American-Israeli Relationship Comes Under Fire

 

By Henry Srebrnik, Saint John Tlegraph-Journal

Criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza, anger over the Iran war, and primary election results in New York and Colorado all suggest Israel’s solid support from Washington may be on borrowed time.

Three pro-Palestinian candidates backed by New York mayor Zohran Mamdani, an ardent critic of Israel, defeated moderates in Democratic congressional primaries in the city June 23. A fierce opponent of Israel won a Democratic primary in Denver a week later.

In New York, Brad Lander defeated Congressman Dan Goldman, one of Congress’s strongest defenders of Israel. Darializa Avila Chevalier unseated veteran Congressman Adriano Espaillat. Claire Valdez won her nomination while advocating a reassessment of U.S. military assistance to Israel.

In Denver, Melat Kiros defeated 15-term incumbent Diana DeGette on June 30. She has justified the 2023 Hamas attack on Israel as the “inevitable consequence of apartheid” and “decades of occupation.”  Her stance on Israel is that it should be eliminated in favor of a one-state solution.

These victories and the growing support for the left-wing Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which supports the Palestinian cause, suggest that positions once considered fringe within the Democratic Party are gaining traction and highlight how criticism of Israel has become an increasingly potent force in Democratic Party politics.

It should be remembered that the day after the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel, the New York City chapter of the DSA held a gathering in Times Square to show their support for the Palestinian cause, marching under the banner “by any means necessary.” This was the start of a season of protest that featured encampments and demonstrations at many New York universities.

Candidates endorsed by the DSA have scored victories in 35 primary elections so far this year, including upsets against entrenched incumbents. The DSA has backed 150 candidates this cycle: 35 advanced from their primaries or were unopposed, while 34 have lost.

This may ultimately be remembered as a watershed moment in American politics. Israel may not be able to count on solid support from Washington in the future, whether in concrete assistance like billions of dollars in yearly military aid, in symbolic backing like reliable vetoes of anti-Israel resolutions at the United Nations, or even in tax exemptions for U.S. charities benefiting Israeli causes.

Pro-Israel groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) poured money into defending incumbents in many of these contests. Their defeats were described by some House Democrats as an “earthquake” and a setback for the party establishment.

“This is a massive win for the progressive movement against the establishment in New York City, which is the epicenter of power for the Democratic Party,” Congressman Ro Khanna, a progressive California Democrat plotting a 2028 presidential run, said in an interview.

A survey published June 24 by Quinnipiac University found that 48 per cent of voters think the U.S. is too supportive of Israel. This is the highest percentage since Quinnipiac University first asked this question of registered voters in January 2017.

Ironically, many of AIPAC’s efforts to combat the rise of antisemitism on the left appear to have deepened Democratic hostility toward the organization. During a campaign rally with Senator Bernie Sanders in Vermont prior to the vote, Mamdani denounced AIPAC as “monsters” who “move millions in dark money to accomplish a single goal: To preserve their power so that they can turn us against one another instead of our leaders turning towards the moral change we all know to be necessary.”

Anti-AIPAC outside spending kept the DSA candidates competitive. That included Justice Democrats and American Priorities, the new PAC designed to counter AIPAC in Democratic primaries. American Priorities spent $2.1 million in the Valdez and Chevalier primaries. 

Republicans have witnessed the ideological drift of their opponents firsthand. “The Democratic Party is being hijacked by the DSA via Zohran Mamdani,” Joseph Hernandez, the Republican nominee for New York state comptroller, remarked. “I think these people could not be more anti-American.” Stated National Republican Congressional Committee spokesman Mike Marinella, “Americans should be terrified by where the Democrat Party is headed.”

Support for Israel was one of the least controversial positions in Democratic Party politics. That consensus has not merely weakened; it has collapsed. Opposition to Israel is now the litmus test in Democratic Party politics. “There’s a cliff, and we’re heading towards it,” warned Daniel C. Kurtzer, a Princeton University professor who was ambassador to Israel under President George W. Bush.

In the past, Congressional support was bipartisan, a reflection of pro-Israel public sentiment. That is no longer the case. Since the start of the Gaza war Israel is no longer the public’s favourite. Within the Democratic Party, a growing majority no longer sees Israel as reflecting American values. Among Republicans, the ground is also shifting. A rising faction on the far right argue that Israel’s actions are entangling the United States in costly wars.

“After 40 years of Israel calling itself a strategic asset to the U.S., there’s a legitimate question: Is Israel an asset or is it becoming a liability?” asked Alon Pinkas, who was Israel’s consul general in New York in the early 2000s. However the Iran war concludes, Israelis and Americans are entering into a new era for their relationship. It may be one less beneficial for the Jewish state.

 

A Left-wing Yiddishist in Western Canada

By Henry Srebrnik, Jewish Post, Winnipeg

I recently presented a paper on Khaim Zhitlovsky, a major proponent of secular Jewish diaspora nationalism and Jewish nationhood, at the Association for Canadian Jewish Studies annual conference at York University in Toronto.

Zhitlovsky was born in Ushachi near Vitebsk in what is now Belarus in 1865. A leading architect of secular Jewish culture and thought, he was a central figure in the progressive Jewish intelligentsia of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in Canada and the United States.

At a Jewish International Cultural Conference organized in Paris in September 1937, the Alveltlekher Yiddisher Kultur Farband (YKUF) was founded, and he was one of the supporters. As the honorary president of the YKUF in the United States, Zhitlovsky became an icon of the Yiddishist Communist movement, particularly in western Canada, where he had inspired the founding of a strong secular Yiddish school system. At the fifth Canadian Labour Zionist conference, held in Montreal in 1910, Zhitlovsky had made a plea for Yiddish schools, saying, “If you reject Yiddish, the Jewish proletariat will reject you.”

During the Second World War, the Communist-dominated YKUF became the most important ideological vehicle for the pro-Soviet Jewish movement in Canada. It included Winnipeg activists such as Dr. Benjamin A. Victor, who had come to Canada in 1912 as a child, from the small town of Zhlobin in Belarus, and grew up in Winnipeg’s North End. He and others devoted their political energies to YKUF work and by early 1941 there were three YKUF reading circles in Winnipeg.

Much of this activity was also due to the arrival in Winnipeg of the new principal of the Communist-organized Sholem Aleichem School (formerly the Liberty Temple School), Labl Basman. Victor addressed meetings, speaking about the works of Zhitlovsky and Zishe Weinper, both prominent New York-based Yiddishists and YKUF leaders.

“Dr. B.A.Victor must be counted as being one of the most important workers in the progressive Jewish cultural movement in Winnipeg, and in particular the YKUF,” wrote Basman in the Kanader Yidishe Vochenblat, the weekly newspaper of the Canadian Jewish Communists, in the spring of 1942. “Dr. Victor has always stood in the forefront of every cultural-social movement that has been progressive and in the interests of the masses.”

Winnipeg, which Zhitlovsky visited frequently over the years, was, in the words of Jack Switzer, “a Zhitlovsky fortress.” Zhitlovsky’s 75^th birthday in the autumn of 1941 had been celebrated by the organization in all of its branches across the country. When he again visited Canada in April 1942, a new YKUF men’s club was named in his honour in Winnipeg.  Montreal poet Sholem Shtern, in one laudatory profile, depicted Zhitlovsky’s struggle on behalf of Yiddish language and culture, against assimilationists on both left and right, and against Zionist Hebraists. “In Yiddish Zhitlovsky sees that great progressive strength which will enable it to bring into being a new era in Jewish life.”

So Zhitlovsky’s sudden death on May 6, 1943, in Calgary, while he was on a cross-Canada lecture tour, “hit us like a thunderbolt” and “brought about sadness throughout the country,” declared the Vochenblat.

Labl Basman reported on Zhitlovsky’s last trip to Winnipeg. His two lectures had been attended by some 1,300 people, and, Basman observed, “provided the progressive Jewish community with a clear and outstanding analysis of these catastrophic times.” Zhitlovsky had stressed that support for the Soviet Union was imperative; the USSR needed to emerge from the war strengthened and with a prominent role in any post-war settlement. The Soviet Union was the centre of world progress and Jews would benefit greatly from a strong USSR, since this would mean the end of anti-Semitism and the solution of the Jewish question.

Louis Pearlman of Calgary, who was cultural chair of that city’s Peretz Shule, described Zhitlovsky’s visit to the city where he would pass away, in the Vochenblat. Zhitlovsky arrived in Calgary from Winnipeg on April 28, in good spirits, and was scheduled to give six lectures over a two-week period.  About 100 people turned out for his first lecture on April 30, in the Peretz Shule, on “Socialism and Religion.”

He spoke again May 2, to 150 people, on “The Spiritual Battle of the Jewish People for its Survival.” His third lecture, on May 4, dealt with Judaism and Christianity and was also well received. But a day later he had a heart attack and was taken to a hospital; he died on May 6. Pearlman accompanied Zhitlovsky’s body back to New York and attended his funeral there.

The Vochenblat reprinted Zhitlovsky’s greetings to Birobidzhan, the Jewish Autonomous Region in the Soviet far east, on its 15^th anniversary, which he had released on April 25. “Our Jewish people now has two countries in which a new Jewish life is being built, a normal life” one where Jews will live in Jewish towns and Jewish cities, “just like all the other peoples on earth,” he wrote. “The two countries are Birobidzhan and Erets Yisroel.” They ought not to be seen as antagonistic alternatives, he declared. In both, Jewish life would become “normalized” and Jews would flourish.

“Every Jewish accomplishment in both countries gives us courage in the struggle for our survival, elevates the prestige of our people in the eyes of the non-Jewish world, and strengthens our desire for the complete national liberation of our people, with the complete rights and strengths of membership in the fraternal family of nations. May the Jewish nation of Birobidzhan have long life and mature in freedom!”

Of course we now know the Birobidzhan project was a dismal failure, nor was the Soviet Union the “promised land” dreamt of by the Jewish left. Perhaps an entry in the third volume of the Leksikon Fun Der Nayer Yidisher Literatur, published in 1960 by the Congress of Jewish Culture, sums Zhitlovsky up best:

“A man who adopted, abandoned, or lost interest in so many different political programs and causes; who joined, left, or drifted away from so many parties was probably destined, at least in the short run, to oblivion. At varying times, he was a sharp opponent of Zionism and a Zionist, an anti-territorialist and a territorialist, a supporter of the Jewish Labour Bund and one of its harshest critics, a Socialist Revolutionary and an apologist for Bolshevism. He was a kind of ideological nomad, forever on the move” -- and so now virtually forgotten.