Reflections of a Sometime Israel Lobbyist
Fein, Leonard
HERE'S A SECRET, the kind we hardly acknowledge to ourselves. But first, you may be wondering who this "we" is, on whose behalf I am writing. In truth, I am not sure. Maybe it is the Jews. But...
...All the pastries and the fine wines cannot erase our tortured wisdom...
...And look, they say, at what a mess the Zionists have made of things...
...But it is not a crime...
...and there are those who take their cue from Anthony Burgess in his retelling of the Exodus story (Moses: A Narrative), when the people complained to Aaron: "And one said: 'I don't like this sort of talk at all...
...We are, in a word, "doves...
...And maybe they cannot be, neither here 66 n DISSENT / Spring 2008 nor anywhere...
...we don't take America's support for granted...
...We are dismayed by the extent of public corruption...
...Born in Egypt, he'd lived in Israel (and fought in its War of Independence) before coming to the United States...
...AIPAC (and the others) work within a hospitable context...
...Foreign Policy, of the discrepancy between "official" Jewish pronouncements regarding American policy toward Israel and the consistent finding of public opinion surveys, which show that American Jews are considerably more dovish than those who speak in their name...
...Which brings me, of course, to the curious case of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, who make a repeated point in their controversial book, The Israel Lobby and U.S...
...They have learned to work the system...
...Whiplash, and suddenly we are Israel's embattled defenders, perceived as imposters on the left, insufficiently dismissive of the parochial claims of the Jews...
...True, there are times when they and some right-leaning others set the bar so high that their endorsement of a two-state solution seems little more than lip service...
...That relationship has deep and diverse cultural and historical roots...
...the decline in the quality of its educational system...
...though rich, we are not comfortable...
...But we don't trust the Palestinians...
...So let me spell it out: the "we" here means oldfashioned liberal Zionists, people who intuitively endorse the idea of a Jewish state, people who acknowledge that to secure the safety of that state and to ennoble its character are the compelling Jewish projects of our time, hence people who these days suffer considerable anxiety and are not strangers to disappointment...
...These days, busy meeting with senior officials of the Defense Department to talk about Israel's pressing needs for this new weapons system or that, meeting over at State to make sure that Israel is not pressed too hard, meeting with Members of Congress to trade support for support— who has time or disposition for talk of purposes and journeys...
...But the problem with "Jews" is—well, not all Jews are in on the secret...
...Chiefly Americans for Peace Now, the Israel Policy Forum, Brit Tzedek v'Shalom—we also lobby, and just as energetically, albeit with considerably more limited resources...
...we worry about Iran...
...If that were a crime, they would be guilty...
...And that hurts...
...Nominally, they support a twostate solution, which—by definition—the exclusivists do not, and which by now has become the litmus test of a pro-peace (which means pro-Israel and pro-Palestine) stance...
...on the other, the universal...
...They are assessed by people riddled with apprehension, and if there is any one word that captures the substance of the apprehension that word is "abandonment...
...We worry that Israel has taken multiple wrong turns, not only on the big question, its peace policy, but on a range of domestic issues as well—most notably, its increasingly inegalitarian economy (where it now ranks with the United States on disparities in income distribution...
...We persist in our love of Zion, thereby evoking rebuke and sometimes contempt from erstwhile and natural allies on the left...
...Israel may abandon the Zionist dream...
...Safran was prescient...
...But it is not helpful or accurate to lump them together as part of the exclusivist camp...
...DISSENT / Spring 2008 n 67...
...The left has a hard time with nationalism and is particularly irritated by Jewish nationalism...
...the engine of its power is a vast and devoted grassroots constituency...
...Esperanto doesn't work...
...The world of the lobbyists, by and large, is less fragmented...
...The Lobby," in their view, is a social scientist's dream...
...on the other the claims of the whole world...
...And yes, power, as Acton taught, corrupts...
...That is how we see ourselves and that is how we see the Jewish state, and that is also how the Israelis see themselves and their nation...
...The secret is that because we are apprehensive, we are not entirely upset that "out there," in the public square, those who speak authoritatively on Israel's behalf—meaning, principally, AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) and the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations—are considerably more rigid, more hawkish, if you will, than we are...
...Now, with guns, they become hunters...
...In the Jewish tradition, there are two Jerusalems...
...Somehow, it is supposed that the Jews should know better, whether because we have so often in the past been victims of nationalism or because there's something awkward about people who have been comfortable living at the margins suddenly insisting that they have a fixed address and a fire in the fireplace or because nouveau powerful is no more attractive than nouveau riche or because statecraft is not a particular strength of a people of artists, scholars, merchants, a people with so DISSENT / Spring 2008 • 65 ISRAEL LOBBIES pacific a history as ours...
...The world may abandon Israel...
...its corrupting entanglement of religion and state...
...these days we have pastries and fine wines...
...underneath our designer costumes we wear a shroud...
...And yet we know there's an urgency to boundaries...
...Bush's gross "You are either with us or against us" were a sober appraisal not only of the battle with terrorism but also of the war between Israel and its neighbors— as if there's no place for qualification, for ambiguity, for nuance...
...Now, none of that is secret...
...It matters not at all which set of exclusivists is the more to blame, which less...
...And though we still proclaim our unbending commitment to justice, we also whine a lot...
...Or maybe they can be, but we are still off course somewhere in the desert...
...But while we cannot, do not, will not dance with those who believe that pro-Zionist passion requires the suspension of critical judgment, we prefer the company of those who wish Israel well to the company of those who wish it ill, even though the course endorsed by those who wish it well seems to us too often mistaken...
...much less does he realize that his position serves only to assure that the Palestine tragedy should have another sequel, and yet another...
...AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents are at most unwitting support personnel for the tedious drama...
...Nationalism was never a good thing, and the Jews were supposed to know that...
...He does not add, but might well, that part of what snapped was his comfort with those friends, his ability to take for granted a roughly similar weltanschauung...
...We believe that classical Jewish values and current Israeli interests are of a piece and, with Seamus Heaney, that one day "hope and history will rhyme...
...The Lobby...
...But neither lies nor truths are assessed by a dispassionate liedetecting machine...
...Where, then, do we belong...
...others of us feel betrayed, thereby embittered...
...Or maybe it is the Zionists...
...The argument cannot be whether there should be a lobby or whether, once there is a lobby, it is entitled to be powerful...
...The things you talk of are only in the mind...
...It's all blown up, like a sheep's stomach full of wind...
...Well, look: though pocked with imperfections, some no cosmetics can mask, the record's hardly one of unrelieved bungling...
...Now both seem remote...
...There are mainstream claims that Israel's own policies are the necessary and sufficient explanation of the conflict, that Israel is therefore the villain of the piece...
...Psychic dissonance is hardly an unknown phenomenon...
...And what of the liberal Zionists...
...In his preface to that book, Safran wrote, "I believe that fundamentally both Arabs and Jews have an unassailable moral argument...
...Our leaders may inflate, exaggerate, even lie...
...it is not an artifact of which the lobby is the author...
...As if there's no appreciation for tragedy...
...As if empathy for the Israelis precludes sympathy for the Palestinians...
...Only so long as they were not allowed to carry guns...
...But we know that impotence ISRAEL LOBBIES is even more corrupting...
...But we are held together (when we are) by memories of the dreams we have dreamed, of what it is supposed to be like: the swords into plowshares, the spears into pruning hooks, all under their own fig tree and none shall make them afraid...
...we haven't a clue about how you get from here to peace...
...ADAV SAFRAN was a distinguished professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard...
...its manner of dealing with the 20 percent of its citizens who are Palestinian...
...That may be true, but it is essentially irrelevant...
...In short, we fear that Israel is at risk both domestically and internationally...
...Again and again, Hillel's questions are heard simultaneously, not sequentially, "If I am not for myself, who will be for me...
...THERE'S A dynamic here, worth attending to: where the left has closed the door to Israel, gone beyond tough criticism all the way to demonization, we are left out in the cold...
...We do what we can to promote a genuine two-state solution and to reverse those policies of the Israeli government—settlements especially though not exclusively—that stand in its way, thereby evoking rebuke and sometimes condemnation from the mainstream...
...So the argument is really about the means by which the lobby maintains its power and the ends to which it devotes that power...
...And, for liberal Zionists especially, there's the growing fashion of Left alienation from Israel, sometimes (though not always) combined with romanticization of the Palestinians...
...and "If I am only for myself, what am I?" Others may find contradiction here...
...Look around, the portents are everywhere...
...Pacific...
...But the problem with "Zionists" is that the word has come to seem musty, at best, and in these last several decades it has been appropriated by exclusivist fanatics...
...Is it necessarily the case that the moment you tie a rag to a branch and call it a flag, you become obsessed with your own narrowly defined interests and to hell with the others...
...And yes, they are powerful, albeit not nearly so powerful as their critics contend...
...It's the lies the leaders of the Lobby have told and continue to tell us...
...LEONARD FEIN is a Boston-based writer and teacher, a regular columnist for the Forward, founding editor of Moment magazine, and a member of the board of Americans for Peace Now...
...Whether true or false (and it is at least partly true), the dismissal doesn't speak to Jewish apprehensions, shared fully by liberal Zionists...
...Those are the givens of the system...
...Mearsheimer and Walt don't know the secret, meaning they don't know the Jews...
...Some of us have given up, dream dreams derived from other stories...
...There are a handful of hard-line ISRAEL LOBBIES American Jewish organizations like the ZOA (Zionist Organization of America...
...the lies of Israel's enemies are vastly larger...
...And all of us get it wrong some of the time...
...We are too old, I tell you, for this talk of common goals and purposes and journeys...
...There's Hamas, of course, in a class by itself...
...It's racist, it's militaristic, and it's an anachronism...
...We insist that "pro-Israel" has many shades of meaning and cannot be a term reserved for the most hawkish of Israel's supporters...
...There are grace notes galore and much to admire: freedom of speech, the rule of law, distinguished science, and an ongoing effort to balance the twin imperatives of the Jewish understanding— on the one hand, the claims of the tribe...
...Nathaniel Popper, a young journalist who works for the 64 n DISSENT / Spring 2008 Forward, writes that when he reported to his friends on his recent visit to Israel, "they seized on my skepticism—of both the Palestinians and the Israelis—to rail against Zionism...
...And what is the secret we hardly acknowledge...
...By imagining that it is morally advantaged...
...Some of us get it wrong all the time, opting either for radical universalism or for stultifying particularism...
...What Mearsheimer and Walt miss (among many other things) is any understanding of the depths of apprehension currently experienced by the Zionist left...
...There are the settlers and their avid defenders...
...How does an oppressed people explain its persecuted status...
...We had it figured out, what Max Weber called "the theodicy of disprivilege...
...Today life is no longer just the taste of a bit of bread or a mouthful of water...
...Tribalism," they call it, and tribalism it sometimes is...
...in the earthly Jerusalem, there are curses alongside the blessings, people shove in line and cheat on their income taxes, they laugh and hug and hate, grandeur and pettiness cohabit...
...The haunting question is how the two Jerusalems can be brought closer together...
...All we have learned so far is that being Jewish does not immunize against the baser appetites and the evil inclinations...
...That is what we were taught, quite often explicitly: the oppression, the advantage...
...Our only remedy is to remain prisoners of hope as well, to remember not only yesterday but also tomorrow, the promised tomorrow...
...I whipped to Israel's defense, summoning arguments I had heard at the proIsrael conferences I attend for work...
...FoR SOME OF us, that means that even with the Land, we still remain in Exile, Exile as an existential condition rather than a geographic space...
...A person who cannot see how this is possible does not understand the essence of tragedy...
...The source of the propaganda, the explanation for the level of American aid...
...it explains not only America's uncondiDISSENT / Spring 2008 • 63 ISRAEL LOBBIES tional support for Israel, it explains everything...
...The broadest statement of the lobby's purpose is that it seeks to preserve and enhance the special relationship between Israel and the United States...
...We were slaves unto Pharaoh in Egypt and we have known pharaohs ever since...
...we will have no truck with exclusivists, whether of the right or the left...
...They look at Israel and see the strongest military power in the region, a prosperous, high-tech economy, and they conclude that all the talk of Israel's vulnerability is merely hokum, clever propaganda intended to keep American aid at its (allegedly) wildly disproportionate level...
...and even if we did, we are not exactly proud to have to depend on that support...
...we find enduring and productive tension...
...THE ISRAEL LOBBY includes all those who, because they take neither Israel nor America's support for Israel for granted, because they remain haunted, prowl the corridors of American power to press the case for "the special relationship...
...We are imprisoned both by our memories and by the world's disorder...
...There's a rush to disinvestment, a palpable abandonment...
...As if this is all a zero-sum game, as if Mr...
...We are all for a two-state solution, we are eager to call a halt to Israel's expansion, to put an end to the settlement movement, to restore Israel's good name, to make almost any compromise consistent with the preservation of Israel's character as a Jewish state and its commitment to democracy...
...And there are Nathaniel Popper's friends—presumably (I don't know Popper) people of the left—who have neither use for nor patience with the Jewish state...
...Things are not going very well, or even just average well...
...And the strange truth is that we feel both powerful and powerless at the same time...
...What matters is that together they've come to own the crowded stage...
...There is that risk, as ample precedent makes clear...
...In the heavenly Jerusalem, Moses teaches, David sings, Solomon dispenses wisdom...
...The project may fail...
...Pound for pound, we may even be as effective, as powerful one might say, as the others, but we are welterweights...
...Exclusivists on both sides of the conflict have indeed brought on sequel after sequel, by now an ongoing calamity...
...His first major book, published in 1963, was The United States and Israel...
...in some ways, they have become the system...
...On any given day, in connection with any given episode, Israeli officials and much (but not all) of the pro-Israel activist community in the United States may, indeed, repeat the tired slogans, the inflated claims, the whole of the familiar litany of rationalization and justification: Israel is the only democratic state in the region, it faces implacable enemies, it is America's ally in the war on terrorism, its values and America's are the same, its response to threats to its security is measured—all dismissed by Mearsheimer and Walt as false pleadings...
...Two words, three syllables, and you have the key to the whole of the special relationship: you know why America invaded Iraq, you know why Camp David II failed, you know why both Congress and the administration are without spine in dealing with the chronic conflict between Israel and its neighbors...
...we were taught to expect more and better...
...Something snapped...
...And Israel's destiny, in the end, may be to be a nation like all the other nations rather than the light unto the nations that the utopians imagined...
...Life is . . . life is what we see, smell, feel—the taste of a bit of bread, a mouthful of water, sitting at the door, watching the evening come on with the circling of the bats...
...For Jews, abandonment is an old, old story...
...on the one hand, the particular...
Vol. 55 • April 2008 • No. 2
