In retrospect, Rabinowitz’s confidence seems to have been justified, given Obama’s performance among Jewish voters. Despite the constraints he was operating under, it appeared that Obama wanted to make it clear that he would not simply pick up where the Bush administration had left off with regard to American-Israeli relations. During the process of selecting his cabinet and formulating policy objectives, he consulted with liberal Jewish peace advocacy organizations such as Brit Tzedek v’Shalom, J Street, and the Israel Policy Forum. That he also talked with the conservative groups that have historically served as the “voice” of the Jewish community, such as AIPAC and the arch-rightist Zionist Organization of America, however, indicated the caution with which he had to proceed. While those groups had suggested to varying degrees that Obama would be no friend to Israel, he lacked the standing to leave them out in the cold. Still, the fact that the Obama team was listening to anyone beyond the usual mouthpieces was of note, even though many liberals in the U.S. remained skeptical that his selection of Hillary Clinton as secretary of state would lead to any fundamental changes in American foreign policy.
While it makes sense that Israelis of all political preferences would prepare for the possibility of a shift in American policy, the positive attention given to the idea of a “new approach” suggested a willingness in both Washington and Jerusalem to rethink the rituals of the special relationship. Besides, even the pro-Israel bias displayed by the Clinton administration was, at its worst, more engaged in the effort to create some kind of solution than the Bush administration. As a left-wing Israeli peace activist once told me, “For all of the horrible problems with Clinton’s approach, in retrospect, it may have been better for Arafat to have accepted it all, and stage another intifada later, because at least he would have been working with more than the Palestinians will start with when the next round of peace negotiations inevitably are forced upon them.”
THE POLITICS OF BOREDOM
The day before President Bush addressed the Knesset back in May 2008, he spoke at Israeli President Shimon Peres’s first annual Facing Tomorrow Conference. Three quarters of the way through his talk, Bush’s mouth seized up, as though he were about to say something important that he just couldn’t figure out how to put into words. I waited and waited, but the expression remained on his face. My computer had frozen.
This is Bush’s moment of truth, I chuckled to myself, the momentthat he realizes his failure to say anything new. It was hardly the first time I’d had a laugh at the president’s expense. Although progressives around the world were reduced to a meager diet of hope in the seemingly interminable years of his leadership, we were also able to sustain our spirits on empty calories of irony. It wasn’t satisfying fare, to be sure, but still preferable to the grim alternative of submitting to the status quo. Even with a speech in hand, Bush seemed to be rendered functionally speechless by his administration’s failure to make any concrete progress in the Middle East. His now-notorious landing on a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier in May 2003 to declare “Mission accomplished” had come to stand for his entire presidency.
Unlike the Anwar Sadat of my imagination, Bush had declared war, not peace, in Israel’s chief legislative body—and not on Israelis, but on the leading contender for his successor, Barack Obama. Bush acted that day as though Israel’s parliament was American territory, implicitly comparing Obama to appeasers like Neville Chamberlain, the late British prime minister who had attempted to pacify Hitler by allowing him to invade Czechoslovakia. Despite the drama, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert exemplified the overwhelming sense of tedium during Bush’s address by nearly dozing off, while Deputy Prime Minister Eli Yishai shifted around in his seat like a bored and impatient school kid. Although the speech provided comfort to Jews, both in Israel and the United States, it was the sort of comfort that accompanies sleep, not action.
When my father shouted, “But he’s a brownshirt!” back on November 20, 1977, he was expressing amazement that Menachem Begin—a fiery religious nationalist who advocated the concept of a “Greater Israel” stretching from British Mandate–era Palestine to the Occupied Territories and what is today Jordan—could break with precedent. The hope his exclamation conveyed in the process—that change can be brought about by the peaceful initiatives of individuals rather than the collective sacrifices of war—was largely abandoned in the waning years of the second Bush administration. Yet that hope shows signs of returning in the willingness of Barack Obama and other Democratic Party leaders to push for a new approach to the problems of the Middle East, despite facing significant political risk in doing so.
* During the 1920s and ’30s, the Sturmabteilung (Nazi paramilitary force) wore brown shirts. For many years, the term “brownshirt” was used as a synonym for fascists.
They’ve lost control of the debate,” historian Tony Judt told the Observer’s Gaby Wood in February 2007, discussing the Jewish American organizations that had worked to marginalize his criticisms of Israel. “For a long time all they had to deal with were people like Norman Finkelstein or Noam Chomsky, who they could dismiss as loonies of the Left. Now they’re having to face, for want of a better cliché, the mainstream: people like me who have a fairly long established record of being Social Democrats (in the European sense) and certainly not on the crazy Left on most issues, saying very critical things about Israel.”
Although Judt spoke confidently, the rancor generated by his outspoken statements on the subject of Israel had clearly affected him deeply. Earlier in the interview, he explained how a talk he was scheduled to give at the Polish consulate in New York the previous October, entitled “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” had been cancelled at the last minute due to pressure from those same groups that—though they may have lost control of the debate—still had the power to restrict where it could take place. “They do what the more tactful members of the intelligence services used to do in late Communist society,” Judt remarked of the Anti-Defamation League. “They point out how foolish it is to associate with the wrong people. So they call up the Poles and they say: did you know that Judt is a notorious critic of Israel, and therefore shading into or giving comfort to anti-Semites?”
The possibility of being classified as one of those “wrong people” has increased markedly for commentators like Tony Judt over the past decade, as well as for Jews who would once have been exempt from such labeling. Whereas organizations like the Anti-Defamation League once concentrated their efforts on professed anti-Semites, they now seemed more preoccupied with finding Jews who claim not to be anti-Semitic while fostering support for anti-Semitism. Although Judt’s analogy between such organizations and the enforcers of totalitarian states is compelling, they might be more aptly compared to the Red-hunting of the McCarthy era. What people like Judt have experienced is an attempt— however muted its public expression—to blacklist.
That’s why the Jewish press in New York referred to the controversy over the cancellation and its aftermath as “l’affaire Judt,” conjuring the late-nineteenth-century Dreyfus affair in which a French officer of Jewish descent was accused of treason. The fact that over 100 intellectuals (many of whom disagreed with Judt on key points) found it necessary to sign an open letter of protest on his behalf underscores the significance of an episode that under other circumstances might have attracted little attention.
Published in the November 16, 2006, edition of the New York Review of Books, the letter excoriated the Anti-Defamation League for working behind the scenes to have Judt’s talk canceled, and then denying its role in the affair. “In a democracy,” the letter declares, “there is only one appropriate response to a lecture, article, or book one does