In The Wall Street Journal, Marty Peretz says that Jonathan Pollard is a scoundrel, but Barack Obama is indifferent to Jewish history and persecution.
I believe that Mr. Obama does exhibit a certain disdain for the Jewish state—an indifference to and ignorance of the incandescence of Jewish history. “When the chips are down,” said the president to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee last March, “I have Israel’s back.” The whole lesson of Zionism, a good and truthful lesson, is that no one but Jews can be relied on to have Israel’s back. No American troops desired, no American troops required. No Americans should die for Israel. Too many have died for Afghanistan already, a country which we will in any case leave in the deadly lurch.
This is the historical error of Zionism. No one community can depend only upon itself. That’s crazy. It won’t work. World opinion is simply too significant a force in all our lives today. We are interdependent.
Also, if Jews are really alone, how come Marty Peretz gets a platform in the Wall Street Journal? The question raises a corollary problem: we must build an Israel lobby. If Israel can only count on Jews, and Americans won’t be there for Israel when the chips are down, well then, American Jews must build a lobby to sway American political leaders.
Alan Dershowitz in Chutzpah:
My generation of Jews was too young to fight against Nazism or for Israeli independence, too American to make aliyah (emigrate to Israel), too comfortable to put our bodies on the line for anything Jewish. Instead, we observed, contributed…We became part of what is perhaps the most effective lobbying and fund-raising effort in the history of democracy.
Irving Kristol, 1973:
Jews don’t like big military budgets. But it is now an interest of the Jews to have a large and powerful military establishment in the United States… American Jews who care about the survival of the state of Israel have to say, no, we don’t want to cut the military budget, it is important to keep that military budget big, so that we can defend Israel.
Avraham Burg, 2008, at the NY Public Library, marveling at what Jews produced:
When you look around the Jewish existential reality, you realize that actually the Jewish people built two structures. One is the semi-autonomous American Jewry, which was not here 150 years ago– powerful influence, access to the corridors of power, impact on the culture, and civilization… plus the infrastructure of the community of solidarity and fraternity and support system and education etc and also the sovereignty over there in the Middle East.
The Jewish struggle seems to me to be a struggle to reconcile Burg’s pride in Jewish achievement with a sense of accountability to the world community.
Peretz is conflating love for Israel, which I think is mostly limited to Jews, with willingness to be an ally–by treaty possibly, with a Jewish state that has recognized borders and has made a fair peace with the Palestinians. I would support that kind of alliance, rather like we have with NATO countries.
But apart from that I credit him at least for ignoring the contemporary hasbara line, which holds that a majority of Americans are deeply and emotionally committed to Israel because of Judeo-Christian values or whatever. That’s a lie, no matter how often it is repeated.
“The whole lesson of Zionism, a good and truthful lesson, is that no one but Jews can be relied on to have Israel’s back. ”
That’s paranoia.
The whole lesson of Zionism is “do unto others as you would have others do unto you.”
Israel’s economy is run on the principle that Jews need the outside world. It is just that the default zionist head settings haven’t caught up. There is a fundamental conflict between the mentality that runs the occupation and the settings of the system that puts food on the tables of those running the occupation.
‘But apart from that I credit him at least for ignoring the contemporary hasbara line, which holds that a majority of Americans are deeply and emotionally committed to Israel because of Judeo-Christian values or whatever. That’s a lie, no matter how often it is repeated.’
I think you’re right about Americans in general, but many American Jews and Christians are deeply (and disturbingly) committed and they’re the ones who are most politically and socially active.
“This is the historical error of Zionism. No one community can depend only upon itself. That’s crazy. It won’t work. World opinion is simply too significant a force in all our lives today. We are interdependent. ”
Try to imagine where, and what the condition of, Jews would be today without ‘the others.”
The constant claims of the zionist that I see and hear, that no one ever helped the Jews, that they accomplished what they did ‘all by themselves’, that they can and do only depend on themselves, that all others are inherently anti semitic, is probably the biggest have your cake and eat it too lie that zionism tells.
Every day they come to the others world with a plea or a demand or a request for something for themselves and their state.
Zionism was built on “separateness” and yet Israel is totally dependent on “the others world” in every way.
If the world treated zionism and Israel or the Jews with the same philosophy, as ‘separate’ from the rest of us, as zionist treat the world, Israel would not exist.
I think that religiously inflamed love of a kind for Israel is quite common in some non-Jewish circles. The idea, mentioned by Scott, of a rational alliance with an Israel which had accepted limitations on its borders seems – don’t you think? – comparatively rare, even odd. I can see that highly educated Jewish people like Peretz might consider that the religious credulity and sentimentalism of his Christian allies makes them too unpredictable to be trustworthy, whereas every Jewish person is, he would think, chained to Israel by self-interest that can never change. I would have thought that the same hasbara could accommodate both the idea that Jewish people can in the end trust no one but each other and that Jewish values are very widely and enthusiastically shared, only not always by people who can be trusted to live by them. One of the most bleak, soul-destroying world views that I could imagine but not logically impossible.