FIGHTING THE BIG LIES:NOTES OF A JEWISH LEADER
MANN, THEODORE
FIGHTING THE BIG U LIES: NOTES OF A JEWISH LEADER THEODORE MANN The letters come in every day, to my law office. This day is no different. I am siding with an intransigent Israeli Prime Minister,...
...We deal with that one all the time...
...But American Jewry can't deal with two-thirds of the world's nations, I respond...
...Give them up and, unless you are a ritually observant Jew in the way most American Jews are not, you must start asking yourself the question...
...Strange as it may seem to decent folk, this is far more important to them than a Palestinian "homeland," just as—incomprehensible as it remains to most of us—the destruction of world Jewry was far more important to Hitler than winning the Second World War...
...Every time we hear that big lie, we try to nail it...
...I am no better than the Judenrat, perhaps worse...
...Such charges are intended to intimidate, to stop Jews from doing vigorously that which the First Amendment allows and good citizenship requires—petitioning their government for the redress of grievances...
...The big lie that equates Zionism with racism...
...And they dare label Zionism racism...
...He laughs...
...Eighty-nine non-aligned countries met in Havana last month, he says, and concluded that Zionism constituted a "crime against humanity...
...the Jewish people have carried that burden for thousands of years and will continue to carry it...
...Yes, I am bothered, disturbed, deeply disturbed, apprehensive...
...In any event, my job is to deal with other matters: to wrestle, as best I can, with this Jewish community, this American community, the relationship between the two...
...And I, the Chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, was silent...
...Why doesn't everyone see this...
...Could it be those people in the audience last week who came up to congratulate me...
...The reason, of course, is that no one wants to be accused of putting a price tag on the nation's security, even if that price is already too high...
...And I have been silent...
...They can try, he shoots back...
...The letters don't bother me...
...The Senator fairly shouts: What do you mean, "does anyone even know...
...Such a charge must be answered, the letter says, and it is my job to answer it...
...They have said it openly, unashamedly, precisely as if no moral issue even fits into the equation...
...It has created one | small spot in the world in which the Jewish people are sovereign...
...continued from page 28 the fact that the tensions of war and inflation have already weakened Israel's appeal to Jewish immigrants...
...Later in 1976, in the Security Council, a PLO representative spoke of the Pretoria-Tel Aviv Axis, comparing it to the Nazi Germany-Fascist Italy Axis in the 1930s...
...And they can petition their government to try...
...According to the Israeli government, more than 400,000 Israelis are now living in the United States and Canada, including 200,000 in New York alone...
...he must deal with it...
...Else the Jewish people would not have survived through most of recorded history...
...But the superstructure is being created, he almost screams at me...
...In my office I allow myself to become consumed in the careful preparation for a cross-examination in an upcoming litigation...
...Next we respond with the real facts...
...The subterranean fear and resentment of dependence upon the United States could even be used to advantage in such a call for austerity...
...I am in his office...
...The "ball" in the last several months has not been Havana...
...Neither the situation of the world's few democracies nor the condition of world Jewry can be compared to their helpless condition in 1935...
...And then there is the big lie about the bombing of PLO terrorists in Lebanon...
...I am taken by surprise...
...Almost six million Jews live in America, the freest and most secure nation in the world, which shares with Israel and all too few other nations a deep respect for democratic values...
...I continue...
...Unlike me, he cannot simply accept philosophically such a wide diversity of views...
...Have I not read the Bible...
...It has been the PLO, and the State Department's misguided attempts to bring the PLO into the Middle East negotiations...
...Soviet propaganda began to equate Zionism with racism in 1970, he notes quietly...
...this American society, that Israeli society, and the relationship between the two...
...Why bother to remain Jewish...
...But in recent weeks prominent black Americans have suggested that it is necessary for Israel to make accommodations that are required by Arab states, because black America will be hardest hit by the economic dislocation that will occur when Arab states withhold oil supplies...
...America and a small handful of democracies in this world, including Israel, carry that burden in 1979...
...He was right about his facts...
...Perhaps busy Americans no longer have the time to make basic moral distinctions, like the distinction between the policemen and the criminals whom they chase, like the distinction that suggests itself to anyone who would only take the trouble to answer two questions: If the PLO were to renounce terror, would Israel continue bombing them in Lebanon...
...They had become depressed by everything they had heard and read about the Middle East situation, and it was a delight to hear from someone in authority that things are not nearly as bad as all that...
...My job is to ask myself questions like...
...Why not bury yourself in the crowd...
...Doesn't anyone ask why those refugees were not then resettled in the West Bank, which Jordan then controlled...
...Would any black really feel more supportive of Israel, if the Jewish community supported quotas...
...I was right about the limitations which inhere in the ability of the voluntary American Jewish community, not nearly as powerful as anti-Semites would make it appear, to impact upon each and every one of the enormous problems confronting Israel and world Jewry today...
...Andy Young claims that that has happened...
...To answer such a lie lends credence to it...
...Israel has the strongest army in the Middle East with which to protect both its 3,500,000 citizens and America's most vital interests...
...This is nothing like the Germany of 1935...
...or does he try to change it...
...Perhaps it is the emotional conversation I had with a United States Senator yesterday...
...with an almost infinite number of future possibilities...
...Just as the fall-off in immigration weakens the case against belt-tightening in Israel, the current rate of inflation gives those urging cutbacks a powerful boost...
...What's the point of remaining Jewish in this society...
...Something that has nothing at all to do with the distinction between truth and falsehood...
...Is there a danger that the American Jews will become as isolated within America as Israel has become among the nations...
...This Administration came into office pledged to reverse the anti-democratic tide among third-world countries...
...In dealing with problems of the Middle East and of world Jewry there is no such satisfaction...
...There is a big lie about the human rights of Palestinians in refugee camps in Lebanon...
...And it is possible that only a normalization of political relations could provide the necessary psychological framework for the difficult task of restructuring the economy...
...Have we altogether misjudged the mood and character of Americans...
...Only the Palestinian refugees remain, unwanted by their ethnic brethren who have vast amounts of empty territory, and vast amounts of oil revenues with which to resettle them...
...The blistering pace of price increases could provoke the government into taking drastic deflationary measures and provide the nation's leadership with an opportunity to rally public support around its belated efforts to deflate the economy...
...What is bothering me finally emerges...
...Like the one about Palestinian human rights...
...One operates within an expanding universe, with an almost limitless number of facts that go back to the earliest period of recorded history...
...A trial lawyer works within a closed universe...
...Havana proves that it hasn't happened...
...By the careful, step-by-step, methods they have employed over these past many years, in careful conjunction with the Soviet Union, they have revealed that their short-term and their long-term goal is and always was the extinction of the Jewish State...
...Some have expelled their Jews...
...This kind of criticism comes with the territory...
...In the end you confront the question that has been confronting Jews, somewhere, in every generation for four thousand years...
...We didn't make it this far, we Jews, by giving in to despair...
...First we call attention to its source—Arab states, some of which, like Saudi Arabia, officially abandoned slavery and slave trading in black Africans only in 1962 (that is /962, not 1862) and look the other way as vestiges of slavery continue to exist in their own societies...
...The "Palestinian human rights" slogan is manifestly a big lie, and we must nail it every time...
...We hear West Bank Arabs talking from East Jerusalem on our own television screens, criticizing the government of Israel...
...To endure in a free society, our kind of community must fashion its own set of principles by which to live...
...He had put his finger on the reason why the PLO cannot be dealt with by Israel or the United States...
...If the world is that corrupt, does a Jew, does America, join it...
...If masses of people believe palpable, demonstrable, false charges, those charges must be filling a need...
...I go on...
...My optimism reasserts itself...
...We scurry about, telling truths, and our audience could not care less...
...And almost three million Jews are in the Soviet Union...
...Only a generalized peace could permit the gradual reduction of defense spending...
...The big lie— the outrageous, grotesque libel—is not...
...And a feeling of isolation, personal isolation, Jewish isolation, remarkably akin to the feelings that gripped world Jewry in May, 1967—that, too, is bothering me...
...The Senator's assessment is overly pessimistic, I insist...
...Why should we be the ones to advertise that obscenity...
...Yes, they are endangered...
...Arabs and Africans and everyone else can have national liberation movements, but not the Jews...
...But there is a job to be done...
...In 1974 the International Labor Conference charged Israel with discrimination and racism in the occupied territories...
...I set aside one trenchant letter, not so easily disposed of, for later consideration...
...I respond that I have never answered a charge of dual loyalty...
...One can assume that many of those people may choose to remain...
...Something is troubling me deeply, and I am trying to put my finger on it...
...Annexation of Judea and Samaria must be supported by every true Jew...
...Forty million refugees in this world have been resettled since the Second World War...
...It is Tel Aviv, and Haifa, and Jerusalem...
...I have reminded him of the British attempt to defend Singapore in the Second World War against attack from the sea...
...Theodore Mann is chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations...
...On the plane back to Philadelphia, I shut my eyes and considered his thesis...
...this Jewish community, that Jewish community in Israel, and the relationship between the two...
...Later that year, the Soviet Union accused Israel of "racial genocide" and a PLO document submitted to a General Assembly committee likened Israeli measures to Nazi atrocities during World War II...
...Have we as a Jewish community made the right judgments about what other Americans are really like...
...The facts of the case and the law that applies to those facts set the limits within which the challenge must be met...
...The Senator looks me straight in the eye...
...In 1976 the UN Commission on Human Rights found Israel guilty of "war crimes" in the occupied Arab territories...
...But I must not permit such speculations to overwhelm me...
...And I wonder now whether optimism is genetic...
...More important, am I misleading my people if my buoyancy, the manner in which I express myself rather than the words that I use, leaves the impression that I am optimistic...
...Under Israeli administration, Arabs have achieved enormous improvements in health care and longevity, dramatic increases in per capita income, universal education for all of their children, local elections with universal suffrage, and the kind of freedom of speech and press simply unknown by any other Arabs in the Middle East except those Arabs who are citizens of the State of Israel...
...Such an appeal may not bring the emigrants home, and might even encourage others to leave, but it could also spark a revival of the country's old pioneering spirit...
...The big lie technique had worked once again...
...A disgusting and explicit accusation of dual loyalty...
...Of the roughly 40 percent that do go to the Middle East, many are elderly people seeking a place of retirement...
...Ordinary lies are answerable with simple truth...
...I am no better than the Judenrat...
...Yet this proposition— that the key to Israel's economic survival lies in a more aggressive pursuit of peace—is almost never heard in Israel...
...Silently I recalled the charge made by black leaders last month that Israel and South Africa had a military alliance...
...I return to the letter I had set aside...
...There is no other place in the Middle East where an Arab could criticize the government under which he lives to an international audience and remain free the next day...
...I respond that I have been trying to keep my eye on the ball...
...They were uplifted, they said, by my sense of optimism...
...Does anyone even know, I ask, that in Havana Zionism was labelled a crime against humanity, in language reminiscent of Nuremberg...
...others persecute their Christians...
...Newsweek had carried a story that Israeli Intelligence can get whatever information it requires from any distinguished American Jewish leader, just for the asking...
...The answers have never been clear and simple, but they have always been sufficient for most of us...
...Perhaps that is because of the other letters: How dare I express opposition to an Israeli settlement on the outskirts of Nablus...
...My mind goes back to 1964...
...Something irrational is at work...
...Brick by brick the superstructure is being built, from 1970 until this day, with the Soviet Union nurturing and instructing the PLO and its Arab supporters every step along the way, and it will continue until the oven is complete...
...Words like love and justice and mercy and courage and holy...
...Eight hundred thousand Jewish refugees from Arab countries are among them, and most of those were resettled in Israel where they and their children today are productive citizens...
...When it is over, I ponder alone over my second cup of morning coffee...
...I hold the daily meeting of my firm to consider strategy questions in pending litigation...
...He is an attorney in Philadelphia...
...But I am still troubled...
...I sense that only through kindness has he refrained from calling me a blind fool...
...I and others were arrested for picketing at the World's Fair, in front of the Jordanian Pavilion...
...It was being used for political purposes, to blame Israel for the plight of the Palestinian refugees...
...The pleasure that is the reward of competency comes from knowing that he has selected the best of a limited number of options within that closed system...
...The Jewish national liberation movement was and is called Zionism...
...There they are able to determine for themselves that Jews unwanted anywhere else may enter and find refuge...
...Steadily since then, with malice aforethought, the charge has been circulated and accepted in wider and wider circles...
...It is far better to ignore it and continue to do with greater vigor that which the accusers wish you to stop doing...
...A crowd of nation states which dare declare that Zionism is a crime against humanity...
...still others have raised murder and persecution of minorities to the level of theology...
...The Senator looks me straight in the eye...
...My respect for the embattled Israeli Prime Minister goes up a notch...
...If we begin to favor quotas in order to win allies among the blacks, for example, or if we change our church-state separation position in order to win the support of more American Catholics, what then will become of the American Jewish community...
...In their own way...
...And now two-thirds of the nations in the world have concluded that Zionism is a crime against humanity...
...Will our efforts to avoid isolation, to find allies in our struggles, change the very nature of the American Jewish community...
...In the face of the biggest lie of all, I was silent, and so was everybody else...
...The human rights of Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza are incomparably better protected than they were under Jordanian rule before 1967, at a level far superior to the human rights enjoyed by Arabs in all other Arab states today...
...They passed it...
...That is bothering me...
...Why bother...
...Israel is gradually being made a pariah among nations, and Jews, most of whom regard themselves as Zionists, are being made into criminals precisely as they were in Germany in 1935...
...And mostly the word truth...
...But there are so many big lies...
...If the Israelis unilaterally stopped bombing Lebanon, would the PLO stop its terror...
...Or, like mysticism, is optimism an expression of a religious faith in which one takes refuge when rational processes no longer provide acceptable conclusions...
...I am siding with an intransigent Israeli Prime Minister, causing Americans to become anti-Semitic, thereby hastening the end of the Jewish people...
...They are not merely "another" terrorist organization...
...Twenty-two sovereign Arab states have been created in this century in response to Arab national liberation movements...
...But Arab states have preferred, for 31 years now, to use these refugees as political pawns in their efforts to dismantle and dele-gitimize the Jewish State...
...Why doesn't everyone understand that it is not the West Bank that the PLO wanted then, or wants now...
...I continue to sleep well at night...
...No government has protested...
...Our biggest danger—Israel's, America's, the democracies' biggest danger—comes from the big lie...
...Or questions like...
...In truth, it is minuscule in the total context of the things with which I must deal...
...In 1973 Israel was excluded from regional bodies of UNESCO...
...If only Israel had been created in 1938 instead of 1948, what a difference it would have made...
...I agree with him, and tell him that American Jews deal with virtually nothing else...
...words like human rights and democracy and aggression and liberation...
...this American government, that Israeli government, and the relationship between the two...
...But the Senator, perhaps without intending it, was right in still another way...
...One always senses in the far distance the blurry outline of still another ridge of facts...
...Two-thirds of the world's nations know...
...Just another face in this crowd...
...But with the help of their brethren in Israel and in America, large numbers of these Soviet Jews are walking into the sunlight of freedom...
...But Singapore fell by attack from the rear...
...More than half of the Jews coming out of the Soviet Union wind up in the United States rather than Israel...
...Would any Catholic truly feel more supportive of Israel if we favored lowering the wall of separation...
...And what would be the point of such efforts anyhow...
...Why continue to be a target...
...Israel is gradually being made a pariah among nations, and Jews are being made into criminals precisely as they were in Germany in 1935...
...Someone must hold the key to the lock on civilization's dictionary so that humanity's very few important words do not disappear...
...In the end, however, it may well be that the only lasting solution to Israel's economic dilemma, and its only hope of becoming a substantially self-sustaining state, lies in an overall peace settlement...
...In Idaho some seek Frank Church's defeat for the reason that Libya might then be able to engage in lucrative trade with Idaho potato farmers...
...I am comfortable with my response...
...But Havana...
...So much for the morning mail...
...Or are we simply driven to it when we are terrified by the alternative...
...In 1975 the Zionism-racism resolution was adopted by the General Assembly...
...We have assumed, for example, that oil blackmail would be repugnant to most Americans, that succumbing to blackmail is simply not in the American character...
...still others practice slavery...
...I stop for a moment to wonder whether legal training is the right training for this job as American Jewry's spokesman...
Vol. 4 • November 1979 • No. 10
