A majority of American Jews do not belong to the groups represented
by the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.
Yet this strident minority, uncannily like the Christian Coalition in its
self-righteousness, claims to speak for all the rest of us.
A set of Jewish organizations has obliged Rep. Richard A. Gephardt,
D-Mo., to drop Salam Al-Marayati, the respected director of the Muslim
Public Affairs Council in Los Angeles, from his list of nominees to a newly
created national counter-terrorism commission. Al-Marayati has been quoted
as saying that Palestinian terrorism comes from "pain and suffering."
Several members of Congress, who unintentionally remind us of the ignoble
persecutions of the McCarthy epoch, asked the FBI director to interest
himself personally in the security check to which Al-Marayati would have
been subjected. The Jewish organizations attacking him did not need the
FBI. They had already judged the case.
Gephardt has capitulated ignobly to their demands, on the pretext that
the background checks will take longer than the life of the commission.
That fools no one. A distinguished congressman has succumbed to ideological
blackmail.
Three questions arise. One is whether Americans of Arab descent have
the rights of other citizens or are to be treated as guilty unless proved
innocent, with the Israel lobby as prosecutor, judge and jury.
The second is whether we can debate anything and everything in this
country except the conduct of the Israeli government and people toward
the Palestinians. Palestinians constitute an exception, an unpeople, whose
complaints are irrelevant, tedious or mischievous.
For years, some Jewish organizations have tried to impose their standards
of "balance" on America's universities. They have demanded the
dismissal of scholars whose views of the Middle East they did not like.
The universities held firm, and the American public has access to a
multiplicity of perspectives on a complex problem. It is time that our
politicans start thinking about the Middle East with the complexity it
deserves.
The third question has to do with the soul of American Jewry. We claim
full rights in this country by virtue of universal criteria of citizenship.
For most American Jews, life here is marvelous, free of the savage persecutions
of the European past and of the subtler but still painful discrimination
earlier generations encountered in America. Our Israel, in other words,
is here.
That ties of solidarity and sympathy connect us to the people of Israel
is clear. There is, however, a flagrant contradiction between our enjoyment
of citizenship in a multi-ethnic, multireligious and multiracial democracy
and the notion that solidarity with Israel requires that we accept any
policy it might choose to follow toward the Arabs it rules. The matter
is made worse when Jews who think differently are branded as self hating,and
Gentiles who disagree are told that they are anti Semitic. Fortunately
for israel, its population debates this matter strenuously. The recent
election demonstrates that an Israeli majority wishes to make a new beginning
in relations with the Arabs.
That has been lost, apparently, upon some of Israel's supporters here.
The phrase about Israel living in a "bad neighborhood" speaks
volumes. It applies American notions of class and racial conflict to a
totally different historical situation, and reveals the ignorance of those
who employ it. Egypt and Jordan are not bad neighbors to Israel; they are
very good ones.
The phrase is revealing in another way. It bespeaks a view of life as
a jungle in which survival demands a tooth for a tooth, an eye for an eye--and
the permanent oppression of the Arabs in their own homeland.
A good many Israelis see that if conflict with the Arabs continues,
they are in danger of becoming like the Germans from 1933 to 1945--accomplices
if not perpetrators of permanent oppression. American Jews can pay tribute
to our tradition--and to our own experience of America--by backing them.
We should also reach out to fellow Americans who are Arabs and whose rights
to full citizenship are as great as ours.
The most profound threat to American Jewry comes from the unreflective
belief that humans are subject, in the last analysis, only to the law of
the jungle. Nothing, in that case, can protect us--here or anywhere else.