Searching for Perspective on the Israel-Palestine Crisis in America

Is the "Golden Age of American Jewry" really over? Did it ever exist? Plus, how after the 1967 Six Day War, many of the same rifts and debates broke out across the US liberal-left.

“I read underground papers and Newsweek; I’ve learned to take every view,

Ah, the war in Vietnam is atrocious, I wish to God that the fighting was through,

But when it comes to the arming of Israel, there’s no one more red, white and blue,

So love me, love me, love me, I’m a liberal.”

That was Sixties folksinger Phil Ochs, who in 1971 updated the verse of his iconic song Love Me, I’m a Liberal with a rarely heard verse criticizing the hawkish response many American Jewish leftists expressed after the Six Day War in 1967.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose? As we wait out what is maybe the end-game of the Six Month War (though who really knows if this conflict will ever end, given the incentives Benjamin Netanyahu and Yahya Sinwar both have to keep it going), I’ve found myself wondering if we are truly living in radically changed times, or if we need to apply some historical perspective to the wrenching experiences of the last half year.

For example, are we really living at the end of “The Golden Age of American Jews,” (gift link) as the Atlantic writer Franklin Foer put it? That article has reverberated widely; even Israeli president Isaac Herzog was pressing his American Jewish visitors about it in recent weeks. Foer’s piece hit inboxes like a plate of perfectly smoked Nova lox on an everything bagel with a shmear of chive cream cheese, crisp red onion slices and capers for intellectual Jews hungry for some comfort food. Yes, our worst fears are true! Nom, nom. Did I see some smoked whitefish on your side of the table? Pass me the Times crossword puzzle, Irving!

But, oy, dare I ask this, does the emergence after October 7 of a “disconcertingly large number of Israel’s critics on the left [who do] not share that vision of peaceful coexistence, or believe Jews [have] a right to a nation of their own,” as Foer put it, equal the end of some Golden Age? First, we’re talking about the amorphous American left here, which is so powerful (NOT!) it has managed to elect a whopping six Members of Congress who loosely make up The Squad, while the MAGA Right has taken over an entire political party, holds the House of Representatives and threatens to take the White House and the Senate this fall. Yes, there have and continue to be loud and visible anti-Israel demonstrations, but cumulatively they’re a fraction of the size of the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprising or the 2011 Occupy movement.

Also, what “Golden Age” is Foer referring to? Since 1964, the Anti-Defamation League (a very flawed organization, but one that still does some valuable work addressing prejudice in America) has been surveying Americans with the help of the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago on a battery of questions designed to elicit a baseline understanding of how much the public subscribes to antisemitic beliefs and tropes about Jews. People are asked to say whether they agree with statements like “Jews stick together more than other Americans” and “Jews in business go out of their way to hire other Jews,” and from the cumulative results, the ADL has produced an overall score expressing how many Americans hold significant antisemitic attitudes. Just three percent of the population agree with all of those statements, while 85% agree that at least one trope is somewhat true. But here’s the key finding from its most recent report, which came out a little over a year ago:

Since 1964, when the ADL first began these surveys, the percentage of Americans agreeing with at least half of the antisemitic tropes has dropped from 29% then to 20% in 1992 and then hovered around the mid-teens. For some unexplained reason, it fell as low as 9% in 2014 and 10% in 2015, and then between 2019 and 2022 it jumped from 11% to 20%. OK, so was there a Golden Age? When exactly? When President Barack Obama was holding seders in the West Wing, apparently. One could argue that we might still be in the Golden Age, if the cultural touchstones Foer uses to highlight the Happy Days of Ralph Lauren, Dr. Ruth, Seinfeld and a VP candidate named Joe Lieberman are meant to point us at something like the levels of antisemitism found during the 1980-2000 period. (If the next version of this survey shows a reversion to 1964 levels of prejudice, I’ll eat my hat.)

Don’t get me wrong. There definitely has been a rise in physical attacks on Jews and Jewish-identified property in recent years in America, predating October 7. And the anti-Israel rhetoric and behavior on the streets, online and on campuses since then has included a lot of explicit antisemitism, alongside ideological political stances that would have the effect of eradicating seven million Israeli Jews if they were somehow put into practice. Many people have lost their minds over October 7 and the Hamas-Israel war, though many have also channeled their dissent in responsible and productive ways. It’s tempting but also dumb to paint every statement critical of Israel or defensive of Palestinian rights as age-old antisemitism rearing its ugly head.

If anything, what is ending now is the Golden Age of the Jewish (and Israeli) Establishment’s power to shape American attitudes about Israel. There’s a renegotiation underway about where the center of gravity will rest and on what bedrock commitments. The blank check aspect of American military aid to Israel has been completely drawn down by Bibi; in the future debates in Congress over Israeli behavior will be likely be wider. But given how volatile American politics has become, who knows if this is the new equilibrium point. Stay tuned.

Same as it Ever Was?

Still, for readers of this newsletter, I know the rifts that opened between Jewish progressives and their supposed allies on the left after October 7 have been wrenching. So consider this: after the June 1967 Six Day War, when Israel’s surprise attack on the encroaching armies of Egypt and Syria led to its conquering of the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, and (when Jordan foolishly joined the war) the taking of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, something very similar happened.

According to Michael Fischbach’s fascinating 2020 work of historical spelunking, The Movement and the Middle East: How the Arab-Israeli Conflict Divided the American Left, nothing that we’re experiencing now in the fracturing of alliances among progressives and in the intensely polarized debate on campuses and inside various liberal-left institutions is new—except instead of idealizing Hamas as some kind of noble resistance movement, back then the left idealized the Palestine Liberation Organization and its terrorists/freedom-fighters as the anti-imperialists fighting Western colonialism. And of course, let’s remember how social media has given everyone a mini-megaphone. After 1967, you may not have known that an ex-coworker was now a radical anti-Zionist; now, thanks to Instagram, you do.

As there is now, back then were different formations on the liberal-left: the anti-war movement (which operated mainly under the umbrella of “the Mobe” or Mobilization, a broad coalition of groups opposed to the war in Vietnam), the civil rights movement centered on Martin Luther King and groups like the NAACP and SCLC, the new feminist movement, New Left organizations like the Students for a Democratic Society and the Black Panther party, and older sectarian left-wing political factions (like the Workers World Party, the Socialist Workers Party, the Communist Party USA).

Fischbach writes that there were two major fracture lines across all these groups. The first was “whether one was committed to a universal restructuring of society, which pro-Palestinian leftists tended to advocate, or wished to make Israel an exception to that restructuring.” As Mark Rudd, a leader of SDS in its late 60s radical period told Fischbach decades later, “It was a major issue; it distinguished the true anti-imperialists from the liberals.” The second “agonizing fault line,” Fischbach writes, was along questions of Jewish identity, since Jews were disproportionately well-represented across the whole liberal-left spectrum. “Many Jews in the Movement had been raised to love Israel, but not all Jews on the Left were so moved. Indeed, some of the sharpest denunciations of Israel and expressions of support for the Palestinians came from Jews,” he writes. “The entire Left would feel the impact of this Jewish ‘civil war.’”

Sound familiar?

Here are some more samples of what this clash of ideals and identities produced:

-The Workers World Party condemned Israel even before the Six Day War was over, declaring on June 9, 1967 that the “U.S. is the Real Sponsor of Israel’s Attack on the Arabs.” (As the WWP and affiliated groups demonstrated in solidarity with Hamas on October 8 and blamed Israel for “all the violence” underway.)

-In a similar light, a group affiliated with the WWP, the Committee to Support Middle East Liberation, demonstrated in September 1970 outside the Hilton Hotel in New York City where Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir was addressing a United Jewish Appeal fundraiser. They carried Palestinian flags and chanted slogans like “Free Leila, Jail Golda,” a reference to the Palestinian airline hijacker Leila Khaled.

-At Wayne State University in January 1969, the student paper The South End ran a front-page editorial summarizing a recent press release from al-Fatah, the PLO’s armed wing, illustrated with a sketch of a Palestinian guerrilla fighter holding a pen that looked like a rocket-propelled grenade. (Shades of the “paraglider left”?)

-This in turn led to pressure from a Jewish philanthropist backer of WSU as well as the state legislature, who all threatened to cut support to the university unless the editor of the paper was fired. In the end, the school’s president wrote an official letter condemning the paper for printing “attacks on Jews…that are highly reminiscent of Hitler’s Germany” but the student paper editor, who happened to be Black, was allowed to keep his position. (In that respect, Bill Ackman and the various Ivy League alumni networks who attacked people like Harvard President Claudine Gay were far more successful.)

-The Students for a Democratic Society published a pamphlet called Zionism and the Israeli State: An Analysis in the June War that claimed: “The central issue in Southwest Asia is the fact that a Jewish state has been established in the midst of the Arab world without the invitation or consent of the indigenous population. The Jewish immigration occurred, and could only have occurred, under the aegis of Western colonial control.” (Hello, settler colonialism.)

-A Jewish SDSer named Susan Eanet, a writer for New Left Notes, claimed “the so-called birth of Israeli ‘socialism’ was founded on the complete relocation of thousands of people of color.” (The fact that roughly half of Israel’s Jewish population itself was of color, made up of people who were also forced to relocate from countries in the Middle East and North Africa, was disregarded then, as it also has been by many leftists now.)

-And sometimes the vitriol was pretty astounding, as in when Abbie Hoffman, the cofounder of the Yippie movement, wrote to his wife Anita in 1974, for a book of letters that was later published: “I am violently anti-Israel and no longer believe they have a right to exist. During the past ten years they have forfeited any right they might have ‘earned.’ … Zionism was the cause of the war. The PLO are as guilty of aggression as were the North Vietnamese!!...I hate Israel and want to see the Palestinians triumph.”

Leftist Jews also fired back in the other direction, insisting that there was no contradiction between their support for Zionism and other liberation movements.

-M.J. Rosenberg, who went on to a long career in journalism, was just a college student when he wrote, for the Village Voice, an article titled “To Uncle Tom and other such Jews,” arguing that if Black Power advocates who embraced their blackness, Jewish leftists were equally entitled to embrace their Jewishness. He called Mark Rudd of SDS an “Uncle Jake” for fighting for everyone else’s liberation but his own. “We are radicals,” he wrote. “We actively oppose the war in Viet Nam. We support the black liberation movement as we endorse all genuine movements of liberation. And thus, first and foremost, we support our own.”

Other liberal Jews defended Israel in ways that portended their own coming pivot to the right. Perhaps no one exemplified that more than Martin Peretz, then a young Harvard professor, who wrote in Commentary (then a liberal magazine published by the American Jewish Committee) that leftwing criticism of Israel was part of “a certain naivete about the purity and virtue of the revolutionary world [that] has characterized much Left and anti-war sentiment in America,” and that “the new left’s enchantment with the Third World will prove costly as was its old enchantment with the second [ie, the USSR], for the erection of double standards inevitably leads to a corruption of the moral sense no less than the political.” (Is it a coincidence that Peretz went on to run The New Republic and hired Franklin Foer to edit it for a period?)

Also like today’s debate, many organizations that were focused on other liberal causes tried to steer clear of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While some of the more radical members of the massive Mobilization Against the War coalition, like Sam Marcy of the WWP, sought to push the movement to condemn Israel after the 1967 war, arguing that it would “completely discredit” itself if it was only opposed to “one of imperialism’s wars, while it closes its eyes to another one,” the bigger members of the coalition managed to table such topics, arguing that it was hard enough to maintain movement unity around Viet Nam. (Today, as I’ve noted previously, groups like MoveOn, Indivisible and many labor unions have managed to maintain a similar strategic attitude.)

Perhaps most interestingly, civil rights icon Martin Luther King Jr. had his own balancing act to perform. As Fischbach writes, he had just come out against the Vietnam War in April 1967, “so when war broke out in the Middle East two months later, he struggled to maintain his reputation as a peacemaker without damaging his credentials with his Jewish allies.” King was also worried that the Six Day War was weakening the anti-Vietnam War movement. So his strategy, writes Fischbach, was to “offer total support for Israel’s right to exist but at the same time explain that peace could only come through economic development in the Arab world.” A paper put out that fall by his Southern Christian Leadership Conference made the same argument, urging enlightened action from both sides. “Neither military measures nor a stubborn effort to reverse history can provide a permanent solution for peoples who need and deserve both development and security,” the paper noted.

Echoes That Resonate Today

Of the many responses to the new, Goliath version of Israel that emerged after the Six Day War, my favorites are the ones from people who tried to stand in the breach and weigh the complexities of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Their words largely still ring true and applicable today.

For example, here’s I.F. Stone, who embraced the creation of Israel in 1948, writing after the 1967 war ended with Israel holding much more Arab land and many new Palestinians turned into refugees: “The cornerstone [of a final peace settlement] must be to find some new home for the Arab refugees, some within Israel, some outside of it, all with compensation for their lost lands and properties.” American Jews should aid in that effort, he argued, writing that, “It was a moral tragedy—to which no Jew worthy of our best Prophetic tradition could be insensitive—that a kindred people were made homeless in the task of making new homes for the remnants of the Hitler holocaust.” Though he didn’t mention the danger of apartheid directly, he also wrote that Israel was creating a “moral schizophrenia” in world Jewry, because—as Fischbach puts it, “Jewish existence outside Israel dependent upon secular, nonracial, pluralistic societies—but Israel was the exact opposite of that.”

Or take this group statement on “The Liberation of Israel and Palestine” that appeared in The New York Review of Books in July 1971, organized by Arthur Waskow and Paul Jacobs, and signed by left-wing Jews like Noam Chomsky and Todd Gitlin: “We urge that the American Jewish community and the American anti-war and radical movements take up these issues not by mindless endorsement of one party orthodoxy or another in the Middle East but with serious study and a sensitive commitment to the liberation of both the Israel and Palestinian people from militarism and exploitation.”

If there’s one echo from the past that isn’t likely to repeat in today’s climate, it’s the move to the right among American Jewish voters and intellectuals who were both newly enthused about Zionism and Israel and more distrustful of the left—though of course that backlash came from many sources, not just the way some radicals embraced the PLO and its armed struggle against Israel. When the New Left was at its height in the late 60s and early 70s, Richard Nixon saw his share of the Jewish vote nearly triple to 35% between 1968 and 1972. But as Fischbach notes, this shift was biggest in the cities and neighborhoods which had experienced significant black-white tensions after 1968. In Cleveland, 48% of Jews supported Nixon in 1972. In Canarsie in Brooklyn, he got 54% of the Jewish vote. (Only Ronald Reagan did better among Jews, getting 39% of their votes in 1980.)

I don’t think that’s likely to be the case in the wake of October 7. The split in the American Jewish community is plainly a generational one, with older Jews either already in the Republican camp for social reasons (that’s the Orthodox Jewish vote) or still firmly with Biden. Younger American Jews, who express great alienation from Israel—especially Netanyahu’s Israel—are in the forefront of the progressive movement, alongside Arab- and Muslim-Americans—trying to get Biden to take a tougher stance on the Gaza War. We still don’t know how big a factor that will be in the fall, but the warning signs of a electoral debacle are there if even just a few thousand voters in key swing states abstain are certainly worrisome.

But there’s one difference between the 1968 presidential election and the 2024 choice. Back then LBJ’s Democratic party was being ripped apart by a massive and unwinnable war pushed by Democratic leadership while Republican Richard Nixon promised a peace plan to voters. Today, the Gaza war is tearing at parts of Joe Biden’s Democratic coalition, but the truth is most Americans are not paying close attention to events in the Middle East. American Jews and American Muslims are paying close attention, but together those two groups make up a small fraction of the electorate. According to a recent survey by Pew Research Center, “Many Americans are … disengaged: Relatively few (22%) say they are closely following news about the war, and half can correctly report that more Palestinians than Israelis have died since the war’s start. On many questions about the war, sizable numbers express no opinion.”

Achieving proper perspective on this topic is especially hard because when you look at things with really powerful lenses (like cover stories in elite opinion magazines), you make them look bigger.

End Times

Speaking of perspective, here’s what I saw on Monday from a snowy field in Newport, Vermont, not far from the Canadian border.