The Controversy of Zion / Jewish Power

...The early Zionists had little idea that Palestine's 76 By presenting the conventional wisdom of American Jewish political organizations in its own words, however, Goldberg offers an excellent case study in the confident take-over of national politics by minority special interest groups...

...The last hundred pages of The Controversy of Zion deal almost exclusively with Israel's relations with America and its Jews — unsurprising, since America is not only Israel's primary patron, but its biggest philosophical challenge as well...

...Here Jews can live securely and openly...

...they seemed to have secured veto-proof support...

...A more perfect analogy would be Liberia, whose colonization was the result of a massive, organized movement created by free American blacks who, like Herzl, believed that "their equality before the law, granted by statute, has become practically a dead letter...

...Such nationalism is almost the mirror image of the Enlightenment political philosophies underpinning a nation such as America...

...Yet while Jordan might be a conclusive answer to demands for Palestinian statehood, it cannot solve Israel's March 1997 - The American Spectator The Jewish state was finally created just when the European powers were divesting themselves of their colonies...

...Both were widely practiced and defended at the time, but certainly no other movement combined the assumptions of both...

...Herzl confidently predicted that the situation for Jews would become untenable everywhere they lived...

...Herzl's genius was in conceiving a plan to return the Jews to Palestine, the necessary prequel for their nationalistic aspirations...

...And what to do about the unavoidable fact that most Jews are foreigners to Israel...

...Zionism was unprepared, as a practical matter, to deal with the colonial ramifications of its enterprise...

...This was little more than a truism...

...Indeed the very people whose actions the book supposedly analyzes—the Jewish legislators, organization leaders, journalists, and publishers who create Jewish political power in America —first appear in the acknowledgments...

...Goldberg has no difficulty taking readers "inside the American Jewish Establishment" because that is where his friends and sympathies lie...

...The Palestinians, of course, have their own state in Jordan, and if King Hussein had not displayed a Rasputin-like resiliency in surviving dozens of PLO attacks, they would have their own government as well...

...newly formed movement for Palestinian statehood...

...Yet the similarity of their theories has never helped differing nationalists to get along as neighbors...

...This is the most vexing part of the Zionist legacy, for no solution will please both parties...

...Wheatcroft, like his compatriot Paul Johnson, is not a historian but an intelligent and insightful popularizer...

...intractable problem with the Palestinians...

...This innocuous (and indisputably accurate) comment created a bizarre, almost irrational response from the Jewish community, which Goldberg reports as if it were quite normal and justified: The last thing [the leader of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations] expected to hear from his mouth was a public attack on the rights of Jews as American citizens...

...Even the most reactionary of all Zionists, Vladimir Jabotinsky, did not deny the abstract justice of the Arab claim to Palestine, even when there were no "Palestinians...

...Congress had been swarmed by 1,300 lobbyists and leaders of Jewish groups, pressing passionately for the immediate extension of the loans...

...still others considered the relocation of Jews from Europe an obvious anti-Semitic trap...

...In his 1896 manifesto, Der Judenstaat, he uses the example of California to prove that large-scale settlement can work...

...Unlike the worker's revolution, Zionism was never intended to be an ongoing process...

...Zionism, however, had bad timing...

...What Israel's existence means for Diaspora Jewry has emerged as the final ambiguity of the Zionist legacy...

...In 1991, President Bush asked Congress to delay $10 billion in loans to Israel to finance the resettlement of Soviet Jews...

...The central conceit of Jewish power—and this is true for any politically influential minority— is that whatever interests the Jews is a vital Jewish interest, and therefore must be defended by both taxpayer and state...

...But if nationalism was a desire for one's own country, the Arabs were to be richly rewarded after World War II, with nearly twenty states given to them, and a large chunk of Palestine as well, which they refused to accept...

...Jewish leaders believe that getting the United States to give money to a second country, in order to import people from a third country, is a "right...

...Yet Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, did not subscribe to the sentimental nationalism of romantics like Wagner, who looked back nostalgically at his people's mythical past...

...But this demonstrates not only how divorced American Jews are from Israel, but how detached American government has become from its original ideal of not treating people, both in benefits and obligations, as members of groups, but as identical citizens...

...What better sign that Jews feel at home in America, having embraced its culture of rights and its politics of special interest group power...

...How should Israel rule over a foreign people...

...Indeed, in many ways America is a better home...

...The Czechs had not struggled for a Czech state on behalf of the Austrians, or the Irish on ``± behalf of the English (nor, it might be said, The American Spectator • March 1997 75 small and disorganized Arab population would grow to its current numbers, or that these Palestinians would object to sharing the land with the Jews...

...Yet the history of America has proved him wrong, Wheatcroft maintains...

...Furthermore, Zionism overlapped with the embryonic stage of Arab nationalism, which had begun with the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire...

...But the Jewish state was finally created just when the European powers were divesting themselves of their colonies, and colonialism was no longer sanctioned by the unspoken rules which governed the conduct of nations...

...Goldberg Addison-Wesley /374 pages / $25 REVIEWED BY E.V...

...The achievement of that goal, however, has left Israel with a pair of prickly (and related) problems...

...He concludes that Zionism, as an ideology, has much in common with the E.V...

...No doubt these comforts contribute to the high assimilation rate of American Jews, which threatens to vastly reduce their numbers within a generation or two...

...Perhaps its greatest conceptual failing was in providing Jews with a nationalist solution to their pains, but not their pleasures...

...At this point, Jabotinsky's 1937 statement, quoted by Wheatcroft, became even more apt: "When the Arab claim is confronted with our Jewish demand to be saved, it is like the claim of appetite versus the claim of starvation...

...American law and politics is suffering from a hypertrophy of alleged rights, and while Jews surely did not invent this crisis, they have fallen under its sway...

...In a television press conference, Bush angrily said he was "up against some powerful political forces" in the loan-guarantee struggle...

...on behalf of the Bohemian Germans in the one case or the Ulster Protestants in the other...

...The nationalist believes that the ethnicity of his ruler is more important than the institutions or principles through which he is ruled...

...For several decades, these enemies of Israel rallied under the banner of the United Nations' Zionism-equalsracism resolution, which has bestowed the highest legitimacy on their pugnacious views...

...While not safer to live in, it is certainly more affluent, modern, and upwardly mobile...

...From German, Greek, and Italian nationalists, the Jews got the idea that a people, having a common ancestry, language, and culture, should also have a common country...

...True, the Jews had a historic claim to Palestine, as well as an uninterrupted presence there for thousands of years...

...Calling the resolution a "gravely malicious and deeply offensive" tautology, Wheatcroft writes: [The resolution] was an accurate reflection of the malice and malignancy of the Arab states, and still more of Soviet Russia and its satrapies, who were really behind the resolution...

...The re-establishment of a Jewish state in the Levant after two millennia—the political and historical equivalent of Jurassic Park—was a product of distinctly nineteenth-century European ideas: nationalism and colonialism...

...while he brings no new research to the subject, he illuminates it with an original and literate perspective...

...Kontorovich t is a common error to think of Zionism as the central dogma it of Israeli public life in the way that international socialism, say, was the reigning ideology of the Soviet Union...

...The American Spectator • March 1997 77...

...Augustine's prayer for chastity: "Lord, let me make aliyah, but not yet...

...It later became the fashion to denounce the whole Zionist idea as a form of colonialism," writes Wheatcroft...

...It was a practical movement with a concrete goal: the creation of a Jewish state...

...Bush had just issued the first-ever public assault on the American Jewish community by a sitting president in the history of the Republic...

...Wheatcroft points out the inconsistency in such a position...

...To achieve statehood, the Jews first had to return from their dispersion...

...At the same time, it was little more than a statement of the obvious: a statement which could have been made (as it was not) about almost any national movement...

...In the Israeli-Arab disputes, he professes himself to be "a genuine neutral or agnostic, able to see right and wrong on both sides and wishing both sides well...

...America has proved him wrong...

...Zionism has also been a source of division among Jews themselves, and Wheatcroft provides a fascinating account of the various expressions of Jewish dissent...

...as a judgment, it was not so much wrong as prochronistic...

...The existence of Israel is seen by them to be a blow against all Gentiles, especially those in the neighborhood—though these same anti-Zionists would certainly agree that no street is complete until a black family occupies one of the homes...

...Now that the Jews have gotten the government to put up "a museum of Jewish suffering," as Goldberg calls the Holocaust museum, they have all the comforts of home, so to speak, making it far less likely that they will ever consummate Zionism's bequest by moving to the Jewish state...

...The president feared that further aid, on top of the over $3 billion annual subsidy to Israel, would jeopardize the peace negotiations in Madrid...

...ticipation in the American political process...

...KONTOROVICH is a contributing editor of the Forward...

...This view was in many ways shortsighted and naive, but in most cases it was not malicious...

...The biggest problem Goldberg can find with the muddled world of Jewish group politics is the communication gap between the leaders of the organizations and the Jews they claim to represent...

...While the black nationalists reduced the West African natives they discovered to a condition of second-class citizenship, they did not attract a word of international ire in the late nineteenth century or, for that matter, today...

...whereas, in contrast, those who sailed to settle the Americas and Australia in previous centuries were taking over where no European had ever lived before...

...No better proof can be found than J. J. Goldberg's Jewish Power, which shows how, as a politically organized ethnicity, Jews have become a force to be reckoned with in policy debates over everything from aid for Israel to abortion rights...

...Certainly the emergence of an Arab nationalism—as "racist" as that of the Jews, if less tolerant—was virtually unforeseeable...

...Goldberg provides an excellent anecdote to illustrate this error, which he himself makes...

...The Controversy of Zion: Jewish Nationalism, the Jewish State, and the Unresolved Jewish Dilemma Geoffrey Wheatcroft Addison-Wesley /352 pages / $25 Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment J.J...

...Geoffrey Wheatcroft, unlike virtually all other chroniclers of Israel and Zionism, is neither Jew nor Arab, nor even a Soviet apologist or Christian fundamentalist...

...Wheatcroft shows that, in principle, the nationalist argument is more or less the same for every group, and about as valid for all of them...

...The Hasidim regarded the establishment of a Jewish state in advance of the Messiah as heresy, while assimilated Jews thought it regressive to stress Jewish difference...

...Wheatcroft shows that, to understand Israel's dispute with the Arabs, one must first examine Zionism's intellectual roots...

...Hostility to Israel has always been quite drastic: its opponents are not so much incensed by its actions as by the existence of a peculiarly and unabashedly Jewish state...

...Yet Zionism faced an obstacle unknown to other European nationalisms, for the Jewish people were in a position unlike any other save the Gypsies...

...Indeed, the gulf between Israel and American Jews is best shown by the very vigor and enthusiasm of the latter's parHerzl predicted the situation for Jews would become untenable everywhere they lived...

...Yet as Wheatcroft writes, pro-Israel American Jews tend to echo St...

...Nationalism is by definition exclusive, and in practice if not in theory all too often narrow and bloodthirsty as well...

...Herzl wrote at the height of European colonialism...

...Herzl's argument was pragmatic and rooted in the realities of the present: without their own state, the Jews would not survive...