USA & Israel: who's in charge?

What follows is another account of naiveté and betrayal. These make an old, old tale so I’ll try to be quick in telling it. Many Americans of my generation already know it well in one form or another.

Born in the thirties, before WWII, when there was no such thing as Israel, I was a little WASP baby in New York. Followed a childhood passed on army bases and among cousins in the South. After the war, came later school years in a ‘restricted’ mile-square Westchester suburb called Bronxville where there were a few Catholics, no Jews and certainly no blacks. Thus the making of an innocent. Three years in the Marine Corps produced no gain in sophistication.

Until late adolescence, Jews were like homosexuals: I’d little notion either group existed. However, once gradually exposed to this exotic culture through travel and reading – early Salinger late in high school after someone’s parent complained, on moral grounds, about the teacher’s plan to do Tess of the d’Urbervilles - I adopted it eagerly, with wide-open arms, wondering where I’d been all my life. It was hard to get enough. Saul Bellow, Leon Uris, Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, Joseph Heller, Isaac Babel and the hilarious Isaac Bashhevis Singer shone among my favourite authors. I dated ‘hot’ Jewish girls, I discovered the delicatessen, cheese cake, cold cuts, bagels, lox, pickled herring. I even began to preach, particularly to anti-Semites, the blessings on an earnest, sheltered US culture brought by Jewish immigration: respect for learning, appreciation of classical as well as folk music, much-needed variety in food, wryness and irony in humour. My vocabulary grew far richer. I day-dreamed about spending time in a kibbutz. A similarly besotted colleague and I dubbed ourselves ‘honorary Jews’.

In Paris in the sixties I met my first Israeli, a guy my age, a captain, as I remember, in the Israeli army. To my increasing horror, as he and I spoke about our nationalities and experiences, this young man grew steadily more and more repulsive: crass, boorish, fascistic, smug. Because of what had happened in history, and especially to European Jews during the Holocaust, Israelis, he claimed, had the perfect right to do whatever was necessary to protect themselves. Arabs were lazy scum standing in the way and got what was coming to them. He assured me that the great majority of Israelis felt as he did. The US government, he promised, was guaranteed to come to their rescue in the last resort.

From this point, my naiveté about Israel began in classic fashion at last to dissolve. Thus we grow. My guilt, though, in admitting genuine dislike of an individual Jew would, in time, slowly be replaced by a sense of wholesale betrayal. How could such things befall an ancient and worthy culture? Was this what Zionism entailed? Were most Israelis really of that young Army captain’s opinion? How could they be so certain that the US, my native country, would always back them up?

Seeking answers, not in any systematic way, to these and other questions has become for me latterly a kind of intellectual sideline. Incidental information about private funds sent regularly from the US to Israel, over and above massive government financial support, grows in significance. So too does dawning awareness and outrage over the power – self-confidently audacious activities – of the Israel lobbies in Washington and elsewhere. Knowledge of military arms and intelligence support in addition to finance has become almost banal. Evidence of the unexpected and oddly-vehement backing of Israeli causes by apparently unconnected yet influential US politicians has become equally routine. Swelling detestation of the US in surrounding Middle Eastern states now seems entirely understandable. The increasing, gratuitous brutality reported about Israeli military and security forces, the stories of foreign aid workers being discouraged to the point of assassination, and finally the evidence of war crime in the recent Gaza invasion by Israel, both on a personal as well as a national scale, all this, and more, has brought me to the tritely-named sadder but wiser condition in which I find myself.

It now seems very clear that the US must disengage, quickly and finally, with the state of Israel. The losers would be the extreme conservative wings of Israeli politics and religion. The rest of us stand to gain, don’t you think?