Democracy Matters (14 page)

How sad it is to move from this grand Judaic insight of the prophetic to the bloodshed and bigotry, myopia and idolatry of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Both peoples are currently led by such arrogant and stubborn leaders—Sharon and Arafat—locked together in escalating and reinforcing spirals of violence. Both lead principally because of their manipulation of the deep fear and paranoia of their respective peoples—and an understandable fear and paranoia it is. But that paranoia has been used by the nihilistic xenophobes on both sides. On the Jewish side are zealous colonial settlers who envision a greater Israel that entails a full-blown apartheid condition for Palestinians, and on the Palestinian side are suicide bombers who call for Jewish annihilation. It is clear that this seemingly intractable impasse cannot be settled by the Israelis and Palestinians acting alone. Sharon’s government refuses to substantially dismantle Israel’s imperial settlements or give up colonial occupation. Arafat’s government refuses to stop the barbaric suicide bombers or punish in any consequential way those
who work to push the Jews into the sea. Anti-Arab racism and anti-Jewish racism delimit the democratic possibilities among both peoples. The only hope for a peace with justice is either for the autocratic Arab states to intervene by ensuring Israeli security and accepting Israeli legitimacy or for the American empire to wed its indispensable diplomatic and financial support to democratic and anti-imperial ends.

The major obstacle to peace in the region is the autocratic rule of Arab elites and their support, whether explicit or implicit, of anti-Jewish terrorism—the heinous terrorism of suicide bombers has dealt a devastating blow to peace—but the special relationship between the United States and Israel and Israeli violence against the Palestinians have also played crucial roles in the deepening of the conflict.

There is no doubt that the relationship of the American empire and the Israeli state is a special one. It was not always so. Nor will it likely forever be so. Most American political elites supported the Arab states in the late 1940s and early 1950s owing to oil. In 1956 President Eisenhower ordered Israel to withdraw from the Gaza Strip and Sinai Peninsula, which it had invaded and occupied, along with oil-hungry Britain and Nasser-hating France. Israel complied. The present U.S.-Israeli alliance did not emerge until the mid-1960s. Soviet ties to Egypt and Syria pushed President Johnson closer to Israel. Meanwhile, Israel’s fear of Arab threats to eliminate the Jewish state made it eager for U.S. support. The first U.S. offensive weapons systems sale to Israel—the A4, Skyhawk jet deal—was approved in 1965.

When, in 1967, Egypt’s Nasser closed the Strait of Tiran, the
waterway that gave access to Israel’s only port on the Red Sea, Israel launched its historic preemptive attack on Egypt and Syria—an attack that was approved by the CIA and the Pentagon during the visit of Meir Amit (Israel’s chief of Mossad) on the eve of the action—which led to the Six Days’ War. The next fall the United States sold Phantom jets to Israel, making this weapon available for the first time to an ally outside of NATO, even before giving it to South Vietnamese forces who were fighting a war in which U.S. soldiers were dying daily. U.S. military sales to Israel were $140 million between 1968 and 1970. This jumped to $1.2 billion from 1971 to 1973. After the Israeli defeat of the Soviet client states of Egypt and Syria in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, U.S. military aid increased still further. In 1974 it totaled $2.57 billion. This massive shift to support for Israel took place not because U.S. officials were drawn to the just cause of the Israeli state but for cold war political and geostrategic reasons. Israel, a small and fragile state under siege, began to look like an important ally to the American empire because of U.S. dependency on foreign oil and fear of Soviet influence in Arab states.

Today Israel—a country of 6.5 million people—receives 33 percent of the entire foreign-aid budget of the American empire ($3 billion a year). Another 20 percent of the budget goes to Egypt, in part as a payment for not attacking Israel, and Jordan is the third largest recipient (comparable to India!). In short, more than half the budget concerns the security of Israel. The average African receives 10 cents a year from U.S. foreign aid. The average Israeli receives $500 a year. Only 0.2 percent of the U.S. GNP goes to foreign aid—by this measure America ranks last out of the twenty-two wealthiest countries in the world!

A conservative estimate of total U.S. foreign aid to Israel since 1949 is $97.5 billion. Israel has become a military giant (with nuclear weapons) in the Middle East, and yet that military might and the protectorship of the United States that has accompanied all the munitions have not come for free. Israel has paid a price: it has no peace or real security. Historically empires have looked to their allies to assist in their dirty work, and Israel played a key role in some of the most morally indefensible policies of the United States as it waged the cold war: providing arms, training, and intelligence support for the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua, the Afrikaner government of apartheid South Africa, UNITA thugs in Angola, and repressive juntas in Guatemala. Like Turkey, Greece, and South Korea, Israel became a frontline U.S. ally, and no other ally in the Middle East yielded such positive results.

As this strategic alliance developed and deepened, American elites and certain powerful factions of American Jewish leadership became so hardened in their partnership that they adopted a “broach no criticisms” position about Israel’s actions in the conflict with the Palestinians, a stance that effectively silenced critics, including Jewish critics.

The painful irony is that the most significant and powerful group of Jews outside beleaguered Israel has not been free to engage in a robust debate about the policies of the Israeli government. There are indeed many prophetic Jews out of the 6.1 million Jews in America (1.8 percent of the U.S. population) eager to pursue honest, Socratic questioning of the hard-line position of the U.S.-Israeli alliance, but their voices are marginalized and their
motives are often maligned. Mainstream Jewish leadership has suffocated genuine Jewish prophetic views and visions. In this way, the most visible Jewish identity in the Diaspora appears to many, here and abroad, to be an imperial identity whose security resides in military might and the colonial occupation of Palestinians. Yet in regard to domestic policy, American Jews have been the most loyal group—other than black Americans—to support civil rights and civil liberties. Jews have been a pillar for liberal efforts to support social justice for all in America, yet the issue of the Jewish state tends to muzzle their democratic energies.

Through the lens of the Jewish invention of the prophetic, which harkens back to the struggle against Pharaoh’s Egypt, this conservative Jewish identity in regard to Israel reeks of imperial idolatry, and it remains in place as long as a grossly simplified Manichaean framework for discussion of the conflict is promulgated. This is a paralyzing framework that posits U.S.-supported, civilized Israelis with their backs against the wall against Arab-supported Palestinian savages who revel in terrorism. This take on the complex situation is so impoverished that it promotes a callousness in denying the extent of Palestinian suffering, in the name of dubious security of Israelis. In short, this myopic viewpoint precludes both justice for Palestinians and security for Israelis.

As Michael C. Staub points out in his recent book,
Torn at the Roots: The Crisis of Jewish Liberalism in Postwar America
(2002), the fierce debates within the Jewish community over Zionism, desegregation, Vietnam, gender relations, and exogamous marriage more and more put prophetic Jews on the defensive. He writes:

In regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he notes that, by the 1970s, “it would be hard not to conclude that the hawks had triumphed over the doves…. It is crucial to register the on-going vitality of a right-leaning, religiously inflected American Zionism.”

The recent history of prophetic American Jews questioning the myopic viewpoint and Manichaean framework of this conflict is appalling. The experience of Breira is revealing.
Breira
is Hebrew for “alternative.” In the years 1973 to 1977, this group of prophetic American Jews tried to create a democratic space that allowed serious debate about the fate of Israelis and Palestinians beyond the narrow consensus of mainstream American Jewish leadership—a consensus predicated on “
ein breira
” (there is no alternative to the reigning consensus).

Breira accused the Jewish establishment of a kind of “Israelotry” that blindly worshipped the Israeli state while downplaying Jewish
democratic commitments to peace and justice. The group strongly supported the security of Israel and bravely promoted a Palestinian state. Most important, Breira members called for a respectful democratic debate among American Jews regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And they were viciously attacked and mercilessly crushed—denied membership in local Jewish organizations, forced to quit Breira in order to keep their Hillel rabbi jobs, and cast as self-hating Jews. This antidemocratic response of the mainstream Jewish groups sent chills down the spines of prophetic Jews. For example, the treatment of Rabbi Arthur Waskow was atrocious. His prophetic pro-Israel and pro-Palestine stance was deliberately cast as a terroristic pro-PLO position. He was dubbed a “Jew for Fatah” rather than a concerned rabbi rooted in the rich prophetic tradition of Judaism. Like Rabbi Michael Lerner today, Rabbi Waskow was unfairly labeled a Jewish heretic or traitor. Yet both today persevere against such attacks.

And the present does look more promising. Strong prophetic voices are in fact emerging within the Jewish Diaspora—as well as in Israel—that are putting forward powerful critiques of Israel’s handling of the crisis and courageous visions of less violent, more democratic ways forward. New Jewish Agenda, Jewish Peace Lobby, Jewish Peace Network, Americans for Peace Now,
Heeb
magazine, Israel Policy Forum, and especially Rabbi Michael Lerner’s
Tikkun
magazine and Tikkun community (headed by Rabbi Lerner, Susannah Heschel, and myself) are slowly beginning to turn the tide against the mainstream Jewish imperial idolatry. These organizations rightly recognize that Israeli colonial occupation of Palestinians and deference to American imperial strategic interests
produce neither security for Israel nor justice for Palestinians. Yet these prophetic Jews are up against formidable Jewish establishmentarian forces.

Those forces have sponsored an impressive Jewish civic activism, through a highly successful lobby, to support Israeli government policies and snub prophetic Jewish—and non-Jewish—voices. We democrats must support the right of citizens to organize and influence U.S. foreign or domestic policy. Yet there also must be accountability and responsibility in democratic public life, including vibrant debate and dialogue. Unfortunately, the highly effective Jewish lobby seems to have little interest in such debate and dialogue. Like the attacks against Breira and Rabbi Arthur Waskow, the response to prophetic Jews like Rabbi Michael Lerner and others forecloses meaningful democratic exchange.

The two major groups of the Jewish lobby are the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. The first group consists of 60,000 members and a staff of 130 and has an annual budget of almost $20 million. Widely known as AIPAC, it focuses on Congress, maintaining an office near Capitol Hill. It mobilizes hard-line Israeli supporters in nearly every congressional district and encourages its members to make significant monetary contributions to candidates of both parties (from conservative Republican Trent Lott to liberal Democrat Hillary Clinton), and it can torpedo candidates who criticize Israeli policies, like Cynthia McKinney in Georgia. The second group is composed of the heads of fifty-one Jewish organizations, including the three largest—the Union of
American Hebrew Congregations (1.5 million Reform Jews and their 900 synagogues), the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism (1.5 million Conservative Jews and their 760 synagogues), and the Orthodox Union (600,000 Orthodox Jews and their 800 congregations). This group has a staff of six and an annual budget of less than a million dollars. And despite its political and ideological diversity, its leader for the past eighteen years, Malcolm Hoenlein, has been dubbed “the most influential private citizen in American foreign policy” by a former high-ranking U.S. diplomat. His fundamental aim is the security of the Jewish state. But the weight he puts on justice for Palestinians is suspect—even though many prophetic Jews in his organization want both security for Israel and justice for Palestinians. In short, those in the powerful Jewish lobby—though far from monolithic and certainly not an almighty cabal of Zionists who rule the United States or the world (in the vicious language of zealous anti-Semites)—are far to the right of most American Jews and are often contemptuous of prophetic Jewish voices. In fact, their preoccupation with Israel’s security at the expense of the Palestinian cry for justice has not only produced little security for Israel but also led many misinformed Jews down an imperial path that suffocates their own prophetic heritage.

This suffocation is seen most clearly in the major sectors of the mass media. Mortimer Zuckerman, the new head of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, owns
U.S. News & World Report
and the
New York Daily News.
Martin Peretz, editor in chief and co-owner of the
New Republic
, is a defender of
hard-line Israeli policies toward the Palestinians. The Sulzbergers, the more sophisticated and open-minded Jewish family who publish the
New York Times
, house the unofficial dean of American foreign-affairs journalism, the bestselling author Thomas Friedman, whose misrepresentations of the Middle East are legion (yet whose call to pull back on Israeli settlements is courageous). Needless to add, the far-reaching influence of the non-Jewish Rupert Murdoch (
New York Post, Weekly Standard
, Fox News Channel) is enormous. He is a stalwart of the imperial U.S.-Israeli lobby.