Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, November 2006, pages 58-59

Israel and Judaism

American Jewish Opinion Divided Over Israel’s Role in Lebanon

By Allan C. Brownfeld

ISRAEL’S ROLE in Lebanon was embraced without any apparent reservations by most major American Jewish organizations. On July 28, 2006 The New York Times reported that, “With Israel at war again, American Jewish groups immediately swung into action, sending lobbyists to Washington, solidarity delegations to Jerusalem and millions of dollars for ambulances and trauma counseling.”

Observed Rabbi Steve Gutow, executive director of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, an umbrella group for 125 local councils and 13 national groups: “The world in which I live is filled with people who are deeply connected to Israel. For almost everyone I know, there’s no distance.”

William Daroff, vice president of public policy for United Jewish Communities, which represents 155 Jewish federations around the U.S., helped organize a lobbying campaign in Washington expressing their thanks to officials in the White House, the State Department and Congress for their support of Israel.

According to the July 21, 2006 Forward: “Bucking calls in the international community for a cease-fire in the Middle East, Jewish organizations launched a major lobbying offensive in the nation’s capital…to give Israel more time to deal a decisive blow to Islamist militants in Lebanon and Gaza…In an effort to head off calls in Washington for a quick cease-fire, some officials with Jewish groups have spent the past few days urging policymakers to make sure that Israel is given ample time and freedom of action to inflict as much damage as possible on Hezbollah’s infrastructure in southern Lebanon.”

Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice president of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, declared, “This is a unique moment of broad consensus in the community in support of Israel’s right to defend itself and to take the measures necessary to stop the reign of terror.”

Beneath the surface of Jewish unity with regard to Israel’s Lebanon campaign, however, the reality of widespread dissent and of concern for what many believe to be Israel’s disproportionate use of force against civilians slowly became clear. Even as Israel was bombing its northern neighbor, dissenting voices expressed concern about mounting civilian casualties and attacks upon Lebanon’s infrastructure which seemed to have little to do with defending Israel against Hezbollah.

Tikkun, a widely read bi-monthly Jewish magazine, sponsored a full-page ad in the July 31, 2006 New York Times headlined, “Stop The Slaughter in Lebanon, Israel and the Occupied Territories.” It declared, in part: “We demand that the Israeli government immediately halt its attacks on Lebanon.…these attacks are utterly disproportionate to the initial provocation by Hezbollah, have killed innumerable innocent civilians, displaced half a million people, destroyed billions of dollars of Lebanon’s infrastructure and will not, in the long run, secure peace or security for Israel. We also call upon the Israeli government to supply food, electricity, water and funds to repair the humanitarian crisis caused by its invasion of Gaza.” Among those signing the ad were Rabbis Michael Feinberg, Mordechai Liebling, David Schneyer and Arthur Waskow.

Editorialized the July 19, 2006 National Jewish Post and Opinion: “Israel now is dealing death and making life miserable for innocents in Gaza and Lebanon, all ostensibly to retrieve a few Israeli soldiers captured—presumably not yet slain—by Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists.…Simple arithmetic says the killing of scores of civilians and endangering thousands more does not equate with the loss of a few soldiers to terrorist captors.”

Scores of Civilians for a Few Soldiers

Responding to the frequent declaration that the Israeli military exercises great care to avoid harming Lebanese civilians, Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, wrote in the Aug. 4, 2006 Forward: “Not always. Human Rights Watch investigators in Lebanon have recorded an appalling number of incidents in which civilians and civilian objects were hit with no apparent military justification: 12 civilians, including nine children, killed in Dweir; at least 16 civilians, including nine children, killed while fleeing Marwahin; nine civilians, including four children, killed in Beflay; as many as 42 civilians, including many children, killed in Srifa; some 60 percent of nine square blocks of southern Beirut, composed mostly of eight- to 10-story apartment buildings, destroyed; and now the tragedy of civilians, many of them children, killed in Qana. The list goes on. With hundreds of Lebanese civilians killed in three weeks of bombing, Israel clearly isn’t doing enough to avoid such loss of life.”

Declared Max Paul Friedman, professor of history at Florida State University: “The principle of proportionality in international law is not a formula whereby there should be one dead Lebanese for every dead Israeli. Proportionality means that the destruction caused by military force must be outweighed by the good it will accomplish; one cannot use more force than necessary to achieve one’s objectives. The high number of civilians killed by Israeli forces is disproportionate not to the number of Israeli victims of Hezbollah’s rockets, but to the goals Israel claims it is trying to achieve in Lebanon. If anything, the devastation and the high body count are making Hezbollah’s anti-Israeli arguments more plausible to the many Lebanese affected by Israel’s wide-ranging attacks.”

In a particularly provocative column in the July 18, 2006 edition of The Washington Post, Richard Cohen argued that, “The greatest mistake Israel could make at this moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now. Israel fights Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south, but its most formidable enemy is history itself…Whatever happens, Israel must not use its military might to win back what it has already chosen to lose: the buffer zone in southern Lebanon and the Gaza Strip itself.”

While most American Jewish organizations raising money to assist Israel during the Lebanon war used their contributions to meet the immediate needs of Israeli citizens affected by the conflict, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) initiated a different sort of emergency fund-raising campaign. When AIPAC posed the question, “What can you do to help Israel?” in its e-mail solicitations on its Web site, the organization’s first answer was: Donate to the powerful Washington, DC-based group to bolster its political lobbying efforts. Asked what emergency campaign funds would be used for, AIPAC spokesman Josh Block said that the campaign is intended “to provide training on how to be an effective pro-Israel activist.” The statement offered no indication as to how monies raised by the group’s “emergency call to action“ would be specifically allocated.

Noted Douglas M. Bloomfield in the Aug. 3, 2006 Washington Jewish Week: “War may be hell for the Israelis, Palestinians and Lebanese, but for some Jewish organizations, it is the goose that lays the golden egg. Most American Jewish organizations have launched major appeals for humanitarian aid…AIPAC is trying to capitalize on the crisis to add to its already bulging coffers after some record-breaking fund-raising years in the wake of its brush with scandals. Howard Friedman, the pro-Israel lobby’s president, sent out an ‘emergency call to action,’ appealing not for humanitarian aid for Israelis, but for new dues-paying members…An official of another Jewish organization that is raising funds for humanitarian purposes called the AIPAC appeal ‘crass with capital letters.’”

Israel’s “most formidable enemy is history itself.”

But AIPAC was hardly alone. According to Bloomfield, “A few other organizations are also using the Mideast crisis to enlist new members and contributors, including the Simon Wiesenthal Center. It boasts of participating in rallies and making pro-Israel pronouncements…The Anti-Defamation League sent an e-mail appeal…featuring a link to ‘Make a donation today and help ADL rally support for Israel during this crisis.’ New Jersey’s Elihu Davison, a Jewish activist who has been the recipient of many fund appeals, observed, ‘Nothing’s so good for American Jewish fundraising as a little bloodletting in the Holy Land.’…AIPAC’s current ‘emergency’ appeal isn’t because the group needs money, but because it sees an opportunity to rake in more. With a $45 million budget and millions more in the bank, AIPAC is planning to construct its own six-story office building near the District’s Chinatown next year.”

Tikkun’s Rabbi Michael Lerner lamented the narrowness of the concerns of the organized Jewish community. “This is a time for the Jewish community of the United States to signal a new open-heartedness toward those who’ve been our adversaries if we want to break through the cycle of violence,” he said. “So we should be raising funds for Israel as well as for Lebanon, as well as for Gaza, as well as for the West Bank. Donations to the federation at this point are simply a ‘yes’ vote to continued Israeli militarism and a ‘no’ vote to the Israeli peace movement that is calling for…a negotiated settlement of all the issues that have led to war in the past 60 years.”

A significant gap exists between the views expressed by national Jewish organizations and those held by the majority of American Jews. A recent study by the National Foundation for Jewish Culture found that, among young people in particular, many said they were alienated by what they see as Jewish organizations’ unquestioning support for Israeli government policies. It is less than clear for whom such organizations speak in their lockstep support for the operation in Lebanon, which is now being widely criticized in Israel itself.

It is hardly in Israel’s long-term best interests to blindly support policies which may lead to disaster. Good friends try to steer those they care about in a proper direction, not simply ratify whatever mistaken decisions they may make.

Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.

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