February 3, 1974

Now, Instant Zionism

By NORMAN PODHORETZ

ver since October, 1973, with the outbreak of the Yom Kippur war, it has become clearer and clearer that something new has happened to the Jews of America; they have all been converted to Zionism. Now if, in the words of a sardonic old quip, a Zionist is a Jew who lives in the Diaspora with his bags eternally packed; or if, as David Ben Gurion once insisted, only a Jew who intends to settle in Israel is entitled to call himself a Zionist, no more than a few thousand American Jews are today or ever have been Zionists. If, however, Zionism means supporting the idea of a sovereign Jewish state in Palestine, then most American Jews have been Zionists at least since the end of World War II. Most, but by no means all. Once upon a time there were anti-Zionist Jews in America, there were non-Zionist Jews in America, and there were Jews in America indifferent to the whole issue of Jewish statehood. What the Yom Kippur war has revealed is that many who were formerly hostile or indifferent to Israel have by now either become Zionists or have simply faded away. Consider first the anti-Zionist Jews. The number of such Jews in America was probably never large, but until the state of Israel came into being in 1948 the influence of anti-Zionist sentiment was strong among three important sectors of American Jewry which otherwise had nothing whatever in common. There was the Reform rabbinate, which in those days mainly served a constituency of wealthy Jewish families of German origin; there was the Orthodox Jewish community, largely of East-European origin; and there was the Socialist intelligentsia, also largely of East-European origin, whose most popular outlet was the Yiddish daily newspaper Forward, and whose major institutional locus was the trade-union movement. To the Reformers, who believed that Judaism was a religion and not a nationality, Zionism was an ideological heresy. But even more to the point, perhaps, in speaking of the Jews as a nation in a period when the idea of "hyphenated Americans" was frowned upon, Zionism struck at the effort Jews were making to achieve full acceptance in America as Americans. to many Orthodox Jews, Zionism was also a heresy, but of a religious nature. Its sin in Orthodox eyes consisted of trying to "hasten" the redemption of the Jews through the establishment of a secular state instead of waiting for the advent of the Messiah. And, finally, to the Yiddish-speaking Socialists on the Lower East Side of New York, who believed that only within the framework of proletarian internationalism could the "Jewish problem" be solved, Zionism was a heresy of yet another kind: a form of reactionary bourgeois nationalism.

Zionism, then, threatened the Americanism of the wealthy, the Judaism of the religious and the Socialism of the poor -- although it is important to remember that most Zionists in the early days

were themselves Socialists, that many Orthodox Jews were Zionists and that the leadership of the Zionist movement in America included Reform rabbis like Stephen Wise and wealth Jews of German origin like Louis Brandeis. But so far as the German-Jewish upper class in America was concerned, it was probably nonZionism, rather than pro-Zionism or anti-Zionism, that eventually commanded the support of its largest and most influential sector before the state of Israel came into being. Non-Zionism was based on some of the same ideas and anxieties as anti-Zionism, but those who subscribed to it did not place themselves in active opposition to the existence of a sovereign Jewish state. They were willing at first to tolerate and in the end to endorse the founding of such a state provided everyone clearly understood that Jews in other countries owed it no political allegiance at all.

Unlike the anti-Zionists and the non-Zionists, both of whom cared about the issue of Jewish statehood, another group of indeterminate size and variegated social composition paid a minimum of attention to the idea, neither supporting nor opposing it, any more than they supported or opposed anything else affecting the destiny of the Jews. These indifferentists might be Jewish by birth, but they were not Jewish by religious conviction or by sentimental identification. Jewishness they regarded as an obsolescent category, and anyone foolish or retrograde enough to struggle to keep it alive was to be pitied and patronized. To the indifferentists, the idea of a Jewish state was not personally threatening; it was merely a parochial absurdity.

Neither anti-Zionism nor non-Zionism nor indifferentism has disappeared entirely from the American Jewish community, but they have all become much weaker then they ever were before. The best known anti-Zionist Jewish organization, the American Council for Judaism, has dwindled into near invisibility, while within the clerical precincts of Reform, anti-Zionists have if possible become lonelier and more isolated than pro-Zionists used to be. Similarly with Orthodox anti-Zionism. There is a small Hasidic sect in Brooklyn which remains anti-Zionist, but today when Orthodox Jews in American are politically militant, they are far more likely to be acting on behalf of Israel -- than in opposition to it. As for anti-Zionism of the Socialist variety, it lives on more powerfully than ever in the policies of the Soviet Union and other Communist countries, but it maintains only a precarious existence among American Jews. There are, to be sure, still a few Jewish Communists, a few Jewish Maoists, a few Jewish Trotskyites and even a few Jewish New Leftists, all of whom continue to denounce Zionism -- nowadays for being an arm of counter-revolutionary American imperialism rather than for being a form of reactionary bourgeois nationalism -- and some of whom advocate the transformation of Israel from a Jewish state into a "binational" one under joint Arab-Jewish control. On the other hand, scarcely a trace of anti-Zionism can be detected any longer among the spiritual descendants of the Yiddish-speaking Socialists who wrote in Forward and who worked in the trade-union movement. So stanch, in fact, in their support for Israel have Jews of this stripe become that the accusation once hurled at the Bundists, their political ancestors in

prerevolutionary Russia -- "Bundists are Zionists who are afraid of seasickness" -- takes on a certain retroactive justification. Non-Zionism has grown even weaker then anti-Zionism. The American Jewish Committee was once the leading non-Zionist Jewish organization, but to the extent that it non-Zionist heritage can still be felt, it takes the highly attenuated form of an effort to pursue an independent line on matters affecting Israel rather than according automatic support to whatever policies the Government of Israel might adopt. for the rest, the American Jewish Committee today is at least as fervent in its devotion to Israel as the Zionist organizations themselves. What about indifferentism? For obvious reasons, indifferentism is hard to measure, but there are good grounds or supposing that is too has declined in strength. In the past, indifferentism ran high among Jewish intellectuals, very few of whom ever found anything to interest or attract them either in the idea of Jewish statehood or in the concrete existence of the state of Israel. When, for example, in 1961 Commentary magazine asked a group of 31 young American intellectuals of Jewish origin how they felt about the state of Israel, all but two or three disclaimed any sense of personal connection or commitment and hastened to dissociate themselves from the "chauvinism" of Israel and the "parochialism" of the Zionist movement. No doubt there are Jewish intellectuals who still feel that way today. Yet what has been most striking in the last few months is the depth of concern which has been manifested by Jewish intellectuals who have not previously identified to any great degree with Israel or the Zionist movement. "I am not an Orthodox Jew," wrote Irving Kristol, the editor of The Public Interest, while the Yom Kippur war was still going on. "I am not a Zionist, and I did not find my two visits to Israel to be particularly exhilarating experiences. Truth to tell, I found Israeli society, on the whole, quite exasperating, and none of the Israeli ways of life ... had any great appeal for me. Still, I care desperately." Irving Howe, the editor of Dissent, who rarely agrees with Kristol on any political issue, agreed with him on this: "When the Yom Kippur war broke out," he said, "my reactions were astonishingly intense. I have never yielded to the claims of religion, Jewish or other; I have never been a Zionist; I have always felt contempt for nationalist or chauvinist sentiments. Yet I found myself grabbing editions of the papers as I had not done since 1939." Another group among which indifferentism has run high in the past is Jewish college students. Students have always tended to see themselves not as Jews but as individuals belonging to a wider world than the one encompassed by the concerns of the American Jewish community, including its Zionist concerns. In the nineteen-sixties this tradition of indifference was powerfully reinforced, and sometimes pushed over the edge into outright hostility, by the influence of the New Left on the American campus. To so great a degree was this the case that in recent years, according to a report in The New York Times, "assemblies of Jewish religious and secular groups have deplored the campus as a 'disaster area' for Judaism." Nevertheless, the Hillel Foundation, which for 50 years has been operating Jewish student centers on several hundred American campuses, now reports that nothing in its entire experience "prepared it for the massive and unprecedented response by Jews on campus in the October war."

This response was not only massive; it also "astonished Jewish communal leaders by its intensity" as measured by student contributions of more than a million dollars to the Israel Emergency Fund "and the rush of some 25,000 Jewish students to register as volunteer agricultural workers on Israeli farm settlements."

Yet even the magnitude and intensity of student response were as nothing compared with the explosion of support from the American Jewish community as a whole. According to the polls, a staggering 99 per cent of all American Jews supported Israel. To express this support, they could send telegrams and letters and delegations to Government officials, and they did; they could sign ads and petitions, and they did; surgeons could volunteer their services to treat wounded Israeli soldiers, and they did. But most people had no such useful services to offer. What most people could most effectively do was give money, and they did -- more of them and more of it than ever before in history. What a leader of Baltimore Jewry said of the Jews of his own city was true of Jews everywhere in America: "There was an unbelievable reaction of the Jewish community to the war. I've been in fund-raising 43 years and I've never seen such an outpouring." Similar statements were made of the response of Jews to the Six Day War in 1967. There were stories then of Jews of modest means literally sacrificing their life-savings and mortgaging their homes or otherwise borrowing money to give to Israel, an there were stories of wealthy Jews who had never shown any interest in Israel before not only giving astronomical sums but also taking the lead in raising money from others. Such stories have again been circulating through the air and in even larger numbers, for the record sums contributed in 1967 were exceeded far in 1973. In the wake of the Yom Kippur war financial support for Israel reached what one official described as "incredible heights." To be exact, the United Jewish Appeal received 3 1/2 times as much money as in 1967 and the sale of Israel bonds more than doubled -- well over a billion dollars in all. There has never been anything like it, not among Jews and not among any other group. How can we account for this extraordinary development -- the complete Zionization, as it might be called, of the American Jewish community? The Jews, after all, have never been monolithic on issues affecting Jewish destiny. They have, on the contrary, been notorious for sectarian bickering -- a habit finding tangible expression in the bewildering variety of organizations in every field of Jewish interest or endeavor, each with its own doctrine and approach. In religion, in culture, in philanthropy, and even in defense against anti-Semitism, the Jews are divided and subdivided into groups large and small whose rivalries are more frequently venomous than friendly. In spite of repeated efforts, never in the history of the American Jewish community has it proved possible to unite the Jews into a single organization that could claim to speak of them all on anything whatsoever. As we have already seen, Israel has been no exception to the rule that where there are two Jews there will be three opinions. How then has virtual unanimity been achieved on this once-sodivisive issue alone?

Part of the answer lies in the progressive erosion of the objections to Zionism which originally gave rise to the divisions. Thus none of the three varieties of anti-Zionism has stood the test of time. All of them were born before the state of Israel actually came into being, and whatever the merits of their respective arguments against the founding of a Jewish state, once such a state existed, the only meaning anti-Zionism could have in practice was to advocate its dissolution. Since, moreover, the Arabs were explicitly promising not merely to dismantle the Jewish state but to drive its inhabitants into the sea, Jews who took the anti-Zionist position inescapably found themselves lending support to the massacre of other Jews. There are Jews who in the enormity of their self-hatred do not shrink even from this, but not, it would seem, very many. So far as one can tell from a distance, those few Jews who continue to uphold the anti-Zionist cause in one of its three varieties are able to do so only by deluding themselves as to what, precisely, they are lending their support. Like anti-Zionism, non-Zionism was a product of the period when no Jewish state actually existed. Once the state of Israel came into being, the non-Zionist position became increasingly difficult to distinguish from the Zionist position. It is true that the non-Zionists would have preferred to take a more "even-handed" stand than the Zionists on the conflict between Israel and the Arabs (and they did continue to worry more about the Arab refugees than the Zionists could ever bring themselves to do). But just as the refusal of the Arabs to accept the existence of a Jewish state in the Middle East turned the anti-Zionist position into a call for the massacre of Jews, it turned evenhandedness into an acquiescence in the same adjective. For it was impossible to be evenhanded toward a dispute in which one party wanted to destroy the other, while the other wanted only to be left in peace. The decline of indifferentism is probably also a consequence of the murderous intentions of the Arabs. In the nineteen-fifties, when Israel seemed reasonably secure, the number of Jews voicing no opinion to pollsters on the dispute between Israel and the Arabs went as high as 16 per cent. In 1967, when the genocidal rhetoric of the Arabs reached a fever pitch, the proportion of Jews with no opinion went down to 1 per cent, and has stayed at that level. Evidently even for antiparochial, antinationalist individuals of Jewish origin, it is hard to remain indifferent to the possible slaughter of other Jews. At the moment, of course, the Arabs are not talking -- at least not where they can be overheard by Americans -- about the destruction of Israel or the slaughter of Jews. To Americans they speak only of the return of the territories occupied by Israel in 1967 and of the rights of the Palestinians displaced from their homes since 1948. Among themselves, however, they still speak of the destruction of Israel through a two-stage strategy. The first stage, hey say, is already in progress. Thanks to the oil weapon and the Soviet-American detente, Israel will be forced by the United States to make concessions that will weaken her even as the Arabs, with unequivocal support from the Russians, are growing stronger. Having thus been "Taiwanized" (that is, abandoned under cover of diplomatic euphemisms by the United States for the sake of a settlement with the Russians, as Taiwan was abandoned for the sake of a rapprochement with China), Israel will be ready for the second stage: a military assault aimed at its final destruction. Given this strategy, the old arguments against Jewish statehood are unlikely to recover from their moribund condition within the Jewish world.

But the Zionization of American Jewry cannot be explained wholly in terms of the erosion of the old objections to Jewish statehood as a result of the Arab refusal to accept the existence of Israel. The disappearance of these objections may help us to understand the fantastic magnitude of support for Israel among American Jews -- the fact that a full 99 per cent of them have now become Zionists, at least in the limited sense of backing the existence of a sovereign Jewish state. It cannot, however, account for the intensity of American Jewish support: the obsessive preoccupation to which so many have borne witness, the financial sacrifices, the universal need to do something, anything, for Israel. Almost everyone who has commented on this phenomenon has spoken of the residual effect of the destruction of European Jewry by the Nazis, the determinations this experience has bred in Jews everywhere to resist with all their might the massacre of yet another Jewish community. Without question such a determination has now lodged itself permanently in the souls of Jews everywhere, not only in America but even in the Soviet Union. Yet when in 1967 and then again in 1973 the Jews of Israel were suddenly and violently hurled into mortal peril, the Jews of America responded not as people doing something in a philanthropic spirit for others; they responded as though their own lives, their own families and their own homes, were immediately an imminently at stake. The feeling was -- and is -- that if Israel were to be annihilated, the Jews of America would also disappear. They might disappear, as Irving Kristol suggested, more or less voluntarily, having come to the reluctant conclusion that "the burden of Jewish history is just too grievous to bequeath to one's descendants." Or -- and this was the deepest, most primitive fear of all, rarely articulated, often repressed, but printed on the nerves of many who were astonished to discover that they even cared about Israel, let alone that they believed themselves to be personally implicated in its destiny -- they might disappear involuntarily. For if for a second time in this century, the world were to stand by while major Jewish community was being destroyed, it would be hard to evade the suspicion that an irresistible will was at work to wipe every last Jew off the face of the earth, to make this planet entirely Judenrein -- a will which, having found its instrument first in the Nazis and then in the Arabs and the Russians, would not rest until somehow and in some way it found an equally effective instrument for disposing of the last remaining major community of Jews, the one in the United States. Measured against this hidden apocalyptic terror, the open anxieties which have lately been voiced by so many American Jews over the possible eruption of a new wave of anti-Semitism are very mild indeed. there has, for example, been the fear that Jews would be blamed for the shortage of gas and oil this winter, although so far, according to the polls, the American people are blaming not the Israelis or the Jews of America for the energy crisis, but rather their own Government, the oil companies and the Arabs. A more serious fear is that a conflict may develop at Geneva between Israel and the United States over the terms of a Middle East settlement which will put American Jews into the position of having to choose between supporting their own Government and supporting Israel. It was just such a possibility that the anti-Zionists and the non-Zionists had in mind when they spoke of the problem of "dual loyalty" that a Jewish state would create for Jews in other countries. In the past,

American support for Israel was generally so firm that the issue of dual loyalty never arose. The only time the United States actively opposed Israel was in 1956 when the Eisenhower Administration forced the Israelis to withdraw from the Sinai desert after they had captured a large stretch of it as part of a coordinated effort by the British and the French to take over the Suez Canal. On that occasion, however, Israel's survival was not at stake and the American Jewish community was very ambivalent in its attitude toward the entire episode. Dual loyalty, then, was not a problem in 1956. Is it likely, as some have suggested, to become a problem now? To ask this question is to assume that loyalty for an American citizen means supporting whatever foreign policies his Government may follow, and merely to state such a proposition in postVietnam America is to expose its absurdity and its obsolescence. If, for example, the American Government were to take a position on the question of Jerusalem which the Government of Israel rejected, does anyone suppose that American Jews would be bound, as loyal American citizens, to agree with the American position, or that they would be open to charges of disloyalty if they agreed with the Israeli position? Actually, on any issue not clearly involving the fundamental security of Israel, American Jews would probably be split into various factions, as they were in 1956 and as they have frequently been in times of peace in the Middle East. But the survival of Israel is another matter. Thus if the American Government should attempt to impose a settlement at Geneva which would leave Israel in a dangerously weakened or "Taiwanized" condition, American Jews would most certainly unite in opposing it. They would argue, they would protest, they would lobby. In doing all this, they would of course be acting as Jews with a personal stake in the safety of Israel. But as it happens, they would also be at one with the preponderant sentiment of the American people in general. For the belief of the Jews of America in the desirability of American support for Israel is shared by vast numbers of their fellow citizens. In recent years, sympathy for Israel has run to about 50 per cent for the Arabs (the rest having no opinion) -- a ratio which students of polling usually consider a landslide. What is interesting about this landslide is that it owes almost nothing to the fact that Israel is a Jewish state. The reason most supporters of Israel give for their support is not that the United States has any special obligation to the Jews, but rather that "Israel is a small democratic nation which is trying to preserve its independence." By the same token, only a small minority of Americans (about 15 per cent) has ever favored the sending of troops to Israel, even if such an action were deemed necessary to save Israel from "going under." The Israelis, to be sure, have never asked for American troops, and it is hard to imagine any conditions under which they would. Yet if a situation wee to arise in which a choice had to be made between committing American military forces to combat in the Middle East and allowing Israel to perish, the Jews of America would be torn beyond endurance. Many, including some who have in other circumstances condemned American military intervention as imprudent of immoral, would find themselves inexorably driven to call for American action in this particular circumstance. In doing so they would in all likelihood run into conflict with public opinion in general. Almost certainly they would also run into conflict with other Jews, perhaps not many but some -- although it is impossible to predict what the relative proportions of response among Jews would be in so intolerable an extremity.

In the meantime, fortunately for them and for everyone else, things have not yet come to this pass. For the moment there is virtual unanimity among American Jews and a happy concurrence between them and most other Americans on the proposition that it is right for the United States to help "a small democratic nation" like Israel "which is trying to preserve its independence," especially when that independence is directly threatened by the Soviet Union. So compelling is this moral-political consideration that not even the hardships caused by the Arab oil embargo have led to a popular demand for a new "tilt" toward the Arabs in American policy. On the contrary, sympathy for Israel rose rather than fell in the polls after the embargo went into effect, and only this past January, a national sample of Americans, in another landslide (38 per cent as against 7), declared "that the United States should apply little or no pressure on Israel to relinquish Arab territories taken in the 1967 war." Of course, the Israelis themselves are willing to relinquish a good deal of the territory taken in the 1967 war in exchange for a peace that would leave them with secure and recognized boundaries; and this has been the American position as well. The question that is now troubling the sleep of so many American Jews is whether President Sadat of Egypt is right in saying that "the United States has adopted a new policy." No one imagines that the Nixon Administration would wish to see Israel destroyed. What worries the Jews of America is that the Administration, pressured by oil and detente and eager to claim another triumph in foreign affairs, might force Israel into making territorial concessions without peace and without adequate guarantees of its security in return. In the absence of any convincing evidence that the Arabs have given up their determination to destroy Israel, and since the Soviet Union is clearly ready to provide them with the military means for accomplishing this objective, such a change in American policy would place Israel in mortal danger -- in danger, that is, not merely in danger of losing its independence but of losing its life. It is this very danger that has turned almost every Jew in America into a Zionist, and so long as it goes on hanging in the ominous political air, there will be no defections from the Zionism to which they have all by now been so thoroughly and passionately and unequivocally converted. Norman Podhoretz, author of "Making It" and other books, is editor of Commentary.