Why Jewish organizations reflexively defend Israel — even when not asked

In discussions of antisemitism, leaders of American Jewish organizations seem unable to resist pivoting to defense of Israel.

Appearing on MSNBC on January 27, on Holocaust Memorial Day, the Anti-Defamation League’s Jonathan Greenblatt answered a question from host Nicolle Wallace about why a school library banning Art Spiegelman’s Maus is dangerous and in 73 seconds Greenblatt managed to segue from Holocaust to “anti-Semitism on the rise…” to–

“ugly persons sort of calling Israel a Nazi state. These are awful comparisons that have no place in a decent conversation.”

So a discussion of American intolerance quickly became a message of equivalency — anti-Israel means anti-Jew– and Greenblatt signed up U.S. Jews (and Holocaust dead) for the Zionist project.

After the Israeli assault on Gaza last May, Greenblatt used another appearance about antisemitism to warn that criticism of Israeli war crimes would lead to “holding Jews collectively responsible” elsewhere, promising that the ADL is “working with elected officials, law enforcement agencies, community leaders, social media companies, to pull down these unhinged memes.”

The American Jewish Committee is committed to the same tactic. On August 31, 2021, the AJC Tweeted:

“Whether they carry tiki torches or placards denouncing Zionism, antisemites must be confronted no matter their background or ideology,” said AJC CEO @DavidHarrisAJC, commenting on the latest FBI hate crime statistics.

It’s very predictable: During discussions of anti-Jewish hate, these American Jewish institutions react with pre-emptive exculpations of the militant “Jewish state” which controls Palestine– in often bizarrely irrelevant interjections.

There is a traceable provenance for the behavior.

On the cusp of the declaration of the state of Israel, in March 1948 Zionist envoy Moshe Shertok (later Moshe Sharett, first Israeli foreign minister) described a syndrome that is operative today in the relations of American Jewish organizations to Israel.

​Shertok​ argued to UN Security Council members that so many “Jewish hostages throughout the world” would be a guarantee of the good behavior of the Jews of Palestine towards the Arabs after partition, according to State Department correspondence ​I discovered ​in the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) compendium.

American Jewish organizations accepted the role of hostages in their own country and developed a protective strategy: Burnishing Israel’s image became part of their mission of protecting Jews from “defamation,” regardless of the justice of the charges brought.

As it became apparent that Israel was not going to live up to its end of the bargain– and good behavior by Israel towards Arabs of Palestine could not be guaranteed– so did the mission shift. Efforts centered on issuing a covering barrage of propaganda for Israel to “protect” Jews worldwide.

I became aware of how this situation developed for American Jewish organizations doing original research in 2009-11. I was interested in documenting a famous exchange, the 1950 Blaustein-Ben Gurion Agreement, an attempt by Jacob Blaustein, then chairman of the American Jewish Committee, to protect American Jewish life from being submerged in the Zionist ethos, concerns that Blaustein had laid out in a February 1948 speech to the Baltimore chapter of the AJC, “The Meaning of Palestine Partition to American Jews.”

I worked in the Blaustein collection at Johns Hopkins University, the AJC archives and the American Jewish Historical Society, New York, and drew upon UK Foreign Office, US State Department, and other archival websites.

I developed an understanding of how the mission of American Jewish organizations, centered on the rights and welfare of Jews in the United States and elsewhere, was affected and — ultimately — distorted by the success of militant Jewish nationalists in Palestine.

Discussions by AJC staff and members before and after Israeli statehood show them to be fully aware of the danger of Jews being seen as oppressors after taking Palestine for a “Jewish” state– and of Jews being seen to do to Arabs what gentiles had done to minority Jews in diaspora.

The Palestinian plight was generating sympathy. And AJC staff and officials made hapless efforts to influence Israeli officials to acknowledge and accommodate the refugees from the new state. AJC memos I reviewed show that on November 16, 1953 executive director John Slawson met with Consul-General of Israel in New York Avraham Harman for help in “developing a public opinion program to interpret Israel’s problems to the American people, for the reason that opinions concerning Israel affect public attitudes toward American Jews.” (Emphasis added.)

Harman briefed Slawson on Israel’s positions, telling him that the creation of Israel had been “a feat of colonization unique in history, which was accomplished without displacing anyone.” This claim was false; more than 750,000 Palestinians were displaced to establish Israel, not allowed to return to their homes. But Nakba denial became part of the American Jewish organizations’ playbook.

The American Jewish Committee program repeatedly contacted major and minor print and electronic media in the United States with information favorable to Israel. An internal report on its progress explained its rationale in the wake of the Qibya massacre of 1953, when Israeli soldiers under the command of Ariel Sharon crossed the armistice line to kill 69 Palestinian civilians in a village in the West Bank (then controlled by Jordan).

The major focus of this committee’s activities during the five months of its existence, was the impact of the Middle East crisis on American public opinion. Most immediately we were concerned with the effect of any possible anti-Israel sentiment, stirred up by Kibya and similar incidents in the news, on the position of American Jews, the assumption being that the general public associates American Jews with Israel. (Emphasis added.)

It was decided,

the (AJC) Public Information and Education Department would continue to carry on an educational program [promoting positive stories about Israel to American media] along the lines undertaken in recent months.

These AJC accounts illustrate it was acting in reaction to Israeli statehood’s consequences as foreseen by Moshe Sharett in March 1948: placing Jews worldwide in the role of hostages to Israel’s actions.

Concern for the injuries done to Arabs in Palestine merged with, and ultimately was overtaken by, the concern that Jews in America would suffer by being seen as complicit in Israel’s human rights violations. This led to a strategy of preemptive denial of reports of Israeli offenses against Palestinians, and later, the extension of “antisemitism” to mean anti-Zionism or reporting of Israeli misconduct.

At times, some Jewish leaders (speaking for themselves but not as officials) rejected the conflation of Jewish identity with the State of Israel. For instance, Robert Mnookin, a veteran leader of American Jewish communal organizations (Community Federation, Hillel, and New Israel Fund), writes in his 2018 book, The Jewish American Paradox: Embracing Choice in a Changing World, “To me ‘anti-semitic’ does not mean ‘critical of Israel’ or ‘opposition to the Zionist project’;  it means having prejudice against or hatred of Jews.”

Mnookin’s precision on this issue is refreshing, but also exceptional.

Organized American Jewry’s identification with the “Jewish state” is both a vice and a hazard, even as we see its origin was intended self-protection.

As a vice, it glories in armed power and ability to dominate. The hazard is illustrated by American Jewish organizations volunteering preposterous defenses of Israel when antisemitism is discussed, vitiating credibility that may become needed in a real crisis. American Jewish organizations – the “mainstream” ones – will be naked against charges of adherence to Jewish solidarity regardless of morality or factual reality.