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My new book, We Are Not One: A History of America’s Fight Over Israel, will be published on Tuesday. You can learn more about it via links to the publisher, Basic Books, to the indie books site, or the dreaded Bezos behemoth. My shelves groan from the countless books written about Israel itself, and especially those on its conflict with the Palestinians and nearby Arab states. This one, however, is the only one that focuses on the debate it has inspired in the United States. While I actually don’t expect anyone to agree with all of it, I’m pretty sure that anyone interested in the subject will find it useful. I do know it is the best thing I’ve ever written.
Authors need good reasons to write a book—especially those clocking in at over 500 pages—and I certainly have my share. Here are a few of them:
First, there’s just obsession. While I signed the contract for the book in 2015, I actually began it 40 years ago, while writing my college honors thesis. Just as I was coming into adulthood, I discovered that the life I thought I was best suited for, that of the New York (Jewish) intellectual, had been hijacked by a group of well-funded right-wing neoconservatives whose views struck me as wrong about just about everything. I decided to investigate their origins and did so with a focus on the role that Israel’s 1967 Six-Day War played in turning liberals into conservatives and doves into hawks. I was such a nerd that I saved my little note cards, and some of the interviews and research I did back then actually ended up in my new book.
Then there’s my perennial frustration with the state of the debate. Literally never in my life have I ever experienced anyone actually changing anyone’s mind in an argument about Israel. I have, however, seen an awful lot of people get really angry at each other. This is due to the fact that such debates are rarely mere policy disputes. Frequently, they function instead as expressions of an individual’s deepest self-definition. It’s a real problem, too, because pretty much everything about Israel is complicated. The distortions that inevitably arise in debate double, triple, even quadruple the nature and level of these complications. Addressing oneself to over 125 years of such arguments, well, as I said, made for a long book.
Fortunately, the time feels right. For many decades, public discussions of Israel in the U.S. were dominated by a Disneyland-style fantasy of that nation put forth by Israeli politicians and public relations officials and vigorously promoted by its supporters among American Jewish organizations. These same organizations, led by AIPAC, formed a powerhouse alliance with neoconservative pundits and politicians, and Christian Zionists, to effectively enforce fealty to this fantasy in the media, Congress, and other public forums. In doing so, they often engaged in vicious personal attacks to discredit almost any prominent individual whose views traveled beyond the boundaries of the debate as they defined it.
What has been lost is not only American Judaism’s previous focus on social justice and social services but any attention to the substance of what it means to be an American Jew.
Yet these boundaries were in a constant state of motion. President Kennedy was advised never to utter the word “Palestinian.” President Carter was allowed to admit that Palestinians existed but was pilloried for employing the word “homeland” when discussing them. Even so, Andy Young was forced out of his job as Carter’s U.N. representative for meeting with a member of the PLO, when those were the only people who could negotiate on the Palestinians’ behalf.
Today, for a series of (yet again) complicated reasons, the discourse is far freer. Alas, all too often, this results in the fact that “both sides” now have the power to pillory. (Believe me, I know.) The difference is that while the “pro-Israel” side has the power to cost a person his or her livelihood, the Palestinian side will likely only say mean things on Twitter. This is an accurate reflection of both the power relations in the discourse as well as those of the larger Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
I think it’s important to name names. You will, for instance, read a great deal about the antics of the likes of The New Republic’s Martin Peretz, Commentary’s Norman Podhoretz, and both William Safire and A. M. Rosenthal of The New York Times. Each deployed the power and influence they enjoyed in the media to vilify the reputations of those they deemed insufficiently supportive of Israel, as well as often deploying racist tropes to attack Israel’s Arab critics and opponents.
But I do not hold the Palestinian side to be entirely innocent victims. Rather, I judge Palestinian leadership and their champions in the discourse to be sorely lacking in realism, and, for that reason, unhelpful to the people who so desperately need a voice in the debate. However much the Palestinians and their supporters believe themselves to have justice on their side, the fact is that Israel has always been the far stronger party in this conflict. It has won 14 or 15 wars—depending on how you count them—and will continue to do so as long as these wars continue. Israel’s point of view is rarely challenged in Congress or the executive branch or, until recently, on most of the nation’s editorial pages. Given this fantastic power imbalance, the Palestinian side has never faced up to the reality of the situation and set actually achievable goals for itself. Rather its leaders and spokespeople aim for mere rhetorical victories that do little or nothing to improve the lives of the people for whom they profess to speak. The BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement, so popular among college students and leftist publications and organizations, is just the latest manifestation of this doomed strategy and one that has, so far, led absolutely nowhere.
Moreover, there’s the price that American Jews have paid for what the Jewish scholar and rabbi Shaul Magid has termed the “Zionization” of the American Jewish identity. Ever since the 1967 war, American Jewish institutions have focused almost all of their resources on a combination of Israel support and Holocaust remembrance (which has become a subsidiary of Israel support). Lately, they have embraced a focus on antisemitism: certainly a legitimate concern, but one that pro-Israel groups often exaggerate and exploit in order to try to silence legitimate criticism of Israeli actions.
What has been lost is not only American Judaism’s previous focus on social justice and social services but any attention to the substance of what it means to be an American Jew or why a young person, given the choice, would want to remain one. Defining one’s Jewish identity exclusively as support for Israel, however vicarious, was certainly understandable in the wake of the Holocaust, especially given the desperate condition of the hundreds of thousands of Jews who had survived Hitler’s mass murder and had nowhere else to go. The new state needed help, and American Jews needed a post-Holocaust reason for optimism about the future as well as a means to shake off the shame of having failed the Jews of Europe.
But Israel long ago ceased to serve as a unifying cause for American Jews and has become, instead, a deeply divisive one. What’s more, while Israel was initially understood to be a place of refuge for endangered diaspora Jews, it now is the cause of many a violent attack on them by angry Arabs and other Palestinian partisans. These are just a few of the many reasons secular organized Jewry in the United States is in crisis today, especially when judged by the large-scale exodus of so many Jews—especially young Jews—from both of what have been historically by far the most popular American Jewish institutions, Conservative synagogues and Reform temples.
The book is called We Are Not One because we can no longer paper over all of these differences. Despite an economic and social profile that should put them in the conservative camp, Jews remain by far America’s most liberal white ethnic group. Israel, once admired as a sort of socialist Sparta, has become an increasingly illiberal nation that, over a series of five elections in little more than three years, has elected right-wing government after right-wing government; none of which have shown the slightest interest in making any concessions toward the possibility of a two-state solution. Israel is the only remotely democratic country on Earth whose citizens prefer Donald Trump to either Barack Obama or Joe Biden; with numbers almost perfectly reversed from those of the preferences of American Jews. And again, the divergence is most pronounced among the young.
Self-described “pro-Israel” organizations like AIPAC, whose political action committee supported the re-election of 109 election deniers and insurrectionists in 2022, ask American Jews to ignore these truths as Israel prepares under its corrupt leader, Bibi Netanyahu, to form a government even more illiberal, theocratic, and hostile to peace and the Palestinians than in the past. The recent announcement by the FBI that it will open an investigation into the killing of the veteran Al Jazeera journalist and American citizen Shireen Abu Akleh during an Israeli military raid in the West Bank last May, and the announcement by Defense Minister Benny Gantz that Israel will not cooperate with the investigation, is a clear demonstration of the sorts of conflicts we can expect in the future.
I’ll be doing a bunch of interviews and talks about the book in the next few weeks. Please check my Twitter feed and open Facebook page for updates. In the meantime, the most useful articles I have come across for those seeking to understand these developments would include: “Israel’s Rightward Turn,” by Nir Evron in Dissent, “Israel’s Hard-Right Turn,” by Dahlia Scheindlin in Foreign Affairs, and a fascinating profile of Jamil Dakwar, the Palestinian-Israeli lawyer who heads the American Civil Liberties Union’s Human Rights Program, in Haaretz.
Music, you say? Here is, as far as I know, the only great song ever written about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the incredibly prescient and moving “Border Song,” beautifully performed by a young Elton John—who wrote it with Bernie Taupin, of course—plus a rhapsodic version by Aretha Franklin, an absolutely awful version by Eric Clapton, and a sweet, raspy rendition by America’s elder statesman, Willie Nelson.
