Obama will poll 70 percent. Your claim that Jews have only cultivated power since the Holocaust is inaccurate. Bleichroder under Bismarck. The court Jew. The Jews who used financial power to spring my ancestors from Russia. The cultivation of the British establishment to obtain the Balfour Declaration.

The reason I make the point about Jewish money is that Jews overwhelmingly are for the state of Israel, as you say. We worship at synagogues that have American and Israeli flags on the pulpit. I think this is regrettable. It's a change in Jewish identity that's occurred since 1960 and the onset of AIPAC and the Holocaust as a cultural phenomenon in American life and the 67 war and the 73 war. A lot of factors. Assimilation is also important. As Jewish identity became attenuated here, Israel loomed as the lodestone of Jewish identification. And now Israel is central to Jewish identity. Probably the 2nd most important definition of "being Jewish" for most Jewish organizations is: caring about Israel deeply. After Jewish family stuff.

You said in your last post that Jews care about Israel out of

I find your definition disconcerting. To begin with, I didn't like it when Irish Americans were supporting the IRA in Northern Ireland. So I don't think this is all hunky-dory. I think dual loyalty is a serious question. In the Israeli case it is magnified because unlike Northern Ireland, the Arab world hates the U.S. because of our support for a state that oppresses Arabs and crazy Arabs have learned how to fly airplanes. Period. We have to deal with this issue without demonizing the Arab world, as the neocons have. So your apple pie is really getting in the way here, of my cherry pie.

You dignify "natural ethnic and religious affinity and sense of kinship." Fine. It's a concept with dignity. A central issue in modern liberal life is: How large a factor should this be in one's political activities? I think it's central to you, as it is for the neoconservatives. I excuse you because you're working for an Israeli-associated group and on the political margins. I don't excuse the neocons, in their thinktanks and West Wing and Pentagon offices.

Here we arrive at the heart of my problem with your Jewish identity definition. The neoconservatives pushed the Iraq war–an overwhelming disaster for my country, the U.S.–in part out of concern for Israel's security. You choose not to believe this. The evidence is overwhelming, I'm reluctant to recite even a portion here again because I think you are blindered. Joe Klein has lately joined me and Walt and Mearsheimer in speaking bluntly of the "Jewish neocons" who believed in a "benign domino theory" that was to begin in Iraq and help Israel. It's craziness, ethnically-driven. John Judis of the New Republic has spoken of dual loyalty as a problem in the Jewish community. Seymour Hersh has said that "Jewish money" was driving the Iran hysteria that has, I hope, broken. Chris Matthews has virtually accused the neocons of acting on behalf of Israel. I can show you countless statements from neocons that conflate Israeli and U.S. interests, beginning with N. Podhoretz and I. Kristol in the 70s going Republican because they wanted a strong defense budget to support Israel. It ends with all the neocons citing suicide bomber attacks on Israel as a reason for us to go to war with Saddam. Just one little reason, but as Mike Kinsley used to say, if it's a factor, then it can be the determinative factor. It shouldn't have been a factor. Americans have wisely understood Sunni suicide bombing in Baghdad as a hateful symptom of a political problem–a dispute over power/resources/territory–and we have not disqualified Sunnis from Iraq's government as a consequence. But the suicide bombers in Israel are demonized by the neocons, and Palestinians denied self-determination for 60 years by their friends in Israel. When the motivation is the same as the Iraq bombers: disputed territory/resources.

I say neocons are central, because you continue to afford them cover on Iraq. You are right that most Jews opposed the Iraq war. But most Jewish congressmen, in California and NY anyway, supported it–the same guys who came into public life opposing the Vietnam War. The Union for Reform Judaism supported it, again citing suicide attacks in Israel. And most important, the neocons who were very powerful men, thank god not so much now, dreamed this thing up in some measure out of concern for Israel. But because you share that ethnic/religious affinity with them, and because you are worried about antisemitism, you can't take your blinders off. I am tired of this part of the conversation. You will make some other blindered statement, I'm sure. You have a Holocaust-era worry that people will blame the Jews and there will be a pogrom. I don't see it. And as an American journalist, my job is to anatomize the disaster of the Iraq war. And in fact I think people will be less inclined to blame Jews if the truth is laid out, and the varying flavors of Zionism are explained to people, and the Jabotinskyites ideas about how to deal with Arabs are fully explored.

I think you're living in the past on a lot of these questions. You think that antisemitism is a real factor in American life, and you think that Jews are still outsiders in American life. The first misconception is used to justify Israel's existence (when in fact the U.S. is safer for Jews than Israel is); and the second is used by Jews to blind themselves to the real responsibility that Jews now have as equal players in the Establishment, with a lot of cultural and political power.

As to my linking Martillo and Atzmon, both are Jewish, which gives me comfort generally. I have certain tribal instincts, especially in this area. For instance, I've given you a prominent spot on my blog lately because you talk like my mom. I don't study Martillo or Atzmon, but I find they have interesting ideas, and I graze those ideas as I graze other ones on the internet, rapidly–not doing a study of the speaker. You want to keep me from reading them, and this gets back to Jewish identity. For they are at least asking questions about Jewish identity with one eye on what is the central reality here: Israel is practicing apartheid in the West Bank. That's how Zionism has worked out. After all the theories and dreams, and after the miracles and the achievements, that's still the reality. (And yes I wonder whether you don't have relatives in the Occupied Territories.)

You have got to frame Jewish identity in a new way, not as allegiance to a state that practices apartheid with 2.3 million Arab. Requiring allegiance to such a Jewish state is a terrible thing to do to Jews who were successful in the diaspora in countless ways for centuries. As Michael Walzer said 2 years back at Yivo, Jewish law and governance has done an amazing job of sustaining the Jews for x,0000 years. But Jews haven't been that good at governing others. Walzer isn't coming to terms with the implications of that admission, and I don't think you are either. Israel is in crisis. It's beholden to radicals and racists on the West Bank. Its people are poisoning the goats of Arabs and shooting their children and stealing their land. It's a pattern. You haven't been able to rein them in for 60 years now. And they've put 630 checkpoints across Arab life… Disgraceful. Call me shrill all night long. Some day Americans will wake up to what's happening there and the screaming will begin.

Finally, a few words about my own identity. It's fluid. Like Obama's. I can't put myself forward as a model to Jewish children on how to be Jewish. Notwithstanding my great pride in the intellectual traditions that I grew up with, I feel too conflicted tribally about the fact of my intermarriage to put myself on any poster. Other than to say Jewish kids should have choices. You may be right that my headline the other day was glib and silly. I wrote it, oh well. I often refer to myself as assimilating on this site because so many of my choices are assimilationist objectively. But I'd remind you that my choices will seem less and less transgressive in the era of President Obama. And Zionism, rooted in ethnic and religious affinity, will seem more and more outdated.

So while I can't hold myself out as a model, I think you have to rethink your model. An identity based on the degree of ethnic affinity that you extol is problematic in the modern western world, especially when people have the power that we have. Obama again: You will notice that Obama has gotten less and less black over the years. His first book was a celebration of the ethnic affinity that you valorize. His concerns were with the black community. And god knows, he was an outsider. His wife when at Princeton was angry and anti-assimilationist. But as a powerful insider who hopes to lead America, he has expanded his own horizons and values and definition of community. If anyone thought for one second that he was shaping Kenyan policy in a way contrary to American interests, he'd be gone tomorrow.

Joe Lieberman never interrogated his own ethnic affinity as Obama has, when it comes to Middle East policy. Neither have the neocons, neither have you. Though I grant that you at least are straightforward and transparent about your agenda, now is the time, as the Jews say, to reflect.