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A NEWSLETTER WITH AN EYE ON POLITICAL MEDIA

The American-and Jewish-Divide Over Israel

My new book analyzes the 55-year-old rift, now grown to a chasm, in
which the right's remaking of and romance with Israel has detached
young U.S. Jews from organized Judaism.

**** My new book, We Are Not One: A History of America's Fight Over
Israel, will be published on Tuesday. You can learn more about it via
links to the publisher, Basic Books
<[link removed]>,
to the indie books site
<[link removed]>, or the
dreaded Bezos behemoth
<[link removed]>. My
shelves groan from the countless books written about Israel itself, and
especially those on its conflict with the Palestinians and nearby Arab
states. This one, however, is the only one that focuses on the debate it
has inspired in the United States. While I actually don't expect
anyone to agree with all of it, I'm pretty sure that anyone interested
in the subject will find it useful. I do know it is the best thing
I've ever written.

Authors need good reasons to write a book-especially those clocking in
at over 500 pages-and I certainly have my share. Here are a few of
them:

First, there's just obsession. While I signed the contract for the
book in 2015, I actually began it 40 years ago, while writing my college
honors thesis. Just as I was coming into adulthood, I discovered that
the life I thought I was best suited for, that of the New York (Jewish)
intellectual, had been hijacked by a group of well-funded right-wing
neoconservatives whose views struck me as wrong about just about
everything. I decided to investigate their origins and did so with a
focus on the role that Israel's 1967 Six-Day War played in turning
liberals into conservatives and doves into hawks. I was such a nerd that
I saved my little note cards, and some of the interviews and research I
did back then actually ended up in my new book.

Then there's my perennial frustration with the state of the debate.
Literally never in my life have I ever experienced anyone actually
changing anyone's mind in an argument about Israel. I have, however,
seen an awful lot of people get really angry at each other. This is due
to the fact that such debates are rarely mere policy disputes.
Frequently, they function instead as expressions of an individual's
deepest self-definition. It's a real problem, too, because pretty much
everything about Israel is complicated. The distortions that inevitably
arise in debate double, triple, even quadruple the nature and level of
these complications. Addressing oneself to over 125 years of such
arguments, well, as I said, made for a long book.

Fortunately, the time feels right. For many decades, public discussions
of Israel in the U.S. were dominated by a Disneyland-style fantasy of
that nation put forth by Israeli politicians and public relations
officials and vigorously promoted by its supporters among American
Jewish organizations. These same organizations, led by AIPAC, formed a
powerhouse alliance with neoconservative pundits and politicians, and
Christian Zionists, to effectively enforce fealty to this fantasy in the
media, Congress, and other public forums. In doing so, they often
engaged in vicious personal attacks to discredit almost any prominent
individual whose views traveled beyond the boundaries of the debate as
they defined it.

Yet these boundaries were in a constant state of motion. President
Kennedy was advised never to utter the word "Palestinian." President
Carter was allowed to admit that Palestinians existed but was pilloried
for employing the word "homeland" when discussing them. Even so,
Andy Young was forced out of his job as Carter's U.N. representative
for meeting with a member of the PLO, when those were the only people
who could negotiate on the Palestinians' behalf.

Today, for a series of (yet again) complicated reasons, the discourse is
far freer. Alas, all too often, this results in the fact that "both
sides" now have the power to pillory. (Believe me, I know.) The
difference is that while the "pro-Israel" side has the power to cost
a person his or her livelihood, the Palestinian side will likely only
say mean things on Twitter. This is an accurate reflection of both the
power relations in the discourse as well as those of the larger
Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

[link removed]

I think it's important to name names. You will, for instance, read a
great deal about the antics of the likes of The New Republic's Martin
Peretz
<[link removed]>,
Commentary's Norman Podhoretz
<[link removed]>, and
both William Safire <[link removed]> and A.
M. Rosenthal
<[link removed]>
of The New York Times. Each deployed the power and influence they
enjoyed in the media to vilify the reputations of those they deemed
insufficiently supportive of Israel, as well as often deploying racist
tropes to attack Israel's Arab critics and opponents.

But I do not hold the Palestinian side to be entirely innocent victims.
Rather, I judge Palestinian leadership and their champions in the
discourse to be sorely lacking in realism, and, for that reason,
unhelpful to the people who so desperately need a voice in the debate.
However much the Palestinians and their supporters believe themselves to
have justice on their side, the fact is that Israel has always been the
far stronger party in this conflict. It has won 14 or 15
wars-depending on how you count them-and will continue to do so as
long as these wars continue. Israel's point of view is rarely
challenged in Congress or the executive branch or, until recently, on
most of the nation's editorial pages. Given this fantastic power
imbalance, the Palestinian side has never faced up to the reality of the
situation and set actually achievable goals for itself. Rather its
leaders and spokespeople aim for mere rhetorical victories that do
little or nothing to improve the lives of the people for whom they
profess to speak. The BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement,
so popular among college students and leftist publications and
organizations, is just the latest manifestation of this doomed strategy
and one that has, so far, led absolutely nowhere
<[link removed]>.

Moreover, there's the price that American Jews have paid for what the
Jewish scholar and rabbi Shaul Magid has termed the "Zionization" of
the American Jewish identity <[link removed]>. Ever since
the 1967 war, American Jewish institutions have focused almost all of
their resources on a combination of Israel support and Holocaust
remembrance (which has become a subsidiary of Israel support). Lately,
they have embraced a focus on antisemitism: certainly a legitimate
concern, but one that pro-Israel groups often exaggerate and exploit in
order to try to silence legitimate criticism of Israeli actions.

What has been lost is not only American Judaism's previous focus on
social justice and social services but any attention to the substance of
what it means to be an American Jew or why a young person, given the
choice, would want to remain one. Defining one's Jewish identity
exclusively as support for Israel, however vicarious, was certainly
understandable in the wake of the Holocaust, especially given the
desperate condition of the hundreds of thousands of Jews who had
survived Hitler's mass murder and had nowhere else to go. The new
state needed help, and American Jews needed a post-Holocaust reason for
optimism about the future as well as a means to shake off the shame of
having failed the Jews of Europe.

But Israel long ago ceased to serve as a unifying cause for American
Jews and has become, instead, a deeply divisive one. What's more,
while Israel was initially understood to be a place of refuge for
endangered diaspora Jews, it now is the cause of many a violent attack
on them by angry Arabs and other Palestinian partisans
<[link removed]>.
These are just a few of the many reasons secular organized Jewry in the
United States is in crisis today
<[link removed]>,
especially when judged by the large-scale exodus of so many
Jews-especially young Jews
<[link removed]>-from
both of what have been historically by far the most popular American
Jewish institutions, Conservative synagogues and Reform temples.

The book is called We Are Not One
<[link removed]>
because we can no longer paper over all of these differences. Despite an
economic and social profile that should put them in the conservative
camp, Jews remain by far America's most liberal white ethnic group
<[link removed]>.
Israel, once admired as a sort of socialist Sparta
<[link removed]>,
has become an increasingly illiberal nation that, over a series of five
elections
<[link removed]>
in little more than three years, has elected right-wing government after
right-wing government
<[link removed]>;
none of which have shown the slightest interest in making any
concessions toward the possibility of a two-state solution. Israel is
the only remotely democratic country on Earth whose citizens prefer
Donald Trump to either Barack Obama or Joe Biden
<[link removed]>;
with numbers almost perfectly reversed from those of the preferences of
American Jews
<[link removed]>.
And again, the divergence is most pronounced among the young.

Self-described "pro-Israel" organizations like AIPAC, whose
political action committee supported the re-election of 109 election
deniers and insurrectionists
<[link removed]> in
2022, ask American Jews to ignore these truths as Israel prepares under
its corrupt leader, Bibi Netanyahu
<[link removed]>,
to form a government even more illiberal
<[link removed]>,
theocratic
<[link removed]>,
and hostile to peace and the Palestinians
<[link removed]>
than in the past. The recent announcement by the FBI that it will open
an investigation into the killing of the veteran Al Jazeera journalist
and American citizen Shireen Abu Akleh
<[link removed]>
during an Israeli military raid in the West Bank last May, and the
announcement by Defense Minister Benny Gantz that Israel will not
cooperate with the investigation, is a clear demonstration of the sorts
of conflicts we can expect in the future.

I'll be doing a bunch of interviews and talks about the book in the
next few weeks. Please check my Twitter
<[link removed]> feed and open Facebook page
<[link removed]> for updates. In the meantime,
the most useful articles I have come across for those seeking to
understand these developments would include: "Israel's Rightward
Turn
<[link removed]>," by
Nir Evron in Dissent, "Israel's Hard-Right Turn
<[link removed]>," by
Dahlia Scheindlin in Foreign Affairs, and a fascinating profile of Jamil
Dakwar, the Palestinian-Israeli lawyer who heads the American Civil
Liberties Union's Human Rights Program
<[link removed]>,
in Haaretz.

****

Music, you say? Here is, as far as I know, the only great song ever
written about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the incredibly prescient
and moving "Border Song," beautifully performed by a young Elton
John <[link removed]>-who wrote it with Bernie Taupin,
of course-plus a rhapsodic version by Aretha Franklin
<[link removed]>, an absolutely awful version by Eric
Clapton <[link removed]>, and a sweet, raspy rendition by
America's elder statesman, Willie Nelson
<[link removed]>.

****

See you next week.

~ ERIC ALTERMAN

Become A Member of The American Prospect Today!
<[link removed]>

Eric Alterman is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English at Brooklyn
College, an award-winning journalist, and the author of 12 books, most
recently

**We Are Not One: A History of America's Fight Over Israel** (Basic
Books, November 2022). Previously, he wrote The Nation's "Liberal
Media" column for 25 years. Follow him on Twitter @eric_alterman
<[link removed]>

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