American Jews and Israel: Amid confusion, free endorsement

By Leonard Fein

Predicting the Jewish vote in America’s presidential elections is a favorite quadrennial pastime, notwithstanding the fact that with a very few exceptions, the Jews have voted on the order of 80 percent Democratic for some 70 years now.

This year, however, the game of prediction is, rather surprisingly, a near constant at almost any Jewish gathering. Why surprising? Because on domestic policy, President George W. Bush’s views and policies are so far from the evident sensibility of American Jews that their rejection of him would seem virtually certain. But then comes the kicker: "Bush is," it is alleged, "good for Israel."

Whether Bush is in fact "good for Israel" is not my concern here, although it is worth observing that no American president who is not "good for America" can be good for Israel. The larger question is the role Israel plays in the political consciousness of America’s Jews. And that has come to be an increasingly complex question in recent years.

So long as peace was more a prayer than a prospect, the overwhelming consensus of the American Jewish community was staunchly "pro-Israel," and being pro-Israel was understood as supporting the policies of the Israeli government. Here and there, especially after the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, there were pockets of dissent, and those pockets grew in the wake of the ascendance of the Likud Party in 1977. But since the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty, and even more since Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon and its siege of Beirut, dissent has become an accepted part of the American Jewish landscape.

That is not to say that the pro-government voices in the community have become muted, or that serious dissent has become a mainstream phenomenon. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations remain the dominant forces in the organized Jewish community, and both can be relied upon to support very nearly any policy approved by an Israeli government - here with more enthusiasm, there with less. Still, organizations such as Americans for Peace Now (a support group for Israel’s Shalom Achshav), the Israel Policy Forum and, more recently, Brith Tzedek v’Shalom have all carved out a niche that the organized community can ignore, but from which it cannot hide. And each of those three groups has access to members of Congress and people in the executive branch.

That is where the no fun begins. The very substantial political weight of the traditional Israel-support groups derives not merely from their numbers, nor even from such things as AIPAC’s legendary mastery of the art of lobbying; it is in no small measure a function of the extraordinary campaign monies they are capable of marshalling. Estimates here vary considerably, but if all the monies provided for congressional as well as presidential campaigns were added together, Jews would doubtless be responsible for at least 25 percent of the total.

That buys not only access; it buys pandering. Many members of Congress are substantially more sophisticated with regard to the continuing conflict between Israel and the Palestinians than their public statements suggest. That is not to say that they do not sympathize with Israel, that they are not outraged by suicide attacks and the like. It is to say that they strongly endorse an end to settlement construction, a two-state solution, a more flexible Israeli stance, a center to center-left approach to the conflict. But they are, for the most part, inhibited from voicing such views when they conflict with those of Israel’s government. To an only somewhat lesser degree, the US administration is similarly inhibited.

That leaves the field of criticism largely free to those who have no use at all for Israel, to those who genuinely wish Israel ill. A few Jews are in that broad camp, which leaves a growing number of other Jews caught between extreme anti-Israel forces and the "whatever Israel does deserves our support" ethic of the dominant forces in the organized community.

Given such an unappealing choice, given the endless confusion that serious attention to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict almost inevitably generates, given the apparent permanence of that conflict, and given the psychic pain engendered by attention to the conflict and concern for Israel, why bother? Love for Israel is not genetically encoded, and these days we seem to find growing numbers of young Jews expressing relative indifference to events over which, as they see it, they have no control and in which they have only peripheral interest.

Years ago, I was the keynote speaker at the national convention of a Jewish organization that will here remain nameless. I’d been preceded on the first two days by Abba Eban and Benjamin Netanyahu, men with very different political outlooks. When I arrived on day three, I asked the organizers with whom the audience had agreed, Eban or Netanyahu. The answer? "95 percent of the audience agreed 100 percent with both."

Things have changed somewhat since then, but not all that much. The American Jewish community remains far less sophisticated than it is generally taken to be. It is highly responsive to Israel’s spin on current events and, in the main, is substantially more comfortable as an endorser of Israeli actions.

Leonard Fein is an author, a social justice activist, and a veteran observer of the American Jewish community.

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