Israel

TEL AVIV—As if staring at each other across the front page of the newspaper, the 10-year-old boy bleeding from a Gaza rocket attack looked up into the controversial photo of the Illinois senator wrapped in a white turban.

“A Hillary Clinton Production,’’ proclaimed the headline in the tabloid Yediot Ahronot, Israel’s top-selling daily paper. “Obama, the Muslim.’’

The next day, however, Obama was back on the front page of Yediot, this time declaring, “I’m a friend of Israel,’’ in an exclusive interview.  read more »

Bernard-Henri Lévy undid the top three buttons of his shirt as soon as he was done with his oration last night. “Now I’m free!” he said. “My love of freedom goes till that. I never wore a tie in my life. Even in very official circumstances, I never wore a tie. Which is very unusual for a Frenchman!”

Mr. Lévy, the dramatic French intellectual with the wavy hair and the persistently bare chest, was standing amid a circle of admirers at the 92nd Street Y, minutes after delivering the annual State of World Jewry address. The address had been mostly grim: Jewry is in peril, was the main idea, and Israel is really good. Also that Islamic radicalism is not to be tolerated, and that to do so is to betray the principles of liberalism.

The Jewish people have never been more “lonely, vulnerable and threatened” than they are right now, Mr. Lévy said.

About 1,000 people had come to hear Mr. Lévy talk about this idea, among them Isabella Rosellini, former New Republic owner Marty Peretz and someone important from the French consulate. Also, Maer Roshan from Radar was there; he sat in the balcony with Portfolio media blogger Jeff Bercovici.  read more »

Ron Paul is the only presidential candidate who doesn't embrace the idea that the United States has an obligation to provide economic, military and diplomatic support to Israel.

This could be taken as an extension of Paul's non-interventionist foreign policy, which calls for all nations to be treated neutrally—no foreign aid and no "entangling alliances," as he frequently argues.

Paul's critics contend that his approach would expose Israel to a mortal threat from hostile neighbors. And his views have also been invoked by critics to charge that he is anti-Semitic, or, at the very least, that his campaign has become a magnet for people who hate Jews.  read more »

Comedian Jerry Seinfeld made such a stir during his trip to Israel over the weekend, talk of his visit threatened to eclipse media chatter surrounding major upcoming Mideast peace negotiations, the AP reports today. Mr. Seinfeld was in the Holy Land to promote his new animated feature, Bee Movie, but the sojourn apparently seemed more like a state visit by a foreign dignitary. Very few entertainers who visit the country are able to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert or President Shimon Peres. Mr. Seinfeld, on the other hand, hung out with both men. He also toured the Israeli Holocaust memorial in a fashion normally reserved for heads of state.

His visit marked quite a change from Mr. Seinfeld’s last visit to Israel in 1971 as a 15-year-old on kibbutz. Speaking to reporters, the funnyman said, “I would be in the fields, and nobody wanted my autograph and nobody wanted to take their picture with me…They just let me hack away at those banana leaves, and no, I didn't meet the prime minister even once."

Referring to the regional political meeting requested by President Bush, which began today, an Israeli political analyst named Amon Abramovitz had only one thing to say: “Yada, yada, yada.”

 

The Middle East peace process, frozen to the point of lifelessness, may be starting to thaw.  read more »

I can't stop talking about the wonderful-horrible AJC report, it's so changed the landscape. Again I say, give credit where credit is due: this was the AJC's reactionary pushback against Carter and Walt and Mearsheimer, and it blew up on the Jewish right/mainstream when the Times actually chose to write about it. Thus the anti-intellectual, vicious, omerta practices of the Jewish leadership were revealed, to its shame.

But I'm going to try to not be self-serving here. The fascinating thing about this Jewish perestroika is that it liberates everyone. Not just my camp, the anti- or non-Zionist camp that wonders if the dream of a Jewish state hasn't slid hopelessly away, but also the We-are-very-upset-about-Israel's-current-policies-but-we-love-her-and-believe-in-her camp. The Zionist left is angered and embarrassed by the AJC report, feel that it's broadbrush and reactionary, and so are standing up with renewed energy, as if the ball is about to be handed to them, at last—the rightwing having shot itself in the foot.

Gershom Gorenberg, who is in that camp, yesterday said the real story is that the left is alive, it's empowered groups like the Union of Progressive Zionists, which is harshly critical of the occupation. Isn't it great they haven't been thrown off the Israel on Campus Coalition, Gorenberg writes, despite the best efforts of the ZOA. And he is right. Tamara Shapiro, the 24-year-old who runs UPZ, is an amazing young woman, idealistic and tough. She brought Breaking the Silence to America last year; she gets it from the right (ZOA) and the left (me). Now the AJC report has given her more room to operate, by blasting open the debate. (Leonard Fein makes the same point in the Forward this week).

Just as the AJC gave leftish John Judis of the New Republic freedom to talk about something he has probably been secretly bitching about for years: the pressure on Jewish intellectuals to be loyal to Israel, from people like his boss, Marty Peretz (he didn't say that part out loud). When is Mickey Kaus, another not-all-the-way-on-the-reservation Jewish intellectual whose career has been boosted by Peretz, going to speak up about this pressure? Or Mike Kinsley? Time is now, boys. Everyone's letting their hair down in the sweatlodge.

The best analysis I've seen yet of the politics of the Jewish left in America is from Daniel Sieradski—"Mobius," of Jewschool. He explains to me that the two big roadblocks are a, ideological differences, and b, dough.

I question as to whether recent events indicate the presence of a movement so much as what I regard as fractious groups with overlapping areas of interest and little coordination. Some folks are focused on liberal domestic political issues such as labor practices, women's rights, gay rights, etc., others are focused on shifting the priorities of the Jewish funding establishment away from intermarriage and Israel advocacy towards Jewish education and cultural initiatives; while others yet still are focused on finding a just resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

That last group is broken into left-leaning Zionists (of the Meretz/Labor cadre), post-Zionists (who believe either in two states or a binational solution, yet overall, a solution which respects both Jewish and Palestinian rights), and anti-Zionists who are more often than not anti-Israel reactionaries.  read more »

The one thing these three groups can agree on is that things are headed in the wrong direction and that the mainstream Jewish leadership is steering us down a dark road.

However, it is practically impossible for these groups to collaborate because of:

A few weeks back I brought up the charge of dual loyalty with respect to the neocons who claim that Israel's interests and the U.S.'s interests are identical. A very sensitive question, yes, and a lot of people got upset with me, including friends.

Well now in The New Republic, John Judis has joined me in legitimizing this question. Here is the money quote:

On the one hand, Rosenfeld, Harris, and others want to deny that American Jews and American Jewish organizations like AIPAC suffer from dual loyalty in trying to influence U.S. foreign policy. It's anti-Semitic or contributes to anti-Semitism, they say, to make that charge. On the other hand, they want to demand of American Jewish intellectuals a certain loyalty to Israel, Israeli policies, and to Zionism as part of their being Jewish. They make dual loyalty an inescapable part of being Jewish in a world in which a Jewish state exists. And that's probably the case. Many Jews now suffer from dual loyalty--the same way that Cuban-Americans or Mexican-Americans do. By ignoring this dilemma--and, worse still, by charging those who acknowledge its existence with anti-Semitism-- the critics of the new anti-Semitism are engaged in a flight from their own political selves. They are guilty of a certain kind of bad faith.

This is intellectually valiant work, Judis should be applauded; and TNR praised for running the piece. As for the demand made on Jewish intellectuals to be loyal to Israel, it is one that anyone who has worked for the New Republic (I did it once, and carried Marty Peretz's anti-U.N. water for him) has experienced.

Wow, I'm just stunned by this. It's another achievement of the AJC report, which Judis's piece addresses (and of Walt-Mearsheimer, who broke the whole thing open). Don't you see what is happening? The dual-loyalty question is being mainstreamed. The degree to which neocons and neolibs and American Jewish journalists generally have been recruited in passive/unconscious identification with Israel is, as I've said here before, a legitimate issue. The suppression in the American Jewish community of any alternative discourse to Zionism—well, thanks to the AJC, the bridges are being dynamited...

The AJC's report on "Only Self-Hating Jews Don't Like Israel"—it's actually called "'Progressive' Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism"—is officially an embarrassment. I say officially because the report's theme that it is "illegitimate" for Jews to question the nature of the founding of Israel, that such inquiries represent a "betrayal" of Israel, based on "tangled psychological" motives, is being criticized in the mainstream press around the world, as it should be. The Op-Eds pile up one after another. The report has exposed the Jewish leadership's underhanded methods: smearing intellectuals as "self-haters."

It has also got the AJC into a fight it doesn't want with Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, a longtime friend of Israel, who is named in the report because of his column last summer saying the founding of Israel was a well-intentioned "mistake." Cohen is upset.

Among the first to call me after the Times piece appeared was the AJC itself. It apologized. It did not mean to include me with the others, and it would, its representative told me, soon set matters straight. It issued a news release saying that Rosenfeld's characterization of me does "not reflect the totality of [my] occasional writings on the Middle East."

Well, the AJC has not set matters straight with Cohen. It is still fiddling. On its website the AJC crows that it got the Times to run a correction of its characterization of the AJC as a "conservative" group. This is a pure expression of vanity (Jewish groups like to think of themselves as liberal). In the Jerusalem Post, David Harris, the AJC's director, goes on for several paragraphs about the good news that he obtained a correction, and then seeks to justify the report: "[T]he individuals [author Alvin] Rosenfeld mentions are on the political fringes in asserting that Israel has no right to exist and should either be destroyed or morphed into a so-called binational state, which means the end of Israel as we know it."

Harris then says this is not true of Richard Cohen, but he has nonetheless made "disturbing" comments about Israel.

This is called digging yourself deeper into a hole.

Today in the American Prospect, Gershom Gorenberg echoes the charge that the AJC is unfair to Richard Cohen—while by and large defending the report, by adding his own attack on anti-Zionists and non-Zionists:

They affirm the right of Palestinians to return to a remembered homeland, but negate Jews' right to repatriate themselves to their remembered homeland. Jewish nationhood alone is a scandal. Morally, this is no different than deciding that everyone but black Africans has the right to self-determination...

Gorenberg's analogy of the Palestinian refugees' claims to the claim of, say, a former Diaspora Californian like himself to emigrate to Israel out of ideas he studied in a yeshiva that include religious messianism (as he states in his book The End of Days) is highly problematic. I think Gorenberg, a wonderful journalist by the way, is wrong.

Cohen undertakes a broader defense of the AJC's targets: "It's sad that the American Jewish Committee commissioned and published Rosenfeld's report. I can't imagine what good will come out of it. Instead, it has given license to the most intolerant and narrow-minded of Israel's defenders so that, as the AJC concedes in my case, any veering from orthodoxy is met with censure... Shame." Cohen gets at the great (backfired) achievement of the AJC paper and its coverage in the Times. It has ennobled the critics, and not just the critics Gorenberg, who made aliyah, wishes to defend.

Zionism's DNA is being examined by American Jews. Tony Judt and Alisa Solomon are at last being heard widely, in their call on the American Jewish community to examine the religious nationalist ideology that has helped foster violence in the Middle East. Liberal integrationists like myself, who chose not to make aliyah, are at last being heard. Call it poison, call it illegitimate: the world seems interested in what we have to say.

A reporter called me yesterday and said I was wrong in declaring there's a movement of progressive Jews who are criticizing Zionism. He asked for my evidence. I started with Jewish Voice for Peace, which runs muzzlewatch and rallied in the cold to support Jimmy Carter at Brandeis. He said, "But they're kind of a fringe organization."

Well, gee. That's actually what movement means, a rearrangement of the political hierarchy (of which that reporter is a part) to include a formerly marginalized group. The women's movement. The settlers' movement. The evangelical movement.

Now here are a few more straws in the wind, demonstrating that the formerly-marginalized progressives are movin' in.

—In Australia, the Age today does a piece on perestroika in the Jewish community (saying that author Antony Loewenstein is leading a breakaway to challenge the Israel lobby), and The Age's sidebar exposes as objectionable a regular practice in the Jewish community: Zionists use the word "self-hating" to describe Jews who dissent from the program;

—The Times piece on the American Jewish Committee's report on these matters of 1/31 devotes real space to a book that nettled the AJC: Wrestling With Zion, edited by Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon. This wonderful book, which includes a great number of Jewish writers who are uncomfortable with Zionist ideology (and some who aren't so uncomfortable with it), came out nearly 4 years ago. It was never reviewed by the Times, mentioned only once in passing. Now it is mentioned prominently in the Times, and in a positive light. Change.

—In Washington last week, Theater J held a reading of the heterodox historical play I saw performed in N.Y. last spring, David Zellnik's amazing "Ariel Sharon Stands on the Temple Mount and Dreams of Theodor Herzl". The reading went well, before a good-sized crowd in the Jewish Community Center in Northwest D.C. No one jumped up and screamed antisemitism, they wanted to talk about Zionism.

—In yesterday's Washington Post, an aggrieved victim of the AJC (as opposed to one of the victims who's reveling in it), Richard Cohen, says "Shame" on the AJC for "promiscuously" throwing around the word anti-Semite.

—Australia again. Today's Australian features a sharp opinion piece by TAMU's Michael Desch, a Holocaust scholar, who hops on the self-hating thing again. Dismissing "Jews who deviate from the pro-Israel line" as "self-hating" is the kind of "dirty pool" regularly practiced by the lobby.  read more »

O.K. So it's a movement. We're gaining traction. What do we stand for?

There was a "rocket explosion" about 10 minutes outside the place in Israel where City Council Speaker Christine Quinn was meeting with an Israeli official, according to Quinn's office.

Nobody was injured, and Quinn will discuss the incident at 2 p.m. in a conference call with reporters.

The blast took place in Nir-am Kibbutz, close to Sderot. -- Azi Paybarah

Last night Noam Chomsky was to give a lecture at the Miller Theater at Columbia University in N.Y. The Miller Theater was sold out 2 weeks back for the event, $5 a head. Probably 500 people. The outside walls of the theater were plastered with posters calling Chomsky un-American. When I came in a tall African guy was trying to chivvy tickets from others. Later I saw where he had gotten in. There was a table of Chomsky's books out front and a crowd of young hipsters. Pretty Asian girls, guys with snowboarding jackets. Not a lot of oldsters (except for mwah, of course). I had to sit in a back row, a disappointment. I wanted to watch his face, this son of a great Hebrew scholar who can take apart Zionism like an old radio.

The lights went down, a screen lit up. We got to watch Harold Pinter's speech accepting the Nobel Prize in Litteratoor from 2005. The playwright wore a red lap blanket and said the crimes of the U.S. were legion and unreported, from Nicaragua to Chile to Indonesia to Iraq, and Tony Blair was the U.S.'s poodle. The speech went on for 40 minutes, it felt like; and was a little motheaten.

After the speech the lights came up and without fanfare Chomsky came to the podium. He said he was going to take questions now. Well I thought that was odd. The event was advertised as a lecture from Chomsky. No. He was just taking questions, after Pinter's taped old speech.

There were a half dozen questions, and then Chomsky said, OK, Thank you, and walked off the stage. A short burst of applause, and that was the end of it. He had answered questions for 15 or 20 minutes, it felt like. Most of it was a tired attack on the big corporations, and—a newer thread—celebrating the democratic movement of integration that is occurring now in South America. I wanted more, much much more. I wanted to see that mind in real exercise, on the jumbotron. (I wanted to hear more about Israel than the idea that it is America's client, trying out 100 new warplanes—his one statement about Israel.)

As it was, the event seemed faintly squalid. The mind at the end of the day, in its nightclothes, wandering around a house. It was so casual as to be insulting to us, all the folks who had paid to hear him. And I heard a lot of grumbling as I went out on to Broadway.

When someone had asked a more difficult question, Chomsky said, Well that is a complex question, I've written about it. As if to say, don't make me jump thru any hoops, kid, you can go buy the book.

He had one interesting idea/emotion. Maybe I will get his actual words off my taperecorder later (for now I'm infected by his laziness). He kept saying that If we wanted to stop the war, we could. We possessed the power. He said that the people of Venezuela had shown great resolution, and any people was capable of democratic resolution, if they only cared. There was something wonderful and sour about this idea. He was judging us pitilessly, and saying, You are responsible for this war because you are doing diddly and you have all the rights in the world. You could be holding your elected representatives' feet to the fire. A student asked him to endorse the Feb. 15 strike by students, and Chomsky had said, Well that's good, maybe you will actually do something. Another time he described us as privileged with free speech, and we face no risks to expressing ourselves, unlike South Americans, or Russians, or Saudis.

It was a theme that wanted to be developed, in a grand speech. No grandeur. Just nightclothes.  read more »

A few possible explanations:

Doni Remba, a peace activist, disputes my claim that the progressive voice in Jewish life has been marginalized by the neocons. He has some evidence: he says he's getting traction in the Jewish press for his view that there has to be a progressive lobby, to push for a two-state solution in Israel/Palestine. His post follows, below.

I have one important quibble, ahead of time. Remba reflects the conventional leftish pro-Israel view that the dog wags the tail. I.e., that Israel is a client that does as the imperial U.S. wants it to do. The U.S. doesn't want Israel to talk to Syria; so it doesn't. His view of the Israel lobby is that it is merely seconding rightwing choices that the U.S. government is making. And so he says:

American choices heavily constrain the Jewish state, eliminating options and creating the environment in which Israel must make its own now far more limited and difficult choices.

That's where I demur. I believe that Israel has made its own choice not to speak to Syria, for years, and that its friends in Congress reinforce that line here. I feel like a lot of lefty Jews want to think the dog wags the tail: the Stephen Zunes line, that neocon Zionist Jews have had only minor influence over a rightwing administration. Or here is Shlomo Ben-Ami, in the latest Commentary, making the same point (I'm afraid it's not online yet, but I just got my issue in the mail):

"[T]he interplay of factors that truly make up American foreign policy [are] strategic considerations, imperial ambitions, oil, the arms industry, corporations like Bechtel and Halliburton, ideology, and, last but not by no means least, the political and intellectual profile of the president. Bush's moral certitude and self-imposed divine mission makes [sic] utterly redundant the need for an 'Israel Lobby' to teach him the political gospel it wants him to follow in the Middle East."

I think Ben Ami is wrong, that he is blinding himself to a multitude of sins under that little word "ideology," that George Bush had little idea of anything when he came into office. I.e., that neocons are smart guys with a highly-developed belief system; and they also had agency here (yes, along with a lot of other fools who pushed this war).

In fairness, Remba does go after Jewish "communal leaders" choices. A nice way of putting the fact that neocon beliefs about the Arab world have gained wide currency in the erstwhile liberal Jewish leadership. But read Remba's post (which he was not able to post; problems again, sorry folks):

You write: "I do question the political will of the body of American Jewry; if they feel misrepresented by the Israel lobby and their congressmen, they ought to rise up against them. George Soros says he's going to start an anti-occupation lobby. Good for him, I'm in his camp. Will he get numbers?"

I'd like to offer two of my recent articles on this subject for your and your readers' consideration. The first, published in the English edition of Ha'aretz, "Wanted: A Moderate Pro-Israel Lobby," can be read in Ha'aretz or on my blog at http://tough-dove-israel.blogspot.com/2006/11/haaretz-wanted-moderate-pr... The new dovish pro-Israel peace lobby is not a Soros initiative, but an cooperative effort of many liberal/progressive Jews from various Jewish organizations, think tanks, liberal Democratic political activists and funders.  read more »

How many supporters will we get? Watch and wait. Many of us are working on it.

One of the challenges facing American Jewry is to understand the Palestinian version of Israel's war of independence in 1948. What was, for Zionists, a great triumph was for Palestinians a Naqba, or catastrophe. 700,000 of them were soon gone. They fled in fear of massacre or were expelled. I know that some argue with that version of history; what's inarguable (as Shlomo Ben Ami points out) is that when the hostilities ended, the Arabs weren't invited back to their homes in the new Jewish state. People don't like to talk about this because it gives legitimacy to the "right of return" of these refugees. I think it's important to talk about for intellectual reasons, because it's true; and morally, an acknowledgment of the injustice would go some way toward healing the wounds.

All this to say that the latest Commentary, alas not yet online, contains a surprisingly-fair treatment of two Israel critics who have raised the issue of what Zionists did to the Arabs of Jaffa, which neighbors Tel Aviv. Writes Israeli Hillel Halkin:

"LeVine and Rotbard are openly hostile to Israel and Zionism. And yet, on a strictly factual level, one cannot fault most of their account... [T]here is no denying that Zionism did paint a deliberately unflattering picture of Palestinian Arab life, did claim to be settling Jews on land more desolate than it actually was... Nor is it debatable that Arab life in Jaffa was devastated by the military defeat of 1948, that the remaining Arab inhabitants were treated poorly, that deserted Arab villages were bulldozed as part of Tel Aviv's expansion, and that Jaffa's gentrifiers [who monopolize the waterfront] have mostly been Jews. These things, though viewable in different perspectives, are a matter of record."

Commentary should be applauded for such fair statements. I hope that this marks the entry into American Jewish discourse of a frank and open discussion of the Palestinian dispossession.

(The two books Halkin discusses are Overthrowing Geography: Jaffa, Tel Aviv, and the Struggle for Palestine (1880-1948), by burgeoning lefty star Mark LeVine, and White City, Black City (2005), by Israeli architect Sharon Rotbard.

The other day at Brandeis, Alan Dershowitz, responding to Jimmy Carter, took a shot at NYU's Tony Judt because of Judt's famous call (in the New York Review of Books) to give up on the idea of a Jewish state.

"Tony Judt is in favor of the complete dissolution of the state of Israel... the total dissolution of the state of Israel," said Dershowitz.

Two comments. First, that Dershowitz should bring this up shows that those who favor a single state in Palestine have gotten the issue on the agenda. Dershowitz's line is is now the talking point. Leon Wieseltier made a similar statement about Judt, with a similarly-angry tone, in the New Republic a few weeks back.

Second, Dershowitz's characterization doesn't seem fair to me; he is using eliminationist rhetoric to suggest that Judt is a kind of Nazi or antisemite, who would sweep Jews into the sea. In fact, if you read Judt's groundbreaking essay, you understand that his position is being caricatured. Yes, Dershowitz is right; Judt's vision would result in the end of the Jewish state. But his tone is pained, realistic, and even idealistic: it is a recovery of the old Judah Magnes/Elmer Berger/Anglo-American Inquiry Commission position that partition is racialist, that Arab and Jew should learn to live together in historic Palestine—because god knows, they haven't done a very good job of living with partition.  read more »

For another point of view on this, read Elik Alhanan's two-state position (near the end of this long post). Meantime, below is an excerpt of Judt's piece:

Whatever happens in the wake of President Bush’s new Iraq strategy, one thing won’t: Sad  read more »

“All these great soloists and conductors are family,” said Avi Shoshani, the secretary g  read more »

Lefty Jew Jeffrey Blankfort offers the same diagnosis as I have for the tepidness of the antiwar movement, the absence of Jews from the vanguard this time round.

Historically, [Jews] have funded the Left... They were the major funders of the Civil Rights Movement. They were the funders of the anti-war movement during the Viet Nam War. If people were arrested, and they needed bail, progressive Jews provided the bail, and the lawyers were mostly Jewish... Going back into the thirties, you have Jews active in the unions, active in every radical movement. That's the tradition I grew up in. It no longer exists. As a matter of fact, it's been erased from Jewish history. Young Jews growing up in America today have no idea of the Jewish radical past in this country.

Blankfort points to the same problem I have pointed to, the Israel lobby, which saw crushing Iraq as in Israel's interest. But I'd like to throw in another factor: class. Since Vietnam, Jews have risen dramatically in American society. My people are now implicated in the power structure in ways we never imagined in the '60s. Back then Jews who joined the antiwar movement thought of themselves as outsiders in American life. Most of the white Columbia U. radicals, for instance Mark Rudd, the late Ted Gold, the imprisoned David Gilbert, Bob Feldman—were Jewish kids from middle class backgrounds who felt alienated from a warmaking establishment.

Rudd, born Rudnitsky (his dad changed the name to advance in the military), writes in an essay on the Jewishness of the radicals:

What outraged me and my comrades so much about Columbia, along with its hypocrisy, was the air of genteel civility. Or should I say gentile? Despite the presence of so many Jews in the faculty and among the students.. the place was dripping with goyishness... We were peasant children right out of the shtetls of New Jersey and Queens screaming, "You want to know the truth about Columbia University, they're a bunch of liberal imperialists! " Morally and emotionally we could not fit into the civilized world of the racist, defense-oriented modern university. Such was our ordeal of civility.

Today's Jewish world is not the shtetl. We have assimilated, we are the American success story. Morally and emotionally, Jewish kids tend to identify with blue-state powers-that-be. There are exceptions, but they are exceptions that prove the rule: as a body we have little class interest in challenging the assumptions of the (corrupt!) ruling class that got us into this disastrous war.

A few more points about dual-citizenship and dual-loyalty.

Last week at the Brit Tzedek event at the Village Temple, the Israeli veteran said that if the West Bank settlements were uprooted tomorrow, most of the settlers would quietly take compensation and move to Israel. But the religious crazies might leave the country. Many of the Gaza settlers had moved back to the U.S., he said. "To New Jersey," someone in the audience called out, knowledgeably. "To Brooklyn," another man cried.

These people were talking about a real issue: the extent to which dual citizenship has allowed religious nutbags from this country with messianic visions to inflame the politics of the Middle East, then when things don't work out, just to come back here.

I dream about a day when national borders will vanish and we'll all sing Kumbaya. That hasn't happened yet; in the meantime, the U.S. and Israel need to clear some of these issues up. The problem came up on Democracy Now yesterday in a forum on the (disgusting) fact that "the Israeli government has effectively frozen visitation and re-entry of foreign nationals of Palestinian origin to the West Bank and Gaza."

Israeli human rights lawyer Leah Tsemel went right to the dual citizenship issue:

I wanted also to mention one very important point. We get information that there are... a half-million Israelis who live in the United States and have dual nationalities. Those, and most of the Israelis, have a second passport and third passport and third nationality, just to kind of -- to be on the safe side. I think that there should be a demand for mutuality. The same [rights should be afforded by] Jewish Israelis toward our American citizens, as we, the Americans have to your Israeli citizens. Because Israelis can come and go with the re-entry permit... into the United States, and at the same time, there is no mutuality, and [Arab] Americans are not allowed in here.

Exactly. There's a revolving door between Israel and the U.S., for Jews. Neocon Max Singer moves to Israel and continues to work for a Washington thinktank, pushing us to go to war in Iraq. Nutbag settlers move from here to the West Bank with religious visions. This freedom (and absence of freedom) is distorting our politics. Yes I dream of a day when there will be no borders. But not just for Jews.

P.S. John Fonte of the Hudson Institute (a principled guy) takes exception to my recent item on dual loyalty:

I read your comments related to my phone interview with you, and your conversation with Max Singer. It is, as we discussed, perfectly legal at the present time to vote in two countries. The implicit subtext of your comments is that Max as a "neo-con," (horrors, hide the children) should somehow be chastized. Why? Because after serious thought he changed his mind and arrived at a new understanding on the basis of principle? On the contrary, Max should be commended for his principled decision to vote only in the country in which he is most politically active. Many dual citizens have not been as principled.

Simkhe accuses me of ignoring a lot of other leftwing Jews' critiques of the neocons, and assuming I'm the first Jew to notice. I'm sure you're right; it's not a discourse I'm that familiar with. One thing I'd note is that I talked to Phyllis Bennis a couple years back and, yes she knows the issue better than I do, but she also said she wasn't bringing her Jewishness into it, it's an American issue, she's talking to Americans. One thing I'm trying to do is bring my Jewishness right in, figure out my own Jewish American identity in the process...

Tough Dove hits me for going over the line in the dual loyalty post. He and I go way back, we were young Jews at Harvard together. I consider him a friend. He says I'm unleashing plagues by using such language. Toughdove and I had lunch together a few months ago and he stated a similar fear at that time.

The first thing is, Toughdove is a political activist. I admire his work, which he refers to. He's in the liberal community, he's been sweating away at this issue for a long time before I even came around. Hats off to him. I'm not a political activist, I'm a writer. I'm interested in ideas here, and not as worried about the political consequences as I am about where the truth lies. Toughdove is holding the possibility of pogroms over me; a, I don't see them, and b, I feel as if Toughdove is failing to register the tremendous difference between Jewish status in America and the history of the diaspora in Europe from ghetto to emancipation to marginalization to extermination. I think our experience here is altogether a new thing, and really does challenge Jews to redefine their sense of their separateness from the goyim. It's a challenge to Jewish consciousness, and it's huge, sociologically.

On the ideas, I don't think Toughdove is responding to the point, which I would sharpen here: I don't think a Washington thinktank should tell us to invade Iraq based on the views of someone who is voting in both Israel and the U.S.—without telling us as much. I don't think the New Yorker should be running pieces on All the good reasons to invade Iraq by a guy who served in the Israeli military, without telling us that. That to me is over the line. I love a pluralist America. But Toughdove is deluding himself if he thinks the debacle in Iraq does not legitimately open the door on a (yes, emotionally charged) issue: How much the U.S. has conflated Israel's interests and our own, to our detriment. Sorting those interests out, when the Middle East is afire, is honorable work.

I bridle at Toughdove's claim that certain ideas are off limits because racists and antisemites have espoused them. That is anti-intellectual of him. Tony Judt has been eloquent on this point. I won't be bound by that type of blackmail—especially when so many people are suffering in Iraq. The liberals in Toughdove's camp who would quiet me here are shielding themselves from the tremendous negative consequences of the neocons' ideas. They worry about some possible pogrom in America; well thanks to a lot of causes Americans now need to examine, there are pogroms right now, killing far more people than the Russian pogroms of the 1880s, in Iraq. I bet Toughdove's children are not in any danger of dying in Iraq.

One other point. As I said, Toughdove went to Harvard, i.e., he gained Establishment certification. Two other liberal Jewish friends of mine from Harvard have written important pieces about Walt-Mearsheimer, the latest being Jim Traub in the New York Times Magazine the other day. Both these pieces, ala Toughdove, have written off as highly questionable/antisemitic the two scholars' questioning of the morality of Israel's founding. W-M dared to bring up the expulsion of the Arabs in '48 and said, Hey guess what, Israel isn't lily-white here—but we still believe there was a moral basis for its founding and that it has a right to exist. Both pieces I'm referring to (the other was in the NYRB) then quoted Israeli historian Benny Morris, who feels, angrily, that W-M had misused his historical work. Both pieces accepted Morris's view to argue that W-M are out of line.

I think this is an intellectual shortcoming. The treatment of the Arabs in the '48 War of Independence is something that American intellectuals should consider fully for themselves, that American Jews ought to know about, and Americans generally. Benny Morris isn't the only informant here; there is Norman Finkelstein, Shlomo Ben-Ami (in Scars of War, Wounds of Peace), and many Arab writers. But Jewish American writers routinely dismiss the issue out of hand. I'm not talking about the right of return per se, I'm not talking about the failure of Arab states to absorb the refugees in the last 58 years, I'm not talking about suicide bombers. I'm talking about a simple historical question: What befell these people? And what did we do in the U.S. to foster it?

In the liberal U.S. Jewish community, there's a real inability even to look at this because of the concerns about the political consequences. Joseph Lelyveld, the former executive editor at the Times, and author of a powerful book against apartheid (Move Your Shadow), 2 years ago published a memoir, Omaha Blues, where he talks about his Zionist father Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld's effort in the 1940s (underwritten by the nascent Zionist lobby) to discredit opposition to the formation of a Jewish state that came from my intellectual ancestors: assimilationist (or integrationist, as Rabbi Elmer Berger put it) non-Zionists and anti-Zionists within the Jewish community in the U.S. In his memoir, thoughtful Lelyveld never really considers the actual consequences of his father's actions. It's a matter for celebration, presumably. And yes, I grew up celebrating Israel's founding; and not knowing anything about al-Nakba, what the Palestinians call their catastrophe.

Acknowledgement of this catastrophe in our discourse would actually go some way toward healing the tremendous rage, and wounds, in the Middle East. That's the intellectual dereliction; let's open this up for discussion; thank you W-M! We're Americans, proud and free! Last night I met a young Palestinian Arab living in Syria, lately come to the U.S. on a State Department scholarship to study. He has a private dream. That one day he can achieve a status in this country that will allow him to visit the village his parents and grandparents described to him, growing up, a village they fled in war out of fear of massacre. He just wants to see it. Right now, he is stateless and angry. Can American Jews not understand his feelings of displacement?

When attacking the ideology of the neoconservatives, the big enchildada is dual loyalty: in their hearts, do they feel allegiance to Israel? Gabriel Schoenfeld of Commentary Magazine said that this was the clear thrust of Walt and Mearsheimer's paper, they were accusing supporters of Israel of being a fifth column. W&M have responded (in their recent rebuttal) that "we recognize that all Americans have many affinities and commitments," including to other countries. That's the American way. They're echoing the Louis Brandeis line, which he came up with 90 years ago to assuage concerns about dual loyalty held by assimilated Jews who didn't care for Zionism, such as Jacob Schiff and Arthur Sulzberger.

Where academics fear to tread, the blogosphere doesn't. I think it's a legitimate issue. But how to talk about it?

The question has come up lately in the Jimmy Carter brouhaha. Critics of Israel are justifiably upset that Amazon.com is not being evenhanded in its listing for Carter's book: in its "Editorial Reviews" heading for the book—"a space normally used either for the publisher's own description of a book, or for short, even-handed summaries from listing services such as Booklist and Publishers Weekly"—Amazon offered only the full text of a sharply-critical Washington Post review by the New Yorker's Jeffrey Goldberg, accusing Carter of being unChristian in his approach to Israel/Palestine. (Amazon.com would seem to have amended the heading, to include a PW review alongside Goldberg's.) The critics point to Goldberg's background—that he "is a citizen of Israel as well as the United States, and that he volunteered to serve in the Israeli Defense Forces, for which he worked as a guard at a prison for Palestinian detainees." The critics are saying, You should say where Goldberg's coming from.

(Goldberg doesn't mention citizenship on his website bio. Henry Norr, who wrote the petition to Amazon, tells me, "Glenn Frankel of the Washington Post, in a review of [Goldberg's book] "Prisoners," includes the following in his summary of Goldberg's personal story: "Like all new citizens below a certain age, he enters the Israel Defense Forces...")

The issue is a long-held concern among Jewish critics of Zionism. In 1970, a leading Jewish anti-Zionist, Rabbi Elmer Berger, learned that several Jewish Americans had served in the Israeli Defense Forces, having gained automatic citizenship in Israel.

[T]his peculiar dual nationality extends only to Jews...It is extended to citizens... who have never been to Israel and whose only relationship to that state is the Israeli presumption—written into its nationality legislation—which claims as a national anyone identified as a Jew. [In allowing them to serve without question,] the United States government...is acquiescing in this religiously-discriminatory presumption...[and it] is contrary to the constitution.

Berger worried about Jewish identity. He feared that American Jews would be called upon to define their religious identity in terms of identification with a neo-colonialist "theocratic" state that was dehumanizing Arabs. (He was right!) And he feared that American Jews would be torn in allegiance, or be seen to be torn in allegiance.

I called one of the leading experts on dual loyalty, John Fonte, of the neoconservative Hudson Institute. Fonte doesn't write about Jews and Israel (probably a Career-Limiting Move at Hudson!), he writes about Mexico. He is concerned that in granting Mexicans in the U.S. a right to vote in Mexican elections, Mexico is making those citizens "supra-citizens," with more rights than other citizens—and also slowing the process of American assimilation.

That's his word: assimilation. This neocon scholar says that assimilation is a democratic value in America: for immigrants or their children, or grandchildren, to take on Americanness.

"I don't think it's a good idea" for American citizens to fight for or vote in other countries, Fonte said. Before America entered World War II, some Americans went over to fly with the RAF, and neocon Fonte thinks Americans joining the Israeli army are in the same category, taking part in a war that's in America's interests. Still he thinks that the State Department should sign off on this kind of thing on a "case by case basis."

"I don't think Israel's interests and ours overlap completely," I said.

"There's never a complete overlap of interests," Fonte said. "Even Britain and the U.S. differed on the Grenada invasion."

You used to forfeit your citizenship by voting in another country or fighting for one. The law on forfeiting citizenship ended in the late 60s on a 5-4 Supreme Court vote in a—you guessed it—Israel-based case, where a Jewish-American artist who had voted in Israel wanted to move back here. Thus a 200-year precedent crumbled.

I told Fonte that the revolving door between Israel and the U.S. disturbed me. One of my relatives just came back from his "birthright" trip to Israel ("Israel is about Jews. It is about saving Jews...") and showed me photos of American kids proudly holding guns and serving in the IDF—serving the apartheid-like Occupation. My relative's commemorative t-shirt for the trip was IDF olive-green, to show solidarity with an army that helps to deprive Palestinians of their rights. On campuses here, Jewish students are told to wear blue and white in solidarity with Israel, something that would have horrified Elmer Berger.

"I find this confusing," I said.

"Definitely there's confusion," Fonte agreed. "Right now you can do anything."

He pointed out that after one of his articles on Mexico, fellow Hudson Institute hawk Max Singer told him that he was going to stop voting in U.S. elections, just in Israeli ones.

So a big neocon was voting in both countries? I called Singer in Israel.

"Correct," Singer said. "I felt I should vote in one country or another but not both."

"John Fonte said you came to that realization not that long ago."

"Yes."

Singer says the dual loyalty issue in his case did not arise from his being Jewish but from being a citizen of both countries. (Which he could be because he's Jewish). He even served in the U.S. Army reserve, according to Hudson's website. But he's decided to be "politically active in Israel."

Of course, he's politically active here, too, helping to shape our foreign policy. Hudson describes him as "Senior Fellow, Board Member, Hudson Institute, Washington, D.C. Headquarters. Areas of Expertise: Middle East..."

I guess I'm still confused.

A founding father and jet-setter, a kibbutznik and a bon vivant, a secular man in an Orthodox city,  read more »

The deepening political crisis surrounding Iraq has generated fears in the Jewish community that Americans are going to blame Jews for the failure—because so many Jewish leaders supported the invasion of a country that had many times attacked Israel, but never attacked the United States. Detailing that support was of course a theme of Walt & Mearsheimer's paper, to which The Forward responded with an editorial, "In Dark Times, Blame the Jews." This week The Forward publishes another attack on Walt/Mearsheimer, by Israeli liberal Yossi Alpher, who claims that then-P.M. Ariel Sharon vigorously opposed the invasion ahead of time, and warned the U.S. not to do it.

Had Sharon made his criticism public, citing the dangers posed to vital Israeli interests, might he have made a difference in the prewar debate in the United States and the world? Certainly he would have poured cold water on the postwar assertions of critics, like professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, who have fingered Israel, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and pro-Israelis in the administration for instigating the war...

There were, of course, neoconservative types in Israel who did encourage the United States to occupy Iraq and advocated democratic elections wherever possible in the Middle East. But there were also many Israelis, this writer included, who spoke out openly and publicly against the American scheme.

This is rank misrepresentation. Whether or not Sharon warned the U.S. in a back channel, Israeli leadership opinion and U.S. Jewish leadership opinion was 4-square for the invasion. Leftwing Jews like Tony Kushner and myself demonstrated against the war and spoke out forcefully, and were marginalized for doing so. Alpher is either lying or deluding himself when he says he opposed the war. Why did he write this in bitterlemons before the war, in October 2002:

Israel is and will be cheering on the American effort, while the sentiments of the Palestinian population, as well as its key institutions, will be with Saddam Hussein

Or this just before the war:

Removing Saddam is good enough

An American-led attempt to conquer Iraq, remove the Saddam Hussein regime and destroy its weapons of mass destruction will almost certainly succeed. An American occupying force in Iraq will almost certainly pressure neighboring Syria and Iran to reconsider some of their more hostile and repressive actions. For Israel and other moderate countries in the region, this is good news. And it is good enough.... we shall have to suffice with the destruction of a regime of psychopaths who finance Palestinian terrorism and pontificate about the destruction of Israel.

Or this as the war began:

The American war on Iraq, however problematic for much of the world, is for most of us in Israel a welcome attempt by a friend and ally to deal with a strategic danger that we have been struggling to cope with on our own for decades.

Or this, about the power of the neocons (whom he treats as a sideshow in his latest article):

But [the] willful alienation by Washington of the global community and the multilateral approach also bespeaks an extraordinary sense of power in the US, cultivated particularly by the neoconservative lobby.

The sad fact is that many Jewish liberals joined the neocons in pushing the Iraq invasion: Pollack, Friedman, Berman, Alpher, the hits go on and on. I've said before that the war represents a crisis for Jewish identity: it reveals the degree to which Jewish identity is now built upon the demonization of Arabs, hundreds of thousands of whom are now dying and fleeing and suffering in incomprehensible ways in part because of crazy ideas hatched in thinktanks. The Forward is responding with cowardice to an intellectual chore: What was the Jewish role in this mess? Progressive Jews have a part to play in this soul-searching. As LRB editor Mary Kay Wilmers, a progressive Jew herself, who published Walt and Mearsheimer, said to me months ago: "It seems that the American left is also claimed by the Israel lobby."

Brooklyn College's Corey Robin has a fascinating piece in the latest LRB about Hannah Arendt, treating three objections that Arendt, who was sympathetic to Zionism, formed in the '40s to certain currents of Zionist ideology. Now that Israel has elevated to cabinet level a racist who supports expulsion of Arabs, Arendt's prescient critique is worth reviewing, especially as it touches on questions of identity and—my concern—the degree to which American Jewish identity is centered on devotion to Israel.

1. The Arab Question. "By 1944.. she had come to see it as the 'most important' challenge. Without 'Arab-Jewish co-operation,' she wrote in 1948, 'the whole Jewish venture in Palestine is doomed.'"

2. Israel's dependence on super-powers would allow it to show contempt for its neighbors. "Only folly could dictate a policy that trusts distant imperial power for protection, while alienating the goodwill of neighbours,' she wrote. In a 1950 essay, she declared that Zionists simply ignored or failed to understand 'the awakening of colonial peoples and the new nationalist solidarity in the Arab world from Iraq to French Morocco'."

3. Some Zionists' definition of Jewishness, as a people or nationality, was a "volk" concept that recalled the racist German definition of Jewishness. Writes Robin: "In 1948, the leader of Herut, Israel's Revisionist party, travelled to America. Arendt drafted a letter of protest to the New York Times, which was signed by Einstein, Sidney Hook and others. Herut was 'no ordinary political party', she wrote. It was 'closely akin in its organisation, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist parties'. It used 'terrorism', and its goal was a 'Fuhrer state' based on 'ultra-nationalism, religious mysticism and racial superiority'. The letter also decried those 'Americans of national repute' who 'have lent their names to welcome' the Herut leader, giving 'the impression that a large segment of America supports Fascist elements in Israel'. The leader of Herut was Menachem Begin."

Last night 100 progressive people, almost all Jewish (one wore Muslim head covering), crowded the Village Temple in New York to learn about conditions in the Occupied Territories. The speakers were a former Israeli soldier and a former Palestinian resistance fighter. They said the following:

—There are 530 checkpoints in the West Bank. Only 30 are on the Green Line between the West Bank and Israel. Yes; some of those have stopped suicide bombers. The purpose of the other 500 has nothing to do with security. "The strategy there is to destroy Palestinian society, to prevent any joint organized struggle [against the occupation]," said the Israeli.

—The Israeli P.M. recently promised the Palestinian President that the checkpoints would be relaxed. They have not been. "The army receives these instructions and... does not take the instructions," the Israeli said, citing Israel's leading newspaper. Thus the army acts on its own as a repressive force (Israeli generals have long defied civilian supervision).

—The Palestinian, his brother, and his father have spent 25 years in Israeli jails, much of that time without due process, for such offenses as graffiti and other statements opposing the occupation. The man's family has lost many acres of its land to Jewish settlers, in a village outside Bethlehem.

—Arbitrary laws prevent Israelis from carrying Palestinians in their cars in the Occupied Territories. The intention, says the Israeli, is to keep the two sides from talking.

The situation these men describe is worse than apartheid. "Three and a half million people live without any rights," said the Israeli, whose own sister was killed by a suicide bomber. "You want to stop these people [suicide bombers], you should give them a reason to live."

The campaign by the U.S. Jewish leadership to smear Jimmy Carter will one day be taught in history books, as an effort by a privileged elite to suppress the truth. Slavery and segregation also had powerful defenders who misrepresented those conditions. Despite all their well-connected efforts, these people will lose for two simple reasons: the facts are against them, and a movement has begun to discover those facts. The progressive Jews jamming the temple last night are the evidence.

The Brit Tzedek tour by these two former combatants in the Occupied Territories continues across our country over the next month. It is aimed at one thing: to open Jews' eyes and ears. Let us pray.

Last night Brit Tzedek, a group that opposes the Israel lobby from within the Jewish community, staged a presentation by two members of Combatants for Peace, an organization of former Israeli soldiers and Palestinian resistance fighters working for a two-state solution. About 60 people turned out in the basement of Beth Elohim, a Reform temple in Brooklyn.

A table was set up on the dais. I recognized the Palestinian at once. He wore a pressed blue shirt and khakis, had a trimmed mustache. Sulaiman Al Hamri walked with a steel crutch. A smallish Jewish kid pulled out a chair for him, a mophead in his 20s with a string bracelet and jeans and old beaten shoes. Now I waited for the kid to bring in the Israeli. Then he sat down next to Al Hamri and I realized he was the Israeli. Just a kid. Elik Elhanan.

Elhanan introduced them. "We are not professors or experts. We did not come here to tell you the truth or what is absolutely right. We came here to tell you our stories and opinions."

Al Hamri told his story first, about spending 4-1/2 years in Israeli prisons. I'll blog about this in days to come, I want to tell Elhanan's story now.

Elhanan is a student in Tel Aviv, 29. He grew up in Jerusalem and as a boy, he did not realize there was a conflict in the Middle East. For he never thought about it, and when the time came that he did, he didn't see that he had any part of it. "I have no problem with the Palestinians, no fight with them." At 18, he joined the Army for the usual reasons. Out of a sense of duty, and privilege, and wanting to be part of something bigger than himself.

His consciousness changed. Over the next three years, he realized, "I am part of this conflict, I can't escape it."

Several events had taken place that had "obliged" him to see the larger issues. In some, he had found himself "an aggressor." He didn't want to go into these events, he said dismissively. They had made him aware of the "discrepancies between the very lofty discourse describing what we are doing and the reality on the ground.

"But the most influential event, I found myself all of a sudden, a victim. On the 4th of September 1997 two suicide bombers left Nablus and killed five people in Jerusalem. 180 people were injured. Among those killed was my sister Smadari and her friend. They were going to school." A third friend was so critically injured she is still not the same.  read more »

The latest battle in the ideological war over Israel/Palestine took place the other day at a high school outside Boston. Andover High had invited a pro-Palestinian group called Wheels of Justice to talk at the school. Local Jewish groups rose in opposition; the event was cancelled. Then the ACLU stepped in and the event took place, 300 people jammed into a library, with loud protest.

A few comments:

1. As Jimmy Carter has shown, there is a new actor on the political stage: liberal Christians. (Per the Globe):

The Rev. Ralph Galen, minister of Andover's Unitarian Universalist Congregation and a member of Merrimack Valley People for Peace, said [Rabbi Robert] Goldstein's stance against Wheels of Justice has disappointed him. "The situation in the Middle East is so complex that it's already at a boiling point," said Galen, who helped bring The Wheels of Justice to neighboring North Andover two years ago with less resistance. "It just pushes us over and it's so hard to maintain our rationality, but we must."

Liberal Protestants used to be quiet about the Middle East, now they're demanding to be heard; the Presbyterian church, for instance, is debating divestment. This is part of the rage at Jimmy Carter: rightwing Jews want to keep the Middle East club exclusive. 2. Contrast the liberal churches' position with the strength that pro-Israel groups are drawing from the religious right. See Zev Chafets's new book, A Match Made in Heaven, about evangelicals' support for Israel, reviewed lately in Commentary Magazine. Chafets calls it the "wonderful Judeo-evangelical alliance." I wonder how wonderful it is. To preserve Israel from criticism, the American-Jewish community is being drawn further and further right.

3. The Globe article features a student at Andover High calling for a balanced panel discussion of the issues, rather than "just" Wheels for Justice. The pity to me here is that a Jewish kid is being mobilized in an argument about a country he probably has never been to, and whose apartheid-like practices he has no idea of. The pressure on Jewish kids these days is sure intense! I feel for them. When I was a little Jewish kid, I was protesting the Vietnam War with my parents and hearing about the Freedom Riders. What larks! True enough, I was being indoctrinated, too, but it was a hopeful set of values, one I still choose to embrace, liberal universalist ideas going back to abolitionism. These kids are being indoctrinated in a narrower set of religious-nationalist values: basically, Arabs Bad, Israelis Good.

In her 1997 autobiography, the late Katharine Graham of the Washington Post described her father as an assimilating Jew who didn't talk about his Jewishness to his Episcopal-church-going children. He was "involved in Jewish charities, causes, and international issues.

"He was not a Zionist, however, believing strongly that he was an American citizen first and foremost."

That's odd. Her father, the financier Eugene I. Meyer Jr., who bought the Washington Post in the 1930s, is a figure in Zionist history. Behind the scenes, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis turned to Meyer again and again for money to support the Jewish settlement in Palestine. Meyer met with Brandeis's Zionist klatches, personally lobbied his friend FDR on their account, and agreed to head the University Zionist society—an organization to build support among Jews on campus (per Brandeis's letters, edited by Melvin Urofsky and David W. Levy, and Peter Grose's Israel in the Mind of America).

So was Katharine Graham lying about her father?

Well, no. Despite Meyer's support, even Brandeis conceded late in life that "his heart was never in Zionism and he did this largely on my account." So Meyer was merely tithing—to something he didn't believe in. This speaks to an interesting feature of the Israel lobby: It has long counted on support from assimilationist Jews who were lukewarm on the idea but went along under pressure from their nationalist Jewish friends.

Consider Meyer's counterpart at the NYT: former publisher Arthur Hays Sulzberger. When Sulzberger died in 1968, the Times obit was emphatic about his views. "[Jewishness] was to him a religion, not a nationality. He did not believe Jews to be a race or a people, and, like Mr. Ochs [his father-in-law], was deeply opposed to the Zionism movement..."

Deeply opposed. Successful assimilating German Jews like Sulzberger and Meyer loved America. They were becoming big deals in the land of opportunity, they didn't quite see the point of Zionism—though they knew that Eastern European Jews who had fled pogroms were excited by it.

Sulzberger flirted with public declarations of his anti-Zionism. According to Thomas Kolsky's splendid history, Jews Against Zionism, in the 1940s, Sulzberger helped draft the mission statement of the anti-Zionist Jewish organization, the American Council for Judaism—which opposed "all philosophies that stress the racialism, the nationalism and the homelessness of the Jews, as injurious to their interests." Wow.

But in the end Sulzberger dithered and didn't sign on publicly. He wanted to, he told the Reform rabbis who headed the group. But till it got a big following, he just couldn't do so. It would hurt the integrity of the newspaper. Chicken.

Besides, the nascent Israel lobby was already on the Times' case, accusing it of being "a transmission belt for anti-Zionist propaganda." This ticked Sulzberger off. He said the viciousness of the Zionists' attacks were a big reason he had converted to anti-Zionism!

What is my point? Here are two powerful Jews, one a non-Zionist, the other anti-, controlling two of the most important newspapers, and both are afraid to express their views. Some may call that professionalism, I call it abdication: they were holding back on a central issue of the time. The publishers of the New Republic and the New York Sun and Commentary would never cheat their readers of their views of Israel, that's their raison d'etre.

Why didn't these men express their views? I think they were ashamed of their assimilation. And they were outplayed by the nationalists in their community. Kolsky says that the Zionists beat the anti-Zionists not on the issues, but by outsmarting them. They put them on the defensive by saying they were unrepresentative or "self-hating." They allowed them to piously play by the rules—no lobbying! the anti-Zionists declared— while the Zionists were working the White House. Give them credit. Today the Israel lobby works the cloakrooms and paints anyone who criticizes the intimacy of the U.S.-Israel relationship as an anti-Semite; and liberal Jews sigh and walk away.

Lately Richard Cohen of the Washington Post admitted regretfully that the creation of Israel was a "mistake." Sixty years ago a group of Reform anti-Zionist Jews were saying just that: that a Jewish state was an anachronism, it would result in endless violence in the Middle East, and would require support from Jews here, which would make those Jews confused about their allegiance. The two publishers evidently shared many of these views but couldn't take a stand.

So what was the position of liberal assimilating Jews in the Zionist movement? Just what Stokely Carmichael said the position of women was in the black power movement: prone.

The fallout from Walt and Mearsheimer's bombshell paper on the Israel lobby includes a loss of credibility to Commentary and the New Republic, two eminent journals (to which I subscribe, thereby emulating my parents, whose house was filled with stacks of Commentary) that have chosen to respond to W/M by denying that there is any such thing as an Israel lobby.

In the January Commentary, Gabriel Schoenfeld returns to his theme, Jewish powerlessness, when he argues that the U.S. government has always supported Israel for its own (goyische) reasons, not through any Jewish prodding. By this analysis, AIPAC should fold up its tent tomorrow, it's wasting a lot of hardworking people's money. And the ailing British chemist Chaim Weizmann should never have rushed to the White House to extract a commitment from Harry Truman to a Jewish state in 1948, again, a waste of time, Truman was planning to defy his own State Department and oppose a binational state.

Israeli scholar Benny Morris was the point man for the New Republic in its attack on Walt/Mearsheimer last year. Outraged that the authors had cited his (honorable) investigation of the expulsions of '48, Morris was shrill, his piece filled with meaningless discussions of his favorite subject, troop strengths in battles long ago. (What is it with these writers who fetishize combat?)

But in his 2001 book Righteous Victims, Morris several times refers to the Zionist and Israel lobby. He says, quite accurately, that Zionist pressure tactics were used on the Truman Administration to bring about American support for partition in '47 (in defiance of the State Department and the recommendations of the Anglo-American Inquiry Commission, the equivalent of the Iraq Study Group of that time). And Morris honestly describes the Israel lobby as a potent force in U.S. politics when he cites the secretary of state's threat to cut off "all public and private aid to Israel" to punish Israeli belligerence in the Suez crisis of '56:

President Eisenhower had just been elected to a second term; he could allow himself to ignore Jewish lobbying.

It just goes to show: Everyone knows there's an Israel lobby. The journalistic challenge is, what are its dimensions? The New Republic and Commentary have chosen to react angrily to the non-Jewish authors' statements rather than doing what they should do, telling us how the lobby works. By responding so defensively, these journals have damaged themselves, and the discourse; American readers deserve better.

P.S. Morris's point re Suez reveals the poverty of Dennis Ross's analysis of the lobby in the debate at Cooper Union last September. Ross basically said, Sure, AIPAC has the Congress in a half-nelson, but no one controls the presidency. Morris (and Abba Eban) contradict this claim.

Henry Siegman has again and again proved a leader on the Israel/Palestine issue. His review of Jimmy Carter's apartheid-in-Palestine book in the Nation offers breathtaking relief from the smear campaign against Carter. His piece concludes with an explanation of Carter's enormous contribution to Israel's security.

Accusations by Alan Dershowitz and others that Carter is indifferent to Israel's security only prove that no good deed goes unpunished. Arguably, the single most important contribution to Israel's security by far was the removal of Egypt--possessing the most powerful of the military forces in the Arab world--from the Arab axis that was intent on the destruction of the State of Israel in its early years. Egypt's peace agreement with Israel permanently removed the possibility of such a combined Arab assault against the Jewish State, something for which the late Syrian president Hafez Assad could not get himself to forgive Sadat, even after he was assassinated.... Carter's book provides an important reminder that the Camp David agreement not only created a durable peace between Egypt and Israel but served as a model for all of the major Israeli-Palestinian peace initiatives that were to follow. Oslo's concepts of a self-governing Palestinian Authority, of a five-year process that concludes with agreements o