[A-List] RE: When Did American Jewish support for Israel Solidify?

["Craven, Jim" <jcraven@xxxxxxxxx>]

I am interested in knowing whether the 1967 war was the catalyst for
unquestioning support of Israel within the American Jewish community, as N.
Finklestein has argued, or whether it was something else. Also, to what
extent is it true, as I've read in a couple places, that a lot of Jewish
radical leftists who became right-wing adopted their shift because of an
orientation to Israel after 1967?

My interest stems mainly from the fact that I've been waging a one-man op-ed
battle in defense of the Palestinians in my college newspaper for the past
couple years, which provoked angry responses in the paper from one student
who is a settler from Hebron, one Jewish professor of business, and one
Israeli of the non-Ashkenazi type, Iraqi I think. But none of their anger at
my writings could match the fury unleashed at the far more moderate,
relatively pro-Israeli view taken by a columnist of the paper, a Jewish
student who is critical of Israel in a Thomas Friedman sort of way. He was
cowed rather quickly.


Response: Israel's use of "The Holocaust", and the revulsion of sensible
people against what was done to Jews and others, to garner uncritical
support for Zionism and Zionist colonization, collaboration with fascist
regimes and outright genocide, (e.g. anti-Zionism = anti-Semitism) is
relatively recent. Indeed the first Holocaust victims going to Israel were
met with outright hostility, vile reference to them as "Sabonim" (pieces of
soap) and even ghettoization into Kibbutzim made up exclusively of holocaust
survivors--by some so-called "Sabras" and some Ashkenaze who saw portrayed
them as "cowards" for having survived the Holocaust.

I really believe that old "cognitive dissonance" is explicitly understood
and utilized by the Zionists to garner uncritical support from Jews of the
Diaspora. When there is a contradiction between facts versus emotions, or
emotions versus beliefs, or facts versus beliefs, it sets up, according to
the theory, a psysiologically and psychologically-disturbing "dissonance" in
need of resolution. For example, suppose I profess to be a real
super-Zionist but do not wish to go to Israel where I may not be able to get
the kind of job I hold here, or perhaps my kids may not be able to go to the
kind of school they can go to in the U.S., or perhaps I just don't want to
get drafted and maybe get killed, or perhaps because I am a secular
non-observant Jew, or perhaps a Reform Jew not considered a "real Jew" in
Israel, "the Jewish State", by those self-professed Hassidim, Orthodox or
Conservative Jews who run Israel, in any case, how do I resolve the
contradiciton between my self-professed "Zionism" on the one hand and my
unwillingness to go to the "homeland" to do my bit? Well the Zionist
establishment will get me off the hook. How? Well first of all, they will
tell me that "Jews in the Diaspora", raising money, uncritically supporting
Zionism in the western media, perhaps getting other Jews to go where I will
not and do what I am unprepared to do, are abosolutely essential to the
Zionist State and therefore I need not feel guilty about not being willing
to actually go to Israel and live/work there. Then there is another element,
commonly found in the so-called "settlements", of those who lived as secular
and non-observant Jews for many years, perhaps doing a whole lot of sex,
drugs and rock n' roll, who, all of a sudden, getting a bit older and now
having families, all of a sudden get the "Super-Jewish" fever, and wanting
to make up for lost time and lost "Jewishness", now have the usual
fanaticism of the convert or lapsed, and now are willing to move to the
settlements, practice ulta-Zionism and virulent racism, go "ultra-Jewish",
and atone for their past "lapsed Jewishness."

Jim Craven