The Andrew Young Affair . . . To Be Continued
Fein, Leonard
THE ANDREW YOUNG AFFAIR TO BE CONTINUED LEONARD FEIN How very real are our fears, and how very little can we expect others to understand them. What can it possibly mean to anyone who is not a...
...It would have been nice, how nice it would have been, back when we were all singing "We Shall Overcome" together, if we had managed to sing just a bit louder, loud enough to make the walls of injustice tumble down...
...For the State of Israel, for a free and fallible home for the Jews, no guilt...
...Tell us that you've changed, that you can no longer abide our good wishes and our advices, show us how far you've come...
...So long as the PLO is encouraged by the whores of Europe and the hypocrites of the Arab world and by misguided souls in this country, why should any Palestinian set forth a moderate position...
...And we've been disenchanted with the housing projects that haven't worked and the welfare programs that haven't worked and all the other programs that haven't worked...
...That's what Julian Bond talked about, and that's what Richard Hatcher talked about, and that's what Franklin Williams talked about when he said, "Blacks are deeply affronted by the inherent arrogance of some Jewish groups," in responding to the Young affair...
...Absolutely...
...This is our independence day...
...but if the lead headline in tomorrow's paper were to say, ALL JEWS ARE TO REPORT AT THE NEAREST ARMORY BY SUNSET FOR TRANSPORTATION, would those of us Jews over thirty-five...
...Here and there, a joint project, a working relationship, but none of the old sense of common agendas, shared destinies...
...Can they see the fear, the fear we speak of only when we are sure there is no one to overhear, the fear we hide so well...
...For if the pot be left to boil over, the others will merely be scalded...
...Some of us are postal clerks, and some of us are nurses, and some of us are schoolteachers, and some of us are penny-ante hustlers...
...Where were the rest of us then...
...Recent history refutes you...
...Young seems to have forgotten...
...We care about justice and other such good things, but the thing we care about most is civil rest, social peace...
...I do not like the air strikes...
...Not more favors, not more sermons...
...we do not know how...
...Tell him Arafat's a freedom fighter and Dayan's a Nazi...
...Not for a second...
...There aren't very many dreamers left, maybe not enough to make it work...
...We don't own the banks, and we don't control the press...
...I think they are a mistake...
...See the one over there, the one who looks well-fed and oh so smug...
...What is he saying, what are They saying in their board rooms, in their locker rooms...
...But each time well-meaning bystanders seek dialogue with the PLO, they postpone that time...
...He will not be tried, nor will Mr...
...Wanna get a rise...
...So much of the time we are simply what we seem to be: white...
...Yassir Arafat is a mass murderer...
...Is he with Us, or with Them...
...Willie Sutton robbed banks, he said, because that's where the money is...
...We're not the Klan, and you expect more from us...
...Perhaps you feel sullied by the encounter, but think it's worth the discomfort...
...One way or the other, Hen-toff's authorities or Richlers' vandals, and most likely both together, we'll get it...
...Not Andy Young...
...Fear and, at our best, a common dream...
...it was independence from the Jews that Clark was talking about...
...When you sit for photos with the murderers of innocents, you imply that they are welcome in civilized company...
...The concentration camp survivors...
...Maybe it does...
...Negroes are anti-Semitic because they're anti-white," James Baldwin said...
...Self-interest...
...the demented Red Guards of China...
...They told us it wasn't blacks and Jews, it was blacks and whites...
...Not to worry, you say...
...Not a shred of evidence supports that view...
...Tell you what: Let's talk about the PLO on the outskirts of Safed, where the kids who were massacred at Ma'alot are buried...
...Not for fear of retribution, but for lack of incentive...
...And there is a difference between these and the inhumanity of the PLO...
...Moshe Dayan has now begun to meet with members of the PLO, presumably because that's who the enemy is...
...In time, thaf commitment may change, and the PLO may come to terms with a more modest goal, or may be displaced by other Palestinians who are prepared to live amicably with Israel...
...And here, Mordecai Richler's Jacob Hersh, who waits, as do we all, for "the coming of the vandals...
...You want to lecture to us about the virtues of non-violence, about the merits of the PLO...
...So much of the time, we do not know, do not even want to know, that we are Jews...
...This is not a plausible world...
...But we won't let go the dream...
...That's fair...
...It's dumb because it's a diversion, a wildly wrong turn, for both of us...
...We have the misfortune that we take our own rhetoric seriously, and we really believe all that stuff about the brotherhood of the ex-slaves—we in Egypt and in the camps, you in the South and in the Arab countries...
...But it's dumb...
...Here is Nat Hentoff, a decade back: "Rationally, we 'know' that there can be no pogroms here...
...Good...
...Not this time...
...We've watched for ten years as the world has fallen for the Big Lie, has rejected the notion that Jews can take care of themselves, has abandoned Israel and dignified the brute, and, meaning no rudeness, we're no readier than you to apologize for living, to excuse ourselves for acquiring, here and there, a bit of power...
...Across the crowded restaurant, he whispers the word "Jew," and at our table all conversation stops: What is he saying...
...We are not more than co-conspirators with you in the fight for decency...
...This time, it's the flip-side of that tragedy: it's the ones who've succeeded, and don't know why, don't know whether it's because they've earned it or because they're black...
...That is what Mr...
...That is their formal commitment, and it is regularly repeated and translated into foul behavior...
...And some of the time we've sold out to self-deception or to fatigue, or just hedged our bets, and thrown in with the powerful, endorsed the status quo—and held our breath...
...We, the Jews of Englewood Cliffs and of Beverly Hills, of Shaker Heights and of all the other high places, the Jews with the Cadillacs and the Mercedes, the Jews with the M.D.'s and the J.D.'s and the Ph.D.'s, the Jews with connections, with lobbies, whose lives are splashed with the smell of success...
...That worries me...
...The emaciated millions of India...
...And that is what Jesse Jackson proposes to deny...
...Young is out because he stood there with his truth shaved, and there may be more to the story, but that's why he's out, and nothing else...
...No, there's no hiding place this time...
...What of those who see the pictures later...
...Kenneth Clark has resented the Jewish intellectuals for all these years, and so have a bunch of others, the ones who are breaking into the employment areas where we predominate, and are working their way up, and are filled with anxiety and resentment and all the rest, and here we are, the Jews, the white Jews, the ones with Israel, potent Israel to identify with, and nobody's firebombing our houses, just a few swastikas here and there, mostly in cemeteries, and always sticking together and being so damned tolerant, so smooth, so clever, so satisfied, and talking about how we understand, how persecuted we are and how well we know what it's like and all that stuff on our way to the airports and to the safe suburbs and to the air conditioned malls...
...Curious, is it not, that there seem to be only two places left where Israel's existence is not yet taken for granted: among the PLO, which does not want to, and within Israel, which cannot afford to...
...you are mistaken...
...We've been busy with other things— with cults and with the PLO and with Skokie and with State Department reassessments and with recovering from the exhaustion of the sixties...
...But note: We've changed, too...
...In this mishaped world, dreams ought not be casually dismissed...
...Ah, but Selma...
...why interfere with the process...
...What was it that Kenneth Clark said when the black leadership met near the end of August to pronounce on the Young affair and related matters...
...I think Israel should stop them...
...Sorry...
...Now no guilt need attach to their utterance...
...And some of us tried to listen, tried to believe that it was just an accident that Jewish storekeepers got caught in the burning cities, just a coincidence that the | teachers' union was mostly Jewish...
...Not for a second can you contend that there would be Israeli air strikes over Lebanon if the murderers of the PLO were not bent on the shedding of Israeli blood...
...No great and noble coalition came undone in August of 1979...
...But the fact that none is perfect does not mean that all are equally culpable...
...Neither does Moshe Dayan, incidentally...
...Sometimes it will be easy for us to work together, and sometimes it will be hard, and sometimes it will be impossible...
...fror do they not have their own special fears...
...be totally surprised...
...for some thousands of years, we've bound ourselves to a higher standard than anyone else has yet managed to impose upon us, a higher standard than we've yet been able to meet...
...So let's see to it that we confine our partings, if partings there must be, to real issues, and that we not make such differences as there are between us into occasions for generalized denunciations...
...Maybe we do feel guilty about our success, and maybe we do feel guilty about your situation, and maybe we feel guilty about Cambodia and the Kurds and the parents we don't write to and the kids we don't spend enough time with, and maybe we even feel guilty about the raw deal the decent Palestinians are getting, but there's one thing we don't feel a gram of guilt about, and not all your preaching, not all your preaching and the preaching of the World Council of Churches and Vanessa Redgrave will change that, will cause us to crawl...
...I worry about a world which chooses to sanitize the PLO, which teaches Jesse Jackson's children—and mine—that there are ample rewards to terrorism...
...What in the world can account for that...
...You frighten us and you offend us...
...But, you see, I can depend on Dayan to know that he's dealing with the enemy...
...Doesn't Selma prove that we are Jews...
...We're used to being held to a higher standard...
...That one just doesn't add up...
...But that's not what we're hearing...
...Above all, the injustice collectors...
...in peace...
...In Cambodia, two million people may die of starvation in the next few months...
...One loud-mouthed Jewish leader (and the blacks know as well as we that the loud-mouthed can't be restrained) called for Young's dismissal...
...Cycle...
...Is it just that we're handy targets...
...Too poor to dream, too rich to care...
...In the board rooms, the authorities...
...And how, if the comfortable others cannot be expected to understand, how can we ever expect the blacks to understand...
...If you need to declare your independence, find a different issue...
...We are not your patrons...
...It is not so hard to suppose what they hear in the dark of the night: rats, real ones, and crosses burning, real or imagined, and the hiss of the descending whip, remembered...
...As of this time, the cause of the PLO remains the destruction of the State of Israel...
...Looking across the chasm that separates us, can they tell that we are not anemic whites, that we are wounded Jews...
...And what will the Palestinians themselves conclude...
...And that's a problem with very dangerous moral and political consequences...
...The one will hold joint press conferences with Kreisky and Brandt, the other will walk the streets of New York and the halls of the U.N...
...Terzi, another active member of this conspiracy to commit homicide and politicise...
...They have come from the right, from the left, from the top, from the bottom...
...But even if, for passing reasons of your own, you withhold that respect, we will not let go the dream...
...These well-funded murderers heroic...
...We live between the rock of the powerful and the hard place of the powerless, and survive by learning how to slither...
...we will die...
...it, too, emasculates...
...The Klan must be chortling...
...So please, no sanctimonious sermons to us...
...Looking across the chasm that separates us, can they tell that we are not anemic whites, that we are wounded Jews...
...No, we will have none of it...
...But if it's equal treatment you want, then listen: We expect more from you, as well...
...Surely, you argue, it is time for us to take the fact of Israel and of its power and of its capacity to survive for granted, and move on to other and more pressing needs...
...Bull Connor—whatever happened to Bull Connor?—is the enemy, and inflation's the enemy, and the galoots that burn down houses on Long Island and in Yonkers, they're the enemy...
...This is about blacks and Jews, head on head...
...It's dumb not because our enmity, if that is where this episode comes to rest, is such a danger to you, any more than our friendship has been all that helpful of late...
...However derelict we've been, we're still not the enemy...
...Or will you call it cheap sentimentality that we react that way to the murder of our women and children, yes, our women and children...
...No ambiguity there...
...The end of it will be to make it legitimate for our racists and for your anti-Semites to say out loud the words they were taught it was wrong to say, the words that decent people frowned upon...
...Most of the time, we've known that our best odds were with the evolutionary left, with those who have sought reform and amelioration, equity and decency...
...the thalidomide babies, the paraplegics...
...And even when we know success, all but a very few of us, after the cologne has worn off, hear the things all mankind hears, the things that go bump in the night...
...Young, Clark, Hooks, Jackson, et al.: If what you're saying is that the rats are still biting your kids, and you can't afford for us to drop out, ok...
...Cycle of violence indeed...
...But no...
...Hitler was a National Socialist, whatever that was supposed to mean, and Stalin was a Communist, whatever that was supposed to mean, and don't forget Torque-mada and the Czars...
...Forgive me, but I worry about a world in which people are so very ready to assume that the more horrible the atrocity, the more compelling the cause that must have brought it on...
...Four million Kurds in Iran may die at Khomeini's hands...
...There is a difference between the mistakes that America and Israel have made and the cowardice which Europe and the Arab world have displayed on these matters...
...Pick on a Jew...
...No, we won't always agree...
...We want your respect for our authenticity, no less than you want the same from us, your respect for the complex authenticity of our confusion and our commitment...
...Our destiny...
...Our interests are not identical...
...That's why those blacks who, in the aftermath of the Andrew Young Affair, alleged that we had been for civil rights only when it was in our interest so to be, were entirely accurate...
...in the locker rooms, the vandals...
...Terror and counter-terror...
...Let us be clear: I accept that responsible people, people who care about peace and such, should talk with anyone at all with whom a bargain may be struck...
...Who can comprehend it...
...I agree...
...Messrs...
...So now, a decade later, when instead of singing we've begun to shout, you want to see who can shout the louder...
...In a plausible world, he would be tried before a world court for crimes against humanity...
...When you sit for photos with those who boast of the murderers of innocents, you imply that they are welcome in civilized company...
...Wanna have some fun...
...followed by the black fanatics...
...Yes, Israel is cast in the role of the mighty, the Palestinians in the role of the dispossessed...
...Show "Holocaust" on compulsory television for an entire year, and they will not...
...Just talk: what harm can come of that...
...No, we do not all live in the high places...
...build a thousand memorials to all our tragedies, require daily attendance, still they will not...
...But the least that you should know about us by now is that we are seized of the dream...
...What can it possibly mean to anyone who is not a Jew when we say that we have felt the lash and smelled the acrid flesh and stood in the abyss, that we bind ourselves in fear...
...All those resolutions we passed, and Heschel, and Lelyveld, and Schwerner and Goodman, those who marched and sometimes died...
...You frighten us just now, with your loose accusations and your superficial analyses...
...This time, it's different...
...Because some— not all, but some—of those special noises that you hear we also hear, and because some of those terrible places you have been we have also been, because fear haunts us both...
...Why negotiate minimal demands...
...it's been a while, a long while, since there was anything left to come undone...
...The starvelings of Africa...
...more recognition...
...How can that be...
...The insulted, the injured...
...When it comes to voting, we're still the closest friends and the stanchest allies of the blacks, but we're confused, and yes, we dropped out, we took time off as just about everybody has for Vietnam and Watergate and for some overdue house-mending of our own...
...Whatever slim chance there may be that other and more civilized men and women will step forward to state the Palestinian case vanishes the moment you have public truck with tlje crazies...
...on Bakke, all three major Jewish defense organizations opposed your views, but on Webber only one did...
...Will they know of your mixed feelings, or will they conclude that the PLO is acceptable in decent circles...
...For under such circumstances, why should any alternative Palestinian voice be raised...
...Is it that these miserable terrorists appear to you as freedom fighters, heroic battlers against mighty odds...
...Last time we found ourselves shouting at each other—it was back during the New York City school strike of '68—the soothsayers tried to calm us...
...How will we react...
...I worry about a world whose international organization confers formal observer status upon a movement so loathsome in its intention and in its behavior...
...You think we want your gratitude for favors past...
...The whole affair, from the time of the revelation to the time of the "resignation," took less than forty-eight hours...
...No apologies...
...There is no cycle here, none at all...
...But how in the name of simple reason one can equate the provocation with the response I shall never understand...
...That is what Mr...
...And they know it...
...But you must know better: let loose the always straining dogs of bigotry, and there is no calling them back...
...We are for civil rights, and we are for justice, because without civil rights and without justice the peace of society is a deceptive calm, because when the storm comes, as it surely will without justice, we are in trouble, the boots come closer...
...Half the world is starving, and the other half is in Las Vegas...
...Yes, there is blame enough to go around, blame for everyone...
...The issues may distress us, but we've tried to behave with reasonable sensitivity...
...Maybe the Libyans will send you more cash, or maybe it just raises your morale to hear us yelp...
...If Israel is disposed to regard the risks the world encourages it to take as life-threatening, is the source of its anxiety not plain...
...We expect more from you...
...So think twice before you finger us as the enemy...
...Call us names, and we rush to our < phones and our mimeograph machines and our conferences and our congressmen...
...The world has become more impatient with Israel than with the PLO...
...There is, withal, a difference...
...Call him a racist...
...Ah, you will say, the innocents of Lebanon are no less innocent, somewhere the cycle must be broken, the endless violence that begets violence...
...As best we can, we will fight on alone...
...Is that what you want...
...Low risk targets, that's what we are...
...the rib will be used by plastic surgeons for women who want their noses to look more European...
...There is a chain that can be broken at any time, and there is only one way for it to be broken, and that is for the PLO to renounce its policy and practice of murder...
...It was James Baldwin, I think, who back then said that the real tragedy of being black in this country is that when you fail, you don't know why—you don't know whether it's because you're flawed or because you're black...
...The problem with Kreisky and Brandt and Young and all the others who know what's best for Israel is that they don't deal with the PLO as an enemy...
...Instead, we're hearing a lot of dumb garbage about the PLO and the Middle East and how arrogant we are and how patronizing and how selfish and about how independent you can be and how moral and oh how righteous...
...In Thailand last week, a man sold his rib, extracted without anesthesia, for forty dollars, so that he could buy food...
...And we hear other things as well, things our neighbors do not, things that may be there and may not be there, and please God let us never find out whether it is only our haunted memories and our crazed imaginations that echo with the sound of the jackboots or whether they have reached our block...
...But it's not an easy thing to live with...
...It has done far too little to encourage them, it has drawn so hard a line that the moderate position has been entirely subverted...
...If there are issues where we part company, let's try to see to it that they aren't the vital issues, the ones that are rock-bottom for one or the other of us...
...Do you contend that were Israel to cease its efforts to interdict the terror, the PLO would likewise be tamed...
...we, afraid...
...This one strikes far too close to the bone, and all those storied guilt feelings you expect to elicit from us you can just forget about...
...Does that help...
...We are not even your brothers...
...But do you not see, can you not tell, that the encouragement of the PLO merely increases Israeli anxieties over the fate of the West Bank...
...Where have we been since...
...Do you imagine that were the PLO to cease its villainy, Israel would nonetheless continue its raids...
...Vicarious virtue won't do...
...It's a mark of some progress, after all, that there vare so many blacks around who haVe made it, whatever the reasons, whatever the routes, whatever the mix of personal merit and of social mandate that has brought them there...
...And if you choose to side with the brute, or in other ways reject our hand, that will be a shame and a waste...
...So it's something else, something deeper, more festering, a wound waiting for an excuse to erupt...
...But how can we expect anyone to understand all that...
...Where are we now...
...The crazies and the bigots in both our communities will try to throw us off, and the demagogues will try to wreck it for us all...
...And we've been troubled and confused, because we keep turning affirmative action inside out and upside down and all we can see are quotas, and we don't think, we really don't think that quotas are good for anybody, except maybe in the very short run, and sure, it's about our own kids and medical school, but it's about other and bigger things than that, too...
...Your kids are still being bitten by rats, and our people languish in prisons in Argentina and in Russia, and our children in Israel's schools and marketplaces are still at risk, the sandboxes in the playgrounds must still be searched carefully for explosives each morning...
...But Israel itself is not without responsibility for the silence of the moderates, you say...
...Declare your independence if you must, if you will...
...It's the middle class blacks, the best and the brightest of Black America, the ones who are supposed to know better...
...Do not know, save for the gnawing fear...
...Oh, it's a delicate and hazardous business, this business of insisting on the dream, and of sharing it...
...Lowery of the SCLC apparently never learned...
...Even without the chasm of their own preoccupation, how shall they know that we are Jews...
...You'd do well to remember that even on affirmative action, our record is not what you've made it out to be: On the DeFunis case, the Union of American Hebrew Congregations and the National Council of Jewish Women, among others, stood with you...
...We didn't, they wouldn't have...
...Don't they remember Selma...
...He'll choke on his food, and it's safe, 'cause he won't hit back...
...Let us talk of their heroism in Kiryat Shmonah, in the apartment building where they left nineteen dead Jews, nine of them children, as tokens of their heroism...
...Sure, if you've got to pick a tragedy, better to pick the story of success rather than the story of failure...
...Don't bother barring the door, they'll spill in through the windows...
...If you want to bring peace to the Middle East, there's not much point in talking with the IRA...
...It's not the vandals, the unwashed, the slum-dwelling hordes...
Vol. 4 • October 1979 • No. 9
