Democracy Matters

by Cornel West

  When, in 1967, Egypt’s Nasser closed the Strait of Tiran, the waterway that gave access to Israel’s only port on the Red Sea, Israel launched its historic preemptive attack on Egypt and Syria—an attack that was approved by the CIA and the Pentagon during the visit of Meir Amit (Israel’s chief of Mossad) on the eve of the action—which led to the Six Days’ War. The next fall the United States sold Phantom jets to Israel, making this weapon available for the first time to an ally outside of NATO, even before giving it to South Vietnamese forces who were fighting a war in which U.S. soldiers were dying daily. U.S. military sales to Israel were $140 million between 1968 and 1970. This jumped to $1.2 billion from 1971 to 1973. After the Israeli defeat of the Soviet client states of Egypt and Syria in the 1973 Yom Kippur War, U.S. military aid increased still further. In 1974 it totaled $2.57 billion. This massive shift to support for Israel took place not because U.S. officials were drawn to the just cause of the Israeli state but for cold war political and geostrategic reasons. Israel, a small and fragile state under siege, began to look like an important ally to the American empire because of U.S. dependency on foreign oil and fear of Soviet influence in Arab states.

  Today Israel—a country of 6.5 million people—receives 33 percent of the entire foreign-aid budget of the American empire ($3 billion a year). Another 20 percent of the budget goes to Egypt, in part as a payment for not attacking Israel, and Jordan is the third largest recipient (comparable to India!). In short, more than half the budget concerns the security of Israel. The average African receives 10 cents a year from U.S. foreign aid. The average Israeli receives $500 a year. Only 0.2 percent of the U.S. GNP goes to foreign aid—by this measure America ranks last out of the twenty-two wealthiest countries in the world!

  A conservative estimate of total U.S. foreign aid to Israel since 1949 is $97.5 billion. Israel has become a military giant (with nuclear weapons) in the Middle East, and yet that military might and the protectorship of the United States that has accompanied all the munitions have not come for free. Israel has paid a price: it has no peace or real security. Historically empires have looked to their allies to assist in their dirty work, and Israel played a key role in some of the most morally indefensible policies of the United States as it waged the cold war: providing arms, training, and intelligence support for the Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua, the Afrikaner government of apartheid South Africa, UNITA thugs in Angola, and repressive juntas in Guatemala. Like Turkey, Greece, and South Korea, Israel became a frontline U.S. ally, and no other ally in the Middle East yielded such positive results.

  As this strategic alliance developed and deepened, American elites and certain powerful factions of American Jewish leadership became so hardened in their partnership that they adopted a “broach no criticisms” position about Israel’s actions in the conflict with the Palestinians, a stance that effectively silenced critics, including Jewish critics.

  The painful irony is that the most significant and powerful group of Jews outside beleaguered Israel has not been free to engage in a robust debate about the policies of the Israeli government. There are indeed many prophetic Jews out of the 6.1 million Jews in America (1.8 percent of the U.S. population) eager to pursue honest, Socratic questioning of the hard-line position of the U.S.-Israeli alliance, but their voices are marginalized and their motives are often maligned. Mainstream Jewish leadership has suffocated genuine Jewish prophetic views and visions. In this way, the most visible Jewish identity in the Diaspora appears to many, here and abroad, to be an imperial identity whose security resides in military might and the colonial occupation of Palestinians. Yet in regard to domestic policy, American Jews have been the most loyal group—other than black Americans—to support civil rights and civil liberties. Jews have been a pillar for liberal efforts to support social justice for all in America, yet the issue of the Jewish state tends to muzzle their democratic energies.

  Through the lens of the Jewish invention of the prophetic, which harkens back to the struggle against Pharaoh’s Egypt, this conservative Jewish identity in regard to Israel reeks of imperial idolatry, and it remains in place as long as a grossly simplified Manichaean framework for discussion of the conflict is promulgated. This is a paralyzing framework that posits U.S.-supported, civilized Israelis with their backs against the wall against Arab-supported Palestinian savages who revel in terrorism. This take on the complex situation is so impoverished that it promotes a callousness in denying the extent of Palestinian suffering, in the name of dubious security of Israelis. In short, this myopic viewpoint precludes both justice for Palestinians and security for Israelis.

  As Michael C. Staub points out in his recent book, Torn at the Roots: The Crisis of Jewish Liberalism in Postwar America (2002), the fierce debates within the Jewish community over Zionism, desegregation, Vietnam, gender relations, and exogamous marriage more and more put prophetic Jews on the defensive. He writes:

  Yes, many Jews were, and a considerable number still are, radicals, left-liberals, or more moderate liberals. But without paying attention to intra-Jewish conflict we have no sense of just how embattled these individuals’ positions within the community often were, nor of how energetically and creatively anti-left and anti-liberal arguments were put forward by their critics. For example, Jewish activists who invoked the prophetic tradition of Micah, Amos, and Isaiah to cast Judaism as morally bound to antiracist activism and other social justice issues already came under sharp attack in the mid-1950s.

  In regard to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, he notes that, by the 1970s, “it would be hard not to conclude that the hawks had triumphed over the doves…. It is crucial to register the on-going vitality of a right-leaning, religiously inflected American Zionism.”

  The recent history of prophetic American Jews questioning the myopic viewpoint and Manichaean framework of this conflict is appalling. The experience of Breira is revealing. Breira is Hebrew for “alternative.” In the years 1973 to 1977, this group of prophetic American Jews tried to create a democratic space that allowed serious debate about the fate of Israelis and Palestinians beyond the narrow consensus of mainstream American Jewish leadership—a consensus predicated on “ein breira” (there is no alternative to the reigning consensus).

  Breira accused the Jewish establishment of a kind of “Israelotry” that blindly worshipped the Israeli state while downplaying Jewish democratic commitments to peace and justice. The group strongly supported the security of Israel and bravely promoted a Palestinian state. Most important, Breira members called for a respectful democratic debate among American Jews regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And they were viciously attacked and mercilessly crushed—denied membership in local Jewish organizations, forced to quit Breira in order to keep their Hillel rabbi jobs, and cast as self-hating Jews. This antidemocratic response of the mainstream Jewish groups sent chills down the spines of prophetic Jews. For example, the treatment of Rabbi Arthur Waskow was atrocious. His prophetic pro-Israel and pro-Palestine stance was deliberately cast as a terroristic pro-PLO position. He was dubbed a “Jew for Fatah” rather than a concerned rabbi rooted in the rich prophetic tradition of Judaism. Like Rabbi Michael Lerner today, Rabbi Waskow was unfairly labeled a Jewish heretic or traitor. Yet both today persevere against such attacks.

  And the present does look more promising. Strong prophetic voices are in fact emerging within the Jewish Diaspora—as well as in Israel—that are putting forward powerful critiques of Israel’s handling of the crisis and courageous visions of less violent, more democratic ways forward. New Jewish Agenda, Jewish Peace Lobby, Jewish Peace Network, Americans for Peace Now, Heeb magazine, Israel Policy Forum, and especially Rabbi Michael Lerner’s Tikkun magazine and Tikkun community (headed by Rabbi Lerner, Susannah Heschel, and myself) are slowly beginning to turn the tide against the mainstream Jewish imperial idolatry. These organizations rightly recognize that Israeli colonial occupation of Palestinians and deference to American imperial strategic interests produce nei
ther security for Israel nor justice for Palestinians. Yet these prophetic Jews are up against formidable Jewish establishmentarian forces.

  Those forces have sponsored an impressive Jewish civic activism, through a highly successful lobby, to support Israeli government policies and snub prophetic Jewish—and non-Jewish—voices. We democrats must support the right of citizens to organize and influence U.S. foreign or domestic policy. Yet there also must be accountability and responsibility in democratic public life, including vibrant debate and dialogue. Unfortunately, the highly effective Jewish lobby seems to have little interest in such debate and dialogue. Like the attacks against Breira and Rabbi Arthur Waskow, the response to prophetic Jews like Rabbi Michael Lerner and others forecloses meaningful democratic exchange.

  The two major groups of the Jewish lobby are the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. The first group consists of 60,000 members and a staff of 130 and has an annual budget of almost $20 million. Widely known as AIPAC, it focuses on Congress, maintaining an office near Capitol Hill. It mobilizes hard-line Israeli supporters in nearly every congressional district and encourages its members to make significant monetary contributions to candidates of both parties (from conservative Republican Trent Lott to liberal Democrat Hillary Clinton), and it can torpedo candidates who criticize Israeli policies, like Cynthia McKinney in Georgia. The second group is composed of the heads of fifty-one Jewish organizations, including the three largest—the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (1.5 million Reform Jews and their 900 synagogues), the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism (1.5 million Conservative Jews and their 760 synagogues), and the Orthodox Union (600,000 Orthodox Jews and their 800 congregations). This group has a staff of six and an annual budget of less than a million dollars. And despite its political and ideological diversity, its leader for the past eighteen years, Malcolm Hoenlein, has been dubbed “the most influential private citizen in American foreign policy” by a former high-ranking U.S. diplomat. His fundamental aim is the security of the Jewish state. But the weight he puts on justice for Palestinians is suspect—even though many prophetic Jews in his organization want both security for Israel and justice for Palestinians. In short, those in the powerful Jewish lobby—though far from monolithic and certainly not an almighty cabal of Zionists who rule the United States or the world (in the vicious language of zealous anti-Semites)—are far to the right of most American Jews and are often contemptuous of prophetic Jewish voices. In fact, their preoccupation with Israel’s security at the expense of the Palestinian cry for justice has not only produced little security for Israel but also led many misinformed Jews down an imperial path that suffocates their own prophetic heritage.

  This suffocation is seen most clearly in the major sectors of the mass media. Mortimer Zuckerman, the new head of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, owns U.S. News & World Report and the New York Daily News. Martin Peretz, editor in chief and co-owner of the New Republic, is a defender of hard-line Israeli policies toward the Palestinians. The Sulzbergers, the more sophisticated and open-minded Jewish family who publish the New York Times, house the unofficial dean of American foreign-affairs journalism, the bestselling author Thomas Friedman, whose misrepresentations of the Middle East are legion (yet whose call to pull back on Israeli settlements is courageous). Needless to add, the far-reaching influence of the non-Jewish Rupert Murdoch (New York Post, Weekly Standard, Fox News Channel) is enormous. He is a stalwart of the imperial U.S.-Israeli lobby.

  The dominant voices of the American Jewish lobby have, in fact, so eviscerated their own prophetic Jewish tradition that they have even embraced the support of conservative evangelical Christians. How ironic it is to see this Jewish lobby fuse with right-wing evangelical Christians whose anti-Semitism, past and present, is notorious, and whose support for Israel is based on the idea that the Jewish state paves the way for the Second Coming of Christ. The recent controversy over Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of the Christ reveals the absurdity of this unholy alliance. To worship the golden calf of power and might is one thing. To unite with the heirs of the fundamental source of anti-Judaism in last two thousand years of Jewish history—whose literal readings of the New Testament reek of anti-Semitic views—is to reveal the depths of establishmentarian Jewish capitulation to the worst of the American empire.

  The greatest Jewish philosopher of the twentieth century—Franz Rosenzweig—put the critique of idolatry at the center of his thought, as shown in Leora Batnitzky’s brilliant Idolatry and Representation: The Philosophy of Rosenzweig Reconsidered (2000):

  The Jewishness of a Jew is done an injustice if it is put on the same level as his nationality…. There is no “relationship” between one’s Jewishness and one’s humanity that needs to be discovered, puzzled out, experienced, or created…. As a Jew one is a human being, as a human being a Jew…. Strange as it may sound to the obtuse ears of a nationalist, being a Jew is no limiting barrier that cuts Jews off from someone who is limited by being something else.

  Rosenzweig’s powerful critique of Zionism—alongside his unequivocal support for Jewish security—is relevant for our time. He knew that the all-too-human idolizing of land and power trumps prophetic commitments to justice and yields little genuine security. This kind of idolatry tends to encourage imperial ambitions and colonial aims, as noted by Ahad Ha‘am, the towering Jewish critic, more than one hundred years ago after his visit to Palestine. He wrote:

  Some of the newcomers, to our shame, describe themselves as “future colonialists.”…They were slaves in their diasporas, and suddenly they find themselves with unlimited freedom…. This sudden change has planted despotic tendencies in their hearts, as always happens to former slaves. They deal with the Arabs with hostility and cruelty, trespass unjustly, beat them shamefully for no sufficient reason, and even boast about their actions. There is no one to stop the flood and put an end to this despicable and dangerous tendency.

  Similarly, prophetic Jewish giants like Albert Einstein and Leo Baeck, who in 1948 spoke “in the name of principles which have been the most significant contributions of the Jewish people to humanity,” have chastised the myopic approach to the conflict. As they wrote in a letter to the New York Times in 1948:

  Both Arab and Jewish extremists are today recklessly pushing Palestine into a futile war. While believing in the defense of legitimate claims, these extremists on each side play into each other’s hands. In this reign of terror, the needs and desires of the common man in Palestine are ignored…. We believe that any constructive solution is possible only if it is based on the concern for the welfare and cooperation of both Jews and Arabs in Palestine.

  They knew that a new democratic Jewish identity must be forged in the Diaspora that shatters all imperial mentalities and unleashes the prophetic energies of decent, justice-loving Jews and non-Jews. This democratic identity must mirror the very realities that have allowed Jewish success and upward mobility in America—rights and liberties, merit and respect for all in a democratic experiment. Would American Jews elect to live in an America that bans interfaith marriage, guarantees a Christian majority to keep minorities as second-class citizens, and rules brutally over its adjacent neighbors whose property they daily annex? Does not the Jewish state ban marriage between Jews and non-Jews, discriminate against its Arab citizens, and subjugate Palestinians under occupation?

  American Jews have been in the forefront of the fight for the rights and liberties of oppressed peoples, especially blacks. Where are those same prophetic voices when it comes to the rights of Palestinians within Israel and under Israeli occupation? This is a moment when progressive Jews are under severe attack and severe test. If ever there was a time in which the best voices of the Jewish world should be heard, it is now. The connection of much of American Jewish power to the most conservative elements in the American elite has allowed a downplaying of the suffering of the Palestinian
people and a willingness to view the lives of the Palestinians as of less value than those of Jews or Americans. Thus we have the need to be at the same time unequivocal in our support for the security of Israel and fully committed to ending the subjugation of the Palestinians. Prophetic Jews can maintain both the demand for Israeli security and the call for an end to occupation, while also joining with non-Jews who are ready to support them. They can open up possibilities for a very important kind of progressive movement.

  The tragic irony is that the deep faith of American and Israeli Jews in the American empire is itself idolatrous and dangerous. It is idolatrous because it makes the U.S. helicopter gunships that patrol the Palestinian West Bank and the U.S.-supported wall that separates Palestinians from Israel the dominant imperial symbols of an Israel founded in the name of the Israelite prophets. It is dangerous because it views America as the Jewish promised land, bereft of its own deep anti-Semitic impulses. Yet the truth is that just as the American empire chose to favor Israel for political and geostrategic reasons, it can abandon Israel for the same reasons. And if an oil-rich Arab country could do imperial America’s dirty work better than Israel at a lower cost and with less controversy, Israel might well be sold down the river.

  Is there not a long and ugly history of Jews in the Diaspora—Spain, Egypt, Germany—succumbing to false security and assimilationist illusions as they deferred to respective imperial authorities? Is America so different? Do the depths of anti-Semitism in Western civilization and Christian-dominated societies not reach to the heart of America? What will happen when American imperial elites must choose between oil and Israel? Cannot these elites manipulate anti-Semitic sentiments among the American citizenry the same way they fan and fuel other xenophobic fears for purposes of expediency? The challenge of democrats is to keep track of all forms of bigotry—including anti-Semitism—and to unsettle the sleepwalking among the comfortable. This means working with and alongside our Jewish fellow citizens in forging a new Jewish democratic identity here and abroad.