AMERICAN JEWS AND THE MIDDLE EAST DILEMMA
Toll, Carolyn
American Jews and the Middle East dilemma A struggle waged behind the scenes Carolyn Toll "Shit, I am tired of that six million routine, man. I am tired of you Jews throwing that six million up...
...How like the early Zionists and Jewish underground fighters, I think to myself...
...Just as the entire spectrum of public debate swung to the Right in this country during that period, with people of good will terrified to be punished for links with the communists, the Jews of Breira were put beyond the pale...
...Carolyn Toll, a free-lance writer in New York, is a former reporter for the Chicago Tribune and Chicago Sun-Times and a former member of the national board ofBreira...
...Would the non-Jewish Left come to our support...
...I wouldn't get fired, but God forbid I should try to find another job...
...Energy has been low among American Jewish supporters of Israeli doves since the collapse of Breira a little more than a year ago, but some former Breira board members and other interested individuals have been meeting to see if there is energy or interest in reviving activity on the Middle East and other issues of concern to progressive Jews...
...Why is this bank setting up a branch in Beirut but not in Tel Aviv...
...Fear of anti-Semitism seems to be the central concern in an ongoing debate within the American Jewish community on whether it can afford to tolerate free speech here in the United States on the Middle East issue...
...Jewish organizational reaction was swift and harsh...
...and as an American I am his responsibility until I get out of the country safe and alive...
...And it is because we know the hearts of strangers that Jews have been in the forefront of great human struggles everywhere, expressing our solidarity with the persecuted, fulfilling our commandment to be "a light unto the nations...
...In 1974, after the PLO massacre of children in the Israeli towns of Ma'alot and Quiriat Shmoneh, one Chutzpah member wrote: "And where are the 'progressive voices' crying out against Jewish suffering...
...So I began by sharing with her some of the experiences in my own diary: September 1957, Pittsburgh...
...But he is human, in his pain and his motives — as human as the Israeli soldiers I know who make retaliatory raids from Galilee and return for rest-and-recreation on my great-aunt's kibbutz near the Golan Heights...
...This struggle over free speech must be resolved before segments of the Jewish community can be persuaded to open their halls to forums on the Middle East in which all views are represented...
...Somehow we must not let the psychic scars from the Holocaust blind us to the human issues in the Palestinian cause...
...Even leftist Jews don't want to take on those anxiety-produced identity questions, so you lack a Jewish force in the peace movement calling for alternatives in the Middle East...
...Would America, thirty years from now, open its doors to fleeing Israelis any more freely than it did to fleeing European Jews thirty years ago...
...With a heavy heart, I have dropped my activities in Habonim — a Jewish labor Zionist organization — and plunged into work for disarmament (and later, civil rights) with the American Friends Service Committee...
...American Jews are living on borrowed time," he says sternly...
...Would the woman who asked me about the suffering of the Palestinians...
...Berrigan made the Jews in the peace movement feel they were alone, and scared non-Jews from getting involved in the Middle East issue because of the strength of official Jewish reaction," says Gail Pressburg, Middle East program coordinator for the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC...
...The Holocaust is perceived by many Jews as simply the Twentieth Century version, and the fact that it came the closest to ending Jewish history altogether makes its implications for the future even more frightening...
...After the leak, the Jewish leadership mobilized to suppress any future meetings between American Jews and Palestinian spokesmen — and to demolish Breira...
...With that background, Habonim's promise that the Jewish state could really be "a light 'Energy [is] low among...
...Now we had better listen carefully to the good professor so we will know how to argue with the Jews about this...
...But that faith, Deutscher noted, had been betrayed: "If instead of arguing against Zionism in the 1920s I had urged European Jews to go to Palestine, I might have helped to save some of the lives that were later extinguished in Hitler's gas chambers...
...I have the impression that the grass-roots Jews tend to support the racist, anti-democratic things going on and refuse to look at what is really happening...
...Rabbi Gerald Serotta gathered a few other former Breira members and many other similar-minded Jews for a weekend meeting in May to consider reviving progressive Jewish activity...
...Where are the Jewish celebrities who will express solidarity with the doves willing to accept a Palestinian state in return for true peace...
...Tell the Zionists it is no less loyal to Israel to give support to us in the minority views than to support the party in power...
...For while I may share some of her views, I share the fate of my fellow Jews...
...Although the letter had no American organizing focus, it did help legitimize open expression of critical views here and triggered debate in the Israeli press over what is an appropriate American Jewish reaction to Israeli policy...
...I tell him I attended a similar teach-in on the war at the Beirut College for Women only the week before and heard Palestinian students discuss the impact of the Six Day War on them...
...The rabbi of the area's most liberal congregation, which is vocal about its commitment to integration and social justice, which mixes Negro spirituals with Hebraic melodies in its music, turns me down flat...
...August 1967, Pittsburgh...
...I am sure there will be no problem in my own Hyde Park neighborhood near the University of Chicago, where the Jews have spurned the white flight to the suburbs to remain in the city and struggle for civil rights...
...The atmosphere is a bit like the week before the Rose Bowl...
...His ambivalence is widely shared today by non-Zionist Jews...
...All the techniques of the McCarthy witchhunt of the 1950s were brought into play...
...We pay Israelis to be Jews for us and the result is a superficial unanimity among American Jews on Middle East questions, but there is no integrity in that unanimity...
...He charges the Western powers with unjustly befriending the Jews at the expense of his people...
...Berrigan's outburst silenced Jewish peace activists on the Middle East just when the time was ripe for them to speak out...
...I am tired of you Jews throwing that six million up at us and hiding behind them corpses to do whatever you want to...
...I am back, determined to work for any group trying to give Israeli doves a forum here in the United States...
...The consul tells me he is annoyed that I, a Jew, took the risk of entering the country and staying with Jews, and he shows it...
...But I had to answer her...
...In an introduction to an anthology of articles from Chutzpah's quarterly newspaper, the group wrote: "We realized many leftists we had worked with closely showed no awareness of Jewish oppression and no concern for Jewish survival...
...I am sitting stiffly in the office of the American consul, who is plainly irritated because I have made myself his problem...
...It is all those who resist any compassion, any compromise, any concern for those with whom Israel must ultimately come to terms...
...One of the Breira people said he could not sleep that night...
...One chapter of the Anti-Defamation League called for firing any B'nai B'rith employes who expressed views differing from the organization's official positions...
...The president of the Zionist Organization of America tried to get Rabbi Ticktin fired from his job...
...Breira's positions rarely saw the light of day in the Jewish community...
...October 1972, Chicago...
...Podiums before large audiences are usually offered by liberal Christians...
...The well-orchestrated attacks which finally succeeded in killing Breira reached their peak early in 1977, just before Breira's first national conference in Washington, D.C...
...It is mainly in the living rooms of concerned Jews that American Jewish dissidents, Israeli doves, and Palestinians can be heard, or in campus Hillel houses run by courageous young rabbis...
...It was hard to leave Habonim because it meant giving up working for the dream of a Jewish socialist state in Israel which could be a model for the world...
...Loeb attributes the failure of Breira to what he calls an unwillingness of American Jews — even those on the Left — to deal with a specifically American Jewish identity...
...There is a coup in Damascus and Americans without important business in the country are being asked to leave...
...And why this meeting with a Palestinian...
...For years he has been an influential voice of the Left, disseminating its conventional views on Zionism...
...As our news media have reported, there is a growing peace movement within Israel itself...
...reports that Lyndon Johnson felt Jews should show gratitude for support of Israel by keeping quiet about Vietnam...
...The group felt it would be unrealistic to try to organize all the Jews with progressive politics into one national organization...
...It is important for those Jews who understand this to champion the Palestinian cause before the bankers do...
...The name Breira — Hebrew for "alternative" — was meant to challenge the slogan "ain breira" (no alternative) used by Israelis and American Zionists to emphasize their view that only official Israeli policy was realistic...
...We thought it was about time someone held a public forum for people to participate on the subject, and we felt it was a critical political time to bring over Israeli and Palestinian doves to have a dialogue with each other...
...This is, of course, precisely what the Jewish organizational leaders want...
...Also victimized by the purge was Bob Loeb, Breira's young founding director, who lost his job in the wrenching inner turmoil which inevitably resulted from the external pressures...
...Jews fear that Christian public concern for the Palestinians could result in American governmental pressure for an armed Palestinian state which could eventually destroy the state of Israel...
...According to Ticktin, a report of the meeting was given to the Israeli foreign ministry by one of the participants — a retired B'nai B'rith official — simply to inform them of current PLO thinking, "but that report was leaked to the press to embarrass the five of us and prevent more meetings between American Jews and PLO members...
...Those people simply shut up after the leak to protect their jobs, concealing the reality of some diverse views quietly held among American Jewry, and leaving Breira to defend the meetings alone...
...The article raged at the Reverend Daniel Berrigan for his speech to the Arab-American University graduates in October 1974 which seemed to place total blame on Israel for Middle Eastern violence and lacked any mention of peace-minded Jews here and in Israel with whom moderate Palestinians could work towards peace...
...But in the American climate of insecurity about non-Jewish majority views, such arbitrary loyalty tests have not been challenged by the same Jews who vehemently champion others' rights to speak freely...
...I could have told her about a shocking private debate among American Jews as to whether we can really take the "risk" of genuine open discussion on this issue, and of the agonizing done by staunch leftists — who would champion anyone else's right to free speech — before cautiously deciding for free speech "but with discipline...
...When the horror of the Holocaust was exposed after the war, American Jews became the beneficiaries of sympathy (and guilt) which imposed a veneer of politeness on even the most virulent anti-Semitism and gave an entire generation of young Jews a taste of full equality that had never before been experienced by Jews anywhere...
...One does not speak this way in polite circles now, but one of these days American sympathy for Jewish feelings about the Holocaust will have run out when a generation comes to power who do not remember, and Jews will have to choose between their loyalty to America or to Israel...
...Breira had become much more controversial late in 1976, when it ceased to be merely a "position pamphlet" organization and publicly defended its right to act on its principles by meeting with moderate Palestinians...
...I have no relationship to the American Jewish community...
...This time more officials of established Jewish organizations were among the signers...
...Deutscher still remained critical of Israeli society, and regretted the need for its existence...
...It is argued that the Israelis conduct debate in Hebrew, in a more homogeneous society, and not in English under the spotlight of a gentile press...
...Jews have been threatened with extinction for 4,000 years — by the Pharaohs, Babylonians, Romans, Crusaders, Inquisitors, Cossacks, Czars, and Nazis...
...Inevitably, the Holocaust comes up in any discussion of Jews and Palestinians, though Jews sense an increasing Christian impatience with that...
...Such an American support group could play an important role in strengthening the Israeli doves' influence...
...She notes that few national peace groups address the Middle East question at all...
...In that same month, the AFSC held a national conference in Washington, and Gail Pressburg wrote letters of explanation to the major Jewish groups...
...AFSC's own peace-making efforts in the Middle East have been discredited in the American Jewish press and organizational mailings, and the group has been branded "pro-Arab, anti-Israeli distributors of PLO propaganda...
...Christians have to take more principled stands against the notion that 'Zionism is racism' if they want Jews to have more guts...
...I scan the faces of the bankers and their wives, and as Professor Sayegh speaks I am sure I see a look of satisfaction, and I imagine them thinking, "At last, we're off the hook...
...And, after all, who should understand the Palestinians — a stateless, homeless people — better than we Jews, who for most of our history were persecuted and in homeless exile...
...Some Jews sympathetic to CONAME felt that only an all-Jewish group could have significant impact on American Jews...
...Certainly I wondered if that were true for the woman asking me the question...
...I did not want to seem to dissociate myself from the collective body of Jews to win her approval...
...I have been warmly invited to this private meeting because I am a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, and no one knows or suspects that I am a Jew...
...The entire staff and lay leadership of the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith called for a policy of restraining employes from identifying their jobs when expressing personal views at variance with the organization's...
...Irving Howe's comments reflect the deepest feelings of both sides...
...All that pressure to hide our natural dislike of Jews, to be polite because of their terrible Holocaust experiences, is over...
...Even now, attempts are made to exclude Stone's views from the legitimate spectrum of Jewish thought...
...comfortable...
...What I yearned for was a specifically Jewish peace group addressing itself to Jews of all ages — but especially energetic Jewish youth — which would talk about civil rights problems in the creation of a Jewish state, which would acknowledge Martin Buber's earlier reservations in his call for a two-state solution, and which would take into account the thinking of other Israeli dissidents who had deep concerns for the direction of the new state...
...Politically, the coalition extended from Arthur Waskow of the leftist Institute for Policy Studies (who called Breira a "mobe") to such mainstream Jewish leaders as Rabbi Balfour Brickner of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, Rabbi David Silverman of the Jewish Theological Seminary, and Rabbi Max Ticktin, associate director of the national B'nai B'rith Hillel Foundation...
...The next rabbi on my list heads the first Jewish congregation in America ever to permit a woman to speak from a pulpit — but it will not be the first to have an Israeli Arab speak, even in a small meeting room...
...In a new preface to a reissue of his book, now titled Underground to Palestine: and Reflections Thirty Years Later, Stone writes of his loneliness as a Jewish dissident...
...But in the late 1960s, when the anti-Israel, pro-Arab rhetoric rose in the Left, I was also extremely un'. . . At stake here is democratic Jewish lite...
...American Jewish leaders offered to spend vast sums promoting his book, a sympathetic account of the struggles of Holocaust survivors to get into Palestine, if he would just delete one small, unacceptable sentence in which he called for a bina-tional state recognizing both Arab and Jewish claims to the land...
...In these circumstances, legitimate public debate within the organized Jewish community on Middle East questions is effectively eliminated...
...Jews — many of whom have never before been involved in any organized Jewish causes — flock to large, emotional rallies...
...I am sinking into a plush sofa in an elegant hotel suite overlooking the Mediterranean, listening to a Palestinian — a professor of economics — who is talking to members of the board of directors of the First National Bank of Chicago and their wives...
...It is no less bloody or serious for that, but it is necessary to see it in those terms to understand that true peace can come only from a genuine settlement...
...A group of Chicago Jews — veterans of the civil rights, anti-war, and women's movements — formed a "Jewish liberation collective" called Chutzpah when their ambivalence turned to anger at the Left's expressions of total support for Arab states and Palestinian guerrillas "in their call for Israel's destruction...
...Why are American Jews so callous to the suffering of the Palestinians...
...But the political education we received in Habonim was suspect to me...
...June 1970, Jerusalem...
...Our parents' generation accepted a kind of Jewish Jim Crow — restrictions and quotas on housing, jobs, hotels, clubs, colleges — as a way of life, because Jews in the past had always accepted a less-than-equal status in every society...
...From what Jewish group is Stone dissenting...
...But for many Jews, the Holocaust was not an event but a recurring historic theme — and one with implications for the future...
...Another member, less upset, called it a clear case of intimidation...
...I needed to know whether I could trust her before I could tell her the truth...
...She wants him to be a "nice Palestinian boy," to get a college degree and then to get an important professional job in Kuwait and make something of himself so his family can be proud of him...
...In fact, PLO members Sabri Jiryis and Issam Sawtawi — who had been brought to the United States by a non-Jewish peace group — had held quiet meetings with people prominent in American Jewish groups in New York and Washington...
...That image of a monolithic American Jewish community has been carefully cultivated by a handful of national Jewish organizations...
...Out of this fear, some Jews are on the alert for waves of "the new anti-Semitism...
...The Bag, by Sol Yurick, 1968...
...With few courageous exceptions, those voices are silent...
...One student suggests the unthinkable: that Israeli soldiers should make their willingness to fight conditional, demanding their leaders show some efforts to make peace, and that soldiers should demand civil rights for the Israeli Arab and occupied Palestinian populations and refuse to take part in removing people from their lands...
...It was agreed that the goal — a public image for progressive Jews in America — could better be accomplished by giving visible support to a broad base of Jewry to speak out, whether it be in temples or in Left movements, on all issues where their Jewishness gives them a special perspective and concern, including the Middle East...
...Somehow it is easier to be called communist than anti-Semite...
...The letter, which was read aloud at an Israeli Peace Now demonstration, was the second such public letter organized by Leonard Fein, editor of Moment, a Jewish affairs magazine, in the last two years...
...Meanwhile, in my Islamic literature class, where I am the only Jew, a fellow student from Egypt — who is the class's only Arab — is torn with worry about her brother, who has been sent into combat...
...I could have told her she has not heard about those Jews because the mainstream Jewish organizatioas in the United States have worked hard with the media to convey the image of a solid Jewish voting bloc behind official Israeli policy...
...And much of the rhetoric on the Left identifies the Palestinians as the underdogs of the Third World and portrays Israel as a monolithic oppressor state on a par with South Africa...
...Those who remember life here as recently as the years before World War II do not take their equality in this society for granted as do those who have come of age since 1945...
...While nostalgic for the open and free debate that prevailed in the American Jewish community of his youth, he urges caution today...
...Such anger from an American official frightens me, but I chalk it up to the political views of just one man working in an Arab country, and put it out of my mind...
...The only audience of Jewish laymen who hear him in my neighborhood are the thirty or so people I cram into my apartment's living room...
...And who gives you a moral cover for making lots of money, besides...
...Any attempts by either side to appeal to the power of those bankers — and the power structure they represent — can only end in tragedy, for the bankers don't care about either of us, but only for themselves...
...But like the "premature anti-fascists" of the 1930s, Breira members paid a price for being right too soon...
...July 1963, Aleppo, Syria...
...Tell the non-Zionists there is an anti-capitalist Left here, not represented by the policies of the government in power, just as you have there, and we need you...
...Prior to the establishment of Israel, he notes, it was respectable for socialist Zionists like himself to call for binationalism and Arab-Jewish co-existence...
...Israel is the current homeland of our people, many of whom were offered no other home when they desperately needed one...
...I have just arrived and refuse to leave, because this is a visit to the parents of a fellow student back at the University of Michigan who has not been allowed to visit Syria since his passport was revoked...
...They have new rhetoric to back them up — the oppression of the Palestinians, for whom they surely have no greater a love than for the Jews, but who are personally and politically far less troublesome...
...Some Jews fear that as memories of the Holocaust fade, Jews will be back where we were a generation ago, with marginal status in a society where we might become scapegoats — as Jews always have throughout history — for public unrest in bad times...
...Bob Ross, one of the founding SDS members in the early 1960s, says he does not relate to politics as a Jew...
...And it was widely rumored that Jewish organizations successfully lobbied the State Department to deny visas to PLO representatives...
...Yet Howe's disclaimer of any Breira membership reads like a parody of testimony from the 1950s before the House Un-American Activities Committee and is a sad commentary on the climate in the American Jewish community: "I am not a member of Breira, nor do I expect to become one," he wrote...
...One thing is clear: A lot more Jews would take dovish positions publicly if they felt sure the non-Jewish community would continue to support Israel's right to exist...
...Palestinians, after all, are not military people, she tells him, they are intellectuals...
...Other committees are considering specific issues including energy, affirmative action, and the Middle East...
...It is all those who press her on to another bloody round...
...The big fear is to avoid playing into the hands of those in the Carter Administration who want to impose a disadvantageous peace on Israel...
...At first, the meetings were private and Breira was only one of a number of Jewish groups represented...
...My bridges are burned...
...Why is there no Middle East Peace Campaign, complete with media blitz, in the United Stales...
...Israeli doves General Mattiyahu Peled, Uri Avneri, and Arie Eliav had been meeting for months in Paris with Issam Sartawi and Sabri Jiryis of the PLO...
...It is a conspicuous omission...
...And I have to stifle a laugh to avoid offending his youthful pride...
...Argov claimed that to speak against the position of the Israeli government was roughly equivalent to speaking against the Jewish state itself...
...I am sitting in an auditorium at the Hebrew University listening to Israeli students' speeches at a teach-in on the Six Day War...
...I am not so naive as to think that his familiarity makes him harmless, that he hasn't shot that gun and perhaps killed Israelis in a border raid...
...In 1973, Breira was formed, with Bob Loeb as director, as a fairly broad coalition encompassing young people from all Jewish groups and denominations...
...For thirty years I had functioned as an academic on university campuses with a strong tradition of freedom of expression," says Ticktin, who now teaches at George Washington University in Washington, D.C...
...CONAME hired Bob Loeb and Allan Solomonow — both Jews with experience in the peace movement — to give Americans exposure, through speaking tours and literature, to little-known Israeli dissidents and moderate Palestinians...
...In a recent review of his book in The New Republic, Stone's views were labeled "PLO apologetics" by a reviewer who added: "Stone hardly qualifies as a Jewish dissident...
...I could have told the peace worker who confronted me with that vexing question that the American Jewish community is really not a monolith, that thousands of Jews around the country feel concern for the fate of the Palestinians and regard it as central to a just and peaceful solution in the Middle East...
...My grandparents brought their particular brand of Jewish socialism and internationalism with them when they immigrated to the United States just before World War I. I was nurtured on such dreams and ideals by my socialist parents, who fed me a diet of strong ethnic identity and nonviolence so deep that my father was the only Jewish conscientious objector I knew in World War II...
...The result was an "Organizing Committee for a New Jewish Agenda" with working committees for several projects, including a national conference for the fall of 1980 on a Progressive Jewish Agenda for the 1980s, and a national newsletter...
...Such Jewish intellectuals as Irving Howe and Nathan Glazer counted themselves as sympathetic to Breira, but never joined...
...Would Jews here be in any stronger a position than we were then to help save them...
...I. F. Stone, the distinguished Washington journalist, says he was given "the bum's rush" out of the Jewish community in 1946, when he refused to alter a book he had written to further the Zionist cause...
...But where are the large support rallies from American Jews in the peace movement and on the Left...
...In Boston, three Breira members were invited to meet with Shlomo Argov, deputy director of Israel's foreign ministry," wrote William Novak, journalist and Breira board member, in a Boston Jewish paper, Genesis II...
...How much easier it is to take up for an underdog who lives far away, who won't move into your suburb or demand to join your club or publicly call you prejudiced for refusing him admission...
...The AFSC have become 'activist' on behalf of Middle East peace on PLO terms," an Anti-Defamation League document circulated in February 1977 charged...
...The negative social pressure from the Jewish community was enormous," says Solomonow, who now runs the one-man Middle East Peace Project in New York...
...I had to explain the feelings of fear and sympathy her question had aroused...
...The global perspective of the Palestinians was essentially correct, but the tactics were awful — Munich, especially, for me, because I could identify with those Israeli athletes...
...A lot of people said to me, it isn't worth it," said Rabbi Arnold Wolf, who is still Yale Hillel chaplain...
...When the same network asks me to help find speaking engagements for Fouzi El-Asmar, an Israeli Arab poet, I eagerly agree...
...He feels the topic of civil and human rights of Arabs living in Israel is too delicate for a public meeting...
...Those who admit it say they fear that anti-Semites would exploit any debate against Jewish interests, but some dissidents suspect they also fear that the control of the present leadership will be challenged...
...Professor Yusef Sayegh of the American University in Beirut — also well known as a member of the "brain trust" for Yassir Arafat's al-Fatah and the PLO — describes his pain as a Palestinian in being unable to return to his homeland, while any Jew from anywhere is able to take up residence there...
...Once you take a position like this, the organized Jewish community closes you out...
...It was a perfectly rational question, one many Jews debate among themselves — but addressed to me by an American Christian, it troubled and frightened me...
...Frankly it is painful for me to see Jews as the oppressor, knowing what they went through...
...Just before Breira's scheduled February 1977 conference, Israeli consulate staff in Boston and Philadelphia called Breira members to private meetings and urged them not to attend...
...I am anxious about my relatives and friends in Israel, but my concern encompasses my classmate, Mona, her family, and her brother...
...Somehow these bankers — who represent for me the entire gentile American power structure — are being given permission by that Palestinian to go home and be anti-Semitic...
...This Palestinian cause is also just...
...We realized that this was anti-Semitism and decided to fight it...
...I could have criticized the suppression of free speech in American Jewish institutions — the pressures that prevent dovish or dissident Jews from organizing in synagogues, Jewish community centers, and meetings of major national Jewish organizations...
...In all my Islamic studies classes, everyone — students, faculty — has been rooting for the Arabs in the Six Day War...
...Breira soon became a Jewish household word, with rabbis delivering Friday night sermons on the threat of Breira to American-Jewish loyalty to Israel...
...It made the early days of the anti-war movement seem like a lark...
...Memos from national organizations to the local groups called Peled "a mouthpiece for the PLO," causing deep frustration to liberal Jews who had hoped Peled's talk would have softened the hard line some American Jews were taking...
...The late Isaac Deutscher, a prominent Polish Jewish socialist, wrote in 1954 that he had opposed Zionism because he had placed his faith "in the European labor movement, or more broadly, in European society and civilization...
...I could have told her about the rise and fall ofBreira, a short-lived attempt to foster support here for Israeli doves and give them the kind of forum they have in Israel...
...The National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council urged Jews to shun anyone openly supporting Israeli negotiations with the PLO...
...To a Jew living comfortably in America today, it is not bizarre to harbor the uneasy thought that our apparent freedom from discrimination and persecution might merely be a brief lull before the next storm...
...There were many rabbis from the Reform and Conservative movements and from B'nai B'rith Hillel houses on college campuses...
...May 1970, Beirut, Lebanon...
...Were we not commanded, "You shall not oppress a stranger, you know the heart of a stranger for you were strangers in the land of Egypt...
...Somehow we two feel a common bond, not shared by our classmates...
...They make it impossible for you to have any influence...
...Can I really believe that this boy, who seems like a relative, whose mother sounds like every Jewish mother everywhere, is the dread Arab enemy...
...May 1970, on the Lebanese-Israeli border...
...Somehow I feel this is a family fight...
...Those who champion the Palestinian cause often give Jews the feeling that Palestinians have replaced Jews in the Christian circle of concern, leaving Jews with no allies but their own people...
...Sitting next to me in a moving automobile is an al-Fatah Palestinian guerrilla decked out in army fatigues, with a rifle leaning between his legs...
...And in the case of rabbis, their livelihoods were at stake...
...Some seem to feel Jews have received ample public sympathy and are milking the Holocaust for all it's worth...
...I was ambivalent about the Left's position, so I ducked...
...Their concerns were twofold: to fight the anti-Semitism and red-baiting that had emerged in the years of Mc-Carthyism, and to win new respectability as suburban middle-class professionals rather than working-class European immigrants...
...Such answers might have persuaded her that American Jews are not unanimously indifferent to the suffering of the Palestinians — but I could not give them because my fundamental response to her was emotional, simply as a Jew whose subliminal fear of anti-Semitism was tapped by her blunt question...
...One must be clear one speaks as a friend of Israel and it must be emphasized over and over again...
...I could not help asking myself, "Is she anti-Semitic...
...But it seemed at the time that the Jews primarily concerned about Israel were the Establishment Jews — who were fleeing into the suburbs and busily building their million-dollar conglomerates of temples and synagogues, social clubs, educational institutions, philanthropies, and community centers...
...Howe called the demise of Breira "exasperating, because it could have had a real function, popularizing the views of the critics within Israel...
...The Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations denounced the meetings, ignoring the fact that most of the participants in those meetings were not Breira members but mainstream middle-echelon Jewish professionals of major Jewish organizations...
...This public ban on free speech drives underground what dissent remains, concealing the dissenters even from each other and preventing their numbers from growing...
...The comments of gentiles on this subject — like the peace worker's question to me — often omit any expression of awareness of this subliminal Jewish fear...
...What Jews did see was the heat Breira members had to take for dissent...
...Even on the secular Left, most Jews were quiet about the Middle East...
...I am a Jewish student visiting with a Syrian Jewish family, but I am also an American...
...I could have told her of the witch hunt tactics and McCarthyite smear campaigns used by the Jewish Establishment to hound Breira out of existence in an effort to conceal the reality of a split in the American Jewish community...
...I could have talked further of Jewish attempts to suppress free speech on this issue among non-Jewish American peace groups as well, such as denunciations of the American Friends Service Committee as "anti-Semitic" and "dupes of the Palestine Liberation Organization" for insisting that any true peace must include a viable state for the Palestinians...
...They were prepared to defend their political positions, but not their motives and Jewish loyalties — and those were what came under attack...
...It has been a difficult summer...
...But he plans to quit college altogether and devote himself to the movement, because he sees no future for himself so long as Palestinians are second-class citizens wherever they live...
...In 1970, a Committee on New Alternatives in the Middle East (CONAME) was formed, with an initial committee spearheaded by Noam Chomsky, Richard Falk, Don Peretz, Robert Jay Lifton, Paul Jacobs, Everett Gendler, Irene Gendzier, and others — Jewish and gentile — to help in the search for peace...
...it glossed over the human problems of the Palestinians, and treated all Arabs with contempt...
...I was asked abruptly one day by a new staff member of a national peace organization...
...The peace treaty between Israel and Egypt has vindicated Breira...
...Breira members, who cared deeply for Israel as a Jewish state and homeland, nonetheless felt Israel could — and should — be more flexible in negotiating with the Arabs and Palestinians and in announcing a willingness to return occupied territory in return for recognition and peace treaties...
...I continued to focus my academic studies on the Middle East, but for political work I turned elsewhere — to a variety of Left groups on campus, including SDS, SNCC, Fair Play for Cuba, and others...
...But to those who would still argue that such efforts can only jeopardize continued American support for Israel, Rabbi Arnold Wolfs answer is the most eloquent: "But I do not agree that it is only we who risk Israel...
...Instead, the pervasive impression is that the American Jewish community will support whatever line the Israeli government takes...
...The Jews themselves have been oppressing an underdog who needs our sympathies...
...Breira also called on Israeli and American Jews to recognize that no true peace could be achieved without some self-determination for the Palestinians...
...If you don't agree with the party line, they smear you regardless of your Jewish background," Stone told me...
...The Jewish Peace Fellowship offers sponsorship to my Israeli student friend, and people around the country find speaking engagements for him...
...He says he thinks it is important for Israelis and Palestinians to talk about these things together...
...No boards, no rabbinic organizations...
...Some were experiencing hints of anti-Semitism in American society for the first time since World War 11: rumors of bumper stickers reading "Burn Jews, Not Oil" during the 1973-74 "oil crisis...
...It seems that Christians regard the Holocaust as a terrible aberration in history, a single incident but not a trend...
...Critics of official Israeli policy are excluded from mainstream Jewish discussion, their views are denounced as "disloyal," and anyone endorsing the critics' right to speak is dismissed as a supporter of Palestinian violence...
...All the techniques of the McCarthy witchhunt of the 1950s were brought into play' "Tell the American Jews who are in the peace and civil rights movements to help us, their counterparts in the Israeli peace and civil rights movement," he urges...
...This is a crucial time to speak out, but with certain discipline," he told me in a telephone interview...
...In an article titled "For Free Discussion in the Jewish Community," in the now-defunct Breira newspaper Interchange — Howe was on the editorial advisory board — he wrote, "I am not sure that I agree with all of its [Breira's] views, though my general orientation is to sympathize with the Israeli doves...
...From then on, Stone, who might have been a hero on the synagogue lecture circuit as the first American newsman to travel with Holocaust survivors, was banned in any Jewish arena by leaders determined to close the debate on binationalism and statehood...
...In a letter campaign to B'nai B'rith, Ticktin was charged with allowing the university campus Hillel rabbis — whom he supervised — to become spokesmen for the Palestinian position...
...The National Jewish Community Relations Advisory Council called on all Jews to boycott the Quaker conference, calling it a "propaganda trap...
...Never before had he been told he was part of a conspiracy to undermine Israel...
...supporters of Israeli doves...' unto the nations" for peace and social justice was heady stuff...
...Nothing in the way she asked the question gave me a clue as to whether she felt the same concern for Jews as for Palestinians...
...The boycott extended to General Peled's national speaking tour, so that engagements before Jewish groups scheduled to hear him were abruptly canceled...
...In all of these groups there were many Jews like myself...
...In Israel, where Jews establish their identity by birth rather than membership in an organization, Stone would be a full-fledged Jewish dissident...
...After his talk, I discover he is part of a small group of dissidents within Israel who are calling for peace talks with Palestinians, and who are critical of the Israeli government's positions...
...Any hope of Breira's capacity to spark Jewish debate on the issues was dead...
...They have managed to portray American Jewry as more jingoist and hawkish than most Israelis are, less willing to discuss the issues openly, and more callous toward other people's pain...
...There is fear that in a generation, American support for Israel might not be as strong...
...It was a natural question for a peace activist to ask...
...What is at stake here is democratic Jewish life in America, in Israel, and God willing, all over the world...
...Two Breira members — Rabbi Max Ticktin and Arthur Waskow — were among five American Jews at the Washington meeting...
...General George Brown's notorious speech about "Jewish control" of American banks, and more...
...He is a college junior, a chemistry major at the American University in Beirut, and he is telling me that his mother is heartbroken over his extracurricular guerrilla activities...
...In June, a group of fifty-nine prominent American Jewish figures — including Saul Bellow and Leonard Bernstein — sent a letter to Begin protesting the Israeli government's West Bank settlement policies...
Vol. 43 • August 1979 • No. 8
