Jewish Leader Says American Jewish Community Is 'Directed' by Israeli Foreign Ministry

Yesterday's Times previewed the upcoming espionage trial of two former AIPAC staffers in the right context-- the ever-louder conversation about the Israel lobby.

the case comes with issues of enormous sensitivity and emotion, notably the nature and extent of the ways American Jewish supporters of Israel try to influence the United States government.

The two defendants are apparently going to argue that the information they passed along to the Israeli government was conventional Washington talk, not state secrets. My own feeling is that this whole area is a giant mess right now, that Israeli and U.S. interests have been thoroughly conflated in Washington, possibly illegally, and the country needs to separate its interests from Israel.

I'd like to offer a piece of evidence on the issue. Last night I was reading Wrestling With Zion, a wonderful volume by progressive American Jews who are alarmed by what Israel has turned out to be. It contains a staggering statement.

Wrestling With Zion was published five years ago but it gets more and more meaningful with every passing hour. I don't think the book has ever been reviewed in the New York Times, though last year the book was singled out by the American Jewish Committee in a McCarthylike report that suggested that progressive Jews who criticize Israel are anti-Semites. That AJC report was hateful. Soon after it came out, I met Alisa Solomon, the book's co-editor, a gentle, serious, generous journalist, teacher and Jew. The idea that she is an anti-Semite--well, it is simply crazy, and yet I saw how this charge had hurt her personally. A year later I can say that both the AJC report and Solomon's book are symptoms of a generational crisis the organized Jewish community finds itself in right now. For the Jewish leadership is agonized that young Jews, following leaders like Solomon, are becoming alienated from Israel.

Now at the end of the book, Solomon and her co-editor playwright Tony Kushner print a dialogue among several activists and writers. It includes the following exchange between two Brit Tzedek Jews--progressive Zionists--Marcia Freedman, who is a former member of the Israeli Knesset and former president of Brit Tzedek, and Rabbi Ellen Lippmann of Brooklyn, a brave rabbi who has openly criticized Israel.

LIPPMANN: [In early 2003, at a meeting of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, which calls itself "the national public affairs arm of the organized Jewish community]... the Reform movement tried to come with a resolution about settlements. It seemed like a fairly innocuous resolution they tried to put forward. They weren't even able to bring it forward until they watered it down. And then it was defeated because it was seen as much too far to the left for what a group of American Jewish organizations could bring to the American government, though it was pretty mild compared to what I think many of us would want them to say.

FREEDMAN: It was just about freezing settlement building. It was a nothing statement. It supported a two-state solution. But I think to understand better what happened there, you have to understand that that organization is the umbrella organization for the Jewish Community Relations Councils, which are part of the organized Jewish community and therefore part of the organized Jewish voice that's being directed out of the Israeli Foreign Ministry [emphasis Weiss's] and AIPAC. That was not anything that represents the Jews. It represents a certain section of the Jewish population that is 'the organized' population.

Does that statement require interpretation? Freedman, a very well connected person, a Californian who was once in the Israeli Knesset, is saying that an important issue in the American Jewish community, perhaps the most important moral/political issue of the last 20 years, calling for a freeze on illegal and racist Israeli colonialism, is being decided for American Jews by the Israeli Foreign Ministry. And this is not controversial!? This book has been out for five years. Since then, Walt and Mearsheimer have presented a convincing argument that the neocons pushed the Iraq war out of concern for Israel, and the Jewish community has by and large risen against them. Where is the journalistic investigation of Freedman's statement? Where is the soul-searching?

I'd add that in Jewish, when we say "make aliyah," or move to Israel, it means "to go up." While those who don't live in Israel are called the  "yoredim," those who have gone down, which I gather is a bit of a slur. In current organized Jewish belief, there is a higher status given to those who live in Israel than to those who live in the U.S. Which may help to explain the abdication by modern privileged empowered American Jews of all moral authority to Israelis, who live in a brutalized and weak state trapped in a cycle of violence.

Yesterday's Times said:

For Aipac and to some extent the larger pro-Israel community in the United States, the charges... could raise what they regard as an unfair, even toxic question about whether some American Jews hold a loyalty to Israel that matches or exceeds their loyalty to the United States.

I say that question is logical and timely.

Comments

[Tank]

http://www.cnn.com/2008/CRIME/03/05/navy.terror.ap/index.html

no mention on mondoweiss yet

[Ed.]

The only thing that I have to do to get a secular liberal Jew to turn into the reincarnation of Ariel Sharon is to show them a few of these postings by you, Ed, some of the others. It's actually been good for aipac membership.
Posted by: the sword of gideon | March 05, 2008 at 02:38 PM
So keep it up, as someone else wrote awhile ago. You're doing AIPAC's work for it!
Posted by: Teddy | March 05, 2008 at 05:43 PM

You guys just don’t get it, do you? Tirades and threats to join AIPAC, join the JDL, join the ADL, move to Israel, call Homeland Security about gentile intolerance of Zionism, whatever…It all merely demonstrates what an increasing number of Americans already suspect: Jewish Zionists are more loyal to Israel than they are to America. And you think that this is going to gain you sympathy? Look, Israel is a Jewish nationalist state, therefore, that is where devoted Jewish nationalists should be living, not in America. I think even an increasing number of Jews are starting to recognize what should be elemental logic, hence we are seeing more and more Jewish critics of Zionism demand that Jewish Zionists shut up and quit claiming to speak for all Jews. You don’t sh*t where you sleep, and you don’t lobby for a foreign country at the expense of your own. Why don’t diaspora Zionists simply practice what they preach and move to Israel? It will solve a lot of problems for everyone, Jews and gentiles alike. The fact that so many diaspora Jewish Zionists want to have it all ways probably causes more anti-Semitism than anything that any gentile could ever say or write.

[the sword of gideon]

Chuck, you don't know shit about Jews except what you get out of "Mein Kampfh".

Ed, your just has big an asshole has you always were. I'm not looking for sympathy. Just making the point that all it takes for a wishy washy universalist, limousine liberal Jew, to turn into a contributor to the guys in Hebron is to read the shit you and the rest of storm troopers right. So keep it up.

[James Morris]

Subject: State Department blog puts up another post of mine (my email to Pedro Echevarria and Ambassador David Satterfield who was warmongering against Iran on C-SPAN's 'Washington Journal' this morning)

Date: Wed, 5 Mar 2008 17:59:09 -0500 (EST)

See the top of the comments of the following URL to see how my email included below was added there:

http://blogs.state.gov/index.php/entries/welcome/

Forwarded:

Date: Wed, 5 Mar 2008 07:46:52
From: "James Morris"
Subject: For Pedro Echevarria and Ambassador David Satterfield
To: Pedro Satterfield
CC: David Satterfield

Dear Pedro,

How could you allow Ambassador Satterfield to warmonger against Iran (for AIPAC) this morning during his segment for 'Washington Journal' when it is obvious that he is acting as an agent of Israel instead of a being loyal member of the American government? You can read more about his mention in the ongoing AIPAC espionage case via my post on the 'Welcome' page (can scroll down to it at the following URL) of the State Department blog which was launched last year (you had to have known about his mention in association with the AIPAC espionage case but apparently didn't have the courage to even ask him about such):

http://blogs.state.gov/index.php/entries/welcome/

[Rowan Berkeley]

I don't buy the idea that AIPAC is run by the Israeli Foreign Ministry. It is equally possible to construct a number of models in which their interests conflict.

In the meantime, concretely, let me remind you of Meyrav Wurmser's fury that Israel did not attack Syria as it was "supposed to," in 2006.

[Jim Haygood]

"Zionism is not Martin Buber's or Judas Magnes' ideal any more than the 21st century U.S.A. is Walt Whitman's or Eugene Debbs'. Zionism is not what "progressive" Zionists imagine it might one day be. Zionism has a clear form, and it is racist and colonialist to the core." - MM

One word: BRAVO!

[Charles Keating]

"We want to lay the foundation stone of the house which is to shelter the Jewish nation,'' and ''Zionism seeks to obtain for the Jewish people a publicly recognized, legally secured homeland in Palestine.'' declared Herzl. And his anti-assimilationist dictum that "Zionism is a return to the Jewish fold even before it is a return to the Jewish land," was an expression of his own experience which was extended into the official platform of Zionisn as the aim of "strengthening the Jewish national sentiment and national consciousness."--Lowenthal, The Diaries 0f Theodor Herzl. pp.215.

[Charles Keating]

The origin of Zionism was based on fear of assimilation in Western Europe before the 20th Century. The original Zionists
were reacting against Enlightenment's policy, as were the
German racial nationalists. Both sought refuge in the mythos of blood and soil. With the romantic suicide of Hitler & Company below in the bunker, rather than high up on the hill, a new Roman appeared with industrial strength. The cut to Israeli survivors at the end of Saving Private Ryan with no appearance of
a single Palestinian tells you everything. If you want to see Private Ryan today, go see a U S Army recruiter in a shabby Mall--he can put you in touch.

[the sword of gideon]

Hey, Keating. Your an idiot, that was at the end of Schindlers list. I know your sorry that they didn't all get knocked off by the krauts but that's life. And the original idea of Zionism came from the Dreyfus affair. But I do like the ever so subtle analogy between six million dead Jews and the Nazi's. Which I guess makes those happy go lucky lads from Hamas, Islamich Jihad, and Hezbollah, the real Jews. Do I have that correct?

[Charles Keating]

What does the Dreyfus affair have to do with the plight of the
Palestinians? Why did Ryan's family have to die? Why is Private Ryan dying now? Why do 97% of the USA population have to fork over their hard-earned dollars to Israel?

[Montag]

On the subject of "yoredim," an Israeli TV station did a report on Israelis living in the U.S. They utterly reject the yoredim label, arguing that they are "Israelis who choose to live in the U.S."--just as if the U.S. was part of the Occupied Territories.