Tikun Olam-תקון עולם: Make the World a Better Place

The following is the Comment is Free article published last Tuesday when J Street launched. Before you read it, if you haven’t already visited the J Street site to join its mailing list, please consider doing so. And even more important, consider making a generous donation so J Street can begin to make a difference in Congress by promoting candidates who will engage with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and pressure our next president to make every effort to promote peace, not war. Now is the time for all good people to come to the aid of their country if we are ever to see peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

Recently, I attended a private Seattle dinner featuring J Street co-founders Daniel Levy and Jeremy Ben Ami. On April 15th, J Street will launch. It will be the first American Jewish PAC dedicated to promoting Israeli-Palestinian peace:

For too long, the primary and often only voices policy makers and politicians have heard regarding American policy toward Israel and the Middle East have been those of a vocal minority at the far-right of American society.

…Neoconservative, right-wing Jewish leaders and radical Christian Zionists have turned their definition of “pro-Israel” into a driving force in the American political process…

These voices do not…represent the mainstream of American Jews or the broader community that cares about Israel or American interests in the Middle East. Their efforts have skewed American policy, undermined Israeli and American interests, and constrained the domestic political and public debate about American foreign policy.

It is time for the mainstream of Americans–Jews and others–to establish a bold, political voice that advocates for the best interests of the U.S. and Israel, including a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict based on the 1967 borders with agreed reciprocal land swaps, and for American policy that will lead to real security for Israelis, Americans and the entire Middle East.

J Street proposes an overarching U.S. approach to the Middle East that eschews military conflict and embraces diplomatic negotiation; that advocates multilateralism over unilateralism; and dialogue over confrontation. It proposes negotiation with Syria and Iran rather than diplomatic isolation and threats. And it will advance these goals both in the legislative and electoral process as well as the media.

Daniel Levy is a British Jew and son of the leading fundraiser for Tony Blair’s Labor Party, Lord Levy. The younger Levy made aliyah to Israel in 1991, where he worked on the peace process with Labor governments. He moved to DC two years ago to become a senior fellow with the Center for American Progress, where he writes the well-respected blog, Prospects for Peace. Levy is the passionate, thoughtful, philosophical member of the duo. He is the deep thinker who ponders the big questions. Ben Ami, a former deputy domestic policy advisor in the Clinton administration is the operations chief. He knows the campaigns and the politicians. He is inside the political process. They make a good team.

J Street plans to do two things. First, it will be a traditional PAC raising funds to support a limited number of candidates for Senate and Congressional races. Second, it will lobby for and against Israel-related bills and legislation. Regarding the PAC portion of its mandate: in its first year (the current election cycle), it hopes to raise around $300,000 to funnel into three to five races in which it can make a significant impact in swing districts. According to the co-founders, it sees no benefit in going after long-serving Democrats who take doctrinaire pro-AIPAC positions because they are too entrenched. Rather, J Street sees its best efforts devoted to choosing races in which there is a weak incumbent with an anti-peace agenda running against a candidate who is open to J Street’s political agenda. Norm Coleman is someone high on the group’s list since he is such a weak incumbent and is opposed by Al Franken, who is already sympathetic to a pro-peace agenda regarding the I-P conflict.

In the following (2010) election cycle, J Street hopes to raise several million dollars and target a slightly larger number of races. Ben Ami noted that he and Levy had studied two critical AIPAC campaigns against Cynthia McKinney and Earl Hilliard. By cross-checking the donor lists they discovered that AIPAC wields an enormous amount of clout with a rather limited amount of donations (in the low millions).

However, it should be noted that AIPAC has a reach that extends far beyond merely punishing those it deems hostile to Israel. After all, it has a $60 million annual budget along with a deep volunteer base. Its power flows in many directions. In this sense, J Street really has its work cut out for itself.

The new group is studying AIPAC’s example and plans to use its tactics while turning them inside out on behalf of peace. Both co-founders reinforced that this effort is not meant to oppose, criticize or attack AIPAC. The idea is that there is room for AIPAC in this political debate while there is also room for a variety of other voices, including J Street.

Ben Ami, who was deputy domestic policy advisor in the Clinton administration, said they’d sounded out scores of politicians and their staffs about how J Street would be received. He is convinced that its message is welcomed with open arms almost universally. Of course, there will be some dyed in the wool Old School holdouts. But he believes that J Street is something the DC pols have been waiting for for a long time. They’ve been eager to break away from heterodoxy but needed the political cover to do so. J Street would help provide it for them.

In talking about what J Street planned to do differently from the mainstream Israel lobby organizations, I was heartened that it planned to pay lots of attention to voices of young people especially those represented by bloggers like Ezra Klein and Matt Ygleisias and others. Ben Ami sees the younger generation as the hope for the future as they haven’t yet bought “their father’s Oldsmobile” in terms of embracing the stereotypes and accepted wisdom of the established groups. The Israel lobby groups are heavily populated and led by the older generation and Jewish opinion surveys show that the younger generation is both more liberal on Israeli politics and more turned off by the Israel-centric issues dear to the heart of the Old School.

The J Street leaders also addressed their relationship with the three existing Jewish peace groups: Israel Policy Forum, Americans for Peace Now and Brit Tzedek. They said that J Street would not duplicate their efforts nor was it meant to replace them. Rather, J Street is the next logical step in the development of a pro-peace political agenda in which candidates would be encouraged to take an independent look at the I-P conflict and throw out old orthodoxies.

Levy, in his talk to the dinner group, emphasized that while Israelis realized that they were primarily responsible for resolving the conflict, that they also needed a good swift kick in the rear end from an energized American Jewish community and U.S. president. An Israeli prime minister like Olmert might welcome pressure coming from America to adopt a more forthcoming approach to the idea of compromise. He could then turn around to the Liebermans (Avigdor, not Joe) on his right and say: “If you want to buck our American friends, be my guest. But where will you turn once you do and they’ve abandoned you?” Levy believes that this narrative will resonate in Israeli political circles.

In fact, the group has recruited a group of distinguished Israeli academics, political analysts and former senior military officers to sign a letter of support for J Street. Among others, it includes former IDF chief of staff Amnon Lipkin Shahak, former foreign minister Shlomo Ben Ami, and former directors general of the foreign ministry David Kimche, Alon Liel, and Uri Savir.

It’s always important with efforts like this to examine the board member names. There are of course leaders of the main American Jewish peace groups. There are rabbis and academics. But most important there are heavy hitter political donors (Alan Solomont), policy wonks (Rob Malley), U.S. ambassadors to Israel (Samuel Lewis), high level political operatives (Eli Pariser of Moveon), Hollywood liberals (Robert Greenwald), business leaders, George Soros’ top aide (Morton Halperin), and even a former Republican senator (Lincoln Chafee) and former Congressman (Tom Downey). The major political donors and business leaders are critical to provide the funding necessary to have an impact on political campaigns.

The group founders believe that Barack Obama and his staff “get” J Street’s perspective while they believe a Clinton candidacy might not advance J Street’s mission as aggressively. In particular, Ben Ami mentioned Tony Lake, Obama’s chief foreign policy advisor as someone who was probably responsible for the candidate’s bracing Cleveland speech in which he admonished American Jews not to believe that a pro-Israel presidential candidacy need also be pro-Likud.

I came away from the dinner heartened by the J Street effort. Trying to be a realist after feeling burned by previous similar efforts, I’m not yet firmly convinced it will succeed. But it is bold, ambitious, well thought out, and doable. Many other dovish political efforts in the past had one or even two of those qualities going for them, but few have had all of them. That is in J Street’s favor.

One big question will be how AIPAC responds to the new initiative. As the big kid on the block it has the most to lose from J Street becoming a major success. So it’s got to feel threatened in some way. My only question is whether it feels defensive and threatened enough that it would take on J Street in its infancy. Already, AIPAC’s former director Morris Amitay has denounced J Street in the pages of the Jewish Forward. Amitay seems to be a surrogate for the group, which doesn’t want to lay down a marker in public yet on the matter. It remains to be seen how the big guns of the right-wing Israel lobby like Malcolm Hoenlein and Abe Foxman will react. If they do, they will only be endorsing the idea that J Street is a force to be reckoned with.

tags aipac, daniel levy, israel, israel-lobby, j street, jeremy-ben-ami, Mideast Peace, norm coleman, palestine, political-lobbying, tony lake

A.B. Yehoshua is one of Israel’s leading novelists and a confirmed Zionist. The Israeli right will point out that he is a confirmed dove whose views are therefore, in their eyes, suspect and marginal. However, what is important to me is that Yehoshua is NOT Ilan Pappe. He’s even more centrist than David Grossman or Amos Oz, two other distinguished dovish Israeli writers.

So for Yehoshua to publicly call, in a non-Israeli publication like La Stampa no less, for the U.S. to withdraw its ambassador till the Olmert government gets serious about obeying its obligations to remove West Bank settlements, strikes like a lightning bolt:

In a scathing op-ed published in the Italian daily La Stampa, Israeli novelist A. B. Yehoshua said George W. Bush should recall the US ambassador to Israel until the Jewish state dismantles all illegal outposts in the West Bank, Yedioth Ahronoth reported Sunday.

“If the American president would have really wanted Israel to disassemble the illegal outposts…he would have done better to stay in the White House…” Yehoshua wrote in response to Bush’s recent visit to the Middle East. “He should have recalled his ambassador to Tel Aviv (Richard Jones) for an indefinite period until the outposts were evacuated.

“I can guarantee you that had he acted in this manner, Israel would have promptly dismantled the outposts, and the US administration would thus cement the faith of the Israelis and the Palestinians in the peace process,” he said in the op-ed.

Yehoshua added that Israel was deceiving the international community into focusing solely on the illegal outposts.

“Instead of dealing with (all) of the illegal settlements (in the West Bank), only the illegal outposts are being discussed – this legitimizes the status of (the other) settlements, in which 250,000 Israelis reside,” he said.

Many in Israel will no doubt see this statement as a betrayal. It violates every concept of Zionist sovereignty and self-reliance–the notion being that Israel and the Jewish people need to govern themselves free of interference from any outside source, even a friendly one like the U.S.

There are at least two interesting aspects to Yehoshua’s statement. First, it indicates a desperation on the part of the rational Zionist center-left. It is clear to them that no one in current Israeli politics has the will or interest to do the hard things that need to get done for there to be peace. Under those conditions, a dyed in the wool Zionist like Yehoshua is willing to give voice to heresy and call for direct U.S. interference in Israeli domestic politics.

Second, the statement bespeaks a recognition among those same rational Zionists that now is the time for a settlement. This realization is accompanied by the conviction that losing this opportunity will be much worse than past lost opportunities because the stakes seem higher than they have ever been in terms of the violence that might be unleashed in the event of failure now.

Third, Yehoshua has attacked the U.S. president viewed by many Israelis as possibly the most friendly ever to Israeli to its interests. It takes guts, enormous levels of frustration, and at least an ounce of desperation to engage in such criticism.

Interestingly, and not surprisingly, Ynet has omitted Yehoshua’s direct criticism of the Israel lobby. JTA reports that Yehoshua also had this to say:

Yehoshua further described all West Bank settlements as illegal and described the “Jewish lobby” as having “become a powerful tool of influence on Israel’s behalf within the U.S. administration.”

What is important here is that it’s no longer Jimmy Carter or Walt-Mearsheimer attacking the Lobby. It’s now a mainstream Israeli figure like Yehoshua who, as a Zionist, might be seen to have a vested interest in supporting the work of the Lobby.

A hat tip to Sol Salbe for this story. I’m very eager to find a translation of the original Italian article or the Yediot Hebrew coverage to get as close to the original statements made as possible. If anyone knows Italian out there and can find and translate it please let me know.

tags a.b.-yehoshua-calls-for-u.s.-to-remove-ambassador-till-, israel-lobby, la-stampa

George Soros, after writing a blistering NY Review of Books essay slamming AIPAC’s pernicious influence on U.S. Mideast policy, disappointed liberal Jews by announcing he would not fund a project simmering over the past six months to create a Jewish counter-lobby to AIPAC:

Billionaire George Soros has no plans to put his money where his mouth is, a spokesman said Tuesday — two days after the philanthropist and political advocate assailed the pro-Israel lobby as a threat to Israeli and U.S. interests.

Rumors, rife since last October, that Soros would fund a dovish alternative to the influential American Israel Public Affairs Committee, quickened when Soros published a blistering attack on the lobby in the New York Review of Books this week. But Soros spokesman Michael Vachon rebutted the notion he would bankroll such an effort.

“He considered it,” said Vachon. “Many people wanted him to fund the effort. In the end he decided he should not be involved.

“On the other hand,” Vachon added, “Who can predict the future?”

That last statement is impossibly coy for me. I say, if you’re in get in; if you’re out, get out. Don’t do a Mario Cuomo Hamlet soliloquy. There’s already more than enough vacillation among key players in this conflict. We don’t need more of the same from Soros.

I can’t say that I’m surprised since on the day Soros’ NYRB essay was published I asked an inside DC source what role the essay played in his strategy regarding the counter-lobby project. The reply came back: “He’s out.”

Soros’ supposed reasoning for dropping out also isn’t fully convincing:

Vachon cited Soros’ lack of prior involvement in Jewish life as the prime reason for his decision. The 76-year-old Jewish hedge fund manager and prominent donor to liberal and Democratic causes has not been a major player in Jewish affairs over his long career, he said.

“He feels he would not have the necessary standing in the community,” said Vachon. “Some people might even be put off by his involvement in such an effort.”

It is certainly true that Martin Peretz will use this argument against Soros and others as well. But since when do we act according to what our enemies say? Since when do they determine the agenda? I’m guessing that Soros himself doesn’t feel the personal commitment to getting as deeply involved in internal Jewish communal politics as he would have to in order to really make the kind of impact that is necessary to take on AIPAC. I can’t say as I fully blame him. How many times can one bear being called a Hitler sympathizer because at the age of 12 you pretended to be a Christian and were sheltered by a government official who confiscated Jewish property?

But still, Soros’ withdrawal is terribly unfortunate. Many of us have that commitment but not the wherewithal to back it up. That’s what Soros would’ve brought to the table.

All I can say is that I somehow hope the initiative continues and proves viable and that somehow Soros is persuaded that it is the right thing to do and that he gets on board. “Ride on the peace train,” George.

I find Larry Cohler Esses’ work in Jewish Week to be impeccably incisive and lacking in the cant one can find in Jewish media outlets like JTA. But this passage, which followed his list of liberal writers who’d recently attacked AIPAC seemed oddly snarky and churlish:

Still, the cottage industry of criticism in the public square by these writers raises oxymoronic questions about their claims of suppression.

Besides the imprecise use of the term oxymoronic without clearly noting what he was referring to, he seems to say that the plethora of criticism of AIPAC gives the lie to the liberal complaint that the Israel lobby suppresses speech it views as anti-Israel. What this ignores is the clear evidence of multiple recent incidents of intimidation to silence or punish Israel critics chronicled here at this blog (Judt, Beinin, Kushner, Khalidi, Massad, Cole, etc.) and elsewhere online. It also neglects the possible explanation that perhaps liberal writers and those media which publish them are becoming less intimidated by the lobby’s reach and are showing some willingness to buck their wrath.

tags israel-lobby, jewish-week-larry-cohler-esses, soros-withdraws-from-project-opposing-aipac

James Traub has written a penetrating NY Times Magazine profile of Abe Foxman awkwardly called Does Abe Foxman Have an Anti-Anti-Semite Problem. Abe will NOT be happy. In fact, I’m sure Traub’s received calls from the Man Himself on High complaining about the ‘unfair, biased’ portrayal of him. For me, I think Traub is on the money and applaud this effort at placing into context the Jewish survivalist mentality of much of the conservative national Jewish leadership when it comes to issues like Israel or anti-Semitism.

Much of Foxman’s alarmist perspective on the subject derives from being a Holocaust survivor and child of survivors. It also didn’t help that his nanny saved his life while raising him Catholic and that, after the war, she refused to give him up without a fight with his parents. This has to have contributed to the making of the bellicose, hectoring, and anti-Semitism obsessed Jewish leader he has become.

The first glimpse Traub presents of Foxman begins with this quotation:

“…Never before has there been such a threat to Israel and to the Jewish people from a geopolitical conglomerate — the Arab world, with Iran, with Hamas, with Hezbollah, with its position that it will not recognize Israel. The vise is closing.”

So begins the grandiosity of thought and overeager melodrama of professional anti-Semitism macher, Abe Foxman. “Never before has there been such a threat to Israel and to the Jewish people from a geopolitical conglomerate.” Oh really. Does that include the Axis powers during WWII??

We should add here that Abe isn’t the only Jewish leader who resorts to grandstanding and scenery chewing when it comes to exhorting Jews to watch their back from ‘die anti-Semiten.’ Bibi Netanyahu is another one who does this extremely well. He had his audience at the recent GA meeting half-expecting Adolph Hitler to step onto the podium to reinforce his charges that as far as Israel-Iran relations, it is 1938 and we are in Munich with Neville Chamberlain. Will we succumb to the dictator’s wiles or will we hold fast?

Who believes this stuff? Well, precisely the aging, wealthy and right-wing Jewish monied classes who are the ADL’s, and Foxman’s bread and butter. I’m not exactly a spring chicken myself (though not yet of retirement age as many of ADL’s donors are), but the melodramatic style of Jewish leadership leaves me utterly cold. It reminds me of what Salo Baron, the dean of Jewish historians, used to call the “lachrymose theory” of Jewish history. In other words, the distorted notion that Jewish identity is all suffering, all pain, all anti-Semitism and cataclysmic disasters.

Lately, of course, the organizations comprising the Israel lobby have been on the defensive after sharp attacks via the Walt-Mearsheimer essay and Jimmy Carter’s new book, alongside Israel’s military defeat in Lebanon and its ineffectual Gaza campaign. AIPAC’s ignominious defeat in its campaign for the Palestinian Anti-Terror Bill, at the hands of three small dovish Jewish groups, has added to the dying sense of impregnability the lobby used to possess. It is in this context that Traub’s article continues and expands upon this stream of political discourse by focussing on Foxman as one of the lobby’s key leaders. I wish someone would do the same for Malcolm Hoenlein of the Conference of President’s of Major Jewish Organizations.

Traub asks Foxman whether he understands the feelings of suspicion and mistrust with which opponents of the lobby like Tony Judt or Walt-Mearsheimer greet his efforts at managing and controlling the political debate:

Abe Foxman isn’t doing the stifling — he’s the one being muzzled with the charge of stifling. But the stifling won’t work: Foxman says he will not be intimidated; people all across the Islamic world already believe every kind of pernicious fantasy about the Jews and about Israel. And now here come credentialed American — even Jewish! — scholars saying, as he put it, “The Jews control the media, control the government, control Congress.” The Jewish people, Foxman said gravely, “have paid a very, very significant price for that canard.” And yes, he’s willing to shray gevalt until he’s blue in the face.

So what’s the problem, the thing Abe Foxman is fighting or Foxman himself?

That’s rich. Foxman doesn’t want to control anyone, not Judt, not Walt, not Mearsheimer. Rather, it is they who want to stifle Foxman. Is this guy real? How do you stifle the flamboyant head of a $50-million organization? Do the anti-Lobby intellectuals have access to that kind of cash to either advance their own views or “stifle” Foxman’s. Don’t be ridiculous. Of course, they don’t. This to me is akin to Goliath complaining that David was bullying HIM.

It’s also important to note how Foxman willfully distorts the true views of Judt, et al in his fake recapitulation of their alleged agenda (”Jews control the media, control the government, control Congress”). This is of course NOT at all what they are charging. Rather, they are charging something more subtle, more nuanced, but no less pernicious. Of course, Jews don’t CONTROL the media, government or Congress. But a certain subset of Jews, our national leaders, wield amazing powers to manage, manipulate and shape the national discourse related to Israel.

Here is how my friend, M.J. Rosenberg, a 20 year plus former veteran of Congress and AIPAC, describes the way the lobby’s power operates in Congress:

“The way it works is that most members of Congress feel that saying things on the Middle East that are not strictly the Aipac line will get them in more trouble than it’s worth.” Rosenberg notes that legislation on the Middle East generally consists of symbolic statements, like the recent Palestinian Anti-Terrorism Act, which are “written by Aipac.” No one, Rosenberg says, “advocates anti-Israel policies,” and even the modest American Task Force on Palestine is “closer to what the American Jewish community supports” — a two-state solution, the rollback of settlements in the occupied territories — “than any of these right-wing Jewish groups are.” Rosenberg describes the attitude of most legislators as a shortsighted “path of least resistance,” which, he says he fears, will do real harm to Israel in the long run.

There you have it: fear, intimidation. The anticipation that every editor, publisher, media executive, Congressmember, and even President must face when they contemplate airing views or stories that might be considered ‘anti-Israel’ by the Abe Foxmans of this world. For a perfect example of how this works that encompasses both Congress and the media, see my stories on the pressure brought to bear on NPR to “stifle” its coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Traub believes that Foxman only began to make his mark once he abandoned the ADL’s traditional engagement with issues like Black-Jewish dialogue and reverted to a more restricted “Jewish defense” mode:

The A.D.L.’s world became increasingly binary — “good for the Jews,” “bad for the Jews.” This change had the effect of moving the organization, as it had other mainstream Jewish bodies, to the right. Foxman upset many of his colleagues by extending a welcome to Christian conservatives, whose leaders tended to be strongly pro-Israel even as they spoke in disturbing terms of America’s “Christian” identity. Foxman was willing to cut them some slack on issues of social justice, and even of church-state relations, in the name of solidarity toward Israel.

I call this the Mephistophelean moral compromise. How is it possible that a powerful religious force that is so inimical to Jewish values and issues Jews hold dear, can become Foxman’s great ally in his war on Israel’s alleged Arab-extremist enemies? Doesn’t he have his priorities completely askew??

I was tickled by Foxman’s rhetorical blunders which Traub manges to point out without appearing too partisan:

[Foxman] did believe that it was wrong to give really evil figures, like Mahmoud Ahmadinejad…at present the world’s most famously anti-Semitic head of state, the legitimacy of a meeting, as U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan and the Council on Foreign Relations recently had. I asked if Annan also shouldn’t have met with Saddam Hussein. “There is a difference between Ahmadinejad and even a Saddam Hussein,” Foxman rejoined. “Here is a man who says time and again, ‘I will wipe this nation’ ” — Israel — “ ‘off the face of the earth,’ and says afterward that the Holocaust never happened. This is not ‘Israel as victim’; this is the destruction of Jewish identity.”

What is interesting about this interaction is that Traub is trying to discover whether Foxman is willing to attack Annan. Foxman refuses to take the bait. But, he does something far worse by making the fatuous statement that Ahmadinehad is worse for the Jews than Hussein. Does he seriously believe that Hussein did not want to “wipe Israel off the face of the earth?” Just how, precisely, are they ideologically different in terms of their danger to Israel or Jews??

What follows is one of the dramatic high-points of Traub’s profile. In it, Foxman continues the discourse from the previous quoted passage, rising into an incantatory state of righteous indignation. Note Traub’s penetrating portrait of an over-the-top personality type and his delicious parting shot at the end:

Foxman made a beseeching gesture, his fingertips cupped before his mouth. “Plus, it has happened before,” he went on. “It’s not an abstraction. By a man, by a government, who aids, abets, fuels suicide bombers, makes them martyrs, celebrates them, who asks for volunteers from his country, and I don’t know what they have, 40,000 now, who have volunteered in future to go kill Jews!” Foxman was now shouting at me across the table. “And you arm yourself to take out as many Jews as possible!” Foxman’s hands were wheeling in circles before him; this possible Holocaust, so remote to many of us, seemed to rise up before him with a terrible clarity. “Oh, my God!” he cried, as if reeling in horror before the vision he had himself conjured.

Foxman really does dwell imaginatively in the Holocaust.

These last few lines are the “money” passage in the article: “…This possible Holocaust, so remote to many of us, seemed to rise up before him with a terrible clarity.” There you have the problem in a nutshell. The majority, perhaps even vast majority of American Jews, do not share Foxman’s vision of the coming calamity for Jews. But nevertheless, Foxman sees it as his duty to make Jews and the world see what he sees. It doesn’t matter to him that very few except his chosen acolytes and ADL members share his view. It only matters that he continue to gin up his troops on fear, hysteria and doomsaying. For that is what stokes the fundraising coffers.

Cool, calm analysis. Rational discourse. Finding ways to compromise with one’s enemies. All of this sounds nice, but doesn’t ‘pay the bills.’ It doesn’t have the fearful, apocalyptic tone of a real stem-winding sermon on anti-Semitism, and the beasts who are coming to get us if we don’t watch out.

It’s really a stylistic and generational divide in addition to a political one. Foxman of the Holocaust generation, not to make too grand a comparison in his favor, is something like Moses and the generation who wandered in the wilderness. None of them were allowed over the mountain to see the Land of Israel which their descendants would inherit. Just so, Foxman will never be the one to lead an organization that sees Israel at peace with its neighbors. The very idea is anathema to every fiber of his being. He thrives on ethnic discord and tribal conflict. Talk of peace or Arab-Jewish coexistence if something alien and even frightening for Foxman’s generation. One hopes of course, that a new generation will arise which “knew not” Foxman and his phobic obsessions. Then we might regain some sense of equilibrium in American Jewish relations with Israel, Muslims and Arabs. It can’t come a moment too soon.

I thought Traub’s “Foxman really does dwell imaginatively in the Holocaust” was the coup de grace for poor Abe. How could he live it down?

Returning to the theme of Foxman’s rhetorical-analytical blunders, Traub notes another one here (italics are mine):

In his most recent book — “Never Again?” — he makes the stupefyingly counterintuitive claim that high rates of Jewish assimilation are a reaction to discriminatory treatment, rather than a proof of the opposite. “One out of three people in these United States believes that the Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the U.S.,” he growled. “That’s a classic anti-Semitic canard.” And yet a Pew Global Attitudes Poll in 2004 found that anti-Semitism had declined in much of the West and was lowest in the United States. A Pew poll last year found American support for Israel as strong now as at any time in the last 13 years.

That’s right, you heard the Man right: anti-Semitism is so bad and it’s so damn hard for the Jews here that we’re all leaving the faith in droves. Is the man in his right mind? If all he needs to do is throw red meat to his insular, fearful true-blue believers in order to maintain his sway, then I suppose there is a twisted method to this madness. But the point of it all escapes me. Or I should say it leaves me cold.

When the NY Times reporter asks the ADL leader about his role in denying Tony Judt the right to speak at the New York Polish consulate, Foxman goes apoplectic. He detests the charge that the ADL is trying to ’suppress’ debate:

That, Abe Foxman would say, is “abject nonsense.” The A.D.L., he says, doesn’t operate that way; it seeks balance, not suppression. Foxman told me that he believes he’s challenging his adversaries to a debate, not shouting them down. But, I asked, isn’t slinging the dread charge of anti-Semitism at people like Jimmy Carter and Tony Judt and Mearsheimer and Walt really a way of choking off debate? No, it isn’t, Foxman said. This was at our lunch; Foxman got so exercised that he began to choke on his gratin. I asked if it was really right to call Carter, the president who negotiated the Camp David accords, an anti-Semite.

“I didn’t call him an anti-Semite.”

“But you said he was bigoted. Isn’t that the same thing?”

“No. ‘Bigoted’ is you have preconceived notions about things.”

The argument that the Israel lobby constricted debate was itself bigoted, he said.

“But several Jewish officials I’ve talked to say just that.”

“They’re wrong.”

“Are they bigoted?”

Foxman didn’t want to go there. He said that he had never heard any serious person make that claim.

Thankfully, in the dim recesses of his mind he realized that calling dovish Jewish leaders “bigoted” would not look good in the pages of the New York Times. But how ’bout that artificial differentiation between “bigoted” and “anti-Semitic?” Foxman doesn’t say Carter is anti-Semitic. No, of course he doesn’t.

What Ol’ Abe doesn’t realize is that “bigots” who “have preconceived notions about things” can also be Jewish leaders who believe that virtually all Arabs and Muslims are evil and enemies of Israel and all Jews. We owe a debt of gratitude to James Traub for providing the raw material in this profile by which we might judge the man and his prejudices.

There is another rather remarkable statement from the “wise-one” that clarifies his lack of faith in our American democracy:

John Stuart Mill’s dictum [was] that in a democratic society the free market of ideas ultimately sifts through falsehood to produce truth. Abe Foxman says this is naïve…Experience — primal experience — has taught him that the truth does not win on its own merits; the market for falsehood is just too powerful.

Abe Foxman just doesn’t trust democracy. What would he call his vision? Democracy plus? Democracy with a menacing face (if you get out of line, that is)? This is one of the key differences between these conservative Jewish leaders and younger (than Foxman) doves like me. We trust to the marketplace of ideas to eventually consign aberrant political ideas to the dustbin of history. We trust that in the long haul those political ideas which have the greatest merit (like the cause of Israeli-Palestinian peace) will rise to the top and subsume all other hateful nationalist ideologies. Abe doesn’t trust that view. He’d rather manage, massage and shape the debate with the club he tends to use. Does anyone still believe his statement that he doesn’t believe in “suppressing” views he holds abhorrent??

Traub makes a telling analogy between the Foxman and Bush-Cheney world-view that envisions enemies from within supposedly chipping away at religious or national identity:

What is the difference between this claim [that our enemies take comfort from the division sown by critics of Israel or U.S. foreign policy] and the accusation, a favorite of Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, that critics of the war in Iraq, or of the war on terror, or of homeland-security preparations, are emboldening the enemy? And isn’t that claim, too, designed to suppress debate, or at the very least to make the critic think long and hard before opening his mouth? Is that a price worth paying? Put otherwise: Should we make the existential choice to err on the side of fear, or of hope — a prudent, watchful hope, that is?

I know which side I’m on. Which side are you?

Traub closes with a stinging rebuke which questions his subject’s relevance to current and future Jewish discourse:

Foxman is an anachronism. The demographic of which he is a member — Holocaust survivor — is rapidly disappearing. Younger people don’t know quite what to make of him. In a recent column in The Jewish Journal, David A. Lehrer, formerly the head of the A.D.L.’s Los Angeles office, observed that Jews are now the most widely admired religious group in America, as well as the most successful, and lamented that Jewish leaders — Foxman specifically — continue to harp on Jewish “insecurity” and the threat of anti-Semitism. Lehrer says that when he raised his view that the A.D.L. had to learn to speak to this new, confident but less affiliated generation of Jews, Foxman dismissed it out of hand. The generational question does not interest him. “It’s not my job to judge whether they should feel beleaguered or not,” Foxman snapped when I raised the subject. “I do feel. And I’ve got news for you: Every one of them, in their maturing process, will experience this.”

So, if we just get old enough and wise enough, we’ll “get” where Foxman is coming from. I don’t know whether to feel sad for him in his intellectually delusional thinking; or to rail against his willful ignorance of what most American Jews actually believe.

tags american-jewish-support-for-israel, anti-semitism, israel-lobby, james-traub-profile-of-abe-foxman, new-york-times-magazine, tony-judt, walt-mearsheimer

Aipac is definitely NOT a lobbying group. Rather, it is an “educational” organization. Yup, if you believe what Aipac is peddling they have nothing whatsoever to do with the sleaze represented by the likes of Jack Abramoff. They’re merely an educational outfit trying to enlighten the U.S. Congress about the goodness of the State of Israel.

JTA is peddling this horse manure in Congressional Travel Limits Don’t Faze Nonprofits. The new Democratic majority is considering legislation to ban Congressional junkets. And pro-Israel Jewish groups which lobby, er educate, Congressmembers about the “right” way to think and vote regarding issues related to Israel are tremendously nervous that they’ll be swept up in the fervor to uproot the type of shenanigans pulled by the likes of Jack Abramoff. While it’s true that no Aipac junket provides golfing at St. Andrews, these trips ARE lobbying of the clearest sort and should come under the proposed guidelines. However, it looks like the proposed legislation has been rewritten so Israel trips will still be permissible unfortunately:

Top Democrats informed Jewish groups this week of proposed travel reform legislation that would ban lawmakers and their staffs from joining tours sponsored by organizations that employ registered lobbyists…Nonprofit groups that do not employ lobbyists would still be able to sponsor such tours…

You see, the issue is whether a non-profit like the American Israel Education Foundation, spun off by a lobbying group like Aipac in order to conduct these trips, should be considered part of the parent group or independent of it. If they are part of the parent, then they would be considered a lobby and Congress members would be banned from joining such trips. If they are independent, then everything would be kosher. Clearly, seeing AIEF as independent of Aipac is a useful fiction for both Aipac and its sycophants in Congress. And doubtless, that’s how the final legislation will ending up looking.

I was tickled though by some of the outrageous assumptions made by Jewish lobbyists, er educators about their function in the legislative process. This is from a United Jewish Communities representative:

“We are very upbeat that they have come up with a mechanism for stopping junkets, while at the same time maintaining bona fide educational trips for members of Congress and their staff,” he said.

Isn’t it interesting that a propaganda junket which, instead of “educating” rather indoctrinates members in the rightist Israeli world view so cherished by Aipac and its fellow groups–becomes such a lily-white enterprise in the pro-Israel lobby’s lexicon.

Note how the Jewish leadership manages by linguistic sleight of hand to distinguish itself from the Abramoffs of the world:

[The new legislation] would mean that lawmakers on legitimate tours will be deprived of insights from those Jewish-community professionals who know them best and meet with them most often in the halls of Congress.

You see, Jack was a skunky lobbyist. But Howard Kohr, Abe Foxman, David Harris and their flacks are “Jewish professionals.” They uphold much higher standards of course. They would certainly never engage in hanky panky with a Congress member to get their vote on legislation critical to the Israel Lobby. Never. They would never stoop to flattery, cajolery, or barraging them with propaganda or threats in order to gain a vote (much as Abramoff did). Never.

In defending their propaganda tours of the Promised Land, the Israel Lobby grasps at any straw to distinguish them from Abramoff type junkets:

It’s broadly understood that the Israel sojourns — grueling 6:30 a.m. to 11 p.m. affairs — hardly count as junkets.

But what they conveniently omit is the fact that these Israel trips, while not as blatantly corrupting as the Abramoff outings, are toxic nonetheless in their impact on U.S.-Israel relations in terms of the Congress. Members get an entirely distorted perspective on Israeli political discourse. They only hear from the rightist security hawks like Netanyahu or Sharansky. If they do hear from so-called moderates like Shimon Peres or Tzipi Livni, the political message conveyed is much more conservative than the message such politicians would convey to an Israeli audience. In other words, the Israeli sources tailor their message for what they perceive as Aipac’s hardline views of the Israeli-Arab conflict.

On these trips, they do not hear from Peace Now or Israeli human rights groups. They rarely if ever hear from the likes of Yossi Beilin, Yossi Sarid or parties like Meretz. They rarely if ever hear from Israeli Arabs who represent 25% of Israel’s population. Sure, they’ll see an Israeli air force base or maybe even get a helicopter ride showing them how allegedly vulnerable Israel is to Arab attack (this was a favorite ploy of Ariel Sharon with visiting U.S. presidents and other notables). But will they ever see the inside of Neve Shalom’s peace village? Hardly.

So if Aipac’s Congressional allies want to write legal fictions into law that’s their perogative. But it doesn’t mean the discerning among us won’t notice the chicanery and call the rest of the world’s attention to it. A lobbyist is a lobbyist is a lobbyist. Jack Abramoff learned everything he knows from Aipac whether he worked there or not. Aipac is a lobby and trips which its “educational” affiliates sponsor are for lobbying purposes. Plain and simple. As such, they should be banned. Until they are all I can say to Aipac is: “You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time but you can’t fool all the people all the time.” Bob Dylan said that.

tags aipac-congressional-trips-to-israel, democratic-lobbying-reform-legislation, israel-lobby, jewish-groups-lobby-congress-for-israel

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