If you knew nothing about American politics you might have assumed, listening to the candidates during the 2008 election season, that the Jewish community constituted the most significant ethnic voting bloc in the United States.
In a way, the obsessive focus on Israel made sense. The Palestinian-Israeli peace process had ground to a halt under the latest Republican administration. By the end of the Bush years, Israel was contending with a Hamas-run Palestinian state in Gaza, a Hezbollah-dominated Lebanon in the north, and a nuclear arms program in Iran aimed, at least rhetorically, at Israel. The verdict was clear: America had mismanaged its Israel portfolio.
If the Republicans were going to prevent Israel from becoming a major election issue, they were going to have to bury it once and for all.
The resulting efforts—by both parties—to convince American Jewish voters that their concern for Israel was taken seriously was unprecedented. For the first time ever, Israel was visited by each nominee like it was a campaign stop akin to New Jersey. Emphasizing their respective commitments to Israel’s security, touring the country’s hot spots, meeting with opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu—the Obama and McCain campaigns both paid homage, as if to the Jewish people’s real government, in the hopes that such respect would resonate strongly back home.
But the two parties maintained the polarity of their positions. Barack Obama and Joseph Biden went out of their way to explain exactly how the Republicans had worsened Israel’s security, not enhanced it. Sounding at times like he’d taken his cues directly from Israel’s center-left daily Haaretz, Obama pointedly told a Jewish audience in Ohio that the Republicans did not espouse Jewish interests, but held a distinctly Likud party point of view.
Americans seem to have assimilated Israeli political culture so thoroughly over the previous decades that they could appreciate Obama’s specific ideological nuances. The same thing happened with the McCain campaign, which, for better or worse, parroted a right-wing approximation of Jewish-Israeli politics, replete with the crude stereotyping, fearmongering, and incitement that are the hallmarks of right-wing rhetoric in Israel.
But, along with the usual gestures toward peace in the Middle East, we also saw a remarkably high number of attacks on Islam, on Iran, and on Arab Americans. There was the Republican outing of Barack Obama as a ‘secret Muslim’ and the promotion of this theory to both elderly Jews and conservative Christians. One survey, released in October, showed that at a sizable portion of the Texas voters polled actually believed Obama to be a Muslim.
The other glaring example was the McCain campaign’s last-minute attempt to use Barack Obama’s friendship with Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi as evidence of the Democratic candidate’s secret sympathies for the Palestinians. During the last week of the the presidential race, McCain and campaign spokesperson Michael Goldfarb (a journalist on loan from the Weekly Standard) completely misrepresented Khalidi’s politics, contending that this half-Lebanese, half-Palestinian, US-born historian was in fact a Palestinian radical and former spokesperson for the PLO.
For anyone familiar with Khalidi’s work, there was no doubt that he was a critic of America’s policies in the Middle East, especially its support of Israel. But to extrapolate that Khalidi was somehow a subversive, on par with radical Islamists, was even more ludicrous than using Barack Obama’s middle name, Hussein, to discredit his candidacy. A progressive intellectual well-liked by many of his Jewish colleagues, Khalidi is not only an independent thinker, but also holds the respect of fairly conservative Zionists like The New Republic’s Martin Peretz.
So what was this about? As Colin Powell put it when he declared his support for Obama, there is absolutely nothing wrong with being an American Muslim—but to suggest as much is. To go one step further and target a secular, educated Arab American as though he embodied of every possible concern ‘average Americans’and Jews supposedly have about Muslims is even worse. Never mind that not every Arab American is religious or is of Islamic background—Khalidi is himself half-Christian by birth. But it is just this kind of complexity that Republican promoters of anti-Arab bias seek to simplify.
As shocked as many Americans were to learn of Khalidi’s scapegoating, the Republicans’ choice could not have been more perfect. Not because the professor heads up a research center at Columbia that has been the target of criticism by conservative education activists, anxious about how Middle Eastern studies is taught in the United States. Rather, because Khalidi is such a liberal, and how increasingly representative his ideology is among Arab Americans. Though he is far better-schooled than most Americans, Khalidi’s intellectual achievements make it difficult to define him by political alliances that require a hostile and unreasonable other, particularly at a time of continued conflict in the Middle East. As long as it can be established that someone like Khalidi is an extremist bent on Israel’s destruction, there can be no place for Arabs at America’s table.
Ironically, it is because of the value that American conservatives have attached to Israel that they feel free to incite against Arab and Muslim Americans. Eager to attract Jewish voters, Republicans trumpet their party’s alleged support for Israel, pointing to everything from the Judeo-Christian values that the two countries share to the fact that Israel is the sole democracy in the Middle East.
Even if one is disenchanted with Democratic positions on Israel, or finds Obama ‘naive’ in matters of foreign policy, the Republicans’ logic is transparent. Israel, as a trope, is of tremendous ideological value for American conservatives— and, under Bush, it became a cover for discrimination. Whether it is used to make inroads with certain classes of Jewish voters (fiscal conservatives and the Orthodox) or the stereotypical ‘Florida voter,’ there is not much to argue with. Whether it is due to agreement over monetary policy or a shared emphasis on the positive role of religion in the public sphere—as Jews, they are more welcome than ever.
There is nothing intrinsically wrong with the idea of Jews finding a place for themselves in such spaces. Especially in the United States, where Jews are frequently stereotyped for their liberalism (witness how often Israeli conservatives complain that US Jews don’t sufficiently appreciate the value of Republicans to Israel’s security and well-being); they too have made tremendous contributions to conservative politics and culture. From the impact of economists such as Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan, and political philosophers such as Leo Strauss, to the influence exerted by former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, not to mention today’s neoconservatives, Jews have made their mark within the most reactionary American economic and political circles. The Jewish impact upon American civilization is enormous, and transcends every conceivable political boundary.
The problem is that despite this fact, during the Bush administration, the way the Jewish-conservative nexus in the United States best manifested itself was not in its promotion of the invasion of Iraq, but in its abuse of the role that Israel plays in American politics.
Why did the figure of Israel have to play such a negative role? Though the demonization of Rashid Khalidi made anti-Palestinian agitation explicitly a part of the election, it was not hard to ascertain that by Islamizing Obama, the intent to drive Jews into the Republican camp was already there. Especially noteworthy were repeated attempts to demonstrate that Obama would not be ‘good for Israel’ and would help facilitate a ‘second Holocaust,’ a lie Republican Jewish activists in Pennsylvania reportedly spread.
Despite the high level of anti-Muslim ideology and anti-Semitism of evangelical Christians in the United States, Jews are more frequently associated with anti-Muslim prejudice because it is assumed that they fear for Israel, and therefore hate Arabs and Muslims even more stridently.
Given how many Jews ended up voting for Obama—78 percent of registered Jewish voters—it is hard to argue that such Jewish fears of Muslims played a role in this election. So, what do we make of right-wing incitement against Islam in America, and Arab Americans like Rashid Khalidi? If most Jews find themselves drawn to Obama despite such urgings, how do we interpret it? Surely there is serious damage being done here.
Such forms of agitation construct the most vulgar of barriers between peoples—in this case, two American communities that share roots in the Middle East and bear unique personal witness to the region’s troubles. In the same way that US foreign policy has made it increasingly difficult to reconcile Jews and Arabs in the Middle East, these discriminatory endeavors inscribe the same divisions into the diaspora we share. Indeed, it is hard to not see in the kind of language used to classify Obama as a Muslim, and Khalidi a terrorist, a perverse desire to bring the war back West, and to ensure the same stresses that characterize life in the Middle East are felt in America as well.
It seems that wherever we go, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is inescapable. And it seems that the final effort to end the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians still has to come from abroad. Six decades of continuous war have made it nearly impossible for either side to make this happen by themselves, no matter how hard they might wish for it, or try. Yet, it is difficult to imagine how a resolution could be possible when anti-Semitism, such as that employed by the Republicans, has become so broadly applied in US politics.
Though many progressives have argued since the failure of the Oslo accords that the United States couldn’t have played a positive role in Mideast peacemaking, it is even harder to see how it could do so now. While it is clear from the recent presidential campaign that an Obama administration will be more ideologically inclined in this direction, it is also difficult to imagine the stresses it will have to contend with to reach that point: withdrawing American forces from Iraq, making peace with Iran, and ‘imposing an unworkable peace agreement’ on Israel, as conservatives fear.
Given the optimism surrounding Obama’s victory, even though there are pressing economic and civil liberties issues to address first at home, it would be a mitzvah (as we say in Hebrew) for the United States to begin to help rebuild a part of the world that it has worked so diligently to help destroy.
Photo by flickr user jamestraceur, used under a Creative Commnons license.
