Mondoweiss

Former Knesset Speaker: AIPAC Fosters 'Near Treason' In American Jews

I keep a dual-loyalty file. Jews like myself who say that Zionism demands dual loyalty of American Jews. Today an addition: former Israeli Speaker of the Knesset, Avraham Burg, writing in Haaretz this week:

[Jonathan Pollard] and his handlers lived and plotted in the twilight zone of the complex loyalty of the Jews of the United States. Their basic premise was and still is that all Jews everywhere have dual loyalty - the loyalty of an American citizen to his homeland, and a much deeper, national-spiritual loyalty to the Jewish people and the State of Israel. For years, Israel officially fostered this snarled loyalty. It entangled and became entangled, plotted and spied. AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee) - the Jewish lobby in Washington - is the bluntest conceptualization of institutionalizing near treason and turning it into an enormous octopus of a political mechanism with enormous dimensions and numerous victims.

Yes, Haaretz. Keep in mind, Walt and Mearsheimer denied that dual loyalty was at work, and were still called antisemites. Give this story ten years, it will be in the New York Times.

The Professor Dragged Her Suitcases Through the Dust at the Checkpoint, and Thought of the Underground Railroad

Israel/Palestine discussions are marked by conflict and ferocity. No big surprise. Rarely do you come on gentleness and dignity. In that spirit, I offer the following.

Two nights ago at Columbia they held a panel on the Nakba. There were to be four professors: the fiery Joseph Massad, a young cultural critic with a fearsome beard and an earring who was dressed all in black, a professor of literature, and an anthropologist. The first to speak was the

Hillary's Strategist Once Sought Full Accounting for Vietnam War Decision-Makers (Will Hillary Ever Apologize?)

A couple of readers have pointed out that I was unfair to Geoff Garin, Hillary's top strategist, in my suggestion that he was milking the Rev. Wright controversy on MSNBC Monday. They're right. Turns out Garin was actually saying it was time to move past the Wright business; it was Andrea Mitchell who was milking it. (I was making lunch, so the factchecking department was drinking wine...) Geoff Garin's a kind person and on the left; he's not the type to exacerbate racial divisions.

That said, I want to return to Garin's writings from college. Yesterday I wrote about his call for violent revolution. To be fair, a temporary mood on Garin's part, confined to 2 pieces at age 20. But a leftwing radical spirit characterized his work. That is the reason I as a young Jewish lefty looked up to him. He was clearthinking, he had figured out what he thought, he was never egotistical, and he had moral vision (at a time in my own life when I was immature and intellectually turbulent).

Garin often hit a theme I hit today: the need for accountability by our leaders and thinkers for a disastrous war policy--the Vietnam war in his case. And as I do he even blamed the meritocracy for producing the war:

Then there is the problem of meritocracy itself. Do we want, or does the rest of the world need, a Harvard that picks out an elite to do society's work when society's work means bombing Asian peasants... [emphasis mine]

Garin wanted war-crimes prosecutions. In 1975, at 22, he opposed the mood of let's-move-on. When Vance Hartke, an Indiana senator famous for opposing the war, said there must not be fingerpointing over who got us into the war, because it had been started by "desperate men caught up in a process that had a momentum of its own and which they neither understood nor could control"--which is sort of Hillary's line-- Garin wasn't buying. He wrote:

That way nobody gets hurt, at least not until the next time around... A conspiracy of silence will rob the United States of its Vietnam heritage: the moral, legal and political questions that American involvement raised but never quite settled.

Beautiful. Here's another inspired passage:

J Street Tees Up 'Disturbing' Jewish Role in Iraq War

Salon has a good piece on the new Israel lobby, J Street, whose founder, Jeremy Ben-Ami, says that part of the motivation for the organization was the special Jewish role in the Iraq war. Well let's not put words in his mouth: 

[Ben-Ami] pointed out that the "very visible" right- wing Jewish support for the Iraq war and for a possible future war against Iran was a powerful motivation for liberal American Jews to speak out.

"Some of the loudest voices that are beating the war drums are those of either neocons who happen to be Jewish, or established Jewish community leaders who happen to be neocons. This is very disturbing," Ben-Ami said. "And it applies not only to Israel but to the whole Middle East -- whether it's American policy towards Iran, or maybe it had some role in the leadup to the war in Iraq. And I think this has made people say, 'Wait a minute, I may never have been interested in Israel, I may never have been interested in the Jewish community, but these folks are speaking in my name and driving us towards wars and policies that I don't want to be responsible for.'"

OK, Ben-Ami doesn't go as far as I do. But he's political. This is yet another sign that some day soon, or not so soon, the Jewish community will search its soul on the responsibility of Jewish neocons for the greatest foreign-policy debacle of the new century, the responsibility of non-neocon Jewish intellectuals and journalists in giving the neocons cover, and the role of Zionism in Jewish ideas about American power.

Is Carter Holding Off on Endorsement as a Favor to Obama?

I just saw Jimmy Carter on Charlie Rose defending his decision to talk to Hamas. Beautiful. Then Rose asked Carter about Obama and the famous Cheshire grin came out. Carter's not endorsing till the primary season is over, but his whole family is for Obama.

Isn't the truth that Carter doesn't want to endorse Obama because it could hurt Obama? What would Hillary do with a Jimmy Carter endorsement of Obama? What would that do to Jewish support for Obama?

'Before I Was a Democrat, I Was a Zionist'--New Chair of Foreign Affairs Committee

From the Forward profile on Congressman Howard Berman:            

Berman’s Jewish background was central to his getting involved with foreign policy issues. Indeed, earlier this month he told the Forward that an interest in the Jewish state was one of the main reasons he first sought a seat on the committee. “Even before I was a Democrat, I was a Zionist..."

Also this:

[O]n Middle East issues he is perceived by a broad swath of Jewish communal officials to be firmly in the mainstream... Berman said he does not believe that now is an opportune time to pressure Israel into making concessions toward the Palestinians.

3 questions:

Why is a Zionist the head of the Foreign Affairs Committee? Because of Jewish sociological power in this society, plain and simple; Jews are principals in the Establishment. [Richard Witty has busted me on this point, and he's right. Seniority got him the job. I should have asked, Why is it that an openly Zionist agenda is not disqualifying for such a position? And the answer is sociological.]

Why is the 2-state solution doomed? Because the Democratic head of the Foreign Affairs committee, who represents the "mainstream" of the Jewish community, is against putting any pressure on Israel

If Obama came out tomorrow and said I'm a black nationalist, would anyone give him the keys to the car? Ask Reverend Wright.

Hillary's Top Strategist Once Called for Violent Revolution

Yesterday I heard Geoffrey Garin, Hillary's new strategist, on MSNBC, using the Rev. Wright controversy to question whether Obama is out of touch. (The link's not up yet, or I'd quote him). He made similar comments in the Times re Pennsylvania voters.

I knew Garin in college more than 30 years ago when we worked at the Harvard Crimson newspaper. He was a special guy--softspoken, funny, brilliant. He was also a radical. In 1973, on an anniversary of the Boston Tea Party, Garin called for violent revolution in the United States:

To commemorate the symbolic significance of the Tea party without acknowledging the significance of the commitment to violence is to miss the point altogether. Boston did not win its "Cradle of Liberty" name because of a special intellectual quality of its leaders but because of a special leaders were willing to resort to violence under conditions they thought to be oppressive... Samuel Adams and the South End Mob were the first to understand Tom Paine's admonition, "Moderation in principle is always a vice."

...America and much of the world is living dangerously close to oppression. ... Whether Americans will soon become steadfast in their resistance to oppression depends on their coming to understand what resistance is all about. The way we celebrate the anniversary of the Boston Tea Party will gauge the depth of that understanding.... Freedom is on the wane in this country and repression is on the rise all over the world. We can no longer sit back and swap stories about the good old revolution. We have to start worrying about the present. On this anniversary we must recognize that the patriots of Boston acted wisely in overthrowing their oppressors and the time is come to express our confidence in what our forefathers did by doing it ourselves. [my emphasis]

Here, following Agnew's resignation in 1973, he says that the government will fall, and again spoke of revolution:

The government in Washington can not survive under these circumstances, and under these circumstances the government should not survive.... America will be governed in any case, but the question is by whom. If not by the people, then by a strong executive. These are revolutionary times, and we must decide now whom we want to win the revolution.

Yes, Geoff Garin was 20 years old when he wrote these pieces. (A mature 20, I must say). I'm sure he stopped calling for revolution after college, probably because he grew out of the ideas-- maybe too because you can't make a living as a leftist. But I knew Garin well enough to be sure that his political impulses, ones of fairness, respect for oppressed peoples, live on somewhere in his thinking to this day. Those impulses once made him call for violent revolution.

It is helpful to read his writings because they demonstrate: how much people grow, how common revolutionary statements have been in the left (even in the Jewish meritocracy, of which Garin and I are members). But mostly because they show that the continuum of left-center ideas, which are now coming back into American life, includes Wright, Garin, and Obama.

I will be "looping," to use Rev. Wright's words, more of Garin's firebrand writings later.

What Do Palestinians Want?

I'm still thinking about the Nakba panel at Columbia last night. Christopher Varley tells me of a tee shirt he once saw a young Arab wearing in Jerusalem: “So how far east do you want me to move?” The Palestinian was of course talking about what Israelis want. Well, we always talk about what Israelis want. There are giant organizations in Washington dedicated to that idea.

But what do Palestinians want? That was the beauty of the conversation in Schermerhorn Hall last night. Jews were asking that question. What do Palestinians want? A simple question, maybe a complex answer. I don't know. Don't we need to ask?

At N.Y. Nakba Event, Some Light at the End of the Tunnel, Inshallah

It's late, I just got home from a Nakba commemoration at Columbia University, a panel of four professors in a classroom with about 250 people in it. It seems important to relate the following before I go to bed.

I saw half a dozen or more students in the crowd wearing yarmulkes. They were quiet throughout the presentation and during the Q-and-A, one of them, a small athletic kid in a blue sweatshirt, questioned the panelists about the significance of Hamas's policy calling for the destruction of the state of Israel. The panelists, Arab-Americans, sought to assure him that no one wanted to kill Israelis, they wanted to live with Jews; and even the fiery Joseph Massad said that he disapproved of Hamas's language.

No one heckled the panel, all the questions were respectful. Saif Ammous, one of the organizers, marveled to me that the ardent Zionists seem to have gone away over the last couple years, just as Norman Finkelstein has observed. Saif had gotten up early that morning to paper the campus with dramatic red posters naming Palestinian villages erased in the Nakba, DAYR YASSIN, for instance. And that surprisingly, they hadn't been torn down.

After the panel, I stood at the side of the room listening to the kid in the blue sweatshirt and another Jewish kid in a yarmulke who had lived in an Israeli settlement for 2 years, a tall thoughtful kid, and a Serbian woman and a big mischievous Arab as they discussed the situation. The conversation was intense, respectful, and earnest. "So because you worry that we will drive you out, you need to drive the Arabs out, that is the justification--" the Arab said. Or when the Serbian woman spoke of Palestinians as second-class citizens, or the terrible conditions in the West Bank, the Jewish kid would say, "100 percent," "100 percent," meaning I agree with you 100 percent. While the tall thoughtful kid said that he was disturbed by the denial of rights in Israel, but Jewish villages had been erased, in the West Bank, under Jordanian rule '48-'67. The Jewish kids acknowledged the Nakba.

I haven't seen a spontaneous conversation of this sort in all my reporting on this issue. I believe that it reflects a lowering of fears among Jews in the next generation, and a new space opening up in the discourse. I want to believe it's a Red Sea moment, a little miracle, and this space will only grow. Readers of this blog know I'm an optimist, tonight I feel full of wonder, that people may actually be listening to one another here in America, which is even more important than their listening to one another over there....

P.S. Two people who speak Arabic better than me (a category roughly equal to the world's population) inform me that my earlier headline, Imshallah, was misspelled. Apologies!

Hillary Uses the Israel Wedge, and So Will McCain. Can Obama Transcend It?

The Forward's analysis of the Pennsylvania results, in which Hillary Clinton captured 62 percent of the Jewish vote, in part by announcing on the morning of the primary that we would "obliterate" Iran if it attacked Israel, is that Israel could be a wedge issue for Jewish voters in this race, and the general. Notwithstanding his efforts to cultivate the Jewish community, Obama is not count-on-able. McCain, Hillary: hawks. So is Obama Ned Lamont all over again? Will Lieberman bring the older Jewish vote to McCain?

And couldn't all this go by the boards if it's Obama vs McCain and the simple question is, Do you want the past or the future?