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The Netanyahu Visit and the Burden of Jewish History

By Walter Donway

January 29, 2015

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“Relations between Barack Obama and Benjamin Netanyahu neared a new low on Thursday as the White House revealed the president would not meet the Israeli prime minister when he visits Republican leaders of Congress in March.” (The Guardian, January 22, 2015)

It is just a newspaper story’s “lead,” of course, but on second reading it arrests attention. The prime minister of Israel is visiting the United States early in March. President Barrack Obama declines to meet with him, but (as the story reveals) it is Republicans who have invited him to address Congress on March 3.

It was the ugly Paris demonstrations at the end of the Nineteenth Century, over the famous Dreyfus affair, which allegedly convinced a young Jewish journalist from Vienna, Theodor Herzl, that Jewish emancipation and assimilation within Europe was hopeless. Jews must have a nation of their own. This is believed to have launched the modern Zionist movement that led, half-a-century later, to the founding in 1948 of the state of Israel.

Herzl had the vision and charisma to change history, but the conflict that he identified had plagued Jewish communities across Europe: the perception that the loyalty of Jews, in any given nation, lay elsewhere: that they might live in France, Austria, Russia, but were not “really” French, or Austrian, or Russian. It is easy to make the case that this is irrational, that a citizen must obey the laws of a nation, and it is desirable that he be productive, contributing to that nation’s wellbeing—as Jews in every instance did—but his views, including on religion, government, or culture—are strictly his own business.

The creation of the nation state, commanding loyalty supposed to transcend race, tribe, or culture, represented an advance for civilization—away from ‘tribalism’ in its many guises. But creation of the nation did not supersede the sense of shared culture that unites people: the unity of language, history, customs, and religion.

That is the way things should be. But they are not and never have been. The European creation of the nation state, commanding loyalty supposed to transcend race or tribe or even culture, represented an advance for civilization—away from ‘tribalism’ in its many guises. But creation of the nation did not supersede the sense of shared culture that unites people: the unity of language, history, customs, and, at least broadly, religion that arguably is the real substance of a “nation.” (This, by the way, may be the reason that the Muslim population of France represents an irreconcilable problem; the explicit French answer is multiculturalism, but in practice that means that Muslims are never, in the foreseeable future, going to be accepted as French. And, it should be noted, the most recent explosion of violence in Paris, though it victimized Jews, also stirred up anti-Semitism—and not just on the part of Muslims.)

The nation that most convincingly assimilated its Jewish population, and reaped the greatest possible rewards of doing so, was America. I hope with all my heart that this is irreversible, but I am alarmed.

No nation is as closely tied to the United States—diplomatically, militarily, and by sentiment—as is Israel. There are roughly as many Jews in the United States as in Israel. It was the United States, above all, that led in ratifying, in the United Nations, the declaration of the state of Israel in 1948. It is the United States that has supplied Israel with the military equipment (not initially, in 1948, but in wars since) to fight its wars and fended off outrage against Israel in the United Nations. The United States, in 1973, under President Richard Nixon, prepared for nuclear war against Russia if the Russians intervened to save their client state, Egypt, from resounding defeat by Israel. And the United States, year after year, gives some $2 billion in foreign aid to Israel—it’s largest such foreign aid.

America has done this, for the most part, with the public conviction that justice was with the Israelis in their wars and that Israel represented an ally of Western values and culture in the Middle East. And there is truth in both of those views.

But America’s special relationship with Israel has not just “happened.” It has not been a wholly natural result of the way Americans perceive their place in the world and their national interest.

America’s erection of Israel to first among its priorities in foreign policy has been from the very outset, the decision of the Truman administration to support the declaration of nationhood, a consequence of an immensely powerful alliance between American Jews and leaders of the state of Israel: first, to exert political influence in American politics, and, second, to win the propaganda war for American public opinion. It was sheer political “hardball” that forced President Harry Truman, against his better judgment, to support the 1948 declaration, although he warned with true prescience that this injustice would lead to unending conflict in the Middle East. His support, during a very tight reelection campaign, was bought with Jewish campaign contributions. (John Judis has written an excellent book, “Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origin of the Arab/Israeli Conflict,” that puts this matter in the broad perspective of Israel’s history).

Many Americans may perceive support for Israel as a simple moral issue; that is what they have been taught and told. But for more than half a century, since 1951, the engine of this extraordinary influence over American foreign policy has been the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). It is the most powerful lobbying group in America, with 100,000 members and the ability to direct millions of dollars, and the crucial “Jewish vote,” to political candidates it merely names as “friends of Israel.” And those candidates always are supporters of the policies of a foreign government—Israel. Recently, and, to me, troublingly, Israel’s government has been dominated by religious fundamentalists. The “Jewish Daily Forward” has explored this issue and its threat to the secular-democratic tradition of Israel’s founding.

This is a painfully controversial matter. Critics allege that AIPAC has a “stranglehold” on the U.S. Congress. The “New Yorker” delved into this question during the recent Gaza conflict (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/01/friends-israel). AIPAC replies that it is a “bipartisan” organization. But it has been noted that when AIPAC holds its annual meeting (this year, March 1-3, when Mr Netanyahu will be present and address the U.S. Congress, too) there are more members of the U.S. Congress in attendance than at the U.S. President’s State of the Union address. The leaders of both the House of Representatives and the Senate promptly answer the AIPAC summons.

The same “New Yorker” article quoted ex-Congressman Brian Baird as saying that “Any member of Congress knows that AIPAC is associated indirectly with significant amounts of campaign spending if you’re with them, and significant amounts against you if you’re not with them.” He said that AIPAC-connected money amounted to $200,000 in each of his campaigns and pointed out that with AIPAC against you, you not only didn’t get the $200,000, but your opponent did—a $400,000 swing in funding. And that is a congressman not a senator. This is the context in which we should view this week’s headlines reporting the struggle between an American President and Congress into which Prime Minister Netanyahu will step boldly. A story in the Guardian on January 23 reported: “This invitation looks like a thinly veiled attempt to scuttle the critical negotiations taking place right now aimed at ensuring that Iran never acquires a nuclear weapon,” said the letter [from “J Street,” a Jewish organization created specifically to counter the claim that AIPAC represents all American Jews}. “Bibi [Netanyahu] and Obama disagree on how to deal with Iran, and that’s fair. But a foreign leader lobbying Congress is inappropriate.”

Whatever your views on the issues at stake—in this case, President Obama’s major foreign policy initiative to settle the matter of Iran’s creation of nuclear fuel—it should be obvious that Mr Netanyahu address to Congress will represent the (usual) blatant intervention in American politics and foreign policy by Israel—a foreign power. And this comes just two weeks before an election in Israel that will determine the future of the Netanyahu government (the reason that the White House gives for not meeting with Mr Netanyahu).

Can you cite another instance of the leader of a foreign state being invited to address Congress on a matter that a U.S. president is actively negotiating? And so undercutting those negotiations, since, in this case, Iran will perceive President Obama as possibly unable to honor any agreement in the face of a hostile Republican Congress.

Even if you hope that the United States will go to war, or back Israel in going to war, with Iran—a development I view as an unmitigated catastrophe—you might concede that the decision to go to war, if it comes, will have had more to do with AIPAC and the state of Israel than any American consensus.

And so, Mr. Netanyahu, smiling broadly and flashing “V” for victory (by the way, what victory, I sincerely would like to know) will come to Washington, and to AIPAC, and to the U.S. Congress, to flout the sheer political muscle of AIPAC’s American Jewish constituency.

And if Americans should begin to ask (as they already have) if our Jewish citizens as a group are “different,” if their loyalty at best is divided between their adopted home and an increasingly reactionary Zionist Israel, what will you say?
 

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