World

ANTI-SEMITISM FRACAS

The Democrats find a way to tie themselves in knots, ver 342

The Democrats find a way to tie themselves in knots, ver 342
Democratic Representative from Minnesota Ilhan Omar (L) and Democratic Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (R) attend a media event to push for campaign finance reform outside the US Capitol in Washington, DC, USA, 08 March 2019. On 07 March, in response to Omar's recent criticism of Israel, which critics called anti-Semitic, the House passed a resolution condemning 'hateful expressions of intolerance.' EPA-EFE/JIM LO SCALZO

The kerfuffle over newly minted Representative Ilhan Omar’s comments critical of the dual allegiance of American Jews and the impact of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee have stirred up a hornet’s nest in the US Congress. Have they made it harder or easier to criticise Israeli policies?

Let’s see now, it has only been a little over two months since the American Congress, and specifically, the House of Representatives, began its new session. This followed a sweeping defeat of dozens of Republican congressmen and candidates in districts all across the nation, and most especially among those suburban and peri-urban districts that heretofore had been the stomping grounds for many moderate Republicans.

It is true they have managed to begin some contentious – and potentially very damaging to the president – hearings in carrying out the traditional role of congressional oversight of the executive branch (i.e. looking into the many “waywardnesses” of the Trump administration); to formulate a broad legislative agenda, and even to pass several bits of legislation such as HR 1. That focuses on substantial electoral reforms, even though the measure is unlikely to be passed in the Republican-controlled Senate. Moreover, even if the measure is passed there by a modest margin with the help of a handful of independent-minded Republicans, the president will almost certainly veto it, and there will not be the support needed to override his veto.

However, despite all of this rather important stuff (and much more), for the past week, the Democrats have also been fixated on the question of anti-Semitism in American public life. Or something like that.

In legislative terms at least, this began when one of the newly elected members of the Democrats’ “blue wave”, Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota’s fifth district, sent out social media postings that were interpreted by some as anti-Semitic, or anti-Israel, or positively inelegant, or just plain foolish and less than knowledgeable.

Omar is a Somali-American who was elected in 2018 in a district that includes all of the city of Minneapolis, and some of its suburbs. She had come to the US as a teenaged refugee from Somalia. Her district has a significant Jewish population, as well as a substantial Somali-American community.

Previously, Omar had been a one-term state legislator, elected under the banner of the Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party. (A quick history lesson: the DFL Party is the name of what progressives had relabelled the Democrats in Minnesota after 1944 as an element of their party’s merger with the progressive movement’s Farmer-Labor Party, supporting a range of policy measures such as national civil rights legislation and what eventually became the Medicare programme.)

Omar’s election two years ago to the state legislature had made her the first Somali-American elected to any legislative office in the country, and the first naturalised citizen from Africa, as well as the first Somali-American, ever elected to the US Congress in 2018. She succeeded Keith Ellison as her district’s congressman. Ellison had been the first Muslim member of the US Congress, and he is now his state’s attorney general.

In her brief public career, for her, her key issues, according to her public statements, are that she wants to focus on increasing the national minimum wage, providing greater housing and healthcare benefit programmes, establishing student loan debt forgiveness, legal protections for the 800,000 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals living in the country, and abolishing ICE (the country’s immigration and customs enforcement office).

She has opposed the Trump administration’s immigration policies such as his controversial travel bans, and has also been outspoken on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, strongly criticising Israeli West Bank settlements and Israel’s military actions directed at Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. As part of that position, she has also been particularly outspoken in opposing the reported influence of pro-Israeli lobbying organisations such as AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee). And, that, of course, is where the trouble began.

In several social media postings, Omar made it clear that in her view, Jewish influence on American Middle East policy “was all about the Benjamins”; and then, to layer it on a bit further, that American Jews were demonstrating a dual allegiance to Israel and America. For those who didn’t immediately grasp the meaning of those “Benjamins”, she was not talking (specifically) about Binyamin Netanyahu, but, rather, in street talk code about American $100 notes, with their engraving of the face of founding father Benjamin Franklin in the cartouche in the centre of the front side of the banknote.

To many American Jews (and many others as well), these messages were far too close for comfort in content, first of all, to a hoary old anti-Semitic trope that Jews secretly controlled the world’s naïve politicians through their monetary wiles and financial wizardry.

(This has played out in the way George Soros of the Open Society Foundation has been pilloried in the past several years by populist regimes in Europe and, on occasion, by American President Trump as well, for Soros’ trying, well, trying to run the world.)

Second, the issue of dual allegiance channelled another old idea that Jews anywhere were amoral, rootless “cosmopolitans”, unconnected to any one nation. They were luft mensch, a people who were not really Americans, just as all those fine people who had marched through Charlottesville, Virginia had been saying in their chants about “blood and soil”, like the other unpleasant fascists and neo-fascists of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Whether Rep Omar knew and fully understood the ugly, under-the-rock connotations to her comments was a pregnant question, let alone whether she actually meant, consciously, to allude to that background, her comments certainly got attention nationally. In her home district, where her election had been fuelled by support from minorities – African-American, Jews, among others – the news of her new messages, per media reports, appear to have left numbers of her supporters confused and increasingly unhappy.

Further, the specific point of that reference by her to the “Benjamins”, effectively, was that “The Jewish lobby”, and most specifically AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee), exercised far too much power and influence over American foreign policy, making politicians virtually their captive on the Middle East. The second point, the nature of allegiance, was actually more incendiary still, implying that Jewish Americans (in Congress) and elsewhere are fatally caught between two stools – loyalty to the US, yes, but also to a Middle Eastern state that embodies the national impulse of their religious values and beliefs.

It is certainly true that AIPAC has some serious influence in Washington – although if the truth be told, AIPAC likes to insist it has much more influence than it actually has. According to the best statistics, it has around 100,000 or so members, but that number pales in contrast to the membership of the National Rifle Association and the Association for the Advancement of Retired Persons. All three are lobbying bodies, designed to represent and advance the organisation’s stated interests with government officials and offices. AIPAC’s influence has waxed and waned, depending on the president in power, with rather less influence with Presidents Carter, Clinton and Obama than with Reagan, the Bushes and now Donald Trump.

AIPAC itself does not make direct political contributions to individual candidates, rather concentrating on being one of the three most influential lobbying bodies in the national capital – and in keeping its connections open with office holders. That said, many of its members obviously do contribute to individual candidates in American elections, and, like other lobbying bodies, the organisation is very careful to inform members whom the organisation believes members should support with their own contributions and via other support.

In fact, in recent times, a key political contributor in American presidential elections has been Sheldon Adelson, a political right-wing supporter of Republican candidates who made his cash through ownership of casinos in East Asia and a hi-tech industry show in Las Vegas.

However, in today’s American political universe, it is crucial to understand that a key locus of influence on American-Middle East policy resides with the 35 million or so voters who are evangelical/fundamentalist/born-again Christians now closely interwoven into the Republican Party. They vote overwhelmingly for Republican presidential candidates, and for theological reasons (the need for the final battle in the Middle East against evil, and the imminent final days for the ascension of the righteous to heaven), they have become a key electoral base for Republican positions on the Middle East and Israel as well as numerous domestic social issues.

That said, a large majority of Americans of all backgrounds and party affiliations have continued to support Israel as a democratic state in a difficult region, at least since the early 1950s. (In the earliest days of Israel’s independence, US government support for that state was to be found in the White House, as both the State Department and Defense Department were more standoffish, based on their geopolitical considerations about the region’s energy exports.)

Since the 1932 Roosevelt-Hoover election in the midst of the Great Depression, a majority of American Jews have consistently voted Democratic, regardless of the candidate, just as African-Americans are similarly a major voter bloc for the same party. Voting behaviour studies consistently show domestic and economic/social issues have been the predominant determinants of voting behaviour, rather than specific foreign policy concerns. Moreover, AIPAC certainly does not represent all American Jews, nor are its current positions, vis-à-vis the current Israeli government, ones that a growing number of American Jews can easily endorse.

In recent times, AIPAC’s increasingly assertive support for Binyamin Netanyahu’s government has put it at odds with many American Jews. They – like many others – are increasingly troubled by the Netanyahu government’s repressive policies directed at Palestinians in the West Bank, and away from any real movement towards real negotiations for a two-state solution. They are troubled, further, by AIPAC’s support for Israeli policies establishing new settlements in Palestinian territories; and, most recently, such people are concerned by policies increasingly alienating Israeli-Arab citizens from the national polity, and Netanyahu’s embrace of a far-right campaign coalition partner for the upcoming election.

AIPAC’s alliance with the then-Republican majority of both houses of Congress and the Netanyahu government came into full focus when Congress invited the Israeli prime minister to speak to a joint session of the Congress, without even engaging in the chimaera of consultations with then-President Obama. This act gained increased criticism of AIPAC by a variety of American Jewish organisations and influential individuals for having turned support for Israel from a more general American concept into a harshly partisan one, woven around support for an increasingly embarrassing and increasingly hard to defend Netanyahu government.

Or as New York Times columnist Tom Friedman (himself born in Minnesota’s fifth congressional district) wrote the other day, while disagreeing with the congresswoman on many things,

The other thing that Omar and I have in common, as others have noted, is that we both don’t like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) — the organisation at the center of the Israel lobby — and have spoken in very blunt language about its strong-arm political tactics.

But that is also where our differences begin. I don’t like AIPAC because I strongly believe in the right of the Jewish people to build a nation-state in their ancient homeland — a nation-state envisaged by its founders to reflect the best of Jewish and democratic values. And I believe AIPAC for many years has not only become a rubber stamp on the right-wing policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, which has resulted in tens of thousands of Israeli settlers now ensconced in the heart of the West Bank, imperilling Israel as a democracy. AIPAC has also been responsible for making support for Israel a Republican cause, not a bipartisan issue, which poses a real danger to Israel’s support in America in the long run, and particularly on college campuses.”

This past week, the Democratic leadership of the House of Representatives attempted to quell this nasty mess, evolving out of Rep Omar’s tweets by, first, sponsoring a House resolution that would have condemned anti-Semitism, thus implicitly administering a slap on Omar’s hand. But, in order to achieve unanimity among the Democratic caucus, the resolution was broadened out to include all hate speech and actions, such as Islamophobic behaviour and anti-LGBT comments. Eventually, this broader measure passed the House, with many Republican members joining in as well, although, critically, 23 Republican legislators voted against it, including Iowa Congressman Steve King, a man whose public utterances have been about as angrily and hatefully white supremacist as one can get and not be subject to universal approbation.

Liz Cheney (the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney and now a Wyoming Republican congresswoman) and Donald Trump both found some extraordinary chutzpah in the midst of all this. They charged that the Democrats were the anti-Semitic and anti-Jewish party in America, apparently by virtue of the support for the wider, more inclusive compass of the eventual resolution, rather than having it hone in specifically and solely on anti-Semitism – and Rep Omar’s alleged sins – and driving her right out of Washington, DC on a rail, as Americans used to say.

As things stand now, Rep Omar has admitted her language was more than a tad impolitic. Meanwhile, the Democratic congressional leadership is, just like the lyrics of that Dusty Springfield classic, Wishin’ and hopin’ and thinkin’ and prayin’, Plannin’ and dreamin’ …” such that they can get back to the business of investigating Donald Trump, blocking “the wall”, and trying to figure out budgetary compromises that can pass the Senate in spite of that house governed by Republicans.

And perhaps most important of all, they are hoping this uproar will not splinter the Democratic Party (with the left wing part of the party snipping or worse) as the party heads into the now-rapidly approaching primary season, just as there is the real possibility they could actually unseat the incumbent president in the 2020 election, and even gain control of the Senate for good measure. Some, of course, are now worried that this affair will make it harder than ever to criticise the Israeli government’s policies.

Curiously, in all of this sturm und drang in Washington, the Omar affair has barely been visible in Israel. They apparently have rather more on their minds, including the growing possibility Binyamin Netanyahu will actually be indicted for various forms of corruption, and/or that he will be defeated by a middle-of-the-road coalition led by retired General Benny Gantz of the newly formed Blue and White Party. Gantz could come to power, with the possible tacit support of Israeli Arab voters, thereby removing Netanyahu from power after all those contentious years.

Israeli voters are probably also transfixed by the evolving circumstances in Syria, and so a snit fight over the ideas of one American legislator doesn’t matter all that much to them. DM

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