The early 1960s would prove an unusually uneventful period in the history of America’s debate over Israel. In retrospect, that lack of controversy during the period is surprising, especially in light of the fact that the Six-Day War that would soon erupt would fundamentally transform the debate for the next half century.
The return to a Democratic administration under President John F. Kennedy in January 1961 was a relief to most American Jews following the tense years under Eisenhower. Kennedy’s opponent, Richard Nixon, had made his name as a mini Joseph McCarthy before becoming Eisenhower’s vice president, and he had dutifully played the role of the administration’s attack dog. Kennedy was a product of Harvard, a lover of culture who respected intellectuals and felt very comfortable around Jews. Unlike Nixon, he was not associated with any policies or priorities that would give those dedicated to Israel’s welfare cause for concern.
Under Kennedy, US-Israel diplomacy resumed many of the old patterns from the Truman administration. The diplomats and professional foreign policy advisers consistently complained of Israeli intransigence, and the president listened respectfully and then ignored them. Before his first meeting with Ben-Gurion at New York’s Waldorf Astoria in May 1961, one National Security staffer tried to persuade Kennedy “to talk Israel into a less belligerent attitude along its frontiers.” Instead, upon meeting the Israeli prime minister, the first words out of Kennedy’s mouth were reportedly, “I owe my victory to the support of the American Jews. How can I repay them?”1
The Palestinian refugee issue never went away, but neither did Kennedy ever take it seriously. He did not think many Palestinian Arabs really wanted to return to their homes in what was now Israel. Kennedy’s top adviser for Jewish affairs, Myer “Mike” Feldman, told him that “not more than one in ten would take repatriation” if it were offered them. This made sense to Kennedy, who compared the idea of a Palestinian wanting to return to a village now in Israel to that of “a Negro wanting to go back to Mississippi.” Apparently, no one close to Kennedy had any inkling of the rise of Palestinian nationalism and the refugees’ yearning for return. When Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Phillips Talbot offered the president suggestions for measures Israel might take to reduce area tensions and begin a path to peace, Kennedy replied, “The trouble with you, Phil, is that you never had to collect votes to get yourself elected to anything.”2
One issue that did interest Kennedy was weapons sales. Israel wanted to be able to buy US “Hawk” surface-to-air mobile missiles, but it also wanted its own nuclear weapon, and it was secretly pursuing the latter goal with extensive help from France. It needed the United States to turn a blind eye to this, as it had no intention—and still has no intention—of admitting to this fact. Kennedy tried, and failed, to use the granting of the former in order to put a hold on the latter. The Israelis repeatedly lied to the president to cover up their nuclear program and relied on their supporters to help them get the weapons they felt they needed on both counts. As always, the relentlessness with which the pro-Israel camp pursued its goals was deeply annoying to the administration. However, it once again paid off. The State Department produced studies demonstrating that to allow Israel to purchase such sophisticated weaponry would “introduce a new, dangerous and very costly phase in an already desperate arms race.” But Israel received a timely assist in the fall of 1962, when Egypt’s Soviet-backed leader, General Gamal Abdel Nasser, launched an invasion of Yemen (in which his troops used illegal poison gas against their adversaries) and threatened a US ally, Saudi Arabia. During the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, when Nasser announced his support for Fidel Castro, Kennedy lost interest in pressuring the Israelis for anything at all, and Israel got its Hawks. It is possible that, over time, he might have been less forgiving of Israel’s secret nuclear bomb project and the dishonesty and dissembling that had gone into hiding it from him. But his November 1963 assassination leaves us only to speculate. Lyndon Johnson lacked Kennedy’s passion for the nuclear nonproliferation issue and was even more enamored with the Israelis and their struggle. He told an Israeli diplomat, just after the assassination, “You have lost a very great friend, but you have found a better one.”3
Late in 1966, following the death of three Israeli soldiers from Palestinian land mines placed near the border of Israel and the West Bank, the Israel Defense Forces conducted Israel’s largest military action since 1956. The West Bank had remained under Jordanian control since the end of the 1948–1949 war, and the IDF operation took place in Samu and other Jordanian villages. (It is thus called the Battle of Samu.) The IDF mobilized three thousand soldiers and six hundred tanks to retaliate by attacking Palestinian guerrillas. The Israelis were unaware at the time that Jordan’s King Hussein, with whom they enjoyed excellent, albeit covert, relations, had sent a condolence note to them after the soldiers’ deaths. This was because the US official to whom he had given it thought it not worth bothering to forward over a weekend. Israel rained destruction on the West Bank villages, and Jordanian military forces had no choice but to try to defend against the Israeli incursion. Jordan ultimately lost sixteen soldiers, with many others seriously wounded; three civilians also died in the attack. One Israeli soldier, a commander of a paratrooper unit, died as well. Riots broke out afterward against Hussein, led by Palestinians who thought his relatively quiescent behavior toward Israel was traitorous to their cause. Israeli prime minister Levi Eshkol, who had succeeded Ben-Gurion in June 1963, understood that the operation had been an error. Jordan had been the only relatively friendly regime on Israel’s borders. Privately, he averred that Israel had sought to “give the mother-in-law a pinch,” but instead it “beat up the bride.”4
Clearly, pressure for all-out war was building. On May 31, the president of Iraq, Abd al-Rahman Mohammed Aref, bragged, “Our goal is clear—we shall wipe Israel off the face of the map.” The next day, a Palestinian spokesman, Ahmed al-Shukeiri, said, “We shall destroy Israel and its inhabitants and as for the survivors—if there are any—the boats are ready to deport them.” An apparently apocryphal threat from Nasser that he would “drive the Jews into the sea” would haunt the discourse about Israel indefinitely into the future.5
Eshkol, who for weeks had resisted the increasingly insistent demands for action from his generals and ministers, now asked, “Must we allow ourselves to be worn down and killed bit by bit, if not destroyed in a future all-out war, as promised by Nasser? Must we wait for Hannah Arendt to write articles about our failure to resist?” US defense secretary Robert McNamara replied that an attack by Egypt “was not imminent,” adding, “All of our intelligence people are unanimous.” President Johnson told Eshkol that if Egypt did attack, “you will whip hell out of them.” This time, the architect of America’s disastrous war in Vietnam would be proven right.6
The June 1967 Six-Day War (an-Naksah, setback, to Palestinians) inspired enormous changes in almost everyone and everything it touched, beginning, naturally, with the Israelis and Palestinians. For American Jews, the transformation was only marginally less consequential for its vicariousness. The Arabs’ prewar threats terrified American Jews and put them in mind, once again, of the Holocaust, with its ensuing feelings of trauma, guilt, and helplessness. While Nasser’s boast has never been reliably sourced, his rhetoric offered Israelis and their supporters plenty to worry about, even though his most threatening words were frequently spoken in response to Israeli provocation. When in mid-May 1967 Israeli pilots shot down six Syrian MiG aircraft and then buzzed its capital, Damascus, Nasser, who had forged a close alliance with Syria, responded, “We welcome the Israeli aggression. We welcome the battle we have long awaited. The threat hour has come. The battle has come in which we shall destroy Israel.” That he denied the reality of the Holocaust and promoted historically discredited antisemitic conspiracy theories added further to the fears of those who held Israel in their hearts.7
On May 16, Egypt demanded that the UN peacekeeping force on the Sinai Peninsula and in the Gaza Strip leave the area. This international peacekeeping operation had been deployed after the 1956 invasion of the Sinai by British, French, and Israeli forces. The United Nations complied with Egypt’s request, though this contravened the agreements the United States had negotiated to earn Israel’s withdrawal ten years earlier. Next, Nasser closed the Straits of Tiran to Israeli shipping. The Israelis pleaded with the Johnson administration for support but received only counsel for patience, even as Jordan joined the Egyptian-Syrian military alliance. Although Johnson promised that Israel would “not be alone unless it decides to go it alone,” he refrained from pledging US support in the event of an attack. Defense Secretary McNamara and Secretary of State Dean Rusk warned of what they called “Tonkin Gulfitis”—that is, allowing the United States to panic itself into a Vietnam-style war in which its fundamental interests were not threatened. What’s more, General Earle Wheeler, chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the president, with remarkable prescience, that “our best estimate is that if there were a war… the Israelis would win it in five to seven days.” The Israeli military shared this view, although its leaders said so only in secret. Years later, the IDF’s Major General Mattityahu Peled called the threat of Israel’s annihilation in 1967 “a tale which was born and elaborated only after the war.” He noted that “the Egyptians concentrated 80,000 soldiers, while we mobilized against them hundreds of thousands of men.” Former Israeli Air Force commander Ezer Weizman, later defense minister and after that president of Israel, would eventually explain that the belief that Israel might be destroyed in 1967 was only “endorsed by the Jewry of the Diaspora, which for its purposes wishes to see us heroes standing steadfastly with backs to the sea.”8
Israeli intelligence reports also contradicted in real time claims that Egypt or Syria was poised to attack. As the American-born historian and future Israeli ambassador to the United States Michael Oren wrote in his history of the war, the Israelis believed at the time that Nasser “would have to be deranged” to attack. War was possible only “if Nasser felt he had complete military superiority over the IDF, if Israel were caught up in a domestic crisis, and, most crucially, was isolated internationally—a most unlikely confluence.” But, given that the country was all but economically paralyzed for a full three weeks of war preparation, together with the opportunities they thought it presented, Israel’s leaders decided to start the war with Egypt and Syria themselves. They secretly communicated a peace offer to Jordan’s King Hussein, but the monarch intuited that his regime would not survive if he did not throw in his lot with Egypt and Syria, however ruinous the result. And ruinous it was. Both the scale and the swiftness of the destruction wrought by the IDF would shock the world.9
Almost overnight, the IDF killed up to fifteen thousand Egyptian soldiers and destroyed roughly 85 percent of that nation’s military hardware (including its entire air force). When it was over, the area of land under Israel’s control was more than four times that within its 1948 borders—to say nothing of the far smaller territory accorded it by the 1947 UN partition plan. Israel now controlled the entire West Bank of the Jordan, including East Jerusalem, taken from Jordan; what had been Syria’s Golan Heights; and the Egyptian Sinai Desert. Then chief of staff Yitzhak Rabin (later Israeli ambassador to the United States, then Israeli defense minister and prime minister) bragged that the IDF could easily have conquered Cairo, Amman, and Damascus “before lunch” had the Israelis wished. The sense of swaggering self-confidence that victory brought to Israelis was astounding given the atmosphere of fear and panic that had previously gripped those not privy to Israeli military intelligence. That the apparent miracle had taken just six days—just like God’s creation of the universe—inspired in many a powerful sense of Divine intervention. One Israeli newspaper reported, “The Messiah came to Jerusalem yesterday—he was tired and gray, and he rode in on a tank.”10
The 1967 war, like virtually all wars, was filled with atrocities committed by all sides, but military censorship ensured that these remained hidden in Israel as well as in the Arab dictatorships. A book titled The Talk of Soldiers—later published in the United States as The Seventh Day: Soldiers Talk About the Six-Day War—contained interviews with 140 kibbutzniks who fought in the war. They gave voice to their conflicted feelings of both national pride and moral revulsion. It was coedited by an as-yet-unknown twenty-eight-year-old writer named Amos Oz, who would go on to become one of Israel’s most celebrated novelists and one of its best-known voices for the need for peace with the Palestinians. When the original transcripts were finally opened to the public nearly fifty years later, however, it became clear that they had been heavily censored to remove soldiers’ references to what might be interpreted as Israeli war crimes, or comparisons of themselves to Nazis. Instead, the published versions of the interviews reaffirmed the now Exodus-imprinted Israeli image of the reluctant soldiers/scholars/farmers who held themselves to the highest possible moral standard despite the existential dangers they faced on a daily basis. And this would become the image of Israeli soldiers affixed in the minds of almost all American Jews.11
US media coverage of the conflict read as if it were scripted by the Israeli military itself. When the Washington Post’s Al Friendly was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting on the war, he sent a private note to Israel’s press coordinator to say how happy he was “that the award came for stories chronicling a situation where the white hats licked the black ones, as should be the case in every proper Western.” Israeli defense minister Moshe Dayan “wasn’t playing dominoes” after all; “his back was to the sea,” The New Republic reported, employing the metaphor that had so agitated American Jews before the war. “On all other sides he was eyeball to eyeball with a vicious enemy who meant to exterminate the Israeli soldiers’ families, homes and country.” Life magazine rushed out a special issue filled with photographs of ruggedly handsome Israeli soldiers—“a picture of military triumph and virile sexual appeal,” in the words of literary scholar Amy Kaplan—in celebration of the fact that “tiny Israel” had triumphed “over the surrounding Arab nations that had vowed to exterminate her.” Kaplan described the paradoxical way so many American Jews viewed the moment: “In Israel’s swift victory over Soviet allies, Americans could vicariously experience both the dread of vulnerability and the thrill of invincibility, the irrefutable victory that was eluding them in Vietnam.” As a result, “Israel came to appear both vulnerable and invincible at the same time—at risk of destruction yet militarily indomitable. Its Arab enemies were portrayed as the inverse: formidable enough to obliterate an entire nation, yet incapable of matching Israel’s military forces on the battlefield.”12
Herein lay the origins of one of many absurd aspects of American Jewish discourse on Israel. The Jewish state was now a regional superpower and would soon boast the world’s fourth most powerful and possibly its second most technologically advanced army. Its military budget was greater than any four of its potential adversaries combined, to say nothing of its not-so-secret nuclear capability. And yet, because the discourse reflected emotion far more than rational calculation, the fear that these same nations would one day “drive the Jews into the sea” rarely—if ever—receded. Indeed, it remained at the foundation of almost every public pronouncement by mainstream Jewish leaders in the United States and in the literature of virtually every fund-raising pitch.
June 1967 transformed American Jews’ relationship not only to Israel, but also to themselves. In a remarkably prescient Commentary article published just weeks after the war, Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg noted that the crisis had united American Jews “with deep Jewish commitments as they have never been united before, and it has evoked such commitments in many Jews who previously seemed untouched by them.” A much-admired scholar of Jewish history as well as a congregational rabbi, Hertzberg could find “no conventional Western theological terms with which to explain this.” Rather, he found that “most contemporary Jews experience these emotions without knowing how to define them,” as Israel was possibly “now… acting as a very strong focus of worldwide Jewish emotional loyalty and thereby as a preservative of a sense of Jewish identity.” Time would prove the accuracy of these predictions. In the immediate aftermath of the war, among American Jews, “terror and dread,” said the celebrated theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel, had metamorphosed into “exultation.”13
This transformation manifested itself in multiple ways. Few American Jews were eager to put their bodies in the line of fire, or to encourage their sons and daughters to do so. But they did donate early, often, and with great enthusiasm. The Jewish press was filled with stories of people going into debt, selling their cars, and cashing in insurance policies in order to donate the proceeds to Israel. The small Jewish congregation of Okmulgee, Oklahoma, even sold its synagogue and wired the revenues to Tel Aviv. Jewish philanthropic organizations that had formerly gone begging were now deluged with funds, with as much as a 400 percent increase above the previous year’s tallies. The money came from Jews who had maintained “only the most pro forma links with Jewish religious traditions, who [knew] little or nothing of Jewish culture,” the political scientist Daniel Elazar noted. These Jews wanted to “express themselves Jewishly in connection with Jewish political causes or interests.” The amount of money shaken loose in Hollywood from celebrities such as Kirk Douglas, Paul Newman, Barbra Streisand, and virtually every mogul in the business appears astounding even today: $2.5 million—the equivalent in 2022 dollars of $20 million—was pledged in just one hour at a cocktail party hosted by studio executive Lew Wasserman.14
The war touched individual American Jews in profound and unpredictable ways. For instance, the novelist Henry Roth published the masterpiece Call It Sleep—a Jewish companion to James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—in 1934 at age twenty-eight, but had put down his pen after the book was condemned by his Communist Party comrades. He had spent the next three decades as an itinerant worker, settling down to slaughter chickens for a living as a farmer in Maine. But Israel’s remarkable victory reawakened his creative spark. As Roth told it at the time, he feared “the Arab states… were going to drive the Jews, the Zionist-imperialist pawns, into the sea. Jesus Christ, another holocaust of Jews!” Instead, “by skill, by daring, by valor, Israel prevailed. A miracle!… And it was Israel, a revitalized Judaism, that revitalized the writer, his partisanship, a new exploration into contemporaneity, a new summoning of the word—however inept in the service of the cause.” The eventual result of Roth’s revitalization was a triumphant return to writing fiction.15
While no doubt extreme, Roth’s experience was hardly unique. Liberal intellectuals who had previously maintained an emotional distance from both Israel and the American Jewish community were now quick to embrace the cause. Hannah Arendt, formerly self-identified with the Ihud’s diehard binationalists who bitterly opposed Israel’s founding, joined other previously estranged Jewish writers and scholars in a prewar plea published in the Washington Post that defined the crisis with what its text termed “stark simplicity: whether to let Israel perish or to act to ensure its survival and security, legality, morality and peace in the area.” After the war, Arendt told her friend the German/Swiss philosopher Karl Jaspers that “Nasser should be hung instantly.” On a more solemn note, she later admitted to her friend Mary McCarthy that “any real catastrophe in Israel would affect me more deeply than almost anything else.”16
Commentary flipped 180 degrees and now basked in Israel’s military prowess. The sociologist Milton Himmelfarb, the American Jewish Committee’s research director, bragged that “while Jews can be pretty good with a fountain pen and briefcase, they can also if necessary be pretty good with a rifle or tank.” Associate editor Werner Dannhauser crowed, “Jews all over the world walk with greater pride upon the face of the earth because of the state of Israel.” In the self-consciously socialist counterpart to Commentary, Dissent, the shock of recognition was no less profound, however much it may have contradicted the universalist ethos that had defined the democratic socialist publication since its founding in 1954. Before the war, explained its guiding spirit, the literary critic and Jewish historian Irving Howe, he had not felt much of an emotional tie to Israel, and “no particular responsibility for its survival or renewal.” But it now thrilled him “that after centuries of helplessness Jews had defeated enemies with the weapons those enemies claimed as their own.”17
The power of these emotions and the institutional changes they presaged would lead to a remarkably rapid remaking of American Jews’ collective identity. It had long been difficult to explain just what non-Orthodox Jews “believed” that distinguished them from mainstream American Protestants, save for the fact Jesus had likely been conceived in the usual fashion. The rituals of Jewish life remained vibrant in many families, but the theology was decidedly fuzzy. Most Jewish communal organizations pursued agendas indistinguishable from most other liberal organizations. Jews had their own foods, their own country clubs, law firms, and vacation spots, but the sermons of their rabbis sounded an awful lot like a typical college commencement address. To be a secular American Jew, pre-1967, was to have faith in an America that was going to make itself better—fairer, more equal, and more peaceful—with the help of its Jews. Support for the Zionist cause had, in the past, been “one among various alternatives of Jewish identity,” the Jewish scholar and rabbi Shaul Magid would write in 2019. Beginning in 1967, however, “the Jewish discourse about Zionism has become Jewish identity itself; Zionism defines Jewish legitimacy and is no longer part of a larger conversation. It defines the conversation.” Rabbi Hertzberg, speaking then as president of the American Jewish Congress, confirmed this back in 1977 when he observed “the only offense for which Jews can be ‘excommunicated’ in the US today is not to participate in these efforts [to support Israel]. Intermarriage, ignorance of the Jewish heritage, or lack of faith do not keep anyone from leadership in the American Jewish community today. Being against Israel or apathetic in its support does.” This view has only hardened over time. More than forty years later, Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum, leader of New York City’s Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, the nation’s largest LGBT-oriented synagogue, spoke in almost identical terms. “A Jew today can walk into almost any non-Orthodox synagogue in America,” she observed, “and profess his or her atheism or lack of Jewish practice and be embraced and accepted, but if a Jew enters that same synagogue and professes to be an anti- and even non-Zionist, he or she will likely be shown the door.”18
This revolution made itself felt in virtually every non-Orthodox American Jewish institution. Support for Israel soon overwhelmed all other commitments, whether to social service, community solidarity, or social justice. In the everlasting battle between Jewish particularism and universalism, the former—which had been on the run among American Jews for more than century—was now threatening to wipe out the latter and do so with remarkable speed. The historian Lawrence Grossman noted that in the American Jewish Committee activities report for 1966–1967, “Israel” was buried “on page 35, yielding pride of place to ‘The Spirit of Ecumenism,’ executive suite discrimination, civil rights, extremism and anti-Semitism, church-state separation, Jewish identity, and reports on Europe, the Soviet bloc, and Latin America.” A year later, however, it was the lead item, “and there it remained.” Within six years, Israel had blossomed into the biggest single budget item for the group, taking up nearly a third of its outgoing funds. The Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith, founded as a domestic civil rights champion, now allocated nearly half of its budget to defending Israel. John Ruskay, former CEO of the United Jewish Appeal–Federation of Jewish Philanthropies of New York, described the “Israel at risk” fund-raising paradigm as having “fostered the explosive growth of the Federation system post-1967,” and the numbers clearly bear him out.19
The Israeli triumph brought with it a new attitude for American Jews about not only themselves but also about God and Torah. Israeli leaders had long talked about their nation in the language of miracles, connecting them to the stories of the Bible as if these constituted the literal history of their nation. But following the 1967 war, the notion took on a newer, more literal meaning among both Jews and gentiles. President Johnson, like Harry Truman before him, said he saw “the hand of the Lord in the creation of Israel and… in bringing the Jews back to Israel.”20
America’s secular Jewish leaders now began to adopt the language of Divine intervention to explain the Jewish state’s stunning military success, especially with regard to its conquest of East Jerusalem, where the holiest site in the Jewish religion, the Western Wall of the Second Temple that the Romans destroyed in 70 CE, still stood. At a postwar rally in Washington, DC, Morris Abram, president of the still non-Zionist American Jewish Committee, transgressed all of the rhetorical and linguistic boundaries his predecessors had so carefully observed in the past. “The people of the Book have proved the verities of the Book,” he shouted to the near-delirious gathering. “‘Not by power, nor by force, but by thy spirit, sayeth the Lord.’” This theological leap would soon become fundamental to Jewish American identity. The official doctrine of Conservative Judaism would proclaim “the existence of Medinat Yisrael (the State of Israel) in Eretz Yisrael (the Land of Israel), with its capital of Jerusalem… not just in political or military terms; rather, we consider it to be a miracle, reflecting Divine Providence in human affairs.” Reform Jewry would refer, no less fantastically, “to the realization of God’s promise to Abraham: ‘to your offspring I assign this land.’” Each of these distinctly American Jewish religious movements soon, and increasingly, wrapped themselves in the garb of Israeli identity, with new holidays and special prayers regularly offering praise to the modern-day state. Synagogues invited an endless parade of Israeli guest speakers (often in uniform) to inform and inspire them, and many also began to sing the Israeli national anthem, “Hatikvah,” in their religious services.21
A second, and no less important, component of the transformation of American Jewish life inspired by the war was the sudden sacralization of the Shoah. Peter Novick is among the many historians who have discerned in the reaction to the war an “immediate and most important cause of a new closeness” connecting American Jews via their “fears of a renewed Holocaust on the eve of that war.” The result, after the crisis passed, was a “permanent reorientation in the agenda of organized American Jewry.” A year earlier, a Commentary symposium titled “The State of Jewish Belief” had inspired not a single reference to either Israel or the Shoah. By a kind of unspoken but widely respected consensus, the latter had been rarely mentioned; when it was, it was only on specific occasions. Now, together with identification with Israel, recognition of the Shoah and grappling with its meaning became a pillar of what it meant to be a Jew. The theologian Marc Ellis posited the birth of “Holocaust theology” in this moment, in which a Judaism emerges that fuses its religious and cultural heritage with loyalty to the state of Israel. The perception of a second near mass death experience had a theological component. Before the 1967 war, the rabbi and philosopher Emil Fackenheim, a Holocaust refugee, famously posited a “614th mitzvah” (biblical commandment): to give Hitler no posthumous victories. In his 1982 book To Mend a World, he amended this precept to define the defense of Israel as the “orienting reality for all Jewish and indeed all post-Holocaust thought.”22
Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf, a former assistant to Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel and later a friend and mentor to a young Barack Obama, would examine this dynamic in a 1979 essay, “Overemphasizing the Holocaust.” In it, Wolf lamented the fact that in “Jewish school or synagogue… one does not now learn about God or the Midrash… nearly as carefully as one learns about the Holocaust.” Worse, American Jewish leaders were using “the Shoah as the model for Jewish destiny,” and so “Never again” had come to mean “Jews first—and the devil take the hindmost.” Peter Novick aptly argued that “as the Middle Eastern dispute came to be viewed within a Holocaust paradigm,” it simultaneously became “endowed with all the black-and-white moral simplicity of the Holocaust”—a framework that promoted “a belligerent stance toward any criticism of Israel” no matter who was giving voice to it or what may have been their inspiration.23
Even without the theological gloss, which, to be fair, did not interest most Jews, the connection between the two events evinced an inescapable transformation of what it meant to be a Jew in the United States. The constant invocation of the Holocaust’s “lessons” soon became an all-but-inescapable aspect of justifying whatever needed justification on the part of Israel’s actions, especially as the occupation of the West Bank became increasingly and often brutally entrenched in both time and space. The Harvard literature professor Ruth Wisse, for example, writing in Commentary on the twentieth anniversary of the conflict, combined Nasser’s apocryphal words with Hitler’s ambitions, insisting that the former were merely a “reformulated” version of “the Nazi theory of Lebensraum in Mediterranean terms.” Fortunately, she added, “what the Arabs did not reckon on was that a people so recently pushed into ovens would not now permit themselves to be pushed into the sea.”24
Before 1967, many American Jews experienced the aftermath of the Shoah “like a family secret,” as one historian put it, “hovering, controlling, but barely mentioned except in code or casual reference.” No more. The war—or, more specifically, the fears that preceded it—had, in the eloquent formulation of Elie Wiesel, turned all American Jews into “children of the Holocaust.” Not surprisingly, detailed, multivariate studies of the attitudes of Shoah survivors across the United States show that they grew particularly attached to Israel. This powerful state, with its apparently miraculous military, became, in the words of three scholars, “the symbol of Jewish resilience after the murder of the six million.” Israel was now perceived to be “the best means to implement the slogan ‘Never Again,’ [as] the unofficial battle cry of post-Holocaust Jewry.” It should not be surprising that roughly fifty years later, when the Pew Research Center published “Jewish Americans in 2020,” it found that more Jews (76 percent) picked “remembering the Holocaust”—more than any other practice or symbol—as the “most essential” component of their Jewish identity.25
The Holocaust historian Lucy Dawidowicz identified a “new kind” of American Jewish pride in what she termed “the aura that radiated from General Moshe Dayan, his ruggedness, vigor, determination.” She wrote that “Jews across America reveled in stories like the one about the Georgia gas station attendant who told a customer, ‘I always thought Jews were “yellers” but those Jews, man they’re tough.’” So, too, the gentile businessman who explained to a Jewish associate, “You Hebes really taught those guys a lesson.” This “new Jew” represented a kind of corrective to the previous two thousand years of Jewish history, but most especially to the Holocaust. One Jewish woman who had been cut off completely from her religion and community told a sociologist, Marshall Sklare, “We never fought back before. We always picked up our bundles and ran. Now we can fight back.” Perhaps of even greater importance for Israel’s future value to US policymakers was the reaction of Harry McPherson, special assistant to President Johnson, who had replaced Mike Feldman on the “Jewish” desk. McPherson happened to be in Israel, on his way back from Vietnam, the day the 1967 war was launched. He found it “deeply moving,” after “the doubts, confusions, and ambiguities of Vietnam,” to witness a nation whose people’s commitment to their nation’s defense was “total and unquestioning.” No less impressive was the way the war had “destroy[ed] the prototype of the pale, scrawny Jew.” Israeli Jews were “tough, muscular, and sunburned.”26
McPherson was a gentile, but his paean to Israel’s masculine prowess mirrored how many American Jews had internalized the Israelis’ oft-stated contempt for diaspora Jewish life. Israeli Jews did not commute to their law or dental offices on trains from Scarsdale; nor did they show off when it came time to pony up for the synagogue building fund. Rather, they lay aside their plowshares, and with muscular arms, tanned by hours spent “making the desert bloom” in the hot sun, mounted tank battalions and fighter jets. This was Uris’s Exodus cast not as a movie but as real life. “American Jews said to themselves,” as the journalist Thomas Friedman put it, “‘My God, look who we are! We have power! We do not fit the Shylock image, we are ace pilots; we are not the cowering timid Jews who get sand kicked in their faces, we are tank commanders.’” The American Jewish embrace of this “particular pathology,” as the historian of the Holocaust Saul Friedlander diagnosed it, was a natural corollary to the triumph of Zionist ideology: “‘You, the Diaspora Jews, went like sheep to slaughter; we, the proud youth of Eretz Israel, will show you what self-defense and strength mean.’” American Jews proved themselves eager to buy into this implicitly insulting bargain.27
Meanwhile, in the Middle East, the war had redrawn the map of Israel and offered it previously unimagined opportunities for expansion. Having conquered East Jerusalem, the Israelis immediately annexed it amid celebrations over the city’s putative reunification. This move, and the subsequent attachment of all future Israeli governments to its retention, has strained and quite possibly doomed the practical possibility for a negotiated peace with the Palestinians and the larger Arab world. (As of July 2021, there were 358,800 Palestinian residents within the boundaries of the Jerusalem Municipality, constituting 38 percent of the city’s population.) Even so, it was done with virtually no discussion and next to no dissent. As for the rest of its conquests, the plan was not to have a plan. Israel’s 2.4 million Jews were now responsible for the governance of 1.4 million Palestinians, or roughly ten times the number that were living inside Israel proper. When Foreign Minister Golda Meir asked Prime Minister Levi Eshkol, “What are we going to do with a million Arabs?,” the prime minister replied, “I get it. You want the dowry, but you don’t like the bride!”28
Israel ended up with both. The cabinet adopted plans to do everything possible to encourage remaining Palestinians to leave voluntarily as well as to create Jewish settlements in what had been Syria’s Golan Heights, Egypt’s Sinai Desert, and the West Bank of the Jordan. (After initially administrating but not legally claiming the territory, so as not to appear to accept the legitimacy of the Jewish state, Jordan had annexed the West Bank in 1950, changing its earlier name, Transjordan, and had given citizenship to all the residents. The annexation was rejected internationally and recognized only by Britain and Pakistan.) Israel created its first settlement in the Golan almost immediately after the war, in July 1967, and shortly after that, established two more in the Sinai. But it was the West Bank settlements, combined with the massive military occupation necessary to sustain them, that would remake the politics of the region and redefine Israel’s national identity for the coming half-century and beyond.
Owing to the ambiguous legal status of the post–1948 West Bank, the Israelis insisted that no known international law applied to its actions there, and so they began a process of land expropriation that would last, as of this writing, indefinitely. They did so, moreover, as the Palestinian American legal scholar Noura Erakat noted, “without either preserving the sovereign rights of its inhabitants or absorbing them under [Israel’s] civil jurisdiction.” The Israelis were well aware that they were acting on the basis of specious legal arguments (to put the matter generously). When Golda Meir became prime minister, her legal counsel informed her that, based on Article 49 of the Geneva Conventions, the erection of civilian settlements in the territories would violate international law; settlements could only be built for military purposes by “military bodies.” But the fact that almost all of Israel’s young people—men and women—served in its military made this distinction meaningless in practical terms, and so the Israelis sought to bend their extremely elastic interpretation of international law to suit their purposes.29
Israel’s settler movement began as the brainchild of a small group of religious zealots who subscribed to a strand of Jewish political theology initially inspired by the first Ashkenazi chief rabbi of British Mandatory Palestine, Rav Abraham Isaac Kook, who had died in 1935 at the age of sixty-nine. Unlike almost all traditional Jews of his time and place, who had seen the Zionists not only as godless but as the blasphemous enemies of the ultimate redemption of the nation of Israel, Kook, a poet and a mystic and theologian, blessed their efforts. He understood the Zionists—however secular, and, indeed, anti-religious, their rhetoric may have been—to be God’s unwitting instruments in redeeming the Land of Israel for its rightful owners, and therefore, part of his divine plan. These heretics, without understanding what they were doing, were building “the foundation upon which rests the Throne of God in this world.” In Kook’s theology, Zionists were crucial actors in what would become the Jews’ Messianic redemption rather than the enemies of traditional Jewish practice and religion that they believed themselves to be. While Kook made his peace with the Zionists, however, he did not push them in the direction of greater militancy toward the Arabs. His teachings directed traditionalist Orthodox Jews to take an accommodationist approach to the Zionists they had previously viewed with contempt. The Zionists could hardly be defying God’s will and preempting the Messiah in this interpretation, because they did not believe in God, and hence, they knew not what they said or did. Therefore, the rise of Zionism must be the echo of the Messiah’s footsteps, the dawn of the Messianic era.30
The “miracle of 1967” touched off an explosion of religious ecstasy. Rabbi Zvi Yehuda Kook, Rav Abraham’s son, taught that it was God’s commandment to settle the sacred soil for the greater glory of God and Israel—and that if any West Bank territory were given away to non-Jewish sovereignty, it would preclude the return of the Messiah. Beginning not long after the Six-Day War, he led his followers to undertake the task of personally settling in all of the biblical land of Israel. They called themselves Gush Emunim (Bloc of the Faithful), and with their zealous commitment to the conquest of biblical Israel, they proceeded, over time, to hijack the meaning and purpose of Zionism—as they understood it—to turn it into a Messianic movement in which the state itself became sacred and the Israeli Defense Force a “holy” instrument of Jewish redemption. As Rabbi Eliyahu Avihayil, a student of Abraham Kook’s, understood the moment, Israelis were now “living at the end of history,” a time in which the morality of men no longer held sway. “Divine Providence no longer operates, as a rule, according to Israel’s actions but according to a cosmic plan,” one that was currently under way and “from which there is no backtracking.”31
Deploying an ultimately unbeatable combination of fanaticism, psychological insight, strategic sophistication, and sheer chutzpah, the “Gush” repeatedly outlasted or undermined whatever government they faced, almost always securing official sanction and protection for their illegal land-grabs and intimidation of the local population. The group would simply seize land and buildings in West Bank areas under military occupation, claiming Divine inspiration, and leave Israel’s leaders the choice: protect us and claim the land for the state of Israel, or risk our murders at the hands of the people we are displacing. With precious few exceptions, the settlers emerged victorious in this contest of wills. Successive Israeli governments almost always sent in the IDF to protect them before deciding that whatever settlement was in question happened to be necessary for “security reasons,” though, in most cases, it was a matter of avoiding the accusation of having sent in soldiers of the Jewish state to evacuate Jews from what the Gush proclaimed to be “the land of Israel.” In this manner, the Gush determined not only the parameters of Israel’s future negotiations with its neighbors over the possibilities of peace, but also, in many respects, US policies as well. No American president has ever been willing to demand that Israel dismantle a single West Bank settlement, once established, or face meaningful consequences. Ironically, before the 1967 war, Secretary of State Dean Rusk had insisted that it was “inconceivable” that the United States “would ever support an Israeli attempt at territorial expansion.” This would turn out to be one of history’s worst predictions. The West Bank is, at this writing, home to nearly half a million Jews. At the same time, Israel has dispossessed Palestinian communities of more than 247,000 acres of land that were in use by them and slated for their development. In these settlements, Israelis live by their own legal system and are entitled to water allocations and other natural resources as well as archaeological sites and nature reserves.32
While State Department disapproval was a given, the Johnson administration had no interest in picking any fights with Israel. When it came to the issue of Palestinian refugees, the president made the same decision as his slain predecessor: forget them. Even referring to them as either “Palestinians” or “refugees” became problematic. The president relied on the same informal Jewish adviser/kibitzer that Kennedy had, Mike Feldman, who acted as a conduit to pro-Israel lobbyists and funders. In a dinner speech in honor of Israel’s premier scientific research institute, named after Chaim Weizmann, he advised Johnson to speak of the “resettlement” of the “so-called refugees” and not to mention the word “Palestine,” because, Feldman instructed, it “went out of existence in 1948.” But to be fair to Johnson, he needed little prodding. As he put it in his memoir, “I have always had a deep feeling of sympathy for Israel and its people, gallantly building and defending a modern nation against great odds, and against the tragic background of Jewish experience.”33
The intense new American Jewish focus on Israel naturally transformed the American political landscape. Before 1967, Israel had been understood to be a progressive cause, and the Arabs a regressive one. Israel had successfully positioned itself in the anti-imperialist camp and had enjoyed good relations with other emerging nations, especially those in Africa. The socialist orientation of its dominant party, together with the “David vs. Goliath” global image to which it had attached itself vis-à-vis the Arab world, placed it within the geography of the “good guy” camp for most liberals and leftists. That Israel had voted to seat Communist China in the United Nations, that it sided with the Soviets on some key votes, and that it opposed the apartheid regime of South Africa in almost every available instance accorded it additional capital upon which to draw in movement circles.
Conversely, before 1967, conservatives had not shown much affection for the socialist state whose leaders occasionally invoked Marxist-tinged anti-colonialist tropes about their own nation. For instance, a 1957 National Review editorial cautioned the Eisenhower administration about “sacrificing America’s primary strategic interests to Zionist pressures at home.” This pro-segregationist magazine, which termed the “white” race to be “the advanced race,” nevertheless found fault with the Israelis having “the first racist state in modern history.” While a few Jewish conservatives did brave the sometimes naked antisemitism that accompanied the ever-present anti-Black animosity in National Review, they remained largely invisible within mainstream Jewish politics. Barry Goldwater received just 10 percent of the Jewish vote in the 1964 presidential election despite having a Jewish father. Some Jews were more conservative than others, of course, but what was considered far-left liberalism in much of America was dead center among Jews.34
Opposition to liberalism in the Jewish community came not from the right, but from various offshoots of socialism, anarchism, and communism. Among older Jews, this was in part a vestige of the socialism-soaked Lower East Side, as well as a product of the continued prestige that Jewish labor leaders still enjoyed. But, overall, left liberalism was understood to be consistent both with the tenets of the Torah and with the marginal status Jews had occupied in virtually every society in which they had previously settled. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the most liberal American Jews, including, especially, Jewish intellectuals, identified with the European traditions of social democracy, while the more conservative ones saw themselves as just plain “liberal.” A few important genuinely conservative thinkers did happen to also be Jews, but the most prominent among them—such as the economist Milton Friedman, the Russian-born philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand (née Alissa Rosenbaum), and National Review writer and editor Ralph de Toledano—did not appear to be much interested in Israel. During the 1950s, the most famous conservative Jew in America was probably the lawyer Roy Cohn, an aide to Joseph McCarthy (before becoming mentor to Donald Trump). Most Jews came to regard Cohn as a literal personification of shande (shame) to his people. Jewish organizations often had agendas that were largely indistinguishable from the liberal Americans for Democratic Action or the American Civil Liberties Union. Regarding Black-Jewish relations pre-1967, US civil rights leaders, including, especially, Martin Luther King Jr., were almost uniformly pro-Israel. (Incredibly, the Communist Black folksinger Paul Robeson had performed at a benefit concert for Menachem Begin’s Irgun back in 1944.) This may have been partially a consequence of the fact that their movement received a significant portion of its funding from liberal American Jews, together with invaluable support from the Jewish legal community. Whatever its foundation, the alliance was real.35
The Six-Day War said “goodbye” to all that. The cause of the Palestinians had long been part of the Marxist-inspired “third world” international revolutionary vanguard that included North Vietnam, Cuba, Nasser’s Egypt, and other nonaligned or pro-Soviet governments opposed to the Americans and their allies. These anti-colonial sentiments grew more vocal with every day that the United States continued to rain down destruction on the people of Vietnam and Cambodia. The Black-Jewish alliance had endured for more than half a century, at least since the Ku Klux Klan had begun targeting “Koons, Kikes, and Katholics.” Now, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a New Left civil rights organization, began publishing articles reporting on what it called Israel’s conquest of “Arab homes and land through terror.” In one newsletter, an article noted the “fact” that “the famous European Jews, the Rothschilds, who have long controlled the wealth of many European nations, were involved in the original conspiracy… to create the ‘State of Israel.’” The newsletter featured a cartoon of Moshe Dayan with dollar signs plastered to his epaulets, and another of a hand bearing a Star of David, with a dollar sign tightening a noose around the necks of Colonel Nasser and the controversial boxing champion Muhammad Ali, who had converted to Islam and supported Palestinian rights. In response to Jewish complaints, SNCC’s program director, Ralph Featherstone, explained that the organization was not attacking all Jews, “only” the ones in Israel, and “those Jews in the little Jew shops in the [Negro] ghettos.” Former SNCC president Stokely Carmichael’s keynote speech at its 1968 convention announced that “the same Zionists that exploit the Arabs also exploit us in this country.… We feel very strongly for the Commandos in Palestine.… We have begun to see the evil of Zionism, and we will fight to wipe it out.” These attacks left many Jews “devastated psychologically,” according to Albert Vorspan, a vice president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations. “They couldn’t take the personal rejection, and they couldn’t even understand, at least in theory, that even in the best organizations, blacks simply wanted to run their own show. They lost whatever ability they had had to distinguish between the shit-heads and the hotheads.”36
A similar storm was brewing among radical New Left organizations run mostly by whites. Eric Mann, a spokesman for the Weathermen (later the Weather Underground), a violent revolutionary offshoot of Students for a Democratic Society, the mother ship of the New Left, told his comrades that “Israeli embassies, tourist offices, airlines and Zionist fund-raising and social affairs are important targets for whatever action is decided to be appropriate.” Hostile assessments of what were deemed to be Israel’s colonialist and imperialist intentions driven by the “mad hawks” who led it began to appear regularly in left-wing publications. George Novack, leader of the Trotskyist-affiliated Socialist Workers Party, summed up their view in this way: “The upper and middle ranges of American Jewry, comfortably ensconced in bourgeois America, some of them bankers, landlords, big and little businessmen, participate in the system of oppressing and exploiting the black masses just as the Zionists have become oppressors of the Palestinian Arabs.”37
The views of the far left, it should be noted, were not entirely monochromatic. The primary axis of the argument rested, however, on what role Israel played in the machinations of US imperialism. In October 1967, for example, the independent and intellectually minded Marxist publication Monthly Review took the unusual step of publishing two editorials by its cofounders, Paul Sweezy and Leo Huberman, that took opposing views. Sweezy took the anti-Israel view dominating the New Left, while Huberman, conceding that his Jewishness no doubt influenced his position, argued that while Israel may have been “a lackey of imperialism,” and given the Arab nations “just cause” to resist it, their true enemy was “not Israel, but their own feudal, reactionary, bureaucratic governments which exploit [their citizens] and Western imperialism which robs them of their wealth.”38
One could see the full flowering of this attitude at what became an all-too-typical carnival of counterculture self-infatuation in Chicago in September 1967, called “the National Conference for New Politics.” The mass meeting had been funded in significant measure by Martin Peretz’s second wife, Anne Devereux (Labouisse) Farnsworth Peretz, an indirect heir to the fortune created by the Singer Sewing Machine company, whom Peretz married after divorcing his first wife—also, coincidentally, an heiress, albeit a lesser one. It ended with a speech by Martin Luther King Jr. that he could barely finish owing to constant heckling by radical critics, a walkout by the “Black Caucus,” and another walkout by the “White Caucus.” In a perfectly symbolic example of “Sticking it to the Man,” the conference’s two thousand delegates voted to support the Black Caucus’s resolution calling for the condemnation of Israel’s “imperialistic Zionist war,” and adopted, sight unseen, all the resolutions that a Black Power conference had devised in Newark, New Jersey, months earlier—though no record of what these were ever became available.39
For Marty Peretz, who had long been contributing his wife’s riches to various New Left causes while at the same time professing his devotion to Israel, these two warring selves demanded a winner, and that winner was Israel. He walked out, too, but purchased The New Republic in 1974. He then appointed himself editor-in-chief of the “flagship” publication of American liberalism. There, he was in a position to police—as well as to poison—the liberal discourse on Israel for the next forty years. Just as Norman Podhoretz would do in the American Jewish Committee–supported Commentary, Peretz published an endless series of personal, often abusive attacks on anyone who criticized Israel in a manner he deemed inappropriate.
In November 1967, Peretz set his sights on a then much-admired figure among New Leftists, I. F. Stone. In what had rapidly become—and today remains—the most influential intellectual publication in America, the New York Review of Books, Stone had written an eight-thousand-word missive that basically gave equal weight to the Arab and Jewish claims for their respective positions. But he called on the Israelis to offer concessions, because, after all, they had won virtually everything, and the Palestinian Arabs, nothing. What’s more, he exploded a series of Zionist myths, most particularly the one about the “voluntary” exodus of Arabs in 1948 and the phony-baloney story of radio broadcasts demanding that the Arabs (temporarily) abandon their homes and villages so that Israel might be more conveniently defeated. In fact, he wrote, “Jewish terrorism, not only by the Irgun, in such savage massacres as Deir Yassin, but in milder form by the Haganah, itself ‘encouraged’ Arabs to leave areas the Jews wished to take over for strategic or demographic reasons. They tried to make as much of Israel as free of Arabs as possible.”40
Stone’s criticism stung, because he had reported so famously and sympathetically on the state’s founding. His adoption of a more critical stance toward Israel was both painful and symbolic to liberal American Jews. In Peretz’s estimation, as he wrote in Commentary at the time, “the significance for the Left of Mr. Stone’s apostasy cannot be overestimated.” (Commentary’s editors apparently agreed, as the magazine published the scholar Robert Alter’s attack on the same article three months later.) Having credited Stone’s coverage of Vietnam in his subscription newsletter, I. F. Stone’s Weekly, with having “given the peace movement much of its bearings,” he was clearly concerned that Stone would be able to do the same for the Palestinians.41
Stone’s interrogation of Israeli propaganda upset Peretz, who insisted on repeating the canard that alleged Arab “radio broadcasts” had inspired the Palestinians’ 1948 exodus. But it was the larger context of sympathy for the Arab victims of Israel’s victories that most piqued his ire. To Peretz, Israel was “besieged by implacable foes for two decades, hampered in its trade, and harassed by virtually continuous violence on its borders.” His article sang Israel’s praises: its treatment of its Arab minority as well as its “internal democracy”—which, he failed to mention, did not include these same Arabs—and proudly added that “Israel alone in the Middle East has a functioning Communist politics with representation in the Knesset—and with two Communist parties at that.” The upshot? “It seems that the Left, so patient with the political grotesqueries of its favored nations, would only be satisfied with an absolutely unflawed Israel, which would mean also an Israel willing to surrender its national existence.”42
Peretz’s disappointment was understandable. Stone had famously treated the Israeli Jews as his brave brethren during the state’s founding and compared them to “the men of Concord or Lexington.” But his views had evolved. As Stone explained, he had devoted more space among his eight thousand words to the Arab than the Israeli side “because as a Jew, closely bound emotionally with the birth of Israel,” he felt “honor bound to report the Arab side, especially since the US press is so overwhelmingly pro-Zionist. For me, the Arab-Jewish struggle is a tragedy. The essence of tragedy is a struggle of right against right.” Stone had not lost his sympathy for the refugees-turned-pioneers he had so admired twenty years earlier. But Israel had betrayed his hopes by insisting, as Moshe Dayan put it, “We want a Jewish state like the French have a French state”—a quote that put Stone in mind of the expulsion of Jews from Spain in the 1400s as well as “more recent parallels.” Stone also put his finger on what would become, over time, one of the fundamental contradictions of American Jewish support for Israel: “In the outside world the welfare of Jewry depends on the maintenance of secular, non-racial, pluralistic societies. In Israel, Jewry finds itself defending a society in which mixed marriages cannot be legalized, in which non-Jews have a lesser status than Jews, and in which the ideal is racial and exclusionist. Jews must fight elsewhere for their very security and existence—against principles and practices they find themselves defending in Israel.” Peretz was correct to treat Stone as a weathervane. He had quoted him favorably in another article—this one aimed at New Leftists and published in the self-consciously radical Ramparts, titled “Israel Is Not Vietnam.” That article, however, had demonstrated the graceful literary hand of his coauthor, the philosopher Michael Walzer, who, over time, would emerge as perhaps the most eloquent and sophisticated defender of Israel among democratic socialists. On his own, writing in the proto-neoconservative Commentary, and for decades later in The New Republic, Peretz’s disdain, mixed with faux-disillusionment with one’s former allies, would almost always be the order of the day.43
Meanwhile, as the left was getting ready to turn on Israel just as the right was preparing to embrace it, inside mainline Christian organizations—the very ones where Reinhold Niebuhr had championed the Zionist cause so enthusiastically—Israel was becoming a villain. When Israel’s survival appeared to hang in the balance before the 1967 war began, the leaders of America’s Jewish organizations had looked to their allies in civil rights and antiwar marches for support in Israel’s time of peril, and were met by a surprising—and depressing—silence. After the war, relations went from bad to worse. In a July 1967 letter to the New York Times, Henry Van Dusen, a former president of the Union Theological Seminary, wrote that objective observers must “stand aghast at Israel’s onslaught, the most violent, ruthless (and successful) aggression since Hitler’s blitzkrieg.” He even used the word “holocaust” to describe Israel’s actions. The National Council of Churches announced its opposition to what it called “Israel’s unilateral annexation of Jordanian portions of Jerusalem.” The editors of the Christian Century professed an inability to understand “the rationalistic gymnastics” necessary for those who, “having worked hard to get US military power out of Vietnam, insist that the power of the US be unleashed in the Middle East on the side of Israel.” Statements like this one inspired a back and forth that led to further alienation on both sides. “Was the Christian conscience so ambivalent on the question of Jews that, once again, a pall of silence would hang over the specter of Jewish suffering, until later, condolences and breast-beating and epitaphs and the croak of guilty conscience would fill the air?” asked the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations.44
Political conservatives saw an opportunity in Israel’s David-to-Goliath transformation in the public discourse. They began with the argument that if American Jews really cared about Israel’s well-being, they might wish to reconsider their outspoken opposition to the exercise of US military power around the world, most particularly in Vietnam. President Johnson himself made this argument frequently even before the Six-Day War. Speaking to a gathering of Jewish war veterans in September 1966, he wondered aloud, “If you turn the other cheek in Vietnam”—an odd reference, given his audience—“what do you do when little Israel calls on you for assistance and help?” Meeting with the departing Israeli ambassador together with his replacement in February 1968, Johnson told both men “to tell their American friends at every turn that the US cannot play a responsible role in the world if they pull out on obligations like Vietnam.” After all, Johnson continued, what was he to make of the “bunch of rabbis” who had come to him to instruct him “not to send a single screwdriver to Vietnam, but on the other hand, [to] push all our aircraft carriers through the Straits of Tiran to help Israel?”45
The philosopher Michael Wyschogrod, a member of the editorial board of Tradition: A Journal of Orthodox Thought, argued that the wars in Vietnam and the Middle East had more in common with those of Israel than most American Jews had hitherto been willing to admit. In addition to assorted local and historical similarities, they shared an analogous political context: “The Arab infiltrators, often of Palestinian origin, who spread death and destruction in Israeli villages, like to think of themselves as liberating their country just as the Vietcong see themselves liberating their country from the American invaders and their local supporters.” And “in both cases the sympathy of the world Communist movement is on one side, while the Western world by and large supports the other.” This led Wyschogrod to an argument that would soon be echoed for decades to come: that, in order for the “American commitment to the security of Israel [to] retain its credibility,” the United States had to continue to maintain its war in Vietnam and its empire across the world. This was “the Jewish stake” in America’s foreign wars.46
Though the neoconservative movement can claim many mothers and fathers, Wyschogrod’s argument would join Peretz’s as an essential document of its origins. One can also point to the rhetorical excesses of student protesters, violence on the part of the New Left, and increasingly open antisemitism and anti-Zionism in the Black Power movement. It is impossible to separate Jewish neoconservatism’s origins from the revulsions caused by constant news reports of inner-city riots, the bombings of university research centers, the disputatious 1968 New York City teachers’ strike, the chaos of that year’s Democratic National Convention, the Weather Underground’s “Days of Rage,” and the broader societal dislocations caused by the myriad social movements of the 1960s and 1970s that these events represented. But neither can the transformation of Israel’s image in the leftward precincts of American political life be dismissed.
Open criticism of Israeli actions among American Jews was decidedly rare in this period. Jews who did not face the threats that the Israeli Jews faced were instructed to keep whatever misgivings they had to themselves; their job was to write checks to pro-Israel organizations and pro-Israel letters to the editors of their local newspapers to counter any criticism that appeared. Abraham Foxman, who would go on to rule the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) as his private fiefdom for nearly thirty years, explained the diktat in simple, unambiguous terms: “Israeli democracy should decide; American Jews should support.” In its 1977 annual report, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations offered up a more nuanced version of the same iron law: “Dissent ought not and should not be made public because… when Jewish dissent is made public in the daily press or in the halls of government, the result is to give aid and comfort to the enemy and to weaken that Jewish unity which is essential for the security of Israel.”47
In Israel, however, no such “not-in-front-of-the-goyim” nervousness crippled dissenters from speaking up. Among the most eloquent of these voices was that belonging to the kibbutznik and budding young novelist Amos Oz. In August 1967, he published a letter in the Israeli newspaper Davar pleading with his countrymen to recognize that they “were not born to be a people of masters”: “‘To be a free people’—this wish must awaken an echo in our hearts so long as we have not lost our humanity.” And yet Israelis were “condemned now to rule people who do not want to be ruled by us. Condemned, not merry and euphoric. The shorter the occupation lasts, the better for us, because an occupation is inevitably a corrupting occupation, and even a liberal and humane occupation is an occupation.” Oz wrote of his “fears about the kind of seeds we will sow in the near future in the hearts of the occupied.” And “even more,” he had “fears about the seeds that will be implanted in the hearts of the occupiers.” Not long afterward, in the spring of 1968, the world-renowned Jewish scholar Yeshayahu Leibowitz published an essay in the newspaper Yediot Ahronot titled “The Territories.” He prophesied that “a state ruling a hostile population of 1.5 to 2 million foreigners would necessarily become a secret-police state, with all that this implies for education, free speech, and democratic institutions.… The administration would have to suppress Arab insurgency on the one hand and acquire Arab Quislings on the other.” He, too, begged Israelis, “out of concern for the Jewish people and its state,” to “withdraw from the territories and their population of 1.5 million Arabs.”48
But they did not listen. Or at least not enough of them did. And in the United States, meaningful debate was not even permitted among Jews of good standing in the community who wished to remain so. As the French Jewish philosopher Alain Finkielkraut has observed, “To be a hero by proxy, to ritualize the present, to need the insecurity of Israel to remain Jewish: each of these things explains why many in the Diaspora confusedly punish themselves through an unqualified solidarity with every decision Jerusalem takes.” The American Jewish embrace of their unique form of nationalism—which the scholar Benedict Anderson termed “long distance nationalism”—would only grow in the coming decades.49