For many people in Israel, ties with American Jewry are a very personal matter. We met those same Jews years ago when they were young. They – and we – aren't young anymore. Back then, a thousand years ago on the kibbutz, they were volunteers of students of Hebrew who got up early to harvest melon. Or to work in the cowshed. They learned to love the landscape, the fields, the pool, and the dining hall. There was virtually no argument about Israel in and of itself.
Follow Israel Hayom on Facebook and Twitter
Despite everything, including the friendship that has survived for decades, I can remember tough questions that I heard one woman ask back in about 1974. Why did the nearby Arab village look the way it did? Why was the quality of life and level of development there so poor, compared to – yes – our community's. What seems obvious to you can look bad to Americans. Today, the quality of life has in a sense been equalized, and at least that little village with its mud huts has grown a lot more than the kibbutz. But that doesn't matter, because a considerable number of the volunteers from the late 1960s and early 1970s are furious with Israel. Back then, they experienced the country for themselves. They saw what a country looked like after a war. Today, they are experiencing Israel via infusions from the left-leaning media.
But the real emotional schism revealed itself to me when I arrived in the US in the late 1970s. Then, the opposite question was raised – what would US Jews do if a change in their fortunes forced them to leave America? Flee? One older woman gave me a clear answer: the first choice would be Vienna, Austria. And if that didn't work out, they would leave for Germany. A current event such as the investigation into attorney Michael Cohen, which has caused all the anti-Semitic stereotypes to rear their heads, has caused a few people to question the future of the Jews in the US. The assimilated Jews are aware of their Jewishness, but Israel is not an option for them.
Some of the Jews we used to know have developed a knee-jerk anti-Israel reaction. All the existential threats to the country don't bother them. They blame the Israeli prime minister for the mass shooting at a Pittsburgh synagogue. The anti-Semitic cartoon in The New York Times reflects not only the reflexive anti-Israeli atmosphere but also the hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of Jewish readers who read The Times like their grandfathers read Psalms. The Times could only have run a cartoon like that if it was sure that American Jewry would accept it, and that some of them might even light was it was offering up.
Abandoning conventions
To understand something about ties between Israel and American Jews, we might start with a key event that took place during World War II, as the murder of millions of European Jews was coming to an end. The battle to save the Jews of Europe took place before Israel was founded, but it was a sign of conflicts and struggles to come, which continue to repeat themselves. In Israel, there are leading Holocaust scholars to whom one mustn't mention the name "Peter Bergson," the pseudonym of Irgun activist Hillel Kook. Kook's activity in American proved that one could be effective in a relatively short time, and there was no need to depend on institutionalized Jewish leadership. Researchers such as Rafael Medoff and David Wyman revealed only a generation ago how apathetic then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt was about Jewish refugees and how little he did about the mass murder itself, which his administration knew plenty about.
In his book "The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941-1945," Wyman exposes the huge moral failure of Roosevelt, the American hero that US Jewry worshipped (and many still do). At the time, the Jews' alliance to the Democratic Party was made stronger. Some of Roosevelt's close advisers were Jews. Stephen Wise, who was known as the leader of American Jews, helped Roosevelt hide the Holocaust from the Americans. If he and his friends didn't shout or cry, why should The New York Times run a headline about the annihilation of millions when it could bury the story at the bottom of an inside page?
Kook embarrassed the Jewish establishment by demanding that the US allocated special aid for the Jews. He was filmed describing the shock he felt when he saw the first report on the Holocaust in The Washington Post. Because of him and his group, the US administration established the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish People, and some say that the committee was responsible for rescuing some 200,000 Jews. Kook thought that the Holocaust was a little more important than any awkwardness that might be caused to American Jewish leaders, and enlisted partners such as the great screenwriter Ben Hecht. They wrote provocative full-page ads that ran in The New York Times and horrified the public and organized huge events in which Hollywood stars and theater stars, including Marlon Brando and stars like Paul Muni and Edward G. Robinson, who until then had kept their Jewishness a secret.
Kook, the brother of Rabbi Avraham Yitzhak Hacohen Kook, founder of Israel's chief rabbinate, arrived from Palestine and created a new, rare kind of leadership. He behaved in a way that was unacceptable by battling for American public opinion and put direct pressure on the administration and on Congress, skirting the established Jewish leadership. Two other leaders that broke convention with American Jewry were Yitzhak Rabin, in his years as ambassador to Washington, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The Holocaust changed how leaders of American Jewry did things. One person who appeared as a great leader was Abba Hillel Silver, a Reform rabbi from Cleveland. He was a key figure in forging ties between the leadership of the Jewish population and the former Soviet Union ahead of the UN vote on partition.
The Jewish-American-Israel relationship always reflected international diplomacy. Silver joined forces with Moshe Sharett and Eliahu Epstein (Eilat), who were trying to contact Russia's ambassador to the UN, Andrei Gromyko. He succeeded and they learned that the person pushing to supposedly pro-Zionist line was none other than Josef Stalin himself. But the Russians wanted not only to push the British out of the Middle East by establishing a Jewish state, but they also wanted to influence American Jews to vote for the pro-Soviet Left in the 1948 election. It turns out that two years earlier, in the mid-term election, most American Jews has voted for Republicans to punish the Democrats for Roosevelt's pro-Arab stance. The left-wing candidate for president, who was supported by the communists, was Henry Wallace, a staunch pro-Zionist. Eventually, Harry Truman wavered, and the State Department and the American establishment as a whole threw their entire weight against the establishment of a Jewish state. The Jewish vote, general public opinion, and the position of the USSR caused Truman to go against the defense and foreign policy establishment and the US wound up supporting the establishment of a Jewish state and was the first to recognize it after it was founded on May 14, 1948.
An obviously fateful moment
After Israel was established, a kind of formula for relations with US Jewry was determined when Ben-Gurion struck a deal with Jacob Blaustein, head of the American Jewish Committee. The deal laid out the following guidelines: that Israel wanted US Jewry to continue to exist safely and to flourish; did not see itself as allowed to interfere in its affairs; saw it as an equal partner in caring for persecuted Jews in the world; and did not see it as a Jewish population in distress. This meant that Israel would refrain from activity urging American Jews to make aliyah. American Jews, who numbered 5 or 6 million, were strong and – as a community – wealthy compared to the Jewish state, which in August 1950 was home to a little over a million people and under a policy of austerity. Donations from American Jews had a decisive effect on Israel's economy.
In the 1950s, the US government was alienated from if not actually hostile to Israel, and American Jews did not have easy access to the White House under President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The establishment of the state under Truman, as well as McCarthyism, pushed more and more Jews in the direction of the Democrats. The test came when Operation Kadesh started on Oct. 29, 1956. Eisenhower blamed Israel's war against Egypt in the Sinai for eclipsing the Soviet invasion of Hungary.
At the time of Operation Kadesh, Abba Eban was doing double duty as Israel's ambassador in Washington and at the UN. In his autobiography, he writes that the 1956 operation embarrassed and confused American Jews. Abba Hillel Silver thought it was a serious mistake. American Jews worried that the operation, which was vital to Israel's security, threatened their standing in the US and thought it preferable for Israel to do nothing lest the crystal chandeliers shake over the heads of the various US Jewish organizations.
But later on, Abba Eban, one of the greatest orators in the history of the UN, gave a speech that sent a shockwave through American public opinion and brought US Jewry around to Israel's side. After the speech, Ben-Gurion wrote to Eban and told him he himself had had doubts about Kadesh, but Eban's speech had convinced him of its justness. Four months later, when both the Soviet regime and the US administration were warning Israel to withdraw immediately from the Sinai Peninsula, which it had just captured, US Jews were already united behind Israel's demand that is receive something in exchange for a withdrawal.
A similar but bigger test happened in 1967 over the Six-Day War. Israeli-American ties were far from close. There were a lot of questions about President Lyndon Johnson's stance on Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser's shenanigans. In those years, Israel depended on lobbying in the president's close circle. The Arab-Soviet "blockade" of Israel caused public opinion to swing in its direction. Johnson, who was in crisis because of the escalating Vietnam War, was mainly concerned about re-election.
A conflict of interests for the Jews
Everything was mixed up: strategic interests, the Jewish issue, and domestic politics. The closest person to Johnson who was in close contact with Israel was an American Jew named Ed Weinberg. A day before the war started, Johnson sent a warning telegram to Prime Minister Levi Eshkol stressing that Israel must not be responsible for launching a hostile action. Abba Eban read the message to the cabinet at the fateful meeting in which they decided to go to war. Weinberg sent a similar message to Israel's ambassador to the US, Abe Herman: Don't fire the first shot.
But it seems that one of the US ambassador to the UN, Arthur Goldberg, who was particularly close with Johnson, sent his Israeli counterpart, Gideon Rafael, a message saying exactly the opposite: "This is a definitive moment for Israel's existence, the problem is not oil via Eilat or not. If we do no overcome the challenge of Nasser, Israel's international and security standing will collapse, and the Arabs will attack it while they are strong."
Legendary Finance Minister Pinchas Sapir was in the US at the time. He reported on a meeting he held with Jews in Boston immediately before the war. Sapir described them as "miserable and afraid," and said they had sat up together until 1:30 a.m. "They asked, 'What will become of us?'" Sapir later wrote.
When the war actually started, Sapir was in Rio de Janeiro, but the panic was certainly similar to that felt by American Jews. Reports were saying that the Egyptians were already in Israel. "People were sitting and bursting into tears," Sapir said.
"To protect Israel, we'll have to sell our paintings, our horses, and our wives' jewelry, and maybe even our stocks," said Edmond de Rothschild. Menachem Begin heard that and said in a cabinet meeting, "And Baron Rothschild would still have something left."
Professor Michael Walzer describes the feeling on the Jewish Left in his book "Just and Unjust Wars." There was a recognition that the war actually started on May 23, 1967, when the Straits of Tiran were closed. Walzer claimed that Israel was "justifiably afraid."
"There are threats that no nation can live with," he writes. The war was, therefore, a justified pre-emptive strike, whereas the justification for the Arab threat to Israel was based on the assumption that the Jewish state had no right to defend itself because its very existence was illegal.
Always someone to blame
This is the world Israel is still living in – with one difference. Many Jews have suffered a moral collapse, and based on what they read in The Times, they think the Jewish state has no right to defend itself because even if its existence is legal, it is no longer legitimate.
It was Rabin who broke the mold of Israel handling its contact with the US administration via the Jewish establishment, and not only because the Jewish establishment was mostly Democratic and the administration of President Richard Nixon, which came to power in 1969, was Republican. Nixon was the first senior American diplomat to visit Israel after the Six-Day War. Before he was elected president, he formed close ties with the new ambassador, who had been IDF chief of staff in that war. In later years, Rabin would pay a price for his end-run around the Jewish-Democratic establishment.
Rabin was critical of the Democrats' position and praised Nixon, whom American Jews loathed. He launched direct lines of communication with US power brokers, without any need of a lobby. Leading Jews from the Democratic side warned him not to criticize the party's position. He was seen as interfering in US domestic politics, and ahead of the 1972 election openly supported Nixon's re-election bid.
The 1973 Yom Kippur War brought the American conflict of interest in the Middle East to a head. On one hand, there was a material consideration of oil, and on the other, Israel in terms of ideology and in terms of domestic US politics. Nixon, who was accused of being an anti-Semite, took Israel's side, along with Henry Kissinger, who was also not beloved by the Jews.
Before the war erupted, the matter of Soviet Jewry was a hot potato for Israel, the US administration, and US Jewry. The Jackson-Vanik amendment to the Trade Act of 1974 threatened to scupper the détente, with Congress demanding that the USSR not enjoy trade benefits unless it took steps to address human rights and allow its Jews to move to Israel freely. That initiative, which Israel and American Jews backed, threatened the crown jewel of Kissinger and Nixon's international strategy.
A future in question
What is interesting is that the more complicated Israel becomes, it is less understood by American Jewry. On one hand, the Jewish community had been traumatized, mostly when anti-Semites on both the Right and Left accused them of "double loyalty." On the other hand, there were the myths fostered by films like "Exodus," "Ben Hur," and "Cast a Giant Shadow." Jews feared events such as the trial of the Rosenbergs, who were accused of espionage and executed, or the later affair of Israeli agent Jonathan Pollard; but there was also the character Ari Ben Canaan, played by the blue-eyed Paul Newman, and Kirk Douglas as the Jewish prince.
American Jews were comfortable with the homogeneous, idealistic image of Israel exemplified by the Jaffa oranges girl, or the red roofs of kibbutz homes. Now that Israel has a much stronger presence diplomatically, economically, and in the media, it's hard for them to accept. Independent policy and even opposition to the American president, such as existed in the time of former US President Barack Obama, has led to a crisis among the Jews. Under Nixon, when Israel butted heads with the administration about aliyah from the Soviet Union, it created no political difficulties for the Jews. They were part of the Democratic opposition. Under Obama, when Netanyahu was unafraid of conflict, the Jews – who were part of the presidential coalition – were in trouble. The prime minister wasn't counting on them as a base of support for his policies against Iran.
Since then, it would seem that a rift has emerged between Israel and important sectors of American Jewry. Some Israeli leaders think that Israel must espouse a strategy of "healing the rift" with US Jewry. Some say that's a mere slogan, because liberal Jews and even some other parts of US Jewry are undergoing a process of starting to identify Israel with powers we did not know in the part: every year, hundreds of young people from abroad volunteer to serve in the IDF, and the number of visitors who arrive with Birthright-Taglit is big enough for hostile groups to try and torpedo the organization's activity.
In the first few years after the Six-Day War, aliyah from North America rose significantly. Between the Six-Day War and the Yom Kippur War, some 5,000 American Jews made aliyah each year (most of whom eventually returned). In the past few years, aliyah from North American has seen a serious uptick and is approaching the peak numbers of the late 1960s-early 1970s. In the 10 years from 2000 to 2010, American aliyah stood at 350-600 per year, whereas last year (2018), some 3,500 American Jews made aliyah. Who can say whether the trend will continue?
