The Arab_Israeli Conflict

by Jonathan Rynhold

  10 Phillips et al., American Attitudes toward Israel; Perlmann, American Jewish Opinion about the Future of the West Bank; “2006 Annual Survey of American Jewish Opinion,” AJC Global Jewish Advocacy, October 18, 2006, http://www.ajc.org/site/apps/nlnet/content3.aspx?c=7oJILSPwFfJSG&b=8479755&ct=12483107; “2009 Annual Survey of American Jewish Opinion,” Global Jewish Advocacy, October 1, 2009, http://www.ajc.org/site/apps/nlnet/content3.aspx?c=7oJILSPwFfJSG&b=8479755&ct=12479167; “2010 Annual Survey of American Jewish Opinion,” Global Jewish Advocacy, April 7, 2010, http://www.ajc.org/site/apps/nlnet/content3.aspx?c=7oJILSPwFfJSG&b=8479755&ct=12478947.

  11 The exception was the period 1996–1999, when the Netanyahu government was in power. See Phillips et al., American Attitudes toward Israel.

  12 See the 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010 AJC surveys at http://www.ajc.org.

  13 A Portrait of Jewish Americans (Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, October 1, 2013), http://www.pewforum.org/files/2013/10/jewish-american-full-report-for-web.pdf.

  14 Perlmann, American Jewish Opinion about the Future of the West Bank.

  15 For details, see notes 9 and 10.

  16 “Poll: U.S. Jews Overwhelmingly Support Israeli Gaza/West Bank Disengagement, Say Israel Should Depart Most Settlements to Secure Peace,” Ameinu, April 11, 2005, http://www.ameinu.net/newsroom/press-release/poll-u-s-jews-overwhelmingly-support-israeli-gazawest-bank-disengagement-say-israel-should-depart-most-settlements-to-secure-peace/; Perlmann, American Jewish Opinion about the Future of the West Bank; “July 2008 Survey Results,” J Street Blog, March 10, 2012, http://jstreet.org/blog/post/july-2008-survey-results_1.

  17 “March 2009 Survey Results,” J Street Blog, March 10, 2012, http://jstreet.org/blog/post/march-2009-survey-results; James Zogby, “Arab American and American Jews Agree on Path to Peace,” Arab American Institute, August 4, 2003, http://www.aaiusa.org/dr-zogby/entry/w08040/.

  18 For details, see notes 9 and 10.

  19 Steven M. Cohen, After the Gulf War: American Jews’ Attitudes toward Israel: The 1991 National Survey of American Jews (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1992).

  20 “2007 Annual Survey of American Jewish Opinion,” Global Jewish Advocacy, November 25, 2007, http://www.ajc.org/site/apps/nlnet/content3.aspx?c=7oJILSPwFfJSG&b=8479755&ct=12478843.

  21 Perlmann, American Jewish Opinion about the Future of the West Bank.

  22 Renae Cohen, The Palestinian Autonomy Agreement and Israel-PLO Recognition: A Survey of American Jewish Opinion (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1994).

  23 “Poll: US Jews Overwhelmingly Support Israeli Gaza-West Bank Disengagement.”

  24 “March 2009 Survey Results.”

  25 “2009 Annual Survey of American Jewish Opinion.”

  26 This trend was already evident in the 1980s. Cohen, Ties and Tensions.

  27 Poll cited in Ofira Seliktar, Divided We Stand: American Jews, Israel, and the Peace Process (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2002), 153.

  28 Ibid., 158, 183.

  29 “March 2009 Survey Results.”

  30 Phillips, Lengyel, and Saxe, American Attitudes toward Israel.

  31 Eric Fingerhut, “Not Much Division in Community, According to ADL Poll,” JTA, January 30, 2009, http://www.jta.org/2009/01/30/news-opinion/the-telegraph/not-much-division-in-community-according-to-adl-poll.

  32 A Portrait of Jewish Americans, 89.

  33 Phillips, Lengyel, and Saxe, American Attitudes toward Israel; Gilboa, American Public Opinion toward Israel and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 258.

  34 James Guth and William Kenan Jr., “Religious Factors and American Public Support for Israel: 1992–2008” (paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Seattle, WA, September 1–4, 2011).

  35 Gilboa, American Public Opinion toward Israel and the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 258.

  36 Polls cited in Seliktar, Divided We Stand, 166; George Gruen, “Israel and the American Jewish Community,” in Robert O. Freedman, ed., Israel’s First Fifty Years (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2000), 65, note 41.

  37 “March 2009 Survey Results”; “March 2010 Survey Results,” J Street Blog, March 10, 2012, http://jstreet.org/blog/post/march-2010-survey-results.

  38 “Poll: U.S. Jews Overwhelmingly Support Israeli Gaza/West Bank Disengagement”; “July 2008 Survey Results.”

  39 This section is based on Perlmann, American Jewish Opinion about the Future of the West Bank. He used results from the 2000–2005AJC surveys.

  40 Differences between the non-Orthodox movements were almost negligible.

  41 E. J. Kessler, “Orthodox Disagree with Other Jews on Gaza Pullout,” Jewish Daily Forward, July 1, 2005.

  42 Anand Sokhey, Paul Djupe, “Rabbi Engagement with the Peace Process in the Middle East,” Social Science Quarterly 87, no. 4 (2006): 903–923; Theodore Sasson The New Realism: American Jews Views about Israel (New York: American Jewish Committee, 2009).

  43 Perlmann, American Jewish Opinion about the Future of the West Bank.

  44 Theodore Sasson et al., Still Connected: American Jewish Attitudes about Israel (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University, Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies, August 2010), table 11.

  45 A Portrait of Jewish Americans, 91.

  46 A Portrait of Jewish Americans.

  47 Sasson, The New Realism, 15–16, 28–31.

  48 Ibid.

  49 Peter Beinart, “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment,” New York Review of Books, June 10, 2010; Jeffrey Goldberg, “Goldblog vs. Peter Beinart: Part II,” Atlantic, May 18, 2010 http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/05/goldblog-vs-peter-beinart-part-ii/56934/; Jeffrey Goldberg, “Goldblog vs. Peter Beinart: Part III” Atlantic, May 18, 2010, http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/05/goldblog-vs-peter-beinart-part-iii-zionism-reloaded/57088/.

  50 Tony Judt, “Israel: The Alternative,” New York Review of Books, October 23, 2003, http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2003/oct/23/israel-the-alternative/. See also Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon, eds., Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (New York: Grove Press, 2003); Alvin Rosenfeld, “Progressive” Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism (New York: American Jewish Committee, 2006).

  51 Sasson, The New Realism, p.13.

  52 Jewish Press, September 15, 1995, 14; Jewish Press, October 6, 1993, 16; Jerusalem Post, September 6, 1995; Jerusalem Report, October 19, 1995, 38; Yediot Aharonot, September 11, 1995, 1.

  53 Author interview with Nathan Diament, 2013.

  54 Sasson, The New Realism, p.13.

  55 Shmuel Rosner, “Reform Support ‘Jewish State’ More Than the Orthodox,” Rosner’s Domain (blog), Jerusalem Post, October 14, 2010, http://cgis.jpost.com/Blogs/rosner/entry/can_you_believe_it_reform (no longer available).

  56 Glenn Frankel, Beyond the Promised Land: Jews and Arabs on the Hard Road to a New Israel (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 222.

  57 Dan Fleshler, Transforming America’s Israel Lobby: The Limits of Its Power and the Potential for Change (Washington DC: Potomac Books, 2009), 115

  58 Jack Wertheimer, “Breaking the Taboo: Critics of Israel and the American Jewish Establishment,” in Allon Gal, ed., Envisioning Israel: The Changing Ideals and Images of North American Jews (Jerusalem: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Magnes Press, 1996), 397–419.

  59 Martin Raffel, “History of Israel Advocacy,” in Alan Mittleman, Jonathan Sarna, and Robert Licht, eds., Jewish Polity and American Civil Society: Communal Agencies and Religious Movements in the American Public Sphere (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), 132.

  60 Jerusalem Post, July 6, 1990; Lawrence Grossman, “Jewish Communal Affairs,” in Ruth R. Seldin and David Singer, eds., American Jewish Year Book, vol. 92 (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1992), 245.

  61 Jonathan Rynhold, “Labour, Likud, the ‘Special Relationship,’ and the Peace Process 1988–96,” Israel Affairs, 3, no. 3–4 (1997): 239–262.
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br />   62 Seliktar, Divided We Stand, 137.

  63 Ibid., 157; Fleshler, Transforming America’s Israel Lobby, 107–110.

  64 For example, during the Second Lebanon War over a quarter of young Jewish Americans consulted Israeli news sources, while the figure was more than 50 percent for those involved in Jewish student organizations. Leonard Saxe, Theodore Sasson, and Shahar Hecht, Israel at War: The Impact of Peer-Oriented Israel Programs on Responses of American Jewish Young Adults (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University, Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies, 2006), 5.

  65 For a personal journalistic description of the impact of the Lebanon War and the intifada, see Thomas L. Friedman, From Beirut to Jerusalem (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989).

  66 Yossi Shain, “Jewish Kinship at a Crossroads,” Political Science Quarterly 117, no. 2 (2002): 279–309.

  67 Jack Wertheimer, Generation of Change: How Leaders in Their Twenties and Thirties Are Reshaping American Jewish Life (Jerusalem: Avi Chai Foundation, 2010); Sasson, “Mass Mobilization to Direct Engagement.”

  68 Brit Tzedek claimed a network of 40,000 supporters, including more than 1,000 rabbis, though it later integrated into J Street. Dov Waxman, “The Israel Lobbies: A Survey of the Pro-Israel Community in the United States,” Israel Studies Forum 25, no. 1 (2010).

  69 Quoted in Carl Schrag, Ripples from the Matzav: Grassroots Responses of American Jewry to the Situation in Israel (New York: American Jewish Committee, 2004).

  70 The ZOA claims thirty thousand dues-paying members. Waxman, “The Israel Lobbies.”

  71 Ibid.

  72 This is according to polls conducted by the left-wing pro-Israel organization J Street, which is outside the conventional lobby. See “July 2008 Survey Results”; “March 2009 Survey Results.”

  73 Nathan Guttman, “The Waning American Jewish Liberal,” Haaretz, April 3, 2002.

  74 Shlomo Shamir, “The Silence of the Lambs,” Haaretz, April 9, 2002.

  75 Shlomo Shamir, “Is Right-Wing Influence Fading among U.S. Jews?” Haaretz, August 19, 2005; Yaakov Katz, “Battle over American Jewish Support,” Jerusalem Post, March 15, 2005.

  76 “Resolution on Israeli Palestinian Peace,” http://tools.isovera.com/organizations/org/ResolutiononIsraeliPalestinianPeace-final.doc (no longer available).

  77 Brit Tzedek v’Shalom, http://btvshalom.org/ (accessed October 11, 2004).

  78 David Singer and Lawrence Grossman, eds., American Jewish Yearbook, vol. 107 (New York: American Jewish Committee, 2007); Nathan Guttman, “Washington: Splitting Hairs or Hair-Raising Splits?” Jerusalem Post, March 9, 2006.

  79 Ron Kampeas, “AIPAC Stance Irks Donors,” JTA, November 16, 2007, http://www.jta.org/2007/11/16/news-opinion/politics/aipac-stance-irks-donors.

  80 Sasson, “Mass Mobilization to Direct Engagement,” 178–179.

  81 Quoted in James Traub, “The New Israel Lobby,” New York Times Magazine, September 13, 2009; and in Eric Yoffie, “On Gaza, Sense, and Centrism,” Jewish Daily Forward, January 9, 2009, http://www.forward.com/articles/14847/.

  82 Lawrence Grossman, “Jewish Communal Affairs,” in Singer and Grossman, eds., American Jewish Year Book, vol. 107, 113.

  83 Anthony Weiss, “U.S. Ultra-Orthodox Group Breaks Mold by taking Stance on Peace Process,” Jewish Daily Forward, December 2, 2007.

  84 Haaretz, February 17, 2008.

  85 Shlomo Shamir, “Bronfman: Jewish Leaders Creating Rift between Israel, U.S.,” Haaretz, July 2004; Shlomo Shamir, “Reform Movement Rabbis Set to Condemn House Demolitions,” Haaretz, June 24, 2004; “Reform Head Blasts Settlements,” Jerusalem Post, November 13, 2003.

  86 Matthew Wagner, “U.S. Reform Rabbis Urge Settlement Freeze,” Jerusalem Post, June 15, 2009.

  87 Ron Kampeas, “Reform, AIPAC Stake Out Opposing Positions on Penalizing Palestinians,” JTA, January 3, 2013, http://www.jta.org/2013/01/03/news-opinion/politics/reform-aipac-stake-out-opposing-positions-on-penalizing-palestinians.

  88 “Reform Jews Threaten to Leave Conference of Presidents,” JTA, May 1, 2014; Nathan Guttman, “‘Broken’ Presidents Conference Faces Powerful Rebellion after J Street Debacle,” Jewish Daily Forward, May 7, 2014.

  89 Author interview with Yossi Beilin, 1998; Edward Tivnan, The Lobby: Jewish Political Power and American Foreign Policy: A Collection of Essays (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 201–216; Michael Massing, “The Storm over the Israel Lobby,” New York Review of Books, June 8, 2006.

  90 Michael Massing, “Deal Breakers,” American Prospect, March 11, 2002.

  91 Fleshler, Transforming America’s Israel Lobby, 64, 77.

  92 Author interview with Dan Fleshler.

  93 Rynhold, “Labour, Likud, the ‘Special Relationship’”; J. J. Goldberg, Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1996), 218; Allison Hoffman, “King without a Crown,” Tablet Magazine, May 10, 2010, http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/33176/king-without-a-crown.

  94 Fleshler, Transforming America’s Israel Lobby, 77–78.

  95 E. J. Kessler, “Pro-Israel Activists Cheer,” Jewish Daily Forward, March 10, 2006; Rynhold, “Labour, Likud, the ‘Special Relationship.’”

  96 Jerusalem Post, July 9, 1993.

  97 Fleshler, Transforming America’s Israel Lobby, 66.

  98 Author interview with Yossi Beilin, 1998.

  99 Fleshler, Transforming America’s Israel Lobby, 67.

  100 Seliktar, Divided We Stand, 137, 183, 185.

  101 Ron Kampeas, “With Bush More Involved in Mideast, Group Finds Itself Back in the Center,” JTA, June 2, 2005; Shmuel Rosner, “U.S. Jewish leadership Declares Support for Disengagement,” Haaretz, August 17, 2005; Amiram Barkat, “U.S. Jewish Group’s Stand on Pullout Attacked,” Haaretz, February 17, 2005.

  102 Author interview with Israeli official whose job involved liaising with AIPAC, 2006.

  103 Ron Kampeas, “In Major Policy Shift, AIPAC Offers Strong Backing for Withdrawal Plan,” JTA, May 24, 2005; Barkat, “U.S. Jewish Group’s Stand on Pullout Attacked.”

  104 Shlomo Shamir, “U.S. Jewish Leaders Split over Public Support for Pullout,” Haaretz, October 17, 2004.

  105 Barkat, “U.S. Jewish Group’s Stand on Pullout Attacked.”

  106 Rynhold, “Labour, Likud, the ‘Special Relationship.’”

  107 Marshall Breger, “Jerusalem Gambit,” National Review, October 23, 1995, 41–45.

  108 Shain, “Jewish Kinship at a Crossroads,” 305; see also Anshel Pfeffer, “Reform Head behind Olmert on Jerusalem,” Haaretz, February 17, 2008.

  109 Michael Jordan, “President’s Conference Sets Limits after Lauder’s Jerusalem speech,” JTA, February 1, 2001; Eli Wohlgelernter, “Avital Tells U.S. Jews to Stay Out of Israeli Politics,” Jerusalem Post, January 5, 2001.

  110 James Besser, “New Coalition to Fight Any Jerusalem Division,” The Jewish Week, October 18, 2007; Anshel Pfeffer, “Reform Headlines up behind Olmert on Jerusalem,” Haaretz, February 17, 2008.

  111 Sasson et al., Still Connected, tables 2 and 3.

  112 Schrag, Ripples from the Matzav.

  113 Naava Shafner Posy, Jewish American Activists: The Melting Pot for American, Israel and Jewish Identities (seminar paper, Bar-Ilan University, Department of Political Science, Ramat Gan, 2010).

  114 Waxman, “The Israel Lobbies.”

  115 Henry Siegman, “Imposing Middle East Peace,” Nation, January 7, 2010; M. J. Rosenberg, “Lying about the Gaza Flotilla Disaster,” Huffington Post, June 2, 2010, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mj-rosenberg/lying-about-the-gaza-flot_b_597953.html.

  116 Leonard Fein, “Reflections of a Sometime Israel Lobbyist,” Dissent, Spring 2008; Michael Walzer, “The Four Wars of Israel/Palestine,” Dissent, Fall 2002; Michael Walzer, “Response to Jerome Slater: The Lebanon War,” Dissent, Winter 2007.

  117 Dan Kosky, “New Israel Fund Should Not Fund Groups That Oppose Jewish State,” JTA, July 27, 2009; see also “New Israel Fund,” NGO Monitor,
September 2, 2012, http://www.ngo-monitor.org/article/new_israel_fund. The Avi Armoni statement was personally witnessed by the author at a New Israel Fund event in London after the Rabin assassination; Professor Avi Ravistsky presented the alternative view, namely that the two are compatible.

  118 Jeffrey Goldberg, “J Street’s Ben-Ami On Zionism and Military Aid to Israel,” Atlantic, October 23, 2009, http://jeffreygoldberg.theatlantic.com/archives/2009/10/j_streets_ben-ami_on_being_a_z.php#more.

  119 Nathan Guttman, “J Street, Now a Player, Inches toward the Center,” Jewish Daily Forward, November 6, 2009.