The Holocaust Industry (3 page)

(support for a Jewish state would alienate the Arab world). To secure US interests in the Middle East,

the Eisenhower Administration balanced support for Israel and for Arab nations, favoring, however,

the Arabs.

Intermittent Israeli clashes with the United States over policy issues culminated in the Suez crisis of

1956, when Israel colluded with Britain and France to attack Egypt's nationalist leader, Gamal Abdel

Nasser. Although Israel's lightning victory and seizure of the Sinai Peninsula drew general attention to

its strategic potential, the United States still counted it as only one among several regional assets.

Accordingly, President Eisenhower forced Israel's full, virtually unconditional withdrawal from the

Sinai. During the crisis, American Jewish leaders did briefly back Israeli efforts to wrest American

concessions, but ultimately, as Arthur Hertzberg recalls, they "preferred to counsel Israel to heed

[Eisenhower] rather than oppose the wishes of the leader of the United States."
13

Except as an occasional object of charity, Israel practically dropped from sight in American Jewish

life soon after the founding of the state. In fact, Israel was not important to American Jews. In his

1957 survey, Nathan Glazer reported that Israel "had remarkably slight effects on the inner life of

American Jewry."
14
Membership in the Zionist Organization of America dropped from the hundreds

of thousands in 1948 to the tens of thousands in the 1960s. Only 1 in 20 American Jews cared to visit

Israel before June 1967. In his 1956 reelection, which occurred immediately after he forced Israel's

humiliating withdrawal from the Sinai, the already considerable Jewish support for Eisenhower

increased. In the early 1960s, Israel even faced a drubbing for the Eichmann kidnapping from sections

of elite Jewish opinion like Joseph Proskauer, past president of the AJC, Harvard historian Oscar

Handlin and the Jewish-owned
Washington Post.
the kidnapping of Eichmann," Erich Fromm opined,

"is an act of lawlessness of exactly the type of which the Nazis themselves . . . have been guilty."
15

Across the political spectrum, American Jewish intellectuals proved especially indifferent to Israel's

fate. Detailed studies of the left-liberal New York Jewish intellectual scene through the 1960s barely

mention Israel.
16
Just before the June war, the AJC sponsored a symposium on "Jewish Identity Here

and Now." Only three of the thirty-one "best minds in the Jewish community" even alluded to Israel;

two of them did so only to dismiss its relevance.
17
Telling irony: just about the only two public

Jewish intellectuals who had forged a bond with Israel before June 1967 were Hannah Arendt and

Noam Chomsky.
18

Then came the June war. Impressed by Israel's overwhelming display of force, the United States

moved to incorporate it as a strategic asset. (Already before the June war the United States had

cautiously tilted toward Israel as the Egyptian and Syrian regimes charted an increasingly independent

course in the mid-1960s.) Military and economic assistance began to pour in as Israel turned into a

proxy for US power in the Middle East.

For American Jewish elites, Israel's subordination to US power was a windfall. Zionism had sprung

from the premise that assimilation was a pipe dream, that Jews would always be perceived as

potentially disloyal aliens. To resolve this dilemma, Zionists sought to establish a homeland for the

Jews. In fact, Israel's founding exacerbated the problem, at any rate for Diaspora Jewry: it gave the

charge of dual loyalty institutional expression. Paradoxically, after June 1967,
Israel facilitated

assimilation in the United States: Jews now stood on the front lines defending America — indeed,

"Western civilization" — against the retrograde Arab hordes. Whereas before 1967 Israel conjured the

bogey of dual loyalty, it now connoted super-loyalty. After all, it was not Americans but Israelis

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fighting and dying to protect US interests. And unlike the American GIs in Vietnam, Israeli fighters

were not being humiliated by Third World upstarts.
19

Accordingly, American Jewish elites suddenly discovered Israel. After the 1967 war, Israel's military

elan could be celebrated because its guns pointed in the right direction - against America's enemies. Its

martial prowess might even facilitate entry into the inner sanctums of American power. Previously

Jewish elites could only offer a few lists of Jewish subversives; now, they could pose as the natural

interlocutors for America's newest strategic asset. From bit players, they could advance to top billing

in the Cold War drama. Thus for American Jewry, as well as the United States, Israel became a

strategic asset.

In a memoir published just before the June war, Norman Podhoretz giddily recalled attending a state

dinner at the White House that "included not a single person who was not visibly and absolutely

beside himself with delight to be there."
20
Although already editor of the leading American Jewish

periodical,
Commentary,
his memoir includes only one fleeting allusion to Israel. What did Israel have

to offer an ambitious American Jew? In a later memoir, Podhoretz remembered that after June 1967

Israel became "the religion of the American Jews."
21
Now a prominent supporter of Israel, Podhoretz

could boast not merely of attending a White House dinner but of meeting tête-à-tête with the President

to deliberate on the National Interest.

After the June war, mainstream American Jewish organizations worked full time to firm up the

American-Israeli alliance. In the case of the ADL, this included a far-flung domestic surveillance

operation with ties to Israeli and South African intelligence.
22
Coverage of Israel in
The New York

Times
increased dramatically after June 1967. The 1955 and 1965 entries for Israel in
The New York

Times Index
each filled 60 column inches. The entry for Israel in 1975 ran to fully 260 column inches.

"When I want to feel better," Wiesel reflected in 1973, "I turn to the Israeli items in
The New York

Times.
"
23
Like Podhoretz, many mainstream American Jewish intellectuals also suddenly found

"religion" after the June war. Novick reports that Lucy Dawidowicz, the doyenne of Holocaust

literature, had once been a "sharp critic of Israel." Israel could not demand reparations from Germany,

she railed in 1953, while evading responsibility for displaced Palestinians: "Morality cannot be that

flexible." Yet almost immediately after the June war, Dawidowicz became a "fervent supporter of

Israel," acclaiming it as "the corporate paradigm for the ideal image of the Jew in the modern

world."
24

A favorite posture of the post-1967 born-again Zionists was tacitly to juxtapose their own outspoken

support for a supposedly beleaguered Israel against the cravenness of American Jewry during The

Holocaust. In fact, they were doing exactly what American Jewish elites had always done: marching

in lockstep with American power. The educated classes proved particularly adept at striking heroic

poses. Consider the prominent left-liberal social critic Irving Howe. In 1956 the journal Howe edited,

Dissent,
condemned the "combined attack on Egypt" as "immoral." Although truly standing alone,

Israel was also taken to task for "cultural chauvinism," a "quasi-messianic sense of manifest destiny,"

and "an undercurrent of expansionism."
25
After the October 1973 war, when American support for

Israel peaked, Howe published a personal manifesto "filled with anxiety so intense" in defense of

isolated Israel. The Gentile world, he lamented in a Woody Allen-like parody, was awash with

anti-Semitism. Even in Upper Manhattan, he lamented, Israel was "no longer chic": everyone, apart

from himself, was allegedly in thrall to Mao, Fanon and Guevara.
26

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As America's strategic asset, Israel was not without critics. Besides the increasing international

censure of its refusal to negotiate a settlement with the Arabs in accordance with United Nations

resolutions and its truculent support of American global ambitions,
27
Israel had to cope with domestic

US dissent as well. In American ruling circles, so-called Arabists maintained that putting all the eggs

in the Israel basket while ignoring Arab elites undermined US national interests.

Some argued that Israel's subordination to US power and occupation of neighboring Arab states were

not only wrong in principle but also harmful to its own interests. Israel would become increasingly

militarized and alienated from the Arab world. For Israel's new American Jewish "supporters,"

however, such talk bordered on heresy: an independent Israel at peace with its neighbors was

worthless; an Israel aligned with currents in the Arab world seeking independence from the United

States was a disaster. Only an Israeli Sparta beholden to American power would do, because only then

could US Jewish leaders act as the spokesmen for American imperial ambitions. Noam Chomsky has

suggested that these "supporters of Israel" should more properly be called "supporters of the moral

degeneration and ultimate destruction of Israel."

To protect their strategic asset, American Jewish elites «remembered» The Holocaust.
29
The

conventional account is that they did so because, at the time of the June war, they believed Israel to be

in mortal danger and were thus gripped by fears of a «second Holocaust." This claim does not

withstand scrutiny.

Consider the first Arab Israeli war. On the eve of independence in 1948, the threat against Palestinian

Jews seemed far more ominous. David Ben-Gurion declared that "700,000 Jews" were "pitted against

27 million Arabs — one against forty." The United States joined a UN arms embargo on the region,

solidifying a clear edge in weaponry enjoyed by the Arab armies. Fears of another Nazi Final Solution

haunted American Jewry. Deploring that the Arab states were now "arming Hitler's henchman, the

Mufti, while the United States was enforcing its arms embargo," the AJC anticipated "mass suicide

and a complete holocaust in Palestine." Even Secretary of State George Marshall and the CIA openly

predicted certain Jewish defeat in the event of war.
30
Although the "stronger side, in fact, won"

(historian Benny Morris), it was not a walkover for Israel. During the first months of the war, in early

1948, and especially as independence was declared in May, Israel's chances for survival were put at

"fifty-fifty" by Yigael Yadin, Haganah chief of operations. Without a secret Czech arms deal, Israel

would likely not have survived.
31
After fighting for a year, Israel suffered 6,000 casualties, one

percent of its population. Why, then, did The Holocaust not become a focus of American Jewish life

after the 1948 war?

Israel quickly proved to be far less vulnerable in 1967 than in its independence struggle. Israeli and

American leaders knew beforehand that Israel would easily prevail in a war with the Arab states. This

reality became strikingly obvious as Israel routed its Arab neighbors in a few days. As Novick reports,