On the Crisis of Zionism. By Rick Perlstein. Rolling Stone, May 2, 2012.
Perlstein:
As an
adult, I’ve always found the stereotype that Jews are liberal a curious one; my
parents’ circle was predominantly conservative, not just on Israel but on most
political issues. Most of all, they were intensely (and this is a word I
remember repeating in my own angry adolescent dialogues with myself) tribal. What I didn’t fully comprehend,
until now, was why. Beinart unearths a story of 1970s politics that was unknown
to me – except as I so intimately lived it – showing that at the root of this
sense of embattled tribalism was a transformation worked by the leaders of
right-leaning American Jewish organizations, who traded in their founding
(liberal) aspirations to universal justice for a wagon-circling parochalism.
I knew
how the 1967 simultaneous Soviet-backed invasion of Israel by Egypt, Jordan,
and Syria, which put Israel’s very survival at stake, profoundly intensified
American Jews’ emotional connection to the Jewish state. (One marvelous detail
Beinart uncovers: a small Oklahoma synagogue sold its building so they could
send the proceeds to Israel to aid the cause.) What I didn’t realize was how deliberately establishment Jewish
leaders of this period substituted victimhood – the sense that Jews always and
everywhere were at risk of being wiped out, should they drop their guard – for
liberalism, “as a strategy for defending Israel,” and as “the defining ideology
of organized American Jewish life.” The president of the American Jewish
Congress, for example, an organization founded in 1906 that once was so soppily
universalist in focus they had considered changing their name to the “Institute
for Human Relations,” lamented in 1970 that young Jews “lack a sense of ‘being
Jewish’” because the Holocaust was not “seared into” their memories. So
educational materials were developed to do the searing right quick – in part,
by way of simulations “designed to help children imagine that they were
experiencing the trauma firsthand.” (I remember those: We were supposed to
pretend to be Jews in Germany, hiding from Nazis – though in my case the
exercise was called off at the last minute when parents, to their credit,
protested. We did, however, pretend to be Jews running the British blockade of
Palestine.)
The
next AJC president wrote in 1982 that the reason such trauma education was
necessary was “so that our children will know who they really are.” Who we really are: a stunning
admonition. Who we really were, as a 1974 book coauthored by the head of the
Anti-Defamation League and quoted by Beinart were martyrs – and “tolerable” to the rest of the world “only as victims . . . and when [our]
situation changes so that [we] are either no longer victims or appear not to
be, the non-Jewish world finds this so hard to take that the effort is begun to
render [us] victims again.” The usefulness of that bizarre, passively voiced
tautology springs from its nihilism: Actually existing Jewish power can only be
taken as evidence that the deluge must be right around the corner.
The
notion that violent paranoia must be taught as the moral center of Judaism has
persisted to recent times, as I learned on a trip to Israel where a young
cousin of mine was Bar Mitzvahed at Masada (tellingly, a military site, not a
religious one), and during which he and his unwitting friends were directed to
read a poem about the Warsaw Ghetto while standing on a monument to destroyed
European shtetls:
At my
Bar Mitzvah, I lifted my voice and sang.
At his Bar Mitzvah, he lifted his fists and
fought.
At my
Bar Mitzvah, I wore a new tallit over a new suit.
At his Bar Mitvah he wore a rifle an
bullets over a suit of rags.
At my
Bar Mitzvah, I started my road to life.
At his Bar Mitzvah, he began his road to
martyrdom.
It
follows that the actual world we kids inherited, in which Jews now serving on
the Supreme Court outnumber Protestants three to zero and a Jew serves as House
majority leader and the Jew who used to be the president's chief of staff runs
our third largest city, and in which Israel is a nuclear-armed regional
superpower can really be only a mirage. “Is It 1939?” Malcolm Honlein, the head
of the influential Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations,
asked in a 2010 speech. It just might be, was his answer. Which is why he
displays in his office a photoshopped image of Israeli F-15s liberating
Auschwitz. Six million Jews are once more
getting ready to die.
This was the moral education that I
found so dissatisfying in my youth, as it trickled down to medium-sized
Midwestern burgs – a disingenous muddle of irrationalism, intellectual double
standards, and whiny special pleading. I learned that because Israel was a “democracy,”
with Arab citizens and political parties, discrimination against those Arabs
was not a problem – but also that it was appropriate for the Israeli Defense
Forces to harass Arabs at random because, I remember hearing, “they don't wear
signs around their neck saying ‘good Arab’ and ‘bad Arab.’” I was solemnly
informed that groups like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch were
biased against Israel and that the State Department was full of anti-Semites. I
heard men who seemed otherwise utterly apolitical and non-intellectual rehearse
elaborate they-started-it narratives starring conspirators like the Mufti of
Jerusalem, who gulled Arabs into eagerly abandoning their homes, which happened
to make room for Zionist pioneers who had never been anything but magnanimous
toward them. I got the message, loud and clear, that those of us living lives
of bland comfort far from enemy-circled Israel had no right, no standing to criticize the Jewish state; and to just
shut up and send the check to Jewish organizations, the better to salve your
conscience.
The
ideology extended to theology. The only times during my religious instruction I
remember hearing God’s name invoked with any sincere conviction at all was in
the oft-repeated and breathtakingly chauvinistic claim that Israel’s “miraculous”
military victories over much-stronger enemies proved that He was ever on Zion’s
side. (God had help, I later learned as a professional historian: More American
materiel were shipped to Israel in just ten days during the 1973 Yom Kippur War
than over the entire eleven months of the 1948 Berlin Airlift, which also helps
explain why, in my youth, Richard Nixon was seen by many Jews to have got a raw
deal on Watergate.)
All of
which left me, in my youth, feeling utterly uninterested in Judaism, which to
me appeared inherently barren: If you found dubious the proposition that Israel
as it existed protected Jews around the world – rather than making them more
vulnerable through the injustices it perpetrated – there was really nothing
spiritual left.
And
what has the embrace of victimhood wrought for American Jews? “In city after
city,” Beinart points out, they “have built Holocaust memorials. . . . The
Jewish schools in those cities are often decrepit, mediocre, and unaffordable,
but there is no shortage of places to learn how Jews died. . . . When a
community builds better memorials than schools – when it raises children more
familiar with Auschwitz that with Simchat Torah [that means “rejoicing in the
law”; proving his argument, I had to look it up] – the lesson of those memorials
cannot be: Honor the dead by leading,
informed, committed Jewish lives. Nor is the lesson: Honor the dead by acting justly toward those non-Jews which live under
Jewish rule . . . Instead, the implicit lesson is: Honor the dead by preventing another Holocaust, this time in Israel.”
The memorial-builders, he writes, “began hoarding the Holocaust.” Yes! This to
me was stunning to read, remembering how a museum in the ghetto devoted to “America’s
Black Holocaust” made Milwaukee Jews seethe: that word, “Holocaust,” belonged
to us.
There
are, of course, good reasons for Jews to be informed about the history of the
bad intentions that much of the rest of the world has harbored toward us.
Beinart elucidated them beautifully in a stunning essay in the magazine Transition, which I read when it came
out sixteen years ago and remember indelibly. But even more powerfully, that
essay also laid out the dangers of circling the wagons. He wrote about his
grandmother, who said “Jews are like rats,” fleeing sinking ships. In The Crisis of Zionism he lists the ships
his own family has been forced to abandon over the generations: first escaping
“a Spanish town cleansed of Jews five hundred years ago”; then now-defunct
Jewish communities in Greece and Turkey; then the war-torn Belgian Congo,
whence they fled to South Africa.
In
South Africa, Jews found “rich soil,” Beinart writes — “and poisoned soil as
well.” In a system driven by a “mania for classification and segregation,” the
South African state “used the traditional Jewish desire to remain distinct as a
lever to guarantee their support for a political system based on racial
separation and hierarchy.” But Beinart found something to admire in South
African Jews, something revelatory: They were “less reliant on victimology.
While American Jews pour money into Holocaust memorials, South African Jews
have focused on Jewish education.”
The Crisis of Zionism raises
up as heroes a new wave of liberal young people leading informed, committed
Jewish lives right here among us. The facts he elicits about them should be
profoundly sobering to establishment Jewish leaders like Malcolm Honlein with
his Israeli F-15s: men and women in the “independent minyanim” movement (minyanim
are small prayer groups), who “grew up Reform or Conservative [the less
hardcore-religious branches of Judaism], but through Jewish school, summer
camp, or adult study . . . gained a level of religious literacy far beyond that
of most Reform or Conservative Jews.” Members of this Jewish renaissance marry
other Jews 93 percent of the time: What ensures Jewishness, he concludes, “is
not victimhood, but Jewish knowledge as a vehicle of Jewish meaning.” Even more
stunningly, a survey of the new movement’s leadership found that although they “had
spent more time in Israel than their elders and were more likely to speak
Hebrew” – 56 percent had lived there more than four months at a time, double
that of older leaders – and “only 32 percent strongly agreed that Israel was a
very important part of their Jewish identity.”
But
why? “They are,” Beinart says, “deeply troubled by Israel’s policies” –
specifically its insistence on expanding settlements in the territory west of
the Jordan River that Israel began occupying following the 1967 war. Though
Israel is often described as the “only democracy in the Middle East,” these
occupied territories are not democratic: Israeli settlers there, for instance,
enjoy their own system of roads, from which Arabs are banned, and when Arabs
violate Israeli law they are tried before military courts where only one
percent are ever found innocent. And, he argues, since the settlers and their
representatives – people like the settler who deliberately drove his car into a
cabinet minister, then was made a representative of the settlers’ governing
council; the settler who shot a classics professor in 2002 who was helping a
Palestinian farmer harvest his vineyards, and went free; and the head of the
West Bank’s rabbinical council who called Baruch Goldstein, the
settler-assassin of twenty-nine Muslim worshippers, “holier than all the
martyrs of the Holocaust” – are becoming more integrated into the governing
institutions of Israel itself, this threatens the survival of a democratic
Jewish state itself.
It is a
debate I am unqualified to adjudicate. The deeply unsatisfying tribalism that
marred the religious education of my youth laid an unpromising foundation; and
though I respect the way in which many people I love have carved deeply
satisfying spiritual lives for themselves in Judaism, many in the same independent
minyanim movement Beinart so admires,
my religious direction tended elsewhere. As for Israel, I don’t think of it
much. Even in a career as a political writer given to disputation, the sheer
viciousness (which you’ll see from the hate mail this piece produces: I plan to
publish it) faced by those who criticize not merely Israel, but certain
specific de rigeur formulations about
Israel, turned me off the entire subject. Instead, and I’ve never admitted this
publicly before, the deeply saturated irrationalism surrounding it as I was
growing up was what made me fascinated with political irrationalism as such –
and helps explain why I ended up a scholar of the American far-right.
That
reflexive intimidation, in the end, is what most fascinates me about The Crisis of Zionism. I'd heard great
things from friends about the book — but read almost nothing admiring about it
in the public prints. People are cowed at the thought of taking on the
shrieking Israel absolutists, the ones who imagine themselves every day saving
six million lives and their critics as hastening the slaughter. Apropos: In one
stunning story Beinart tells in his book, a group of young Jewish leaders
declined to stand together at a Jewish gathering and sing the national anthem,
but also declined to join a public resolution opposing settlement growth: “In
the organized Jewish world, left-leaning young Jews often rely on establishment
Jewish institutions for financial support. And publicly criticism is an
excellent way to endanger that support.” Again and again, he prints quotations
from unidentified sources, who apparently fear attaching their name to even
innocuous opinions: like the former official of the American Defamation League
who says it is “first and foremost a fund-raising organization”; and the “prominent
Jewish journalist” who remarks that one major institutional conference “looks
like the day room at the old-age home.”
Another
anonymous source is a “senior State Department official,” who recently traveled
with Secretary Clinton from Jerusalem to Ramallah in the West Bank: “There was
a kind of silence and people were careful, but it was like, my God, you crossed
that border and it was apartheid.” For the most prominent victim of this
climate of intimidation, and the retreat from reason and empirical observation
it enforces, is the president whose Chicago home sits across the street from a
venerable synagogue where, Beinart argues, he learned from the Jewish community
that embraced him a Zionism that was both deeply felt and opposed to settlement
growth. But then Barack Obama moved into the White House, where he found it
impossible to follow through on his convictions, thanks to “Jewish pressure,”
as a revealing headline in Time
magazine puts it.
Jewish
pressure issues from people like Malcolm Honlein, not from any preponderance of
actual Jews; polling finds “the gap between Jews and other Americans has not
narrowed at all” on approval of Obama, and only 10 percent of American Jews
make Israel their primary voting issue. “Members of Congress,” Beinart
concludes, “worried that the administration did not fully grasp what he had
gotten himself into” when he made a halt to the growth in settlements by the
Israeli government a precondition for further diplomatic progress. Now,
however, he has given up, and his statements sound like “they were faxed to his
office by the Israeli prime minister’s office,” according to one Israeli
commentary Beinart quotes. “‘If you’re going to pick a fight with a bully, you
need to win.’” This quote is from a “Congressional
staffer who works on Israel policy” – who, naturally, asked not to be named.
