HISTORY DEPT.
Opinion | Anti-Israel Progressives Are Handing Liberal Jews an Impossible Decision, Just Like in 1967
The liberal left alienated Jewish allies in the past. Has anything changed?
Pro-Israel protesters hold up signs and Israeli flags during a demonstration near the White House on June 8, 1967, in response to the Six Day War. | UPI via Getty Images
Opinion by JOSHUA ZEITZ
10/23/2023 10:00 AM EDT
Joshua Zeitz, a Politico Magazine contributing writer, is the author of Lincoln's God: How Faith Transformed a President and a Nation (May 2023). Follow him @joshuamzeitz.
In the aftermath of the Six-Day War in 1967, many American Jews grappled with a challenge that the Talmudic scholar Hillel had posed 1,900 years earlier: “If I am not for myself, who will be? … If I am only for myself, what am I?”
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Jewish lay and religious leaders commonly invoked that famous philosophical question from synagogue bimahs, at political conferences and in newspaper editorials. They had been shocked at their apparent abandonment by many American liberals — particularly liberal Christians — who voiced greater concern and affinity for hostile Arab countries than for the state of Israel. The whiplash from this abandonment led many American Jews to reevaluate their political allegiances. Could they stand up for themselves, even if doing so meant breaking with former allies, and still stay true to their liberal values?
It’s that same feeling of abandonment that many American Jews, particularly the community’s majority of political liberals, are struggling with today. In the two weeks since Hamas unleashed a brutal attack against Jewish and non-Jewish Israelis — a modern-day pogrom that included rape, the murder of babies, the kidnapping of young and old civilians by the hundreds and gangland executions of innocents — many American Jews are writhing in anger at self-styled progressives who strike them as wholly insensitive to Jewish suffering and trigger-happy not just to decry Israel’s military response but to deny its very right to exist.
“I am in such a state of despair,” said Nick Melvoin, a member of the Los Angeles Unified School Board and current candidate for Congress. “In my generation, we have been warned how quickly people would turn on us and we just thought no way.” A rabbi and progressive activist in LA put the matter in sharper relief when she observed that the “clear message from many in the world, especially from our world — those who claim to care the most about justice and human dignity — is that these Israeli victims somehow deserved this terrible fate.”
Scenes from Ashkelon (top) and Tel Aviv (bottom) after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. | Tsafrir Abayov/AP; Moti Milrod/AP
We’ve been here before. If history is a guide, American Jews won’t switch their political allegiances, though Republicans have been anticipating such a defection for a half-century, every four years, like clockwork. But they may react in ways that reshape Democratic politics, activism and fundraising. They may cool their ardor for “progressive” causes and organizations, move more firmly to the center and urge the Democratic Party to follow suit. Certainly, their relationship with the left will never be the same.
To understand why, we need to wind the clock back to 1967.
In late May 1967, the armies of Jordan, Egypt and Syria encircled Israel at its borders and choked off its access to international waterways. As the United Nations quietly submitted to Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s demands that it withdraw international peacekeepers from the Sinai Peninsula, a terrified American Jewish community braced itself for sweeping physical destruction and human losses in Israel. American Jews took seriously Nasser’s threat to drive Israel into the sea. They expected nothing short of a second Holocaust.
“Give As You Never Gave Before,” pleaded the United Jewish Appeal (UJA) in newspaper advertisements that ran nationwide. American Jews responded to the call. At an emergency meeting in New York, attendees pledged $1,000,000 per minute for 15 minutes to the Emergency Israel Fund. In Baltimore, a UJA volunteer recalled staffing tables at city banks where donors lined up to liquidate their accounts and, in some cases, emptied the contents of their safety deposit boxes directly into the hands of collection agents. Time magazine reported that contributions arrived so fast “that officials often had no idea how much they had collected.” A small Jewish congregation of Okmulgee, Oklahoma, even sold its synagogue and wired the revenues to Tel Aviv. American Jews saw the greatest existential threat to their co-religionists since the Holocaust, which was still very much a recent memory.
Of course, the war ended differently than expected. After Israel launched a preemptive strike, it took the small Jewish state just six days to drive back its three assailants and capture East Jerusalem, including the Old City, the West Bank, the Golan Heights, the Sinai Peninsula and the Gaza Strip.
American Jews were relieved and elated. But many of them were also angry. Most American Jews then (as now) identified as liberals. And as longtime anchor participants in a host of progressive movements — from civil rights and social welfare, to interfaith tolerance and peace (particularly during the Vietnam War) — Jewish liberals recoiled at the silence or outright betrayal of former allies.
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The Israeli centurion tank corps prepares for battle during the Six-Day War in June 1967. | Three Lions via Getty Images
Like the 2,000 delegates to the New Politics Convention that fall, in Chicago. Originally conceived as an organizing platform to recruit an anti-war challenger to President Lyndon Johnson, the convention adopted a resolution denouncing the “imperialistic Zionist war.”
Or the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), once a mainstream civil rights organization, which published a broadside asserting that “Zionists conquered the Arab homes and land through terror” and that “the famous European Jews, the Rothschilds, who have long controlled the wealth of many European nations, were involved in the original conspiracy … to create the ‘State of Israel.’” These claims ran beside a cartoon of Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan, with dollar signs plastered to his epaulets and a rendering of a hand bearing a Star of David and a dollar sign, tightening a noose around the necks of Egyptian President Nassar and the boxer Muhammad Ali.
The New Left — a hodgepodge of younger activists, precursors to today’s self-identified “progressive” activists — was one matter. More disappointing was the seeming silent betrayal of friends closer to the center left, particularly Christian lay and religious leaders who had been longtime partners in a variety of reform movements.
In late 1967, the American Jewish Committee reported that while “there were a number of open declarations of support from individual Christian leaders” that past June, “such public statements from Christian institutional bodies were noticeably rare.” In particular, the “reluctance of the two powerful ‘umbrella’ organizations — the National Council of Churches and the National Conference of Catholic Bishops … to commit themselves unequivocally on the basic question of Israel’s survival … came as a surprise to many Jewish leaders.” Time similarly observed that many Jews had not failed to notice that “the majority of Christian Churchmen [had] either remained silent, or failed to protest strongly when Arab nations threatened to annihilate Israel.”
“American Jews are taking a new — and long — look at the practice of holding dialogues — discussions — with Christian churchmen,” declared the Union of American Hebrew Congregations (UAHC), Reform Judaism’s principal religious organization. “[T]he Six Day War had a chilling effect on American-Christian relations” and “many Jews, already cool toward what they consider unwarranted ‘ecumania’ [a term signaling ardor for interfaith cooperation and action] … are now turning to us with an ‘I told you so’ tone, asking: ‘Where was the Christian community during the past few weeks when Israel and the cause of world peace so desperately needed visible support?’” Longtime partners in civil rights and peace, the mainline churches seemed eerily quiet when Jewish lives, and Jewish security, were on the line.
“There is evidently much fence-straddling and conscience grappling, a pro-Arab undercurrent,” reported the Anti-Defamation League. Particularly enraging was a declaration by the National Council of Churches that “with due consideration for the right of nations to defend themselves, the NCC cannot condone by silence [Israeli] territorial expansion by armed force.” The organization particularly opposed “Israel’s unilateral annexation of Jordanian portions of Jerusalem. The historic city is sacred not only to Judaism, but also to Christianity and Islam.”
These were the very early days of the occupation, in the immediate aftermath of a coordinated effort to wipe Israel off the map. This was before there was a serious movement within Israel to keep and settle these lands. The country was still in a state of war with its neighbors. For many American Jews, it seemed wildly offensive for the NCC to demand that the Jewish state unilaterally retreat to its June 1967 borders. Voicing “due consideration” for the right of Israelis to defend themselves seemed like a throwaway line.
Liberal Christian leaders “worried about Arab refugees … but not about clear pledges to exterminate and massacre the people of Israel,” observed the UAHC — arguably the most liberal of the major American Jewish religious movements. “Was the Christian conscience so ambivalent on the question of Jews that, once again, a pall of silence would hang over the specter of Jewish suffering, until later, condolences and breast-beating and epitaphs and the croak of guilty conscience would fill the air?”
The standard historiographical narrative used to hold that American Jews turned inward and rightward after the Six-Day War. That interpretation doesn’t stand the test of time. Mainstream Jewish organizations continued to engage in anti-poverty, anti-war and civil rights work, and most Jews continue to this day to identify as liberal (50 percent) or moderate (32 percent) Democrats. To be sure, there were signs of ideological fracture — from the rise of a small but vocal neoconservative movement among Jewish intellectuals to the creation of Jewish vigilante and terrorist groups like the Jewish Defense League. Mainstream Jewish organizations also broke with civil rights allies over questions like affirmative action in the late 1970s, a break that might have come on its own but which was made easier by the fracture of the late 1960s.
But Jews remained a core component of the Democratic base, partly because the party increasingly drifted to the center in the 1970s, while left-leaning organizations became a more marginal force in politics. It was easy for Jews to maintain their political identity and home, if they didn’t have to share that space with perceived antisemites in the New Left.
The problem today is similar, but different. In 1967 Israel achieved its greatest triumph. Today, Israel — and its American Jewish cousins — are reeling from the single greatest act of violence committed against Jews since the Holocaust. As the journalist Michael Cohen observed, “the key difference is that in 1967 American Jews felt pride over Israel’s military accomplishment. Today it’s just anguish, not just at the murder and massacre of Jews but at the lack of solidarity from our supposed allies on the left.”
Furthermore, if the New Left became largely inconsequential to Democratic politics by the 1970s, the same is not true of self-styled progressives today. Grassroots movements like Black Lives Matter (BLM), and organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), may still play at the margins of party politics, but they have a seat at the table in a way their New Left predecessors never really did.
For many Jewish liberals who strongly disapprove of the Israeli occupation, hunger for a two-state solution, feel sick about what the people of Gaza are experiencing (even if some believe that Iran and Hamas are principally responsible for that suffering) and loathe Benjamin Netanyahu, it has been a clarifying two weeks.
Supporters of Israel demonstrate with national flags in Beverly Hills, Calif. on Oct. 9, 2023, after the Palestinian militant group Hamas launched an attack on Israel. | David Swanson/AFP via Getty Images
Clarifying, when a Chicago BLM chapter and some student activists incorporated renderings of a hang glider in their pro-Palestinian flyers — a savage celebration of the Hamas terrorists who swooped into a concert and murdered 260 civilians, some of whom they sexually assaulted. BLM Chicago’s response? “Yesterday we sent out msgs that we aren’t proud of,” the organization wrote on X. “We stand with Palestine & the people who will do what they must to live free. Our hearts are with, the grieving mothers, those rescuing babies from rubble, who are in danger of being wiped out completely.” That’s what we call a non-apology apology.
Clarifying, when academic activists like Zareena Grewal, a professor at Yale, tweeted that “Israel is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle, solidarity.” Or when 30 student leaders at Harvard issued a letter asserting that Israelis are “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” Or when Russel Rickford, a historian at Cornell university, described the rape, murder and kidnapping of Jews as “exhilarating” and “energizing.”
Clarifying, when the Democratic Socialists of America — an organization with deep hooks in the progressive wing of the Democratic party — chanted, “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” — a genocidal motto for driving all Jews from Israel proper (not just the West Bank).
Even more so when over 260 former staffers on Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s presidential campaign issued a public letter excoriating Israel as a criminal state guilty of war crimes (and calling Warren complicit in those alleged crimes, given her support of Israel) — making only passing mention of the rape, torture, murder and kidnapping of Israeli civilians — and demanding that she call for an immediate cease-fire.
On X, formerly known as Twitter, prominent journalists and political activists casually accuse Israel of “genocide,” “war crimes” and “ethnic cleansing” — words that cease to have real meaning if they’re applied to every single action that Israel takes to defend its citizens, but not to Hamas and its Iranian patrons.
As in 1967, many liberal Jews feel the pain of erasure — of not being seen or heard. Non-Jews on the left strike them as blissfully unaware of, even disdainful of, the experience of American Jews viewing imagery of fellow Jews being hunted house-to-house, carted away on trucks, shot, sexually assaulted and murdered. For American Jews, whose synagogues have been under armed guard for several years, at least since the massacre at the Tree of Life congregation in Pittsburgh — many of whom are the children and grandchildren of Holocaust victims — this act of erasure isn’t just a form of disappointment. It’s enraging.
Jen Bluestein, a veteran Democratic operative who served until recently as a top strategist at NARAL Pro-Choice America, gave voice to this sentiment last week when she tweeted: “On every single social media platform I’m on, I’m experiencing anti-semitism by totally well-intentioned people who probably share many of my values. It is exhausting to be Jewish right now. It’s also heartbreaking & infuriating what’s happening in Gaza. But if your feelings about Gaza lead you say things that your Jewish friends and colleagues hear as deeply anti-Semitic, you may want to listen and learn more than you talk.”
As in 1967, it’s improbable that Jews will swing to the Republican party, a political organization thoroughly in the thrall of white Christian nationalists whom many Jews view as a much more immediate threat to their communities. But the tragedy of Oct. 7, 2023, was something very different from the triumph of the Six-Day War.
While in the 1970s Jews maintained a reasonably steady, if sometimes tense, alliance with the left end of the Democratic party, it’s hard to imagine that the broad center of American Jewish politics will continue to make common cause with self-styled “progressives” after the dust settles. Jews will continue to be ardent supporters of Joe Biden’s and Hakeem Jeffries’ Democratic Party — a party whose leaders have stood firmly with Israel, even as they continue to advocate a two-state solution and a just outcome for Palestinians. But watch how they vote in primaries, where they send their political and philanthropic dollars, which causes they rally to and which they do not, which people they continue to work with — and which they do not. Unlike the 1970s, when the far left represented a fringe element in Democratic politics, today, “progressives” enjoy a significant presence at the local and national levels. They have alienated many American Jews, a core constituency in the liberal coalition. That tension will be difficult to contain.
American Jews will still struggle with Hillel’s age-old quandary: “If I am not for myself, who will be? … If I am only for myself, what am I?” But this time, they’ll face that question somewhat more alone, absent the company of many people who should have been allies, but weren’t.
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