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AMERICAN JEWS HAVE FOUGHT FOR PALESTINIAN RIGHTS SINCE ISRAEL WAS
BORN  
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Geoffrey Levin
January 28, 2024
Slate
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_ My research shows this tradition runs deep. The American Jewish
establishment did not always view anti-Zionism as inherently
antisemitic. Some Jewish community leaders considered themselves
“non-Zionist” until years after Israel’s founding. _

A photo taken by Don Peretz of Palestinian Arab women in a village
where he distributed food and clothes in northern Israel, 1949. (Photo
courtesy of Deborah Peretz // Slate),

 

On a cold and rainy November day, a 65-year-old American rabbi trudged
down the muddy roads of a Palestinian refugee camp. When the rabbi and
his colleagues stopped, refugees gathered around them in a scene of
“disappointment, frustration, [and] despair.” Gaunt men and
“children, big-eyed and thin,” walked up and clutched the
rabbi’s raincoat. Several began chanting, in Arabic, “We want to
go home!” Weary, broken women watched silently from their tents as
rain and wind chilled their bare feet. Guilt overcame the rabbi. “In
my deepest heart, I said the prayer of confession,” the rabbi wrote,
referring to a prayer recited on Yom Kippur, the fast of atonement.
“_Anachnu Chatanu._” We have sinned.

One could imagine this scene taking place recently. Yet it was 1953
when Rabbi Morris Lazaron walked through the refugee camp—Shatila,
located in Lebanon—where he witnessed firsthand the suffering of
Palestinian families who had lost their homes during the war that
accompanied Israel’s creation in 1948. The “illimitable misery”
of the refugees, to use Lazaron’s words, had a decisive impact on
the former head rabbi of the prestigious Baltimore Hebrew
Congregation. After his trip, Rabbi Lazaron began calling on the
Israeli government to recognize the right of Palestine’s Arab
refugees to return to their prewar homes and urged the Jewish state to
admit 100,000 of them into the country immediately.

Lazaron felt that the Jewish historical experience should compel all
Jews to support the Palestinian refugees. As members of what he called
“the tribe of the wandering feet,” Lazaron pressed fellow American
Jews to remember that they, too, were once “strangers in the land of
Egypt.” Jewish identity weighed heavily on the rabbi’s mind as he
considered how to respond to Palestinian suffering. Yet the hidden
context of the rabbi’s trip reveals that the stakes of his response
extended far beyond the realm of Jewish ethics. Lazaron’s visit to
Lebanon had been organized and financed by a secretly CIA-funded
advocacy organization called American Friends of the Middle East, a
group created to give Americans a more sympathetic picture of the Arab
side of the Israeli-Arab conflict. AFME published Lazaron’s book
about the trip in 1955, apparently as part of a broader public
relations effort that aimed to make it easier for United States
officials to pressure Israel to accept the return of 75,000
Palestinian refugees.

Our Palestine Question
Israel and American Jewish Dissent, 1948-1978
By Geoffrey Levin
Yale University Press; 320 pages
November 28, 2023
Hardcover & E-book:  $38.00  [$25.46 from Amazon]
ISBN: 9780300267853  &  9780300274998

 
Yale University Press
The CIA was far from the only government body interested in American
Jewish responses to the Palestinian refugee crisis. Lazaron
articulated his lament on a playing field where various governmental
actors—Israeli, American, and Arab—all jockeyed to shape U.S.
public opinion surrounding the Palestinian refugee question. Just as
AFME was organizing Lazaron’s trip, Israeli diplomats were quietly
working to undermine both the Jewish newspaper that Lazaron wrote for
and the anti-Zionist Jewish group he represented, the American Council
for Judaism, which in turn had begun fostering warm ties with Arab
officials. The American Jewish debate over Palestinian rights involved
a struggle over Jewish identity, as Lazaron’s words reflect. But as
his broader story shows, the debate also is, and always has been, part
of a high-stakes political struggle between government officials and
others over the future of Israel, the fate of the Palestinians, and
the orientation of American foreign policy toward the Middle East.

There is a narrative about the trajectory of the American Jewish
relationship with Israel that pervades all corners of the organized
Jewish community today. “For millions of secular-minded American
Jews, Israel was the glue. Israel was the cause,” declared
conservative commentator Bret Stephens at the American Jewish
Committee’s 2022 Global Forum. “Zionism was an effective and
powerful and emotionally satisfying substitute for religious
observance,” he continued, bemoaning that in contrast, “at the
height of last year’s war [the 2021 Gaza crisis], so many young
American Jews were eagerly signing letters denouncing Israeli
behavior.”

While young American Jewish letter-signers may not appreciate
Stephens’ tone, they probably would not dispute the gist of his
historical observation, which is considered common knowledge both in
Jewish political commentary and in scholarly works. For decades,
American Jews had rallied around the Jewish state, with Israel uniting
American Jewry in a way that nothing else could, including religion.
But then at some point, according to this telling, young left-wing
Jews began criticizing Israel over its policies toward the
Palestinians, breaking with past generations to shatter this
once-sacred consensus and imperil any semblance of Jewish unity.

Despite its ubiquity, this narrative is flawed in its basic
assumptions. Ever since an estimated 750,000 Palestinians lost their
homes amidst Israel’s birth in 1948, there have been American Jews
deeply unsettled by Israeli policies toward both the Palestinian
refugees and Arabs living under Israeli rule. These critics of old
consisted not only of a few stray rabbis like Morris Lazaron, but in
fact extended well into the American Jewish establishment—including
leaders and staff members of the AJC. The collective amnesia with
regard to this history has been complete: None of the over 1,000 AJC
members in Stephens’ audience likely had any idea that in 1957 their
organization’s president confronted Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion,
urging him to liberalize Israel’s policies toward its Arab citizens.
The audience would not have known that at an AJC gala 66 years before
their own, the Jewish advocacy organization announced a plan to aid
Palestinian refugees that it ultimately shelved in response to Israeli
pressure. And unless they had sifted through faded yellow papers in
their archives, they could not have known that the first Middle East
expert on the AJC’s staff, Don Peretz, lost his job because Israeli
diplomats did not like his research on the Palestinian refugee issue.

Stephens and his audience cannot be faulted for being unaware of these
past events because they are, more or less, unknown. Histories of
American Jewish life make almost no mention of any communal concern
for the Palestinians in the years after Israel’s creation, implying
that it emerged, at the earliest, in the 1970s. Even studies of Jewish
anti-Zionism and non-Zionism during Israel’s early years have tended
to neglect the Palestinian question, focusing instead on debates over
the role of nationalism in Jewish identity.

The fact that this historical undercurrent is so unknown is, to some
extent, the result of concerted campaigns. From the beginning, Israeli
diplomats watched American Jewish interest in Palestinian rights
issues with deep suspicion. Declassified Israeli foreign ministry
files reveal that some of Israel’s most celebrated diplomats
secretly plotted to undermine American Jews who wrote about the
sensitive question of Palestinian refugees, often succeeding in
getting them removed from positions of influence. These diplomats
persuaded reluctant employers to drop “troublesome” employees whom
they had once trusted, quietly sidelining various American Jewish
efforts to highlight or resolve Palestinian rights issues in the
1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.

These findings call for a rethinking of the very nature of the early
Israel-American Jewish relationship. So much written about this era
focuses on the emotional affinities that American Jews held for
Israel, but far less has been written on Israel’s views of American
Jewry. Rather than acting from a place of emotional connection and
intracommunal kinship, Israeli officials acted in pragmatic ways
toward the American Jewish community in the context of a wider public
relations battle that raged between them and pro-Arab voices, which
included Arab diplomats and some in the U.S. government. Israel during
its early years was in a precarious place as it faced an economic
crisis, high security costs, and the expense of resettling hundreds of
thousands of Jewish immigrants. To meet these budgetary needs, the
Israeli government turned to American Jews, who between 1948 and 1956
sent Israel more than $700 million in charitable donations and over
$270 million in cash from bond sales, a combined sum that would total
over $10 billion in 2022 dollars. American supporters of Israel,
including Jews, also lobbied elected officials on diplomatic issues
and successfully urged the government to send economic aid to Israel,
which totaled $450 million (around $5 billion today) in combined loans
and grants during that same eight-year stretch. Since the young
country was reliant on American Jewish support in so many ways,
perhaps it should be expected that its officials acted to ensure that
the question of Palestinian rights did not weaken American Jewry’s
commitment to Israel, harm Israel’s public image, and damage the
U.S.–Israel relationship more broadly. Israel was, in short, acting
as any state might, given the circumstances.

To a certain extent, my new book shows that Israeli leaders
instrumentalized American Jewish organizations, which highlights the
power of the young state and the political savvy of its diplomats. But
to focus only on that would be an oversimplification. American Jewish
organizations first had to yield some of their autonomy to the Jewish
state. Doing so involved American Jews beginning to conceptualize
their interests and ideals not as distinct from those of Israel but as
identical to them—a process that blurred crucial differences between
the community and the state. This required that these organizations
turn away from a distinctive American Jewish identity as a
historically dispossessed minority that has thrived in a liberal
secular state and instead adopt the values of Israel, a country
premised on meeting the needs of an ethno-national majority. To frame
the question underlying this shift in biblical terms, as Lazaron might
have: Is the core of Jewish identity remembering that “we were once
strangers in the land of Egypt”? Or is it all about maintaining a
restored Kingdom of David?

American Jews of the 1940s, 1950s, and beyond often had remarkably
deep conversations about the meaning of Israel’s power over
Palestinians. In recovering this history, _Our Palestine
Question _serves not so much as a starting point for discussion as a
medium that will inform conversations that are already taking place
today and engage them with lost voices from the past. From there, one
can see how the path to the present involved not fate but crucial
decisions made over the course of decades that have shaped the
politics of today surrounding Israel, the Palestinians, and the nature
of transnational Jewish politics.

This history sheds light on political dynamics that at times feel very
distant from those of the present. The American Jewish establishment
did not always view anti-Zionism as inherently antisemitic. Some
Jewish community leaders considered themselves “non-Zionist” until
years after Israel’s founding. American Jewish institutions that had
been established long before 1948 took time to accommodate themselves
to the reality of Jewish statehood, a process that involved countless
discussions about what Jewish sovereignty overseas meant for Jewish
citizens of the United States. Jews had been a perpetual minority, so
many American Jewish institutions had mobilized around liberal and
left-leaning ideologies designed to protect minority groups and those
seeking refuge. Suddenly, after 1948, there was a Jewish state that
not only ruled over a non-Jewish minority group but also denied the
right of refugees to return to their homes on the basis of their
ethnicity and religion. Israel’s birth created a sense of cognitive
dissonance for these American Jewish organizations as they attempted
to come to terms with Israel’s power over the Palestinians without
abandoning the ideologies that they regularly used to protect the
rights of Jews outside the Jewish state.

More than 75 years later, American Jews are grappling with new aspects
of these same crises, an internal struggle that the bloody
Israel-Hamas war in Gaza has made all that more urgent. These dilemmas
will not be resolved easily, but perhaps the only way to start working
through them is by reflecting on their long, forgotten history.

_Excerpt adapted from the introduction of Our Palestine Question:
Israel and American Jewish Dissent, 1948–1978
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Geoffrey Levin, published by Yale University Press, ©2023 by Geoffrey
Levin. Refer to book for footnotes_

* American Jewish community
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* Jewish community
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* Israel
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* zionism
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* Anti-Zionism
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* Jews
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* American Jews
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* AJC
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* American Jewish Committee
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* Palestine
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* Palestinians
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* Palestinian rights
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* Israel founding
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* Nabka
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