US Jewish opinion and the ‘Beinart moment’

By NEIL BERRY | ARAB NEWS

US Jewish opinion and the 'Beinart moment'

The controversial book, The Israel Lobby, in which the political scientists, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, argued that US foreign policy has been hijacked by organized Zionism went strangely unnoticed by the leading journal of American intellectual opinion, the New York Review of Books.

Yet in its June  10 issue the paper carries an article that could scarcely have been written, let alone published, but for the seminal impact of Mearsheimer and Walt's work.

Kindling anew controversy over the role of the Israel lobby in American public life, Peter Beinart's article The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment was already the subject of intense debate when the monstrous Israeli attack on the Gaza aid convoy triggered worldwide outrage and made more bitterly contentious than ever the issue of the United States' endless indulgence of the Jewish State.

Beinart's essay is remarkable for being the work of a Jewish journalist who formerly supported the chief manifestation of the US Israel lobby, the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). Invoking the findings of Republican pollster Frank Luntz, Beinart points out that most non-Orthodox younger American Jews feel much less attached to Israel than their elders, with many professing a near total absence of positive feelings toward Israel. The students interviewed by Luntz were believers in open debate who were skeptical about military force and committed to human rights. They had not realized they were supposed to suspend those values in the case of Israel. The only kind of Zionism that appealed to them was one that recognized the dignity and capacity for peace of Palestinians, and they were not slow to condemn an Israeli government that did not share their values.

Beinart points to a widening gulf in the US between Orthodox Zionists devoted to Israel and liberal secular Jews like Luntz's students who uphold human rights for people of every description. If ever fewer American Jewish liberals are Zionists and ever fewer Zionists are liberals, he writes, it is because 'official' American Jewry have declined to foster a Zionism that challenges Israel's behavior in the West Bank and Gaza Strip and toward its own Arab citizens.

Beinart insists that saving "liberal Zionism" in the United States — and thus saving liberal Zionism in Israel — is the great American Jewish challenge of this era. Yet instead of talking frankly about its delinquencies, the US Jewish establishment accords blind loyalty to the right-wing Israeli government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, acquiescing in its routine portrayal of Jews as history's permanent victims, forever confronted by the possibility of fresh Holocaust. It likewise endorses without question the Netanyahu government's evident belief that to act ethically and respect the lives and human rights of Palestinian people (and even of their supporters) is a luxury that Israel cannot afford.

"The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment" has incensed Jewish conservative opinion in the US but is being hailed by Jewish liberals as an epoch-making event. The progressive Jewish blogger, Philip Weiss, who runs the invaluable anti-Zionist website Mondoweiss, believes that at a stroke Beinart has shifted the "center" of US Jewish debate about the Palestine-Israel conflict decisively to the left. Comments posted on his site indicate that Beinart has spelled out what great numbers of liberal Jews in the US have been saying privately for years. Weiss himself speaks of the "Beinart moment," of "space opening up to acknowledge what Israel is and allow Jews in the United States and beyond to embrace 'liberal' values."

Still, for all that Beinart's article constitutes a major breakthrough in terms of public debate, the Israel lobby remains a hugely powerful force at all levels of American political life, along with the Zionist mentality that inspires it. Even as the article appeared, US President Barack Obama's Jewish chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, was in Israel celebrating his son's bar mitzvah, a visit which not only underscored the symbiotic relationship that exists between the US and Israeli political establishments but epitomized their shared insensitivity to Arab opinion, including as it did a proprietary sight-seeing trip to the occupied Golan Heights. It is true that in deference to Washington settlement building in East Jerusalem has been temporarily frozen (Emanuel met with unbridled contempt from the Israeli right). Yet the peace process itself seems in danger of being frozen in perpetuity. The Obama administration is unlikely to say anything that could occasion negative Israeli reactions before the mid-term American elections in November, the favorable outcome of which for Obama and the Democratic Party depends in no small degree on retaining the goodwill of the party's Zionist sponsors.

The truth is that so long as the US Israel lobby holds the sway that it does, episodes like the "Beinart moment" will have no more than symbolic significance. In May, the New Yorker magazine featured a voluminous profile of the billionaire American Jewish media mogul, Haim Saban. A munificent donor to the Democratic Party (he is intimate with Bill and Hilary Clinton and has stayed in the White House), the Egyptian-born Saban describes himself as a 'one-issue' man, and his one issue is Israel and its welfare. An Israel lobby in his own person, this citizen of both the US and Israel bankrolls the Washington think-tank, the Saban Institute, and notwithstanding his trumpeted commitment to peace he personifies the kind of Zionism that is ferociously intolerant of criticism of the Jewish state. For some time yet, there may be further advances with respect to permissible US public criticism of Israel, without substantive progress taking place when it comes to effectual pressure being put on Israel by its most powerful ally.

The real breakthrough will only occur if and when Washington speaks out against Israel in language as unequivocal as that of Peter Beinart. Such a development may not be imminent, but in view of the changing climate of opinion among American Jewry and growing global revulsion at Israel's behavior, it may no longer be the stuff of fantasy.