The alternative goes mainstream
If you attended Sunday’s Salute to Israel Parade in Manhattan, maybe you spotted me among the marchers. I was the one carrying the sign reading “Zionists” (my kids’ school literally marched under the banners of various Jewish heroes: Zionists, Athletes, Religious Leaders…).
Yes, that was me on 58th Street, between the pro-Palestinian protesters on one side, who included members of the Neturai Karta hasidic sect yelling “Zionism is a heresy,” and pro-Israel supporters on the other, many wearing the orange shirts indicating that they oppose Sharon’s plans for withdrawal from Gaza (“Deport the Nazi Arabs, not Jews!”).
Or maybe you remember me because shortly after this bizarre bit of Jew vs. Jew theater, right there on Fifth Avenue, my head exploded.
In an earlier, simpler era (cue the Bee Gees medley), it was relatively easy to map the contours of Jewish dissent.
On one side you had the Mainstream. The major Jewish organizations invariably backed the sitting Israeli government and represented its interests unquestioningly.
On the other side, you had the Counterculture, college students and young communal activists who accused the Mainstream of representing Israel’s interests unquestioningly. (One of those young activists, Sam Norich, who today runs the Forward Association, suggests that for Jewish radicals the 1960s began in the 1970s. Disillusioned in part by the anti-Israel turn of the Left, they turned their own energies to Jewish causes.)
Of course, just as it was possible in the 1930s to be a “premature anti-Fascist,” in the 1970s you could be a premature peacenik. By 1977 some 12,000 people had joined a group called Breira (Choice), which promoted dialogue and compromise with the Palestinians. The Mainstream came down hard on the group. Its leaders were blacklisted, and the Jewish press, as historian Hasia Diner describes it, “demonized” Breira’s members as “self-haters and enemies of Israel.”
I guess you could call me a premature peacenik — at least according to an official at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, who in 1991 got wind that I had spoken at a picnic run by some former Breira-niks. I was editing the Washington Jewish Week at the time, and tended to accept invitations from whatever local group would invite me. I offered what I thought was a fairly unbiased analysis of Jewish organizational life, and even chided the peaceniks for whom criticizing Israel was their only Jewish involvement.
Nevertheless, the AIPAC official distributed a memo about my picnic putsch, telling reporters that my appearance showed that I “sought to bring down the organized Jewish community,” and that “keeping the paper in the hands of the ‘alternative’ crowd was unhealthy.” (If truth be told, AIPAC was more annoyed by my newspaper’s coverage of its activities than by my perceived politics, but knew the “alternative” tag would be potent. Indeed, the memo set in motion a series of events, too complicated to go into here, which included my demotion at the paper, and eventual resignation.)
Ten years younger than most of the Counterculturalists, I was hardly a member of the “alternative” crowd. I tended to waffle whenever it came to debating the future of Israel. What I was guilty of — if guilt is the proper word here — is the willingness to air all sides in the debate. By the early 1990s, Yitzhak Shamir was prime minister and Peace Now was a force to be reckoned with. I figured if Israelis could engage in these debates, so should readers of Jewish newspapers.
I had the bad luck to stumble into AIPAC’s crosshairs just months before the Mainstream consensus broke down for good. When Yitzhak Rabin came to power talking dialogue and compromise, the Mainstream could no longer stifle debate. Nor did it want to. After all, it was now the right-wing groups that were in the wilderness, and they demanded to be heard. Norman Podhoretz even wrote a self-justifying piece in Commentary saying that it’s okay for the Jewish Right to criticize Israel because it has its best interests at heart; the Left meant only to bring Israel down.
Fast forward about a decade, and you find the culmination of such thinking in the ferocious opposition that is building to Sharon’s disengagement plan. The Zionist Organization of America maintains a drumbeat of anti-Sharon rhetoric in its press releases. A Jewish activist from Edison helped organize an anti-withdrawal rally as President Bush hosted Sharon at his Texas ranch. This week, New York State Assemblyman Dov Hikind is leading a mission of Jews and Evangelical Christians to Israel, where they plan to protest. Joining him is Pastor James Vineyard, who, according to the JTA, has spent more than $750,000 on his efforts to oppose the withdrawal.
The prescience — or persuasiveness — of Podhortez’s essay is seen in the decidedly unenthusiastic way in which the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations brought itself to endorse and promote the Sharon plan. The Conference has shown a deference to right-wing groups that was rarely if ever extended to the Left.
Along Sunday’s parade route, the crowds were dotted, and often swathed, with onlookers wearing orange. Many undoubtedly planned to cross into Central Park for the Israel Day Concert, billed as a rally “supporting the Jewish communities of Gaza, and against the surrender of Jewish territories in this region.” Arutz 7, the pro-settler news service, reported that the anti-evacuation concert “drew less than expected crowds,” but noted with apparent satisfaction that “anti-evacuation shirts were numerous among the spectators.”
I suppose that, as one who suffered collateral damage in the battle for open communal debate, I can take some satisfaction in seeing committed Jews show up at a pro-Israel parade to protest the actions of its government. And I do.
But I also worry that the genie has been let out of the bottle. How far are those marching under the orange banner willing to go to scuttle withdrawal? The Mainstream can no longer stifle communal debate. But is anybody setting its limits?