Last night I attended a jampacked event in New York for this book about imagining a socialist America. The event was taped for CSPAN; several speakers said socialism is in the zeitgeist.
As we milled around afterward, I heard many expressions of rage against New York’s progressive new mayor, Bill de Blasio, for his secret sucking up to AIPAC, his saying his “job description” was to defend Israel. Some of my friends’ comments:
–He’s insulting us. He is attacking Palestinian human rights. He needs to feel it, and he’s not going to get away with it. We’re his base.
–I knew I wasn’t voting for him when he said that the Park Slope Food Co-Op board measure for boycotting Israel goods came from a marginal group. He called us marginal. I really think he believes there is an epic struggle with Islamic radicalism. He’s deluded. But someone’s convinced him of that.
–I’m surprised but not shocked. It’s Matthew Hiltzik. The p.r. guy who worked for Hillary. He’s close to de Blasio and got him on the Iran Watch board, sucking up to Israel, long ago.
–He doesn’t know Jews well; he doesn’t understand that many NY Jews don’t buy into AIPAC. It’s unsophisticated of him. He’s used to the Brooklyn Jews in Crown Heights. But even some of them are anti-Zionist.
–His wife and son and daughter would be cavity searched at Ben Gurion if they weren’t with him on his trips. That needs to be explained.
–We have to organize but we also have to hit the American interest piece of this. I don’t particularly agree with it, but can you imagine signs saying, The mayor has said that his “job description” is supporting a foreign country?
I was cheered by the outrage, and also reminded of something important. The six people who angrily brought up de Blasio with me are all Jewish, and it’s not just a coincidence that all are sympathetic to the socialist ideas in that book. Socialism is a longtime current in Jewish life. It is older than Zionism. Both began as liberation stories, one in a desire to escape into one’s own tribe, the other the desire to radically reform society for all. These two “engines” of Jewish public opinion (as Steven Zipperstein put it in his speech on the Kishinev pogrom at Yivo earlier this month) have been competitive for a long time. Both frightened the rulers of Russia. Both were alive on the Lower East Side.
Zionism won inside Jewish life, even converting the formerly-socialist Forward newspaper. But Zionism has failed. The supporters we’ve had from inside Jewish life for this site– many come out of that socialist tradition. They opposed the tribal impulse; none of them ever said, Is it good for the Jews? None had to be schooled by me to criticize Israel; they got there on their own, long before I did.
And their fury makes me agree: de Blasio does not understand Jewish life. Anti-Zionism is a long tradition. We are angry, we are determined to make him regret his secret speech.
This of course touches on a central political question about the Israel lobby, is it the Jewish lobby? Certainly politicians have long understood it to be that; and afraid to alienate Jewish money and votes, they have staked out pro-Zionist positions. In turn, the Zionist Jewish organizations portrayed pro-Israel views as the heart and soul of the American Jewish community generally, to hold the politicians. They linked the Zionist story of deliverance in Israel to liberation movements in the U.S. that Jews were active in, civil rights, women’s rights, gay rights; and so everyone on the Democratic side believed that it was progressive to support Israel. And even if many Jews were never converted to Zionism, the American Jewish community was able to maintain a high degree of solidarity. The Union for Reform Judaism supported the neoconservatives on the Iraq war. Americans for Peace Now has stayed on the board of the Conference of Presidents, even as that group’s leader took rightwing stances that are entirely contrary to APN’s position on settlements. Barney Frank was lame on the settlements issue. de Blasio learned these lessons well. Just as Hillary is saying nothing to support the Iran deal because she needs AIPAC for 2016, MJ Rosenberg says.
This is changing. The Jewish community is beginning to diversify. Young people aren’t as interested in Israel, some are critical. Jewish Voice for Peace is vocally non-Zionist. And the Iran sanctions are publicly dividing the lobby: Peace Now warns that all the Jews trying to break the Iran deal could undermine Jewish safety in the U.S. (“The lobby’s actions, now more publicized than ever before, jeopardize the Jewish future in America, the safest home we have ever had,” MJ Rosenberg writes.)
That diversity has to be brought home to de Blasio. He insulted us.
All anyone had to do (before the election) was take a cursory look at de Blasio, his background and his connections to the Clintons and Goldman Sachs, to know that he is anything but “leftwing” or “progressive.” Yet once again, so-called “liberals” who elected him feign outrage after the fact. Shades of Obamakinism here. People who choose willful ignorance deserve what they get.
Q: De Blasio’s leftwing base is enraged by AIPAC moment.
R: That’s odd. Millions of years ago, even dinosaurs knew how to flap around using both wings. Guess back then, greenbacks were a yet to be extinct set of spineless species…
Glad to see you expressing ownership with and legacy from a Jewish community, Phil.
Though I think you will agree on reflection that socialism and Zionism were not exactly oil and water and in fact fused from the decades just before and just after the establishment of Israel.
More than half of all young people in a Pew poll said that they are postive to socialism.
I still don’t think Socialism will last. There will be a Bismarck-type realist in the system who understands you cannot parrot Reagan anymore. People are sick of it. Even Kristol is saying the GOP has to stop feeding Wall Street and millionaires.
(But note: he says nothing about the neocons or foreign intervention. Wars abroad will be the last place to be reformed in both parties because of the lobby. Penny Pritzker is willing, although not perhaps in concrete terms, to support the voices of Occupy. She will never turn on AIPAC).
As for this discussion, I’ve long said that I’ve been skeptical about the Jewish community’s ability to break free of AIPAC, the Conference of American presidents and so on. I’ve said so because while the Pew poll said that only 17% or so of American Jews said that settlements were “helping peace”, 43% or so said that they didn’t matter.
So we have a clear majority of the American Jewish base that says that settlements either help or at least don’t hurt prospects to peace. This is a fact that many left-leaning anti-occupation Jewish groups just have to grapple with. If ADL/AIPAC/AJC/Conference of Presidents were as isolated as it is sometimes portrayed, then people would have revolted a long time ago.
But yes, there is a growing chorus of younger Jews. I see it every day. I do, however, think that demographics simply mean that we won’t see a fundamental shift until the people born in the 1960s and later, who grew up with Israel as it is today rather than as they imagined it to be, will dominate the community. Right now, there are many people born in and around WWII and that colors their perspective. It’s always 1938 for these people.
“Zionism won inside Jewish life”
You’re confirming what I’ve long said – many of the people inside of the pro-Palestinian movement, especially the older ones, are disgruntled over the fact that socialism failed, and that their fight against capitalism has failed, spectacularly. These same folks used to insist, in books like Zionism and Antisemitism, that there was no antisemitism in the Soviet Union.
“Anti-Zionism is a long tradition. ”
Not really. It’s a religious tradition borne out of the belief that Jews are condemned to live under oppressive exile until the coming of the Messiah. The intellectual part of the tradition is largely a reaction to modern Zionism, and grows out of a tradition of naivete toward Communist dictatorship. Neither one is worth preserving.
“His wife and son and daughter would be cavity searched at Ben Gurion if they weren’t with him on his trips. That needs to be explained.”
You mean, lied about?
“That diversity has to be brought home to de Blasio. He insulted us.”
Good luck.