QUOTE
The New York Review of Books. Retrieved March 29, 2012.
Peter Beinart is Associate Professor of Journalism and Political Science at the City University of New York, a Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, and Senior Political Writer for The Daily Beast. His new book, The Icarus Syndrome: A History of American Hubris, will be published in June.
Letters
'The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment': An
Exchange June 24, 2010
UNQUOTE
He gets noticed. He is
effective. This could be for the good.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/jun/10/failure-american-jewish-establishment/
The Spectre Haunting Jews In America At the core of the tragedy lies the
refusal to accept that in both America and Israel, we live in an age not of
Jewish weakness, but of Jewish power, and that without moral vigilance, Jews
will abuse power just as hideously as anyone else. American Jewish
organizations do not deny that Jews wield power, privately, they exult in
it. Emotionally, power is what groups like AIPAC sell…. They deny that Jews,
like all human beings, can use power not merely to survive, but to destroy.
A few years ago, a journalist reported that Malcolm Hoenlein, the
influential executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major
Jewish Organizations, had a photo in his conference room of Israeli F-15s
flying over Auschwitz. It is a photo of a fantasy. Israeli jets never bombed
Auschwitz and never will. What they have bombed, in recent years, is the
Gaza Strip, a fenced-in, hideously overcrowded, desperately poor slum from
which terrorist groups sometimes shell Israel. Hoenlein, in other words, has
decorated his conference room not with an image of the reality that he helps
perpetuate, but with an image of the fantasy that he superimposes on that
reality. In this way, he embodies the American Jewish establishment, which,
by superimposing the Jewish past on the Jewish present, is failing the
challenge of a new age. Beinart has offered a powerful indictment of
the American Jewish Establishment, to be sure, but he steadfastly refuses to
challenge the very legitimacy of that establishment. For the one question that
has not been asked is why its loss of the younger generation of American Jews
should be regarded as a problematic development in the first place, much less
a crisis. American Judaism, in the main, does not
regard itself as a religion in the sense that the term is understood in the
modern world. American Jews, in this discourse, are less a religious community
than a polity. All of the major denominations of American Judaism are
affiliated with the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations,
which regards itself as the governing body of the whole American community and
has essentially no other purpose than to advocate for the State of Israel.
Said “community,” in turn, is regarded to be nothing more than an appendage of
the transnational polity called “the Jewish people” of which, according to the
official ideology of the State of Israel, it is the collectively held
possession as opposed to a state of all its citizens. When John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt
published their 2005 book,
The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, it was vulnerable to
predictably lurid charges in part because it was not just aimed at the
powerful American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). The authors also
insisted on documenting a much wider phenomenon, and their use of the somewhat
vague term “Israel lobby” did not properly elaborate that AIPAC and scores of
other politically powerful non-religious Jewish organizations like it are all
affiliates of the larger Conference of Presidents. Peter Beinart’s original
essay in The New York Review of Books, “The
Failure of the American Jewish Establishment,” spoke more directly to this
reality and provided the more apt and precise term “American Jewish
Establishment,” of which the Israel lobby is merely a part. It is largely for this very reason that
Beinart’s exposure of this establishment has provoked yet unprecedented
hysteria from the famously hysterical neoconservative movement. He has been
given a megaphone to announce to the world for the first time what informed
American Jews have always understood about the neocons — that they, in fact,
are the true self-hating Jews, with their pathological hatred of any
expression of Judaism’s traditions of social justice and other affronts to the
Spartan virtues. In short, he has said everything about the American Jewish
Establishment for which Pat Buchanan and Norman Finkelstein were so brutally
vilified in years past. Perhaps no hostile reviewer of The Crisis
of Zionism was more hysterical than Daniel Gordis, president of Israel's Shalem Center, in the Jerusalem Post. Gordis
proclaimed, in what can only be considered a deliberate misrepresentation,
that “Beinart’s problem, most fundamentally, is that the American liberalism
with which he is so infatuated does not comfortably have a place for Jewish
ethnic nationalism. … Beinart’s problem isn’t really with Israel. It’s with
Judaism.” Beinart
responded forcefully: Gordis wants me to be some deracinated
Rosa Luxembourg, cold to my own people and moistened only by the pain of
others. Sorry, that’s not the book I wrote because it’s not the person I am.
At the root of Gordis’ misrepresentations lies this problem. As he’s written
elsewhere, he’s convinced that many young liberal Jews are embracing a brand
of universalism that undermines their commitment to the Jewish people. It’s
convenient for him to make me the poster child of this phenomenon. … The
problem with this analysis is that I actually share Gordis’ concern.
“Are
Young Rabbis Turning on Israel?” Gordis asked in the June 2011 issue of
Commentary. The article began by relating with horror an email sent out by
the faculty of Hebrew College, a nondenominational rabbinical seminary in
Boston, on the occasion of Israel’s War Memorial Day, asking with respect to
the fallen on both sides of the 1948 war, “On this day, what do you remember
and for whom do you grieve?” The question apparently never dawned on anyone
why American rabbinical students should be commemorating the Memorial Day of a
foreign nation to begin with. Indeed, the article at times descends into
self-parody, with a signature neocon reference to Neville Chamberlain.
Nonetheless, Gordis still got to the heart of the matter: What is entirely gone is an instinct of
belonging, the visceral sense on the part of these students that they are
part of a people, that the blood and the losses that were required to create
the State of Israel is their blood and their loss. What
appears to be, at first blush, an issue of weakening Zionist loyalties is
thus actually something far more worrisome. What Gordis evaded is the fact this is not
just a story about students: there already exists a considerable cohort of
senior rabbis of this persuasion. In the aftermath of Gaza, an obscure San
Francisco-based left-wing protest group called
Jewish Voice for Peace was
rapidly propelled by the force of events into becoming a national
organization, and late in 2010 it announced the formation of a “Rabbinical
Council” consisting of over 30 rabbis and rabbinical students. Jewish Voice
for Peace has proven unique in seriously questioning, when not flatly
rejecting, the first principles of Zionism and the American Jewish
Establishment. I attended a recent talk by Beinart at my
Brooklyn synagogue, Kolot Chayeinu,
which has significant ties to Jewish Voice for Peace. The rabbi, Ellen
Lippmann, though not a member of JVP, has been an outspoken leader of the
nearly-as-radical Rabbis for Human Rights, and
both the congregation’s president and education director are longstanding
supporters. The audience for this talk was mostly middle-aged and older,
Beinart’s primary audience seeking reassurance in its progressive Zionism. The
overwhelming sense was of preserving a spiritual dependence on the State of
Israel in an anti-regime form. But this is by no means representative of the
cutting edge of progressive American Judaism. The current student rabbi at Kolot Chayeinu,
Scott Fox, described in an earlier interview the mood lamented by Daniel
Gordis on his own campus in New York: Every year around three people try to
tackle the conversation about Israel in their senior sermon. All of these
people have been appalled at the changes going on in American Jewish
identity. The response to their sermons has been weak. Other than that we
rarely talk about Israel, if at all, in casual conversation or in class.
There is simply little interest in it. Fox describes himself as a non-Zionist,
explaining, “My Judaism is not the Judaism of a political state and certainly
has no connection to the modern State of Israel and its culture and history.
For me they are not the Jewish state, but a Jewish state. They
are Jewish neighbors who share parts of my identity, but not much at that.”
Speaking for himself as well as for the wider American Jewish community as
documented in sociological surveys, he hastened to add, “This is not fueled by
political strife, or compassion fatigue, or self-hatred; it is simply that
American Jews have a deep identity and rich history, and Israel does not
factor into that identity.” Of the student body at Hebrew Union College, said
Fox, “I would say that we are about one third in favor of the above, one third
appalled and fighting vehemently against this trend, and one third ambivalent.
Most of the faculty is in the second category, although there are some who
are also ambivalent. Few, if any, are in favor of these changes.” This, in short, is the specter haunting
American Jewry, or at least its self-appointed leadership in the Israel lobby
and the American Jewish Establishment. The mere proposition that Judaism is a
religion and not a nationality is irrationally feared and despised by this
establishment. There are plainly self-interested reasons for this, including
but not limited to those of the Israel lobby. The increasing disaffection with
Israel and Zionist ideology is colliding with several other trends in American
Jewry that would not necessarily be otherwise related. These include
dramatically rising rates of intermarriage; the gradual breakdown of
denominationalism that has been largely propelled by the atrophy of the
Conservative movement and the growth of unaffiliated progressive
congregations; and the rapid decline of the suburban base that most Jewish
institutions have been designed to serve for the last half-century. Peter Beinart leaves no doubt that he is
painfully aware of these realities that complicate his liberal Zionist ideal
in the present day. Shortly after the publication of the original New York
Review of Books essay, Ross Douthat
identified the unspoken fear behind the piece as being “ that liberal Jews
are (very gradually) following the same trajectory as liberal Episcopalians
before them, keeping their politics but surrendering their distinctive
cultural and religious identity, and that the demise of liberal Zionism says
something, not only about the fate of Israel, but about the fate of secular
Judaism in the United States.” Beinart takes this head-on in the concluding
chapters of his book. He convincingly disassembles the skepticism of the
“alienation thesis” about young American Jews and Israel and explains that for
the bulk of the current generation it is exactly what Douthat described: “they
are less alienated than indifferent.” But Beinart also describes the rise of a
progressive religious movement in the current generation that is decidedly
non-Zionist, with some of its standard bearers even deeply involved in
anti-Zionist activism through groups like Jewish Voice for Peace. Beinart
upbraids this movement: It is a lovely dream, and an abdication.
Even on purely religious grounds… Jewish liturgy itself, if taken
seriously, requires wrestling with what Jews make of their return to the
land of Israel. … Acting ethically in an age of Jewish power means
confronting not only the suffering that gentiles endure but the suffering
that Jews cause. For Jews who espouse liberal principles, indifference to
whether the Jewish state remains a democracy constitutes as deep a betrayal
of the bonds of peoplehood as indifference to whether there remains a Jewish
state at all. Israel cannot be tucked away in the attic, left to degrade
while progressive, committed Jews live their religious and ethical ideals in
the United States. A disfigured Jewish state will haunt not only American
Zionism but American Judaism. And the American Jews who try to avert their
eyes will be judged harshly by history, no matter how laudable their soup
kitchens and how spirited their prayer. There is no question that the Zionist legacy
will unavoidably haunt any progressive Jewish future in America or anywhere
else. But to the contrary, it is the abnormal relationship between American
Jewry and Israel, from which a growing number of young rabbis are recoiling,
that is in such great measure responsible for the unfolding tragedy. It might
be asked in response to Beinart’s challenge: is the rich American Jewish
social justice tradition, the legacy of Meyer London, Rose Schneiderman,
Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwermer really supposed to be reduced to
assisting in Washington bureaucratic wrangling on behalf of the loyal
opposition of a foreign country, as the closely aligned J Street has
essentially asked? Beinart's alternative is an idealized
liberal Zionist tradition of the civil rights era. But liberal American
Judaism in the 1950s and ’60s was ultimately defined less by the civil rights
movement than by the garish Scientology-style demands for financial obeisance
to the United Jewish Appeal, denounced by a few unbowed anti-Zionist rabbis as
a new form of Baal worship. Here is where Beinart’s profound unseriousness
comes into view, which many critics detected in his 2006 Cold War
liberal-revivalist manifesto
The Good Fight. For the historical hero of The Crisis of Zionism,
Rabbi Stephen Wise, an arch-defender of the Soviet Union up to his death in
1949, was as antithetical a character to the narrative of the first book as
could be asked for. This abiding ideological commitment, indeed,
was largely why, in the years leading up to the founding of the State of
Israel, Wise was marginalized by Abba Hillel Silver, a zealot for the first
principles of Jewish nationalism who could forge alliances with such unlikely
figures as Sen. Robert Taft. Yet after 1948, Silver himself was marginalized
for such heterodox opinions as opposing the 1956 Suez War at the expense of
the foremost disciple of Stephen Wise, Philip Bernstein, who as a founder of
AIPAC set the organization’s belligerent and maximalist tone from the
beginning. Indeed, one suspects that if they were alive today, Wise would be
with the neocons and Silver with J Street. This history betrays much of the wishful
thinking in Beinart’s narrative, undermining his distinction between the
“historically liberal” American Jewish Congress and Anti-Defamation League
with the “non-liberal” AIPAC and American Jewish Committee. One of the
“exiles” from the American Jewish Establishment Beinart profiles is Philip
Klutznick, who was roundly ostracized for advocating a two-state solution (to
the point of writing in defense of AIPAC “scalping” victim Sen. Charles Percy)
in the 1970s, but in 1960 was one of the critical operatives who thwarted a
proactive stand on the Palestinian refugee problem by candidate John F.
Kennedy. In the words of the great philosopher of our generation, Homer
Simpson, “Everything’s perfect about the past except how it led to the
present.” To be clear, the Israeli predicament is a
tragedy of epic proportions. When Beinart and other more conscientious
progressive Zionists speak of a genuine two-state solution based on the 1949
armistice line, they speak of what Israel should have accepted in the 1950s.
Even for a moment in the 1990s, a two-state solution on Israel’s terms could
have come off, with Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat the only men with even a
prayer of being able to sell such a deal to their respective peoples. But
through it all has been the fatal conceit that Israel could not simply be a
nation-state unto itself but must define itself as the possession and
representative of the whole transnational “Jewish people.” Ultimately, one
senses that Beinart and many of those he speaks for are more interested in
saving Zionism for themselves than in saving Israel as a Jewish state. Whether or not they have the literary
talent, and even the haziest historical knowledge, to articulate it, both the
indifferent and assimilating majority and the religiously committed
progressive minority of the rising American Jewish generation understand that
this historic American Jewish idolatry of the State of Israel has been the
problem, not the solution. What they seek from the State of Israel is, as
Yitzhak Rabin might have said, a divorce, not a marriage. In offering a romance for the
left-liberal-tinged American Zionism of the early statehood era, Peter Beinart
repeats and indeed celebrates the refusal to make the choice that it is in all
likelihood far too late to make now: whether to content itself to be a normal
nation-state, even a “Jewish” one, or to insist that it is still the
possession and representative of an imagined transnational entity, of which
the other major component is one of the most politically powerful
socio-cultural groups in the world's sole superpower.
The Crisis of Zionism by the Jew, Peter Beinart
Taking Sides: America's Secret Relations With a Militant Israel
Geoffrey Wheatcroft wrote How Israel gets away with murder
For more
reviews go to Books Errors & omissions, broken links,
cock ups, over-emphasis, malice [ real or imaginary ] or whatever; if
you find any I am open to comment. Updated on
03/08/2023 19:27
QUOTE
Since even before its release last month, Peter Beinart's
The Crisis of Zionism has been extravagantly denounced and praised.
To his everlasting credit, Beinart has described in vivid and uncompromising
terms the corrupting and corrosive impact of the American Jewish establishment
he so courageously exposed in The New York Review of Books:
UNQUOTE
Jew tells truth. There is a fuss then a news blackout but these things have
an effect.
QUOTE
Beinart's romance, and the coming tragedy
by Jack Ross on April 27, 2012 60
Even before its release last month,
Peter Beinart's The Crisis of
Zionism has been extravagantly denounced and praised. To his
everlasting credit, Beinart has described in vivid and uncompromising
terms the corrupting and corrosive impact of the American Jewish
establishment he so courageously exposed in The New York Review of
Books:
At the core of the tragedy lies the refusal to accept that in both
America and Israel, we live in an age not of Jewish weakness, but of
Jewish power, and that without moral vigilance, Jews will abuse power
just as hideously as anyone else. American Jewish organizations do not
deny that Jews wield power, privately, they exult in it. Emotionally,
power is what groups like AIPAC sell…. They deny that Jews, like all
human beings, can use power not merely to survive, but to destroy. A
few years ago, a journalist reported that Malcolm Hoenlein, the
influential executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of
Major Jewish Organizations, had a photo in his conference room of
Israeli F-15s flying over Auschwitz. It is a photo of a fantasy.
Israeli jets never bombed Auschwitz and never will. What they have
bombed, in recent years, is the Gaza Strip, a fenced-in, hideously
overcrowded, desperately poor slum from which terrorist groups
sometimes shell Israel. Hoenlein, in other words, has decorated his
conference room not with an image of the reality that he helps
perpetuate, but with an image of the fantasy that he superimposes on
that reality. In this way, he embodies the American Jewish
establishment, which, by superimposing the Jewish past on the Jewish
present, is failing the challenge of a new age.
Beinart has offered a powerful indictment of the American Jewish
Establishment, to be sure, but he steadfastly refuses to challenge the
very legitimacy of that establishment. For the one question that has
not been asked is why its loss of the younger generation of American
Jews should be regarded as a problematic development in the first
place, much less a crisis.
American Judaism, in the main, does not regard itself as a religion in
the sense that the term is understood in the modern world. American
Jews, in this discourse, are less a religious community than a polity.
All of the major denominations of American Judaism are affiliated with
the
Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, which
regards itself as the governing body of the whole American community
and has essentially no other purpose than to advocate for the State of
Israel. Said “community,” in turn, is regarded to be nothing more than
an appendage of the transnational polity called “the Jewish people” of
which, according to the official ideology of the State of Israel, it
is the collectively held possession as opposed to a state of all its
citizens.
When John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt published their 2005 book, The
Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, it was vulnerable to predictably
lurid charges in part because it was not just aimed at the powerful
American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). The authors also
insisted on documenting a much wider phenomenon, and their use of the
somewhat vague term “Israel lobby” did not properly elaborate that
AIPAC and scores of other politically powerful non-religious Jewish
organizations like it are all affiliates of the larger Conference of
Presidents. Peter Beinart’s original essay in The New York Review of
Books, “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment,” spoke more
directly to this reality and provided the more apt and precise term
“American Jewish Establishment,” of which the Israel lobby is merely a
part.
It is largely for this very reason that Beinart’s exposure of this
establishment has provoked yet unprecedented hysteria from the
famously hysterical neoconservative movement. He has been given a
megaphone to announce to the world for the first time what informed
American Jews have always understood about the neocons — that they, in
fact, are the true self-hating Jews, with their pathological hatred of
any expression of Judaism’s traditions of social justice and other
affronts to the Spartan virtues. In short, he has said everything
about the American Jewish Establishment for which Pat Buchanan and
Norman Finkelstein were so brutally vilified in years past.
Perhaps no hostile reviewer of The Crisis of Zionism was more
hysterical than Daniel Gordis, president of Israel’s Shalem Centre, in
the Jerusalem Post. Gordis proclaimed, in what can only be considered
a deliberate misrepresentation, that “Beinart’s problem, most
fundamentally, is that the American liberalism with which he is so
infatuated does not comfortably have a place for Jewish ethnic
nationalism. … Beinart’s problem isn’t really with Israel. It’s with
Judaism.” Beinart responded forcefully:
Gordis wants me to be some deracinated Rosa Luxembourg, cold to my own
people and moistened only by the pain of others. Sorry, that’s not the
book I wrote because it’s not the person I am. At the root of Gordis’
misrepresentations lies this problem. As he’s written elsewhere, he’s
convinced that many young liberal Jews are embracing a brand of
universalism that undermines their commitment to the Jewish people.
It’s convenient for him to make me the poster child of this
phenomenon. … The problem with this analysis is that I actually share
Gordis’ concern.
“Are Young Rabbis Turning on Israel?” Gordis asked in the June 2011
issue of Commentary. The article began by relating with horror an
email sent out by the faculty of Hebrew College, a nondenominational
rabbinical seminary in Boston, on the occasion of Israel’s War
Memorial Day, asking with respect to the fallen on both sides of the
1948 war, “On this day, what do you remember and for whom do you
grieve?” The question apparently never dawned on anyone why American
rabbinical students should be commemorating the Memorial Day of a
foreign nation to begin with.
Indeed, the article at times descends into self-parody, with a
signature neocon reference to Neville Chamberlain. Nonetheless, Gordis
still got to the heart of the matter:
What is entirely gone is an instinct of belonging, the visceral sense
on the part of these students that they are part of a people, that the
blood and the losses that were required to create the State of Israel
is their blood and their loss. What appears to be, at first blush, an
issue of weakening Zionist loyalties is thus actually something far
more worrisome.
What Gordis evaded is the fact this is not just a story about
students: there already exists a considerable cohort of senior rabbis
of this persuasion. In the aftermath of Gaza, an obscure San Francisco-
based left-wing protest group called Jewish Voice for Peace was
rapidly propelled by the force of events into becoming a national
organization, and late in 2010 it announced the formation of a
“Rabbinical Council” consisting of over 30 rabbis and rabbinical
students. Jewish Voice for Peace has proven unique in seriously
questioning, when not flatly rejecting, the first principles of
Zionism and the American Jewish Establishment.
I attended a recent talk by Beinart at my Brooklyn synagogue, Kolot
Chayeinu, which has significant ties to Jewish Voice for Peace. The
rabbi, Ellen Lippmann, though not a member of JVP, has been an
outspoken leader of the nearly-as-radical Rabbis for Human Rights, and
both the congregation’s president and education director are
longstanding supporters. The audience for this talk was mostly middle-
aged and older, Beinart’s primary audience seeking reassurance in its
progressive Zionism. The overwhelming sense was of preserving a
spiritual dependence on the State of Israel in an anti-regime form.
But this is by no means representative of the cutting edge of
progressive American Judaism.
The current student rabbi at Kolot Chayeinu, Scott Fox, described in
an earlier interview the mood lamented by Daniel Gordis on his own
campus in New York:
Every year around three people try to tackle the conversation about
Israel in their senior sermon. All of these people have been appalled
at the changes going on in American Jewish identity. The response to
their sermons has been weak. Other than that we rarely talk about
Israel, if at all, in casual conversation or in class. There is simply
little interest in it.
Fox describes himself as a non-Zionist, explaining, “My Judaism is not
the Judaism of a political state and certainly has no connection to
the modern State of Israel and its culture and history. For me they
are not the Jewish state, but a Jewish state. They are Jewish
neighbours who share parts of my identity, but not much at that.”
Speaking for himself as well as for the wider American Jewish
community as documented in sociological surveys, he hastened to add,
“This is not fuelled by political strife, or compassion fatigue, or
self-hatred; it is simply that American Jews have a deep identity and
rich history, and Israel does not factor into that identity.” Of the
student body at Hebrew Union College, said Fox, “I would say that we
are about one third in favour of the above, one third appalled and
fighting vehemently against this trend, and one third ambivalent.
Most of the faculty is in the second category, although there are some
who are also ambivalent. Few, if any, are in favour of these changes.”
This, in short, is the spectre haunting American Jewry, or at least
its self-appointed leadership in the Israel lobby and the American
Jewish Establishment. The mere proposition that Judaism is a religion
and not a nationality is irrationally feared and despised by this
establishment. There are plainly self-interested reasons for this,
including but not limited to those of the Israel lobby. The increasing
disaffection with Israel and Zionist ideology is colliding with
several other trends in American Jewry that would not necessarily be
otherwise related. These include dramatically rising rates of
intermarriage; the gradual breakdown of denominationalism that has
been largely propelled by the atrophy of the Conservative movement and
the growth of unaffiliated progressive congregations; and the rapid
decline of the suburban base that most Jewish institutions have been
designed to serve for the last half-century.
Peter Beinart leaves no doubt that he is painfully aware of these
realities that complicate his liberal Zionist ideal in the present
day. Shortly after the publication of the original New York Review of
Books essay, Ross Douthat identified the unspoken fear behind the
piece as being “ that liberal Jews are (very gradually) following the
same trajectory as liberal Episcopalians before them, keeping their
politics but surrendering their distinctive cultural and religious
identity, and that the demise of liberal Zionism says something, not
only about the fate of Israel, but about the fate of secular Judaism
in the United States.”
Beinart takes this head-on in the concluding chapters of his book. He
convincingly disassembles the scepticism of the “alienation thesis”
about young American Jews and Israel and explains that for the bulk of
the current generation it is exactly what Douthat described: “they are
less alienated than indifferent.” But Beinart also describes the rise
of a progressive religious movement in the current generation that is
decidedly non-Zionist, with some of its standard bearers even deeply
involved in anti-Zionist activism through groups like Jewish Voice for
Peace. Beinart upbraids this movement:
It is a lovely dream, and an abdication. Even on purely religious
grounds… Jewish liturgy itself, if taken seriously, requires
wrestling with what Jews make of their return to the land of Israel. …
Acting ethically in an age of Jewish power means confronting not only
the suffering that gentiles endure but the suffering that Jews cause.
For Jews who espouse liberal principles, indifference to whether the
Jewish state remains a democracy constitutes as deep a betrayal of the
bonds of peoplehood as indifference to whether there remains a Jewish
state at all. Israel cannot be tucked away in the attic, left to
degrade while progressive, committed Jews live their religious and
ethical ideals in the United States. A disfigured Jewish state will
haunt not only American Zionism but American Judaism. And the American
Jews who try to avert their eyes will be judged harshly by history, no
matter how laudable their soup kitchens and how spirited their prayer.
There is no question that the Zionist legacy will unavoidably haunt
any progressive Jewish future in America or anywhere else. But to the
contrary, it is the abnormal relationship between American Jewry and
Israel, from which a growing number of young rabbis are recoiling,
that is in such great measure responsible for the unfolding tragedy.
It might be asked in response to Beinart’s challenge: is the rich
American Jewish social justice tradition, the legacy of Meyer London,
Rose Schneiderman, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwermer really
supposed to be reduced to assisting in Washington bureaucratic
wrangling on behalf of the loyal opposition of a foreign country, as
the closely aligned J Street has essentially asked?
Beinart’s alternative is an idealized liberal Zionist tradition of the
civil rights era. But liberal American Judaism in the 1950s and ’60s
was ultimately defined less by the civil rights movement than by the
garish Scientology-style demands for financial obeisance to the United
Jewish Appeal, denounced by a few unbowed anti-Zionist rabbis as a new
form of Baal worship. Here is where Beinart’s profound unseriousness
comes into view, which many critics detected in his 2006 Cold War
liberal-revivalist manifesto The Good Fight. For the historical hero
of The Crisis of Zionism, Rabbi Stephen Wise, an arch-defender of the
Soviet Union up to his death in 1949, was as antithetical a character
to the narrative of the first book as could be asked for.
This abiding ideological commitment, indeed, was largely why, in the
years leading up to the founding of the State of Israel, Wise was
marginalized by Abba Hillel Silver, a zealot for the first principles
of Jewish nationalism who could forge alliances with such unlikely
figures as Sen. Robert Taft. Yet after 1948, Silver himself was
marginalized for such heterodox opinions as opposing the 1956 Suez War
at the expense of the foremost disciple of Stephen Wise, Philip
Bernstein, who as a founder of AIPAC set the organization’s
belligerent and maximalist tone from the beginning. Indeed, one
suspects that if they were alive today, Wise would be with the neocons
and Silver with J Street.
This history betrays much of the wishful thinking in Beinart’s
narrative, undermining his distinction between the “historically
liberal” American Jewish Congress and Anti-Defamation League with the
“non-liberal” AIPAC and American Jewish Committee. One of the “exiles”
from the American Jewish Establishment Beinart profiles is Philip
Klutznick, who was roundly ostracized for advocating a two-state
solution (to the point of writing in defence of AIPAC “scalping”
victim Sen. Charles Percy) in the 1970s, but in 1960 was one of the
critical operatives who thwarted a proactive stand on the Palestinian
refugee problem by candidate John F. Kennedy. In the words of the
great philosopher of our generation, Homer Simpson, “Everything’s
perfect about the past except how it led to the present.”
To be clear, the Israeli predicament is a tragedy of epic proportions.
When Beinart and other more conscientious progressive Zionists speak
of a genuine two-state solution based on the 1949 armistice line, they
speak of what Israel should have accepted in the 1950s. Even for a
moment in the 1990s, a two-state solution on Israel’s terms could have
come off, with Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat the only men with even
a prayer of being able to sell such a deal to their respective
peoples. But through it all has been the fatal conceit that Israel
could not simply be a nation-state unto itself but must define itself
as the possession and representative of the whole transnational
“Jewish people.” Ultimately, one senses that Beinart and many of those
he speaks for are more interested in saving Zionism for themselves
than in saving Israel as a Jewish state.
Whether or not they have the literary talent, and even the haziest
historical knowledge, to articulate it, both the indifferent and
assimilating majority and the religiously committed progressive
minority of the rising American Jewish generation understand that this
historic American Jewish idolatry of the State of Israel has been the
problem, not the solution. What they seek from the State of Israel is,
as Yitzhak Rabin might have said, a divorce, not a marriage.
In offering a romance for the left-liberal-tinged American Zionism of
the early statehood era, Peter Beinart repeats and indeed celebrates
the refusal to make the choice that it is in all likelihood far too
late to make now: whether to content itself to be a normal nation-
state, even a “Jewish” one, or to insist that it is still the
possession and representative of an imagined transnational entity, of
which the other major component is one of the most politically
powerful socio-cultural groups in the world’s sole superpower.
This post first appeared on antiwar.com yesterday.
The other is people who despise the very idea of Israel.
Peter Beinart is a Zionist. He opposes the occupation primarily (although
not exclusively) because he believes it is destroying Israel. If there is
one message that comes through in this book (I read a review copy)it is that
Beinart wants the Israel he grew up on (one that he understands was far from
perfect) to be there for his children.
He thinks that the continued occupation will ultimately either destroy
Israel's soul or even its physical existence.
Those fears clearly drove him to write this book.
Reading it, I kept thinking of my father-in-law who survived the Holocaust
and how much he worried that Israel's leaders would let it be destroyed.
He used to say, "These Jews from Poland and Russia figured out how to create
a Jewish country from nothing. What did they know? But sitting in Warsaw and
Lodz, they figured out how you create ministries and embassies and a whole
government. They figured out how to build an army. But I'm afraid that their
children aren't so smart. They take it for granted. They will lose it all
unless they get smart."
That is what Beinart thinks too. An old Jewish soul in a young American man.
This book can change history. That is why it is creating such a ruckus. The
noise you hear are the moans of those who are devoted to the status quo and
worry that Beinart is challenging it.
It's a great book and a pleasure to read.
Not to sound too much like the late 1960's person I am, Beinart's plea
reminds me of the quote Bobby Kennedy always invoked. I think it's Tennyson.
"Some people see things as they are and ask why. I dream of things that
never were and ask "why not."
That is what Beinart is doing.
MJ Rosenberg
D
UNQUOTE
d
QUOTE
A bit daunting for those who are just taking their first steps into looking at
Middle Eastern affairs. Otherwise, Stephen Green has compiled a excellent review
of US documents that adds light to the relationship between Israel and its main
ally. Well worth exploring for anyone interested in the background behind the
conflicts.
UNQUOTE
If you are starting your study of politics and modern
history this book is highly recommended by Jay in the comments part of
Judith Coplon And Why The Venona Project Was Stopped. Another good starting
point is Behind
Communism by Frank L Britton. They are not about the news in the main stream
media; they are about who controls politicians, teachers etc.
Without quite admitting that Jews control America. He knows
exactly who the guilty are but hiding the truth is what main stream media are
about; Jews too of course.
Email
me at Mike Emery. All
financial contributions are cheerfully accepted. If you want to keep
it private, use my PGP Key.
Home
Page