No added value

Peter Beinart presents no evidence that if Israel were to be more in line with the values of American Jews they would suddenly be interested in it.

By SETH J. FRANTZMAN
Peres at AIPAC conference 521 (photo credit: Reuters)
Peres at AIPAC conference 521
(photo credit: Reuters)
In his book-length essay, Peter Beinart, a former editor of The New Republic, launches a scathing attack on the dusty world of pro-Israel American Jewish institutions and on Israel’s policies in the West Bank.
Although he has titled his book The Crisis of Zionism, it would have been more accurate to note that it relates primarily to American Zionism.
According to Beinart, “the American Jewish establishment is dying, literally. The typical large American Jewish organization is run by a man in his sixties, who when he meets his large donors is among the youngest people in the room.”
He writes that “increasingly, what remains of secular Jewish identity is a set of values and tastes that other Americans... share.” However, “for Jews who espouse liberal principles, indifference to whether the Jewish state remains a democracy constitutes as deep a betrayal of the bonds of peoplehood as indifference to whether there remains a Jewish state at all.”
The writer argues that it is time American Jews started looking at the West Bank as “undemocratic Israel” and started struggling against the settlement project.
The genesis of this book was a 2010 essay entitled “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment,” published in The New York Review of Books. In building on a successful essay, he follows in the footsteps of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s much-discussed book The Israel Lobby, which also began as an essay. Like that volume, The Crisis of Zionism appears to gain much of its popularity from a perception that it is breaking new ground and confronting the sacred cows of what it means to be pro-Israel.
The author builds his argument on a multilegged paradigm. First he narrates how the American Jewish establishment, as embodied by the American Jewish Congress, AIPAC, ADL, the American Jewish Committee and Conference of Presidents, among others, has supposedly diverged from the interests of its younger Jewish constituents. In the good old days, they “universalized the lessons of the Holocaust...
but in the 1970s, American Jewish organizations began hoarding the Holocaust, retelling it as a story of the world’s eternal hatred of Jews.”
Jewish organizations are accused of working to curry favor with Israeli politicians and ditching Jewish values at the door.
One of their primary sins is not giving enough air time to Palestinians. For instance, “when American Jewish organizations discuss the ideology of Hamas they dwell almost exclusively on the organization’s anti-Semitic 1988 charter.” Beinart argues that they should be looking for nuance in Hamas statements in the last few years.
The writer complains that at its 2011 policy conference, AIPAC didn’t feature “a single Palestinian, Arab, Turkish or Muslim speaker.” One wonders if any Palestinian Muslims wanted to speak at AIPAC, as they would likely be labeled traitors in their own community – but that is, apparently, beside the point. J Street, which Beinart would hold up as a model of a good Jewish institution, included Mustafa Barghouti at its recent 2012 conference. The Palestinian physician was subsequently beaten by other Palestinians at a rally on Land Day.
In discussing the pro-Israel Jewish establishment, the author accuses its organizations of not being representative.
He then makes a series of observations about the Jewish community in America, such as, “Better Jewish education is essential to American Jewish survival, and thus to our ability to fulfill our obligations to the Jewish state.”
This is well and good, but the writer also concedes that the Zionism of America’s Orthodox Jews “seems increasingly likely to define organized American Jewry in the coming years... because so many other young American Jews feel so little Zionist attachment.”
Furthermore, the book claims that most non-Orthodox Jews in the US are so secular that they “view Israel through the same ideological lens that they view other nations.” If it is true that secular American Jews don’t care about Israel, there is no solution to the problem.
This argument about the divergence of the Jewish establishment and American Jews was the strongest argument of the original Beinart essay in which he wrote “the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door... Because they have inherited their parents’ liberalism, they cannot embrace their uncritical Zionism.”
This important argument is lost in the book because he concedes that these American Jews have no attachment to Israel. They aren’t worried about checking their Zionism at the door because they simply never come to the door in the first place. Beinart doesn’t address the fact that many American Jews simply don’t care and he presents no evidence that if Israel were to be more in line with their values they would suddenly be interested in it.
Here is where the book’s argument is weakest: in providing a solution. In the concluding pages, Beinart meekly notes that “liberal Zionists should keep trying to influence American policy.” He argues that “we should call the West Bank ‘nondemocratic Israel’” and begin supporting a campaign of “Zionist boycott, divestment and sanctions” against companies located in Jewish settlements.
The author might have been more forceful in supporting the efforts of J Street, but he likely knows that the organization’s founder, Jeremy Ben-Ami, made similar arguments in A New Voice for Israel, which was published in 2011. Directing too much attention to Ben- Ami’s book might lead readers to wonder why they are reading this volume.
It is also not clear why Beinart thinks that BDS will seriously harm the settlements. He provides no statistics about the number of companies located in the West Bank or the potential economic harm that might come from this boycott. The book, wrongly, assumes that Israel would change its policies based on the whims of a handful of American Jews who might dedicate themselves to a ineffectual boycott.
THE SECOND theme of Beinart’s book is that US President Barack Obama embodies Jewish values more than Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu does. The “Jewish president... spent his adulthood in the company of Jews,” he writes. These were the aforementioned good Jews of the old days, the fighters for civil rights like Abraham Joshua Heschel and Arnold Jacob Wolf, who eschewed “the narrative of perpetual victimhood.”
Obama is quoted as saying he had “great affinity for the idea of social justice that was embodied in the early Zionist movement and the kibbutz.” This is a lead-in to describing how “Obama reminds Netanyahu of what Netanyahu doesn’t like about Jews.”
In the author’s telling of it, Netanyahu’s ideology can be traced through his father, Benzion, directly to Vladimir Jabotinsky, Zionist leader and ideological forefather of the Likud. Jabotinsky created a party that supposedly advocated transfer of the Arab population and gave birth to Bibi, who has “a tendency to approvingly quote imperialists expressing racist views of Arabs.”
It is when he is writing about Israel, though, that Beinart is most out of his element, and as such it was wise of him to make his actual discussions of the Jewish state account for less than half the book.
The text is full of half-truths and errors , such his claim that many settlements have swimming pools.
Beinart argues that “Arab countries have offered to make peace if Israel ends the occupation.” This refers to the famous Arab League peace initiative of 2002. But the Arab Spring of 2011 seems to have nullified this initiative, which has been further undermined by recent criticism that Israel has made peace with dictators rather than the local Arab people.
Beinart claims that Turkey “only began shunning the Jewish state after Israel’s 2009 war in Gaza.” This view places the blame for Turkey’s coldness only on the shoulders of Israel and doesn’t acknowledge that the policy dates from the election of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Islamic AK Party in 2003.
One of the main stumbling blocks in Crisis is its assumption that the main problem with the American support for Israel stems from its support for the modern incarnation of “non-democratic Israel.” The logic here is that in the old days, American Jewish institutions were more nuanced in their support and that Israel was a much more democratic state in the 1960s. While the former assumption is true – American Jewish institutions used to be more lukewarm toward Zionism – Beinart has done a lot of mythmaking about the early days of Israel and Zionism.
First he claims that “early Zionists who identified themselves as socialists mostly shared a liberal conception of freedom of conscience and equality under the law.” Herzl, we are told, wrote in his diary that “we don’t want a Boer state.” Beinart interprets this as a “revulsion at racist Afrikaner nationalism.” But Herzl was writing in 1902, in reaction to the Anglo-Boer war in which Boer Bittereinder (bitter enders) had fought a vicious war against the British. It likely wasn’t “racist nationalism” to which Herzl objected, since that didn’t emerge until later in Afrikaner politics, but the simple savagery of their propagation of the war.
IN DESCRIBING Israeli politics, the book offers the reader a parade of odd assertions.
Supposedly “by long-standing tradition Israeli prime ministers do not include [Arab political parties] in their governing coalitions.” In fact, the Arab political parties have never been willing to serve in a Zionist government.
In addition, we are told that “the segment of Israeli Jewry most supportive of granting Arab citizens equal rights are the very people old enough to remember an Israel where every Arab actually was a citizen.” In fact, the old generation of Israelis who supposedly cared so much for Arab civil rights didn’t grant Palestinians in the West Bank citizenship in the 1970s. This is an important historical point that the book does not bother to address.
Why did the Israeli Left, which was supposedly so democratic, not grant the Palestinians rights when the Labor government ran the West Bank from 1967 to 1977? Beinart imagines a romantic notion of a 1960s Israel that embodied his Jewish values. But he misunderstands the state he wishes Israel could be. In claiming that “in 2011 the Knesset passed a law giving small Israeli communities greater latitude to bar Arab Israelis from moving in,” he simply misreads the entire history of the country. Arab Israelis and most Jewish Israelis suffered discrimination in kibbutz and moshav acceptance committees that had existed for small communities since before the creation of the state. The 2011 law simply wrote down guidelines for the discrimination that was already there. Understanding whether laws like these represent a significant departure from Israel’s past is important because the author is claiming that American Jews should be wary of Israel’s current policies. However in many ways Israel has not changed. The only thing that may have changed is the perception of Israel as being less democratic.
Crisis also draws a distinction between a positive Labor Zionism that believed in workers’ rights, and the “brutal” Zionism of the Right. In order to castigate the Likud, the author sets his sights on Jabotinsky and claims that it was his radical disciples in the Stern Gang who promoted the idea of transfer, that “the Arabs would be deported to another country.” In reality it was the Labor Zionist Yosef Weitz who proposed transferring the Arabs in the 1940s.
Beinart condemns Jabotinsky for believing that Israel should be built on Western notions of the nation-state, while forgetting that the socialist Zionism of David Ben- Gurion was built on similar Western notions.
Besides this misreading, the book’s primary blind spot is that it imagines the West Bank as “nondemocratic Israel” where “millions of Palestinians lack citizenship,” and considers this the fundamental problem there. Palestinians don’t want citizenship in Israel; they want – and have received to some extent – citizenship in a state of Palestine. Increasingly the institutions of that state are being constructed in the West Bank. That proto-state has its own police force and judicial system and colleges.
How to disentangle that emerging state from an existing state is a problem, and it is not clear if, as this book argues, lobbying from some well-meaning progressive American Jewish voices will help sort out the situation faster.
In coming to terms with Crisis the reader has to grapple with the question of how important it is for Israel to reflect the values of some American Jews. Many of these Jews have little interest in Israel, are not likely to take an interest and show no intention of tying their fates to the Jewish State. Should Israel change based on the values of a group so unconnected to the country? For the Jewish communal leaders who are pro-Israel there will remain a fundamental question whether their organizations will continue to be as relevant in the future. Unfortunately this book provides no long-term solutions to the latter problem and no answers to the former question.