Harry S. Truman

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.

The paddling Jimmy Carter is receiving for making criticisms of Israel that are common in Israel demonstrates a law of the Israel conversation: It is one thing for Jews to criticize Israel, but it's not O.K. for non-Jews to do so. This law is demonstrated by the Hillel chapters I wrote about the other day: it's OK for Jewish groups to host the Israel veterans Breaking the Silence, but those same groups will criticize Palestinian organizations when they sponsor the very same program—as if the Arab groups are doing so as the first step toward a pogrom. Jews feel that they can claim this exclusivity as a (historically) persecuted people. In the same way it is O.K. for blacks to use the n-word, but Michael Richards ended his career by using the word.

The law came to mind after I got a small book published by the American Jewish Historical Society, called "Essays on American Zionism." (1980). There is an essay in this book by Abba Eban, the famously eloquent Israeli Ambassador to the U.N.

Eban's essay is about Jewish influence on the White House. "Influence" is his word, so is "pressure." In fact Eban describes as absolutely key to Israel's emergence the very thing that the Times recently dismissed as an antisemitic delusion—Jewish influence on Harry Truman.

Some statements from Eban:

—"Public influence" by the American Zionist movement leader Rabbi Abba Silver "would have failed if other avenues of pressure and influence had not been brought to bear on presidential decisions."

—Before the 1944 Democratic Convention, Jewish leaders were told that Senator Harry Truman needed $25,000 for publicity so that he might replace FDR's then-VP Henry Wallace. "I told Boyle that I didn't know Senator Truman,' [Zionist and manufacturer Dewey] Stone later recalled, 'but... if he wanted me to take a gamble I would make the $25,000 available'... When President Roosevelt died in 1945 Harry S. Truman succeeded him and Dewey Stone was among the few to whom he owed a political debt."

—In '48, Truman feared losing, and Stone raised crucial funds, along with his friend Abe Feinberg, another leading Zionist; and they "thereafter had fairly free access to Truman in times of crisis."

—Also in '48, when Truman complained of pressure from Zionists, Jewish leaders arranged for the visit to the White House by Truman's former haberdashery partner Eddie Jacobson in order that Jacobson might become "a lever of influence in the central international predicament of the age."

—The "need for Israel's friends to have a permanent link with the White House arose again" in the case of JFK. Stone and other friends of Israel did not trust JFK because of his father's equivocal views of Nazi Germany. In Aug. 1960, Kennedy came to Feinberg's apartment at the Hotel Pierre and met with "a group of influential Jewish leaders [who] interrogated Kennedy stringently on matters affecting Jews and Israel." As a result, Stone had a "close, personal relationship" with Kennedy till he died.

—Indeed, "without the support of American Jewry" Israel would not have been able to emerge from "vulnerability and weakness into sovereignty." This "extraordinary solidarity and kinship... enlarged Israel's power beyond the limited dimensions of its space and size."

God bless him, Eban is merely describing the workings of part of the Israel lobby. For statements less emphatic than Eban's, Walt and Mearsheimer have been described in the press as antisemites. Keep in mind that one of the key things these influencers were trying to influence was Truman's decision to support the formation of a Jewish state in '47 and recognize Israel in '48. If he hadn't done so, English control of Mandatory Palestine would have gone over to a United Nations trusteeship of the territory. You have to wonder if a more deliberate process might not have worked out better.

Steven Erlanger wrote a great piece for the Times last week about a study by Peace Now showing the staggering percentage of stolen Arab land being built upon by Israelis (facts on the ground!). The story ran off the front page. The Times should be congratulated for running it and running it so prominently.

The Times is under a ton of pressure. Bloggers can say just about anything they want without that much consequence (though yes, talking about Palestine is what they call a CLM at Goldman Sachs: "career limiting move;" you won't get a lot of mainstream assignments). But the Times gets a thousand angry letters on a story like Erlanger's; and then people organize against the Times. It isn't what you see that matters, it's the back channel: Influential friends call Times editors. I know this because an editor friend once complained to me how little freedom the Times had.

If you want a glimpse of that pressure, read Steve Erlanger's letter to Partners for Peace (responding to Michael Brown) a year or so back, defending a piece. It includes such gems as "I'm not an international lawyer, I'm glad to say, but I should have broadened the point..." Reading between the lines, I think Erlanger is saying, If you only understood how much I'm trying to do to get the word out on your side; you should see how much flak I get from the other side. Pressure. Speaking for myself, if I had his job, I think I'd throw myself in the Dead Sea.

The pressure on the Times supports Tolstoy's theory of history. In War and Peace, Tolstoy said that the more power you got, the less choice you got about what you were going to do. All the forces of history descended on you as soon as you had power to make real choices. Napoleon's decision to invade Russia in 1812 was one of the great disasters of history, and any moron knew it was a disaster—but how much actual freedom did Napoleon have? The pressures forcing him in were monumental. I think it's the same point Orwell makes in Shooting an Elephant. He doesn't want to kill the elephant, it is wrong and pointless to shoot the elephant, but as a colonial official, he's under tremendous pressure from the population and from the British Empire to represent it. He kills the elephant.

I'd extend the lesson to two American situations. Bush's decision to invade Iraq, and Harry Truman's decision to recognize the Israeli state in 1948.

I don't think we'll ever know just why George Bush made the most calamitous decision a president has ever made. I assume there was a lot of pressure though, it wasn't a free and easy decision. He was surrounded by ideologues, notably Cheney and Rumsfeld, who had been pushing this endlessly. He gave in. The administrative lesson of the Bush presidency seems to be, Be careful of who you listen to. He's learned it: today all the neoconservatives are exiled to beyond shouting distance. (You can tell because they're all shouting.)

Truman's decision to recognize Israel went against his own best instincts (and now Richard Cohen in the Washington Post says bravely that the idea was well-intentioned but "a mistake."). Truman was for a binational state. The Anglo-American Inquiry commission had seconded this view, share the land. But he came under tremendous pressure to support partition, and then when Israel declared itself a state, to recognize it. What is pressure? Chaim Weizmann was visiting him at the White House. Eddie Jacobson, his old haberdashery partner, was coming in from Kansas City to talk about a Jewish homeland. His own administration had three or four key Jewish aides in it who were in touch with the Zionist movement. And they were constantly learning the latest actions of the State Department and running circles around them. The Zionist lobby was camped in D.C. Meanwhile, Truman was being threatened that if he didn't recognize Israel, he would lose the election the following November because of the Jewish vote in New York and Pennsylvania, and also Jewish money. (None of this is an antisemitic canard, by the way; it is all from former New York Times reporter Peter Grose's great book, Israel in the American Mind). Truman had little choice at all. His presidential papers are filled with complaints about Zionist pressure tactics. Because, pressure works.

Erlanger has little choice either. He and the Times showed boldness last week. Let's applaud them—and now turn up the pressure.

Toshikuni Doi is a 50-ish Japanese journalist now visiting the U.S. after spending years in the Occupied Territories with a camcorder. The other day at Columbia he had his first American audience, for a documentary about a family in a Gaza refugee camp in the '90s.

"I want to give Palestinian people a human face," Doi said by way of introduction. "You see that Palestinians are human beings like you. They have a family. They love each other. Each person has a name. That is my message."

The film is nearly an hour long, and is cinema verite, compressed from hundreds of hours of shooting, and without commentary. It was shot chiefly inside the cinderblock rooms of the family of a man called Abu Bassam, and its focus is on father and sons, with only occasional intrusions of the outside world. Some heavily-armed Israeli soldiers, for instance, swing by on anonymous patrols.

The film is utterly desolating. You see a large family having to live almost its entire life within a few square meters. Many times there are a dozen people in a small room, eating or talking, paying cards, watching television. The family's income is meager, their opportunities almost nil. The oldest son was arrested for his participation in a demonstration and spent two years in an Israeli prison, and now cannot get employment. "I feel like I am slowly wasting away, day by day." The second son has lately lost his job as a butcher in Israel because he cannot renew papers that were arbitrarily seized at a crowded checkpoint, and the process of renewing the papers involves days of waiting outside, and arbitrary refusals. The third son dreamed of being a doctor. "I wanted to make a contribution to society." There was no way for him to become a doctor, he became a teacher, and he is unemployed.  read more »

Today the Times at last quotes Steve Walt fairly, in an article by Steve Erlanger and David Sanger about why Israel and the U.S. are joined in a war on terror from Gaza to Baghdad, and maybe on to Tehran.

Though, rest assured, the Times is careful to dismiss Walt and Mearsheimer's paper on "The Israel Lobby" as an antisemitic canard:

Former Israeli ambassadors to Washington like Mr. Rabinovich, Mr. Arens and Mr. Shoval all scoff at the Walt-Mearsheimer thesis, which echoes criticisms of Jewish influence as far back as the presidency of Harry S. Truman.

Wait—why stop at Truman? Pro-Israel forces in the U.S. have played a crucial role in the life of the settlement and state, going back to the Wilson administration. Saying so doesn't make you an Israel critic. It might even make you a dispassionate scholar:

1.Albert Lindemann (of UC Santa Barbara) in his book on antisemitism, Esau's Tears:

Leading State Department professionals came to resent bitterly what they considered a Jewish power so great that It was able to contravene completely the established role of the State Department. A most striking case in point was the meeting in Washington, D.C., in May 1917 between [British foreign secretary] Balfour and Justice Brandeis [lately appointed the first Jew among the Supremes]. Although he was close to President Wilson, Brandeis had no official authority to speak on foreign relations. Nevertheless, he communicated to Balfour a strong American support for the ideas of Zionism. Historian Peter Grose has commented that "as an illustration of back-channel diplomacy at its most effective, the Balfour-Brandeis meeting was exceptional. A Foreign Minister seeking understanding on a delicate political issue turned not to his official opposite number, the Secretary of State, or even to the other foreign policy advisers known to be close to the president." [Grose, Israel in the mind of America] Of course Balfour had every right, even obligation, to seek out spokesmen for American Jewry on such an issue. What is remarkable is that State Department officials, including the secretary of state, were totally ignored...

2. Melvin Urofsky and David W. Levy [of Virginia Commonwealth U. and Oklahoma U], in The Family Letters of Louis D. Brandeis:

Following the Balfour Declaration in November 1917, American Zionists pleaded with President Wilson formally to endorse the pledge that there would be a Jewish homeland in Palestine after the war. The State Department, however, adamantly opposed this request, pointing out to Wilson that the United States was not at war with the Ottoman Empire. Wilson finally decided to yield to Jewish requests and, without consulting the State Department, addressed a Jewish New Year's greeting to the Jewish people through [Reform rabbi] Stephen Wise, dated 31 August 1918. In the letter Wilson approved the Zionist program..."

The fascination here is the extent to which the Balfour declaration of 1917 in England, granting a homeland to Jews in Palestine, and Wilson's affirmation of it a year later, grew out of the only thing Jews had going for them then: access to power of highly-successful men of wealth or learning. In England it was the great chemist Chaim Weizmann. Here it was men like Brandeis and Felix Frankfurter (later to be appointed the third Jewish Supreme Court Justice) and Jacob Schiff, the N.Y. banker.

As for Truman, in 1948, C.L. Sulzberger of the Times met with David Ben-Gurion in Tel Aviv, and the P.M. stated the need for an Israel lobby: The purpose of Israel is to "bring here all those Jews in the world who wish to come. That calls for a partnership between Israel and outside organizations, and all the Jews of the world must help."

Call it a good thing or a bad thing, call it influence, help, a back-channel, requests, or a lobby. Call it anything you like; just don't pretend that it is a fantasy.

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