Allan C. Brownfeld
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THE MIASMA Of UNITY: JEWS AND ISRAEL
By
Abba A. Solomon,
168 Pages,
$14.50.
The relationship between American Jews and the State of Israel has been a subject of contention and debate ever since the state came into being in 1948. An important moment in the continuing debate over this relationship came on August 23, 1950 when Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion wrote a letter to Jacob Blaustein, then president of the American Jewish Committee (AJC), making it clear that Israel did not speak for anyone but its own citizens and that Jewish Americans were citizens of the United States, with no other loyalties. Abba Solomon, wrote an important book, “The Speech And Its context” exploring this subject.
It. Is interesting to remember what Ben-Gurion declared at that time: “The Jews of the United States , as a community and as individuals have only one political attachment and that is to the United States. They owe no political allegiance to Israel.”
Ben-Gurion noted that, “In the first statement the representative of Israel made before the United Nations, after her admission to that international organization, he clearly stated, without any reservation, that the state of Israel represents and speaks only on behalf of its own citizens and in no way presumes to represent or speak in the name of the Jews who are citizens of any other
American Jews Are Not In Exile
At a luncheon Ben-Gurion held in Jerusalem to honor the leader of the American Jewish Committee in August, 1950, Blaustein declared: “Israel has a responsibility in terms of not affecting adversely the sensibilities of Jews who are citizens of other states by what it says or does…American Jews vigorously repudiate any suggestion or implication that they are in exile.”
Blaustein said that American Jews are attached to America, “…the home where they are rooted and which they helped to build.” He declared that Ben-Gurion’s statement “serves as unmistakable evidence that the responsible leaders of Israel and the organizations connected with it fully understand that future relations between the American Jewish community and the State of Israel must be based on mutual respect of one another’s feelings and needs and the preservation of both communities and their institutions.”
Ever since that declaration, Solomon shows, Israel has retreated from this position. General Moshe Dayan,on March 9, 1960, made a statement in Canada, that this government. “Should not only represent the people of Israel, but the interests of all Jews.” On April 15, 1960, Foreign Minister Golda Meir declared that, “Israel will continue to speak for Jewry.” This, of course, has always been the position of Zionism. Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism, said in 1937, “Eliminate the diaspora or it will eliminate you.” Ben-Gurion himself repeatedly expressed the view that Jews living outside of Israel were “exiles of the spirit…who needed to be gathered home.”
American Jews “owe no political allegiance to Israel”
In his 1950 statement to Blaustein, Ben-Gurion declared,”The people of Israel have no desire to interfere in any way with the internal affairs of Jewish communities abroad. The government and people of Israel fully respect the right and integrity of the Jews of the United States. The Jews of the United States , as a community and as individuals, have only one political attachment, and that is to the United States. They owe no political allegiance to Israel.”
Israel’s continuing retreat from Ben-Gurion’s statement to Jacob Blaustein has been steady. Abba Solomon points to many examples, such as “the activities of the Nefesh b’Nefesh organization, supported by the quasi-governmental Jewish Agency, to promote immigration from the United States seems inconsistent with the agreement reached between Ben-Gurion and Blaustein.”
This retreat can be seen, Solomon shows, by repeated statements by Israeli leaders. In 2000, Israeli President Moshe Natsev called on Jews around the world to emigrate to Israel and argued against legitimizing Jewish life in other countries. In the 2000 book, “Conversations With Yitzhak Shamir,” the former Israeli Prime Minister declared, “The very essence of our being obliges every Jew to live in Eretz Yisrael.”
Examining The Nature of Zionism
In the book, “The Miasma of Unity: Jews and Israel,” articles by Abba Solomon written for such publications as Mondoweiss, Tikkun, La Progressive, and other journals are gathered together. His thoughtful analysis provides a much needed examination of the nature of Zionism and how the relationship between Israel and the American Jewish community has evolved over the years.
In a Preface, Solomon explains the title of his book: “Years ago, doing research in the records of the American Jewish Committee in Manhattan, I read, in executive committee transcripts of 1946 AJC member Maurice B. Hexter use the striking phrase “the miasma of Jewish unity.” Hexter felt the AJC must insist that the Arabs of Palestine were assured of their rights and status in the new country that would emerge at the end of the British Mandate. The AJC shouldn’t submit to ‘the miasma of Jewish unity.’ and—-by silence—-accede to demands set at the 1942 (Zionist) Biltmore Conference.”
The Biltmore Conference made the demand that Palestine bear the weight of the problem of “Jewish homelessness” by ceding control of Palestine to Jewish authority: “The Conference declares that the new world order that will follow victory cannot be established on foundations of peace, justice and equality, unless the problem of Jewish homelessness is finally solved. The Conference urges that the gates of Palestine be opened; that the Jewish Agency be vested with control of immigration into Palestine and with the necessary authority for upbuilding the country, including the development of its unoccupied and uncultivated lands; and that Palestine be established as a Jewish commonwealth integrated in the structure of the New Democratic world.”
A Government Oppressive To Non-Jews In Palestine
Solomon writes that, “Hexter urged that the Committee not soft-pedal its concerns that Zionist plans would necessarily lead to a government oppressive to non-Jews in Palestine. In order for the AJC to ignore the pressure for Jewish consensus, it would have to publicly contest the Zionist demands set at the Biltmore Conference. It would have to publicly contradict the Zionist organizations…Jewish community leaders who were not political Zionists were clear-eyed that Balfour’s ‘establishment of a Jewish national home’ in Palestine required negotiations with Arab Palestinians so that it did not cause conflict and bloodshed.”
In the end, Solomon laments, “The miasma of unity interfered with the American Jewish Committee speaking truth that it knew. To me, the miasma of unity has a personal meaning. How critical,can a Jew be about Israel and its mode of creation before one is betraying owed loyalty and one’s own identity? One must live in the miasma, a miasma smelling of our blood. And the blood now sings of The Land (Haretz), not as a spiritual metaphor, but as a country to be maintained with arms and power politics.”
In a 2022 essay entitled “Why Jewish Organizations Reflexively Defend Israel—-Even When Not Asked,” he writes: “American Jewish organizations accepted the role of hostages in their own country and developed a protective strategy : Burnishing Israel’s image became part of their mission of protecting Jews from ‘defamation,’ regardless of the charges brought. As it became apparent that Israel was not going to live up to its end of the bargain—-and good behavior by Israel towards Arabs of Palestine could not be guaranteed—-so did the mission shift. Efforts centered on issuing a covering barrage of propaganda for Israel to ‘protect’ Jews worldwide.”
Palestinian Plight Was Generating Sympathy
Solomon examines how the American Jewish Committee attempted to react to Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in its early years: “The Palestinian plight was generating sympathy and AJC staff and officials made hapless efforts to influence Israeli officials to acknowledge and accommodate the refugees from the new state. AJC memos that I reviewed showed that on November 16,1953 executive director John Slawson asked Consul-General of Israel in New York Abraham Hartman for help in ‘developing a public opinion program to interpret Israel’s problems to the American people for the reason that opinions concerning Israel affect public attitudes toward American Jews.”
Hartman told Slawson that the creation of Israel had been “a feat of colonization unique in history, which was accomplished without displacing anyone.” Solomon provides this assessment: “This claim was false; more than 750,000 Palestinians were displaced to establish Israel, not allowed to return to their homes. But Nakba denial became part of the American Jewish organizations’ playbook.”
Whatever Israel did was defended by the AJC and other Jewish organizations. After the Qibya massacre of 1953, when Israeli soldiers under the command of Ariel Sharon crossed the armistice line to kill 69 Palestinian civilians in a village in the West Bank, then controlled by Jordan. Solomon portrays the response of the organized American Jewish community to events such as this way: “Concern for The injuries done to Arabs in Palestine merged with and ultimately was overtaken by, the concern that Jews in America would suffer by being seen as complicit in Israel’s human rights violations. This led to a strategy of preemptive denial of reports of Israeli offenses against Palestinians, and later as the extension of ‘antisemitism’ to mean anti-Zionism or the reporting of Israeli misconduct….Organized American Jewry’s identification with the ‘Jewish state’ is both a vice and a hazard, even as we see its origin was intended self -protection.”
Being A Jew Opposed To Zionism Is A Challenge
Being a Jew opposed to Zionism, Solomon points out, is a challenging task. He notes in a 2021 essay that, “I, a Jew who is not a Zionist, see Zionism as a form of antisemitism—-opposed to Jews truly being part of other countries than Israel. Jewish ethno-religious myth is no basis for deciding rule in Palestine. Certainly it wouldn’t be something to suggest to a Palestinian. It would be a bad joke. Jews worldwide coalescing again to rule some sort of revived Judea in cosmopolitan Palestine is an absurdity. The Israeli state began with a paramilitary campaign of displacement that is still ongoing. In occupied Palestine, non-Jews are locked out from governance and live besieged. The State of Israel and denying the trauma to Palestinian populations dominate American Jewish consciousness. Within the organized American Jewry, one feels one is living Orwell’s quote, ‘Truth is treason in an empire of lies.’ I’m afraid of mainstream Jewish leadership as dangerous to Jews. They’ve given up on any responsibility to speak about the vices of Jewish nationalism…”
What the world is dealing with in the case of Israel and Zionism, Solomon argues, is a determined effort to transform Judaism from being a religion of universal values and individual Jews into being a Jewish “nation,” no matter where they live or what citizenship they hold. In a 2017 essay, Solomon notes that, “Palestinians and the world are not dealing with a nation, the State of Israel, in any normal sense. They are dealing with a project that aspires to organize how Jews in galut interact with the world. From the Maccabiah Games (“Building Jewish Pride Through Sports”) to Zionist youth camps and lobby organizations, the intent is to encourage a national feeling of Jews, not just Israelis. Once the idea is established, that an American Jew (for instance) is, while not an Israeli, a member of the Jewish nation, an important mechanism is installed for future use.”
The emergence of what is often called “liberal Zionism” is the subject of a 2014 essay by Solomon. It was written shortly after the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations rejected an application for membership by J Street, a group which had been working to create a palatable alternative to hard-line versions of what it means to be “pro-Israel.” The Conference of Presidents, founded in the 1950s to speak with “one voice” for American Jews, was unwilling to accept even modest dissent.
“Liberal Zionism”
What presents itself as “liberal Zionism” is assessed by Solomon this way: “J Street is aligned with more ‘moderate’ personalities in Israeli politics, but what is considered moderate Zionism in Israel may not match sensibilities outside Israel. On a J Street-sponsored U.S. speaking tour, Knesset member Adi Koll said she is pleased that Palestinian refugees from 1948 are dying off, which he portrayed as good for peace: ‘This is what we have been waiting for, for more and more of them to die,’ to finalize the War of Independence expulsion of Palestinians. J Street’s Ben-Ami has warned of ‘ The one state nightmare--a minority of Jewish Israelis in a state with a majority of non-Jewish residents.’ For J Street, an embrace of perpetual Jewish dominance as imperative seems to be a litmus test before any criticism of the occupation is to be deemed legitimate.
The removal of Palestinians was always part of the planning of the early Zionists. Solomon writes that, “Population transfer of Arabs was part of the planning of Zionist leadership, and it was implemented. Benny Morris, the pioneering Israeli historian of the ethnic cleansing of Arabs from Israel said: ‘Ben-Gurion was right. If he had not done what he did, a state would not have come into being. That has to be clear. It is impossible to evade it. Without the uprooting of the Palestinians, a Jewish state would not have arisen here.’ In a talk five decades ago at Hillel House at the University of Chicago, philosopher Leo Strauss mentioned that Leon Pinsker’s Zionist manifesto ‘Autoemancipation,’ published in 1882, quotes the classic Hillel statement, ‘If I am not for myself, who will be for me? And if not now, when?’—-but leaves out the middle of the sequence, ‘If I am only for myself, what am I.’”
The various problems now confronting Israelis and Palestinians as well as the troubled relations between Israel and Jews who are citizens of other countries were all predicted before Israel’s establishment as a state. Solomon explores this in his review of the book “Zionism And Its Discontents” by Ran Greenstein (Pluto Press, 2004) , which appeared in Tikkun. Greenstein, a native Israeli, was also a student of South Africa’s liberation from apartheid.
Consequences Of A Zionist State
“Reading of pre-State opposition—-from Arabs, non-Zionist and anti-Zionist Jews, and Zionists who rejected the ‘Jewish state’ goal,” writes Solomon, “reminds us that the consequences of making a Zionist state, consequences of perpetual conflict and injustice, were foreseen. As I found, while researching a book on the American Jewish establishment and Zionism, the records of Jewish organizations are full of predictions of disaster that would come from taking possession of Palestine as a matter of right, over the interests of residents of that land. Martin Buber, Judah Magnes, Henrietta Szold, and Albert Einstein all saw inevitable disaster borne in the prioritizing of the human rights of Jews over other people. Hannah Arendt and Hans Kohn saw a chauvinist , militarist Jewish Sparta as the inevitable end.”
Dr. Nelson Glueck, who served as president of Hebrew Union College,told the American Jewish Committee in May, 1948, “As one who has lived in Palestine I think one of the sorriest records of Jewish endeavor there has been the long and continued and, on the whole, absolute failure to integrate Jewish life there with Arab life and to make the economy of the country one integral and indivisible part.”
Many thoughtful observers are cited by Solomon. Ugandan scholar Mahmoud Mamdani states that for Israel/Palestine to reach its “South Africa moment,” Jews of Palestine will have to accept the African National Congress Freedom Charter idea that Palestine, like South Africa, “belongs to those who live in it.” Dissident Israeli historian Udi Adiv proposed that there is a delusion in Israeli historiography; the Jewish community of Palestine thinks of itself as the Jewish People. It’s not able to have a realistic view of its relationship to non-Jews in Palestine or to Jews elsewhere.”
Jewish Statehood Or Jewish Eradication
A passage in a speech of Israeli President Reuben Rivlin at the Arab village of Kfar Kassem is cited: “Accordingly, the Arab population of Israel must be brought to internalize and accept that the State of Israel is the national home of the Jewish people. As long as there exists any aspiration to eradicate the Jews from this land, there will be no chance of building a true partnership.”
Solomon notes that, “His two alternatives are Jewish statehood or Jewish eradication —-the Manichean vision of militant Zionism in Palestine. Rivlin echoes Vladimir Jabotinsky in 1923 that Arabs would resist ‘as long as there remains a solitary spark of hope that they will be able to prevent the transformation of ‘Palestine’ into the ‘Land of Israel.’”…A recent Brookings Institution survey shows a large majority of Americans, and American Jews, favor democracy over ‘Jewishness’ if two states are no longer possible. One third now favor one state in Palestine with equal citizenship for all residents…”
Solomon provides this assessment, noting that, “The Zionist project, what was meant at the beginning to be a communal agrarian renewal of Jewish people, has become an arms and ‘security’ industry supplier worldwide. The siege mentality that Arendt warned would develop has created an Israeli, not Jewish, nationality, in its isolation, what she foresaw as ‘an entirely new people.’ …Since Henrietta Szold observed the swagger of ‘shomerim’ organized to fight Arabs in the Galilee in 1915, Jewish identity in Palestine has been fused with besting Arabs and making them outsiders. ‘The problem,’ former Jerusalem deputy mayor Meron Benvenisti says, ‘is the privileged position of the Jewish ethnic group over the others, those defined as the ‘enemies,’ the ‘terrorists,’”
“Emissary Mission” From Israel
The book’s Introduction is written by Jonathan Ofir, an Israeli journalist, musician and conductor now living in Denmark. He is a regular contributor to Mondoweiss. In 1978, when he was 6, his family moved from Israel to the U.S., where they would spend three years as “Shlichut,” meaning “Emissary mission,” where his father served as a messenger for the Jewish Agency, to keep American Jews strongly connected to Israel and to Zionism.
Ofir, who attended the Beth Yeshurun Jewish School in Houston, recalls that, “I felt that I was seen as a national symbol, and it felt like I was steeped in something greater than myself…I, too, was an emissary, I felt. I was part of a great mission—-Israel was the real thing, the ultimate Jewish nationalism that these U.S. Jews felt proud of, they felt proud of us, and my father was there to keep it that way.”
Precisely forty years later, Ofir writes, “…then head of the Jewish Agency Isaac Herzog, who had just stepped into his new role after leading the Israeli Labor party, warned that intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews was a ‘plague’ which required ‘a solution.’ He refused to apologize, and opined that he was merely misunderstood, and that when he said ‘plague’ in Hebrew (‘magefa’) it didn’t mean what people thought it meant in English (which was an outright lie). Herzog is now President in Israel. He is not a religious fundamentalist in Israeli Zionist relativity. He is a leftist. But the racial obsession inherent in his words is unmistakable. Zionist racial sensibility, often framed as ‘demographic concern,’ is a hallmark of Zionist thinking. It is perhaps no wonder then, that Isaac Herzog’s grandfather, Chief Ashkenazi Rabbi for Palestine Yitzhak Halevi Herzog, headed a kidnapping ring in the wake of World War ll, to extract Jewish orphans from non-Jewish adoptive families in Europe. For a Jew to be raised as a Christian, Herzog opined, is ‘much worse than physical murder.’”
“Expulsion And Domination”
Ofir recalls that, “It took me many years to come around and view critically the actual purpose of the Zionist project which I was born into. I was inculcated with an ethos of ‘survival in a bad neighborhood,’ but I had yet to understand how we, Israelis, had created that enmity in our insistence upon Jewish unity, and Jewish supremacy. The consequence of such ideology in land which is predominantly inhabited by non-Jewish Palestinians, is one of expulsion and domination of the rest…The veil of that elusive ‘two-state solution’ that ‘liberal-Zionist’ organizations and lobby groups like J Street advocate is becoming ever more dusty and torn, unable to conceal the reality of an apartheid state. It is in the face of this that Jews today need to consider their identity-relationship to Israel. Many are beginning to contest the notion that Israel, with its state-ideology of Zionism, is necessarily a representation of their Jewish identity.”
On Israeli Holocaust Memorial Day, Israel’s Likud minister Yoav Kisch tweeted: “One nation! One flag! One state! We will remember and not forget.” Ofir notes that, “The photo featured Israeli Jewish youths wrapped in Israeli flags visiting the Auschwitz death camp in Poland, in one of the Israeli sponsored and regular tours for high school students. Kisch was apparently unaware of the bitter irony in the proximity to the Nazi slogan ‘One People, One Nation, One Leader.’ That tweet is still up on Kisch’s account, despite massive critique that ensued after his sharing. This fierce ultra-nationalistic application of the Holocaust as a logical ideological background for an Israel-right-or-wrong ideology, is becoming ever more apparent in its madness. The failure to contain it has resulted in glowingly explicit demonstration of Zionist ultra-nationalism, embodied today in the most right-wing religious fundamentalist government in Israel’s history.”
Since the essays in this book were written, Israel has moved dramatically to the right. It’s current government speaks of annexing the West Bank and Israeli settlements in the Occupied territories are growing. The Netanyahu government is attempting to limit the role of the Supreme Court. Those holding ministerial positions in the government include extremists who openly describe themselves as homophobes and advocate segregation of Jews and non-Jews in hospital maternity wards. In response, Israel has faced massive demonstrations for many months and respected Jewish spokesmen in the U.S. have been vocal in their criticism of Israel’s retreat from the limited democracy it had maintained, at least for Jewish residents.
Israeli Extremism Being Understood By Jewish Americans
The extremism now embraced in Israel is slowly becoming understood by more and more Jewish Americans. Consider Israel’s National Security minister Itamar Ben Gvir, who recently said, “My right and that of my wife and my children to travel on the roads in Judea and Samaria is more important than the freedom of movement for Arabs. I’m sorry, Mohammed. (To Israeli Channel 12 journalist Mohammed Magadli). “that is the reality. That is the truth. My right to life takes precedence over your freedom of movement.”
A U.S. State Department spokesperson said, “We strongly condemn Minister Ben-Gvir’s racist, destructive comments on the freedom of movement of Palestinian residents of the West Bank.”
Israel’s Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, while visiting France, declared, “There is no such thing as a Palestinian nation. There is no Palestinian history. There is no Palestinian language.” The lectern at which Smotrich spoke was decorated with an image depicting the state of “Greater Israel,” which includes within its borders the Palestinian territories of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and parts of neighboring Jordan.
Israel Is Resembling Other Far-Right Regimes
Arguing that Israel’s right-wing government is increasingly resembling other far-right regimes, Yossi Melman wrote an article in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz (August 21, 2023) with the headline, “Israeli Police Are Sadistic With a Gun License.” He describes, “The shocking abuse of a 22-year-old Palestinian…by 16 Border Police officers…reminiscent of the worst days of dark regimes. A Star of David was branded on the detainees cheek…In June 1962, members of an Argentine organization called Tacuara kidnapped a young Jewish girl…Tacuara was a radical, right-wing, proto-fascist group and among its members were police and army officers…Sirota’s kidnappers carved a swastika on Sirota’s forehead.”
He writes: “In Israel 2023—where Netanyahu rules with a tailwind from a radical, right-wing, messianic, clerical coalition—-neither the IDF, the courts nor the police are capable of defending the Palestinians…Unlike Argentina in the 1960s, in Israel today there is no need to set up protocol-fascist militias—-although the settler militias are certainly reminiscent of them—-in order to fulfill the right wing’s desire to savage the Palestinians. Most members of the Israel Police——run by a minister who is a convicted terrorist, fascist and radical racist—-understand which way the wind is blowing. The growing violence perpetrated by Israel’s police against demonstrators at the anti-judicial overhaul protests and against Palestinians shows that the spirit on their commander, National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, and the apathy of Netanyahu and the rest of his government, are seeping into the ranks.”
Recent developments have led to growing alienation from Israel on the part of American Jews. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, long a strong supporter of Israel, now uses the term “apartheid” to characterize Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. This same term is used by Human Rights Watch and Amnesty Intrrnational as well as the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem. Thomas Friedman writes that the Israeli government is using the judicial overhaul push as a smokescreen to “engage in unprecedented radical behavior that is undermining our shared interests…and the shared fiction about the status of the West Bank that has kept peace hopes just barely alive.” In Friedman’s view, there has been “a breakdown of shared values between the U.S. and Israel.” He says that the idea that there are indeed “shared values” between Israel and the U.S. may indeed be a myth. (New York Times, July 12, 2023)
Jewish Voices Warned That Judaism Would Be Corrupted
There were Jewish voices, in both the U.S. and Israel, who warned that The creation of Israel as a “Jewish state” would, in the end, corrupt Judaism. Yeshayahu Leibovitz, the prophetic Orthodox Jewish thinker at Hebrew University, warned of the danger that the nascent state of Israel would become an object of worship for Jews, replacing God. In a 1991 lecture, he called religious Jews who supported the occupation of the West Bank “descendants of the worshippers of the Golden Calf, who proclaimed, ‘This is your God, Israel.’ A calf doesn’t necessarily need to be golden. It can also be a people, a land or a state.”
Abba Solomon has been prophetic in his defense of Judaism’s universal moral and ethical tradition and its corruption by Zionism. The essays in his book deserve to be widely read because they tell the truth which the organized American Jewish community resisted for many years. Today, fortunately, more and more respected Jewish voices are being heard in opposition to the politicization of Judaism and to Zionism’s negative influence. Abba Solomon understood all of this long ago and he deserves recognition for his many years of telling difficult truths people did not want to hear.
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Allan C. Brownfeld is a nationally syndicated columnist
And serves as editor of ISSUES. The author of five books,
He has served on the staff of the U.S. Senate, House of
Representatives, and the Office of the Vice President.