Jimmy Carter’s tireless efforts to bring Israel and Egypt together in a peace agreement during the 1979 negotiations at Camp David are arguably the most consequential contribution any US president has made toward Israel’s security since its founding. The treaty earned the Israelis literally 100 percent of what they had so long sought: a separate peace treaty that ended not only the state of war with their most threatening neighbor, but also the freedom to carry out their other strategic and military objectives without concern of igniting regional war. (It also effectively ended the boycott of Israeli and Jewish products, people, and culture across the Arab world.) However “cold” it may have been in terms of relations between the two signatories, the agreement remained in place despite many Israeli actions that might have dislodged it: Israel’s occupation of an Arab capital (Beirut); its air attacks on numerous Arab countries; its demolition of nuclear reactors in both Iraq and Syria; subsequent mini wars in Gaza against the ruling party there, the Islamic fundamentalist Hamas, and in Lebanon against Iran’s guerrilla allies, Hezbollah; the occasional bombing of military targets in Syria; and the violent crushing of two Palestinian rebellions on the West Bank (the First and Second Intifadas), together with an apparently endless occupation there. But what Carter never understood was that he wanted this peace for Israel far more than American Jewish leaders did, and even more than many Israelis. He proved willing to take political risks for it that no president before or after him has been willing even to imagine. He paid for his success with a consistent campaign of vilification by these same Jewish leaders, and most of them never forgave him for the tenacity with which he pursued his vision of Middle East peace.
A former one-term governor of Georgia and surprise victor of both the Democratic presidential primary and the presidential election of 1976, Carter defeated President Ford on a strong pro-Israel platform. Before running for president, the born-again Baptist had not had much reason to give the Arab/Israeli conflict special attention, save for whatever came up in the Sunday Bible study class he taught (literally) religiously. Carter admitted that as a peanut farmer and southern governor, he knew no Arabs and had little background in Middle East diplomacy. His primary influence in thinking about Israel remained “the Bible.”1
Carter’s top aide on Jewish matters, Stuart Eizenstat, instructed the candidate that “unswerving support for Israel must be the basis for our Middle East policy,” outlining “a punchy, strong pro-Israel position.” The concentration of Jews in and around the nation’s major population centers, as well as their prominence in the media, academia, finance, and the legal and medical professions, amplified their voices and political influence. Carter had not been the first or even the second or third Jewish choice for the presidency in 1976. But he overcame this uneasiness by insisting that the basis of his commitment to Israel’s survival was “a moral imperative.” This issue took precedence for him along with his promises to heal the nation in the wake of Watergate and Vietnam. Carter’s choice of Senator Walter Mondale of Minnesota as his running mate was also appealing to Jews. A significant number of them had defected to the Republicans in the Nixon-McGovern race four years earlier, but Mondale was the protégé of liberal stalwart and Zionist champion Hubert Humphrey. On Election Day, Jewish voters returned to their previous pattern, giving the Democratic nominee a 75–25 margin over incumbent Ford.2
In the Oval Office, Carter’s political team viewed Israel in much the same way that his campaign had. Chief of Staff Hamilton Jordan explained, in a June 1977 memo, that regarding US Middle East policy, “there does not exist in this country a political counterforce that opposes the specific goals of the Jewish lobby.” He added, however, albeit with considerable understatement, that while the members of the administration were “aware of [the lobby’s] strength and influence,” they did not “understand the basis for that strength” or how it functioned politically: “It is something that was not a part of our Georgia and Southern political experience.”3
Carter entered office with a blueprint of how he might proceed if he decided to pursue a Middle East peace. William Quandt, whom Carter would soon hire as his top Middle East expert on the National Security Council, had already convened an influential group of professors, policy entrepreneurs, and politicians sponsored by the Brookings Institution, a centrist think tank, to examine the problem and try to come up with a workable solution to both the Palestinian problem and the Arab/Israeli conflict. Titled “Toward Peace in the Middle East,” it called for staged but complete Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories and the creation of an independent Palestinian state. But as with almost all such blue-ribbon-panel plans, it paid little attention to the question of how to get from here to there. This was a problem, given Israel’s position at the time. When General Moshe Dayan, soon to be appointed Israel’s foreign minister, met with Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s national security adviser, barely ten days into the new administration, on January 31, 1977, Dayan informed him that while the Arab nations might be ready for peace treaties, Israel was “not willing to pay the price.”4
Carter told Brzezinski that he “would be willing to lose the Presidency for the sake of genuine peace in the Middle East,” and Brzezinski believed him (though one cannot help but notice that “peace” is an odd reason to lead a president to think he might lose his job). Often speaking from his heart rather than from his advisers’ talking points, Carter repeatedly brought the wrath of the professional Jewish world down on his head, beginning with a March 1977 town hall in Massachusetts, when he responded to a question on the topic by asserting, “There has to be a homeland provided for the Palestinian refugees who have suffered for many, many years.” Carter was only reiterating, in slightly different language, the same position he had stated during the campaign, and he qualified his remarks by saying that Israel needed “secure borders” and the Arabs needed to recognize these so that the two sides could eventually make peace. But the words “Palestinian homeland,” used for the first time by an American president, set off alarms among American Jewish leaders. To say the word “homeland” was to evoke, in the words of historian Arlene Lazarowitz, the creation of “a radical, PLO-dominated state that would be the first stage for the eventual realization of the PLO goal of destroying Israel.”5
It did not matter that Carter thought this hypothetical entity would be linked to Jordan, rather than fully independent. Nor did it matter that he promised that the nation’s “number one commitment in the Middle East” was “to protect the right of Israel to exist, to exist permanently, and to exist in peace.” Much to his later regret, Carter also reiterated Henry Kissinger’s assurance that the United States would not recognize the PLO “by direct conversations or negotiations” until the PLO recognized Israel’s right to exist.6
Even recognizing the Palestinians as a people with a right to national self-determination was enough to set off the equivalent of a four-alarm fire bell among American Jewish leaders. They had reacted nearly as theatrically when, in 1975, an assistant secretary of state named Harold Saunders, speaking to an almost empty House committee hearing, had expressed the belief that “final resolution of the problems arising from the partition of Palestine, the establishment of the State of Israel, and Arab opposition to those events will not be possible until agreement is reached defining a just and permanent status for the Arab peoples who consider themselves Palestinians.” The Ford administration was on its way out when Saunders made his statement, but Carter’s had just begun. Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, a prominent scholar and president of the American Jewish Congress, would soon emerge as the most dovish of Jewish leaders and a fierce critic of the Israeli government and its neoconservative champions in the United States. But even he objected “most vehemently” to the administration’s use of the term “Palestinian homeland,” as he insisted that it “cannot lead to peace” and would “definitely jeopardize US interests.”7
Carter’s plans would be made immeasurably more complicated in May 1977, by the surprise defeat of Israel’s long-ruling Labor Party by its right-wing rival, Likud. Likud’s leader, Menachem Begin, was nothing like the tough-minded but pragmatic warrior/scholar sons and daughters of the desert that Americans associated with Israel. Rather, as the historian Jerold S. Auerbach described him, Begin “resembled a missing Old-World uncle who had suddenly reemerged from the shadows of Diaspora history.” Decades in opposition and political obscurity had not much moderated the former Irgun leader. Begin and his Likud party hailed from what the Israeli political scientist Shlomo Avineri (who served as head of Israel’s foreign ministry in 1975–1977, appointed by Rabin) has called Israel’s “territorial school,” which was dedicated to maximizing “Israeli control over as much territory as possible of the historical Land of Israel,” and doing so by force, if necessary, and without regard to ancillary costs.8
Likud’s ideological roots lay in the 1925 demand by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism, that “the [British] Mandate be revised to recognise Jewish rights on both sides of the Jordan.” Literally nothing was more important to Begin than maintaining unencumbered Israeli sovereignty over what he, without exception, called “Judea and Samaria” (referring to the West Bank territories’ biblical names). He had rejected the original partition of Palestine as “illegal” and “never [to] be recognized.” He would later explain, in a heartfelt note to President Reagan, that the “Jewish kingdom” was “where our kings knelt to God, where our prophets brought forth a vision of eternal peace,” and where they “developed a rich civilization which we took with us in our heart and mind on our long global trek for over eighteen centuries.” True, the West Bank had been briefly conquered by Jordan in 1948, but in 1967 Israel had “liberated with God’s help that portion of our homeland.” Begin promised that he would never allow a Palestinian state or even Jordanian control over the land. “For Zion’s sake, I will not hold my peace, and for Jerusalem’s sake, I will not rest,” he said, quoting the biblical prophet Isaiah.9
Israel’s lobbyists on Capitol Hill did their best to try to domesticate Begin for American audiences, pushing back against what one termed “a spate of false and unfounded statements in the media regarding the prospective new government and its leadership.” Their talking points sought to dispute the “myths” that “Begin’s Irgun committed a massacre at the Arab village of Deir Yassin,” and that the “Irgun bombed the King David Hotel and killed innocent people.” In Israel, such allegations would not have been popular, but neither would they have been much contested. Among American Jews, however, to deviate from the Exodus-defined discourse, in which Israel achieved the historical equivalent of immaculate conception, was to brand oneself as untrustworthy at best, an enemy at worst.10
Begin further complicated Carter’s task with his proclivity to speak forthrightly about his plans. From Ben-Gurion onward, Israeli leaders had tended to concede to Americans’ rhetorical requests while ignoring them when making their actual policy choices. Not so, Begin. He told the truth, and it was not a truth that many Americans—Jewish or not—wished to hear. He told William Quandt, for example, that he simply would “never agree to withdrawal” from the West Bank. Deploying considerable understatement, the adviser later admitted that the Carter administration “never quite figured out how to get around Begin or work through him or work over his head or behind his back. I cannot stress to you how difficult that turned out to be.” Under Begin, the pace of settlement building exploded. In Begin’s view and that of his followers, there was no West Bank “occupation”; there was only its “liberation.” As he told one television reporter, “You don’t annex your own country.”11
Hamilton Jordan’s memo to Carter had also predicted that “one of the potential benefits of the recent Israeli elections is that it has caused many leaders in the American Jewish community to ponder the course the Israeli people have taken and question the wisdom of that policy.” Brzezinski had also advised Carter that “precisely because Begin is so extreme,” Carter might “be able to mobilize… a significant portion of the American Jewish community” to support his plans for peace negotiations and a settlement. And this Jewish support would ease the president’s path to getting “the needed congressional support.” Failure has met every presidential attempt to enlist American Jews to oppose the Israeli government on almost any matter, but perhaps never quite so spectacularly as in Carter’s case. Before Begin’s first meeting with Carter, in May 1977, the White House received 1,552 letters addressing Carter’s Middle East policies, and 95 percent were opposed; of the 359 telephone calls on the same issue, the figure was 100 percent. Among Jewish leaders, it was considered verboten to publicly disagree with Israel’s leaders on any issue, no matter how trivial. Whatever criticism might be appropriate, Rabbi Alexander Schindler, chair of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, told the New York Times, should be voiced only in private, “because, to a large extent, the strength of Israel depends on the strength of the American Jewish community, on its perceived strength and its unity in support of Israel.”12
Relations between Schindler et al. and the Carter White House deteriorated further in the ensuing weeks and months. Not long after Begin’s meeting with Carter, Schindler promised, “We’ll fight Carter.… Jews will not vote for him in 1980. You can’t scare the American Jews.” When, on October 1, 1977, the governments of the United States and the USSR issued a joint communiqué regarding Middle East peace negotiations to be resumed in Geneva, and calling for a “comprehensive settlement” to finally resolve “all specific questions,” this reaction was repeated. The joint statement used the same sorts of phrases that had set off Jewish leaders in the past, including, especially, its call for the “withdrawal of Israeli Armed Forces from territories occupied in the 1967 conflict,” and “the resolution of the Palestinian question, including insuring the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people.”13
To the pro-Israel editors of Near East Report, the phrase “legitimate rights of the Palestinian people” was nothing less than “a euphemism for the creation of a Palestinian state and the dismemberment of Israel.” The American Israel Public Affairs Committee circulated a letter signed by 32 senators and 150 representatives accusing the administration of “devaluing” the “principles and commitments which have guided U.S. Mideast policy during the last six administrations.” The letter concluded that the US-USSR communiqué was “only the latest in a series of one-sided pressures exerted recently against Israel by the Administration,” one that “spell[ed] real danger for the national interests which the U.S. and Israel have long shared.” It did not help with this crowd that Edward Said praised the communiqué in the New York Times and saluted its rare mention of Palestinian rights.14
Carter’s White House press secretary, Jody Powell, would later describe the political reaction as “bonkers.” Democratic fund-raising events were canceled. Representatives from the administration to Jewish groups were shunned. Hyman Bookbinder, the outspokenly liberal Washington representative of the American Jewish Committee, lectured the Carter people, “Obviously, you do not apparently really understand what those words mean.…‘Palestinian rights’ means the destruction of Israel.” A Harris poll taken at the time found 60 percent of Jews agreeing with the statement that “the president and his people have abandoned Israel.”15
The outcry generated by the October statement had the potential to jeopardize several other important Carter administration goals, including Senate ratification of the recently signed Panama Canal treaties, the SALT II negotiations with the Soviets, and Carter’s efforts to pass a comprehensive national energy policy. Evangelicals were particularly hostile, believing that Carter had literally made a deal with the devil. It further inflamed matters that Carter also took this opportunity to fight a bruising battle over his announced plan to sell advanced fighter jets to Egypt and Saudi Arabia in a deal paired with the sale of far more sophisticated weaponry, in far greater numbers (and with far more generous terms), to Israel. Egged on by Brzezinski, the president felt he needed to prevail in his first confrontation with the pro-Israel lobby, in order to convince Arab nations that he was serious about pursuing a comprehensive peace. He may have been right. Republican Party ears were largely cocked in the direction of the oil and weapons industry lobbyists who contributed so generously to their campaigns at the time. Democrats, meanwhile, were hardly eager to humiliate their party’s president so early in his term.
But the bad blood lingered. Pro-Israel lobbyists went so far as to send novelizations of the eight-hour 1978 television melodrama Holocaust to every member of Congress as a supposed warning of what happens when Jews are left defenseless against their enemies—ignoring not only common sense, but also the fact that the very arms package they were fighting included massive amounts of sophisticated weaponry for the Jewish state. No matter. A presidential meeting with Jewish leaders broke up in mutual acrimony, with the Jewish leaders implying that the Polish-born Brzezinski’s beliefs were colored by antisemitism. Ignoring all protocol, Rabbi Schindler, chair of the Presidents Conference, leaked the off-the-record contents of the meeting to the news media, thereby simultaneously demonstrating his contempt for the president and burning his bridges to the administration.16
Egyptian leader Anwar Sadat’s surprise November 1977 announcement that he wished to fly to Jerusalem to plead the cause of peace directly to the Israeli Knesset presented the deeply religious Carter with an irresistible opportunity. It upended the US-Soviet peace initiative, but at the same time appeared to present a once-in-a lifetime opportunity to break the historical logjam between the two perennially warring parties. The problem was that, even as Sadat made his courageous overture and was warmly welcomed in Israel, Begin remained recalcitrant. He was unwilling to stop the construction of new settlements or the expansion of existing ones; unwilling to withdraw Israeli settlers from the Sinai, nor, should they stay, to permit UN or Egyptian protection for them; unwilling to acknowledge that UN Resolution 242 applied to the West Bank or the Gaza Strip; and unwilling to grant Palestinians a genuine voice in the determination of their future. Carter was stunned and began referring to Begin’s position as “the six noes.” Carter then came up with the audacious idea of convening a summit with the two leaders at the Camp David presidential retreat and just demanding that they hammer out a deal. It would become the first personally negotiated presidential peace agreement since Theodore Roosevelt successfully settled the 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese War.17
At what turned out to be a thirteen-day summit at Camp David, beginning on September 5, 1978, Carter found Sadat “always willing to accommodate” him, and so, for this reason, but also because of the personal dynamics between the two men, he told his aides he felt “very comfortable with him.” With Begin it was just the opposite. Begin was “completely unreasonable,” a “psycho” who demanded “a song and dance… over every word.” Eventually, following thirteen days of dramatic blowups, packed bags, summoned helicopters, and drafted statements of failure at the ready, and fully twenty-three drafts of proposed agreements, Carter somehow found a formula acceptable to both sides. Israeli defense minister Ezer Weizman would later admit that he had “never seen a man more tenacious” than Carter had been in pursuit of the Camp David Accords. At the September 17 signing ceremony, Begin, who was far from famous for his sense of humor, paid tribute to Carter with the quip that to get to yes, the president had “worked harder than our forefathers did in Egypt building the pyramids.” Congressman Stephen Solarz (D-NY), a strong pro-Israel voice, called the accord possibly “the most remarkable and significant diplomatic achievement in the history of the republic.” Sadat, meanwhile, did wonders for the image of Arabs in the US media and with its public. After Jimmy Carter, Sadat, Time’s 1977 “Man of the Year,” had become the living person Americans most admired, five places above Menachem Begin (causing yet another headache for American Jewish leaders).18
The most difficult of the negotiations’ many sticking points were Israel’s West Bank settlements. Carter was certain he had secured Begin’s promise to cease settlement construction immediately while final negotiations about their ultimate fate could take place. He wrote this in his diary and announced it at a post-summit joint session of Congress with Begin and Sadat sitting in the audience. But Begin felt he had meant his pledge to last only three months. What Begin understood Carter to understand is ultimately unknowable. Carter would later, quite bitterly, accuse Begin of having lied on this crucial point. But the evidence is not dispositive either way. Significantly, Begin never signed the agreement that Carter and Secretary of State Cyrus Vance drew up for him that would have codified Carter’s understanding. William Quandt would term this a “loose end” that had been left “vague” and “unresolved,” but it would turn out to be a crucial one that risked unraveling the entire deal: Begin went home and immediately began plans to fortify and expand the settlements and soon committed to building eighteen to twenty more.19
Whatever Carter thought he heard from Begin, the latter never veered from his bedrock belief. Peace in exchange for the Sinai was fine, but literally nothing was ever going to dislodge Israel from “Judea and Samaria” so long as it was up to Begin. As future US ambassador to Israel Richard Jones would presciently observe in early 1982, when Israel had settled a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands of settlers who live on the West Bank today, “The goal has [always] been to create a matrix of Israeli control of the West Bank so deeply rooted that no subsequent Israeli government would be able to relinquish substantial chunks of that territory, even in exchange for peace.” The deal Israel sought—and got—at Camp David from Egypt, thanks to Jimmy Carter, was essentially “1967 for 1948.”20
Carter did enjoy a brief respite from criticism in the mainstream media, which celebrated the historic achievement and paid particular tribute to Carter’s patience and persistence. But American Jewish leaders mostly sat on their hands. They did not object to the agreements themselves, because being more hawkish than the famously hawkish Israeli leader was like being holier than the pope. And they were certainly pleased that Carter and Sadat had ultimately proved willing to sell out the Palestinians, who, yet again, took another opportunity to miss an opportunity. (Vance sent Edward Said, a member of the Palestinian National Council, to Beirut with an offer to Yasser Arafat of US recognition of the PLO as the “sole legitimate representative” of the Palestinian people if the PLO chairman would agree to recognize Israel and join the talks, but Arafat refused even to see him.)21
Following the signing ceremony, Carter continued his dogged efforts to try to bridge the gaps between the two sides. During the repeated trips that he and Vance made to the Middle East, the problem continued to be Begin’s unwillingness to implement what Carter had understood to be his promises at Camp David. In all of these arguments, the Israeli leader had American Jewish leaders in his corner. When, after one December 1978 trip, Vance told reporters that Israeli intransigence was blocking an agreement, the American Jewish Committee’s Washington representative, Hyman Bookbinder, expressed his “outrage” over the “unfair accusations” and attacked what he called the administration’s “anti-Israeli campaign.” William Safire titled one of his New York Times columns “Carter Blames the Jews.” Carter later complained that “in public showdowns on a controversial issue,” the American Jewish leaders “would always side with the Israeli leaders and condemn us for being ‘evenhanded’ in our concern for both Palestinian rights and Israeli security.”22
Public criticism of Israel’s behavior was hardly unheard of before the Carter administration, but it had been confined largely to the far right, oil industry interests, ex–State Department officials, and the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism. The 1967 war put Israel on the wrong side of the anti-imperialist and pro-third-world New Left, in which young American Jews were decidedly overrepresented. But these were not the kinds of voices that would be of any help to Carter’s peace efforts. Unfortunately, the one group that might have helped did not survive long enough to do so. “Breira” (Choice), a group of prominent liberal rabbis and intellectuals, came together in 1972 and 1973 with a platform that read, in part, “We love Israel. We cherish the cultural treasures and the many moral examples it has given us. And we similarly affirm the richness of the Jewish experience in North America and are eager to explore and extend its possibilities.” Its bona fides established, the group called on Israel “to make territorial concessions” and “recognize the legitimacy of the national aspirations of the Palestinians” so as to reach a peace agreement that reflected “the idealism and thought of many early Zionists with whom we identify.”23
Breira’s founding chairman, Rabbi Arnold Wolf, would in later decades become a close friend and confidant of a budding young Chicago politician with the odd name of Barack Hussein Obama, who happened to live across the street from his synagogue in Hyde Park. (As president-elect, Obama would eulogize Wolf in December 2008 as “a titan of moral strength and champion of social justice.”) Writing in the small-circulation independent Jewish journal Sh’ma in March 1973, Wolf expressed the kind of disappointment with Israel that was considered near treason among his fellow Jewish leaders. “Israel colonizes the ‘administered’ territories without regard to international law or the rights of the indigenous Palestinian[s],” he charged, and, “increasingly, in the Jewish state, hard work is done by Arab hirelings.” He lamented the cultural rehabilitation of Jabotinsky, the celebration of “generals and strategists” as opposed to “scholars” and “farmers,” and closed with a near-sacrilegious admonition: “Israel may be the Jewish state; it is not now and perhaps can never be Zion.”24
According to Max Ticktin, a scholar and rabbi employed by Hillel, the national Jewish organization serving college students, Breira hoped to create a new “grassroots based democratic structure for American Jewry” that included “youth, women and the poor.” Another Breira founder, Arthur Waskow, later a prominent progressive rabbi, wondered whether progressive Jews had “a responsibility to oppose the giving of money or support” to traditional Jewish organizations, given the fact that “we feel [they] are blindly marching toward the destruction of Israel.”25
Breira initially received quite favorable publicity in the US media, whose members were apparently intrigued by the bona fides of its founders and the newness of their message. The Washington Post ran a friendly profile noting that Breira’s proposal for Israel “to turn its occupied territories on the West Bank into a separate Arab state and pull back to its 1967 boundaries” was frequently discussed in Israel, but not in the United States, “where criticism of what Israel does has come to be equated with an attack on Israel’s existence.” A New York Times editorial found that Breira was “overcoming… the misapprehension of many Jewish Americans that criticism of Israeli policies would be seen as a rejection of Israel.” But most “major” Jewish organizations saw Breira for what it was: a challenge to their hegemony in the Jewish world and an avenue for American Jews to undercut their policy of unanimous and unquestioned support for Israel. With impressive hypocrisy, the AJC’s Bookbinder professed to detect a “shrillness, a self-righteousness, a certitude” in Breira’s pronouncements. The Jewish women’s service organization Hadassah called the group “cheerleaders for defeatism” in one of its newsletters. (This was a particularly ironic viewpoint given the role its founder, Henrietta Szold, had played in helping to organize the binationalist Ihud movement in pre-state Palestine.) Forty-seven rabbis put their names to a letter accusing Breira of taking a position “practically identical with the Arab point of view.”26
People who should have been its natural allies shunned and slandered the group. Arthur Lelyveld, head of the Reform rabbinate, as well as civil rights champion (and father to a future New York Times executive editor), accused Breira of providing “aid and comfort… to those who would cut aid to Israel and leave it defenseless before murderers and terrorists.” The American Jewish Congress president, Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, refused to speak at a meeting where a Breira representative had also been invited. Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Simcha Dinitz, restated the rules in response to Breira in case anyone had forgotten: all differences of opinion between Israel and American Jews should be aired only privately; only Israelis should decide [its] policies; and no one should suggest that Israel talk to “terrorists.” “These rules,” as the Jewish journalist J. J. Goldberg has observed, “were quickly taken up by the Jewish leadership as sacred writ from Jerusalem,” and any American Jewish leader who refused to abide by them, or even sought in any way to try to elide them, soon found himself referred to as a “former American Jewish leader.”27
The group’s fate was likely sealed in late 1976, when some of Breira’s most prominent figures, including Ticktin and Waskow, attended a supposedly secret meeting with a PLO-affiliated—albeit unofficially—Arab Israeli author, Sabri Jiryis. Virtually every major Jewish organization joined in vigorous denunciation of this event. The Conference of Presidents declared that it “vigorously opposes and deplores any meetings—official or unofficial—with the P.L.O.,” claiming that “the only purpose and possible result of such meetings is P.L.O. propaganda aimed at providing this terrorist federation with an image of moderation.” Rael Jean Isaac, a leading member of Americans for a Safe Israel, a small, shrill, pro-settler group founded in 1971, wrote an astonishingly scurrilous thirty-page pamphlet called “Breira: Counsel for Judaism.” Commentary published a similarly McCarthy-style attack in which Breira was accused of being “a vivid demonstration of the inroads made into the American Jewish consciousness by the campaign to delegitimize Israel.”28
Both Isaac’s and Commentary’s attacks rested heavily on the alleged associations of Breira’s founders. Waskow, for instance, had been one of the earliest fellows at the Institute for Policy Studies, a leftist think tank, where others employed there boasted radical associations, sometimes with groups unfriendly to Israel. Carl Gershman, then a young leader of the strongly anti-Communist Young People’s Socialist League (later a prominent neoconservative), declared that Waskow lived in a political world “in which the criterion of hostility to Israel [is used] to determine whether someone is anti-imperialist and ‘revolutionary.’” In early 1970 Waskow had written in Sh’ma of the need for American Jews to challenge Israel to “deal justly and face-to-face with the Palestinian people.” That same year, Jews for Urban Justice, a Washington New Left organization with which Waskow was affiliated, called on Israel to negotiate with the PLO for the creation of an independent Palestinian state in exchange for its recognition of the Jewish state. A year later, he cochaired the Ad Hoc Liberation of Palestine and Israel Committee. The group, which featured Rabbis Wolf and Arthur Green together with Noam Chomsky, the yippie leader Abbie Hoffman, and the left-wing baby doctor Benjamin Spock, among many others, published an advertisement in the New York Review of Books in which they urged “the American Jewish community and the American anti-war and radical movements [to] take up issues not by a mindless endorsement of one party orthodoxy or another in the Middle East but with serious study and a sensitive commitment to the liberation of both the Israeli and Palestinian people from militarism and exploitation.” Members quit. Donations dried up, and the organization simply fell apart by the winter of 1977–1978. The power to speak for, and represent, American Judaism had long ago passed from rabbis and intellectuals to the professional organizations whose leaders would brook no public criticism, period. As Rabbi Ticktin, whose job at Hillel was also threatened by the brouhaha, would observe in retrospect, “We were naive about the power of the American Jewish establishment and that came out painfully when they began to attack us and limit our activity.”29
Breira’s demise was doubly unfortunate for Jimmy Carter. The group may have grown more popular had it been able to last a bit longer. And its legitimacy in the eyes of fellow Jews would undoubtedly have been boosted by the later emergence of the Israeli peace movement Shalom Achshav (Peace Now) in the wake of Sadat’s visit. Shalom Achshav was led by soldiers who had fought in previous wars and promised to fight in future ones, should they turn out to be necessary; it eventually drew crowds of hundreds of thousands of Israelis for its peace rallies, and it, too, looked to American Jews for support. But Breira was no longer around to give it any. A group called American Friends of Peace Now was eventually formed, but not in time to help Carter.
The president faced yet another crisis with Jewish leaders, one that was not of his own making, when, on August 14, 1979, Time magazine published the news that the US ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young, had met privately with the PLO’s UN observer, Zehdi Labib Terzi, at a July 26 dinner at the apartment of Kuwait’s UN ambassador. The meeting was a violation of the promise the Israelis had extracted from Kissinger four years earlier never to speak to PLO officials until their organization recognized Israel. Owing to miscommunication within an understaffed State Department over a weekend and clumsy responses by the White House press office, followed by extremely bad faith on virtually all sides of the dispute, the meeting led to Young’s forced resignation. The results were an intensification of the deterioration of the political relationship between Blacks and Jews, a weakening of what remained of the Democratic coalition that Franklin Roosevelt had forged during the New Deal, and yet another setback to the cause of Middle East peace.
Andrew Young had been a leader in the civil rights movement, an adviser to Martin Luther King Jr., a symbol of Carter’s commitment to human rights abroad, and the highest-profile Black person in his administration. He was not at all shy about giving voice to his political beliefs, which were well to the left of the center of gravity in the Carter administration. Young once opined that the British had “practically invented racism.” He denounced the United States’ embargo of Castro’s Cuba and its refusal to recognize Communist Vietnam. When Young suggested that the United States had “hundreds of people that I would categorize as political prisoners in our prisons,” House Republicans instigated an unsuccessful effort to impeach him. According to Brzezinski, who opposed all of these ideas, “Carter [only] wanted him because of color.”30
The exact circumstances that led Carter to demand Young’s resignation remain murky even today. The events leading up to the explosion were in many respects a sequence of tempests in a series of teapots. Carter himself called the ban on talking to the PLO “absolutely ridiculous,” and termed Kissinger’s promise to the Israelis “preposterous.” Moreover, it had been ignored whenever that was deemed to be necessary. Fully a year before the Terzi incident, Young had dined with a high-ranking PLO emissary and let his superiors know. Other US officials had already engaged in direct, albeit secret, talks with the PLO via intelligence channels, and the (Jewish) US ambassador to Austria, Milton Wolf, had already met with Isam Sartawi, a senior member of the PLO, three times that spring (Sartawi was later assassinated).31
It remains unclear who exactly leaked the news that, contrary to previous media reports, Young’s meeting with Terzi had been no accident. Carter biographer Kai Bird speculated that Brzezinski, relying on an FBI surveillance transcript, may have engineered the leak in order to get rid of a potential rival for the president’s ear. The purpose of the meeting with Terzi, as Young explained to Israel’s UN ambassador, Yehuda Zvi Blum, was to try to prevent the submission of a draft of a Kuwaiti resolution calling for the recognition of an independent Palestinian state. Young needed the PLO to agree to the withdrawal of the resolution, or the Arab UN ambassadors would go ahead with it. Young was about to rotate into the presidency of the UN Security Council and felt himself to be acting in that capacity, rather than as US representative. In any case, the news leak of the prearranged meeting proved a disaster for Carter, whose administration prided itself on straight-shooting with the American people.32
Despite the fact that Young had succeeded in heading off the PLO initiative on Israel’s behalf, its embassy nevertheless issued a formal protest. Bertram Gold, executive vice president of the American Jewish Committee, insisted that “if Young did talk to the PLO on his own, he should be fired.” The New York Daily News, then America’s highest-circulation newspaper, ran a bold-type headline, “Jews Demand Firing Young.” The Washington Post reported that Rabbi Joseph Sternstein, president of the American Zionist Federation, had wired President Carter that “only the dismissal of Ambassador Young can restore confidence in your administration.” At this point, Vance felt that he had been made to look like a fool, and Carter needed to demonstrate that US policy, however “ridiculous” (and hypocritical), remained unchanged. Vance, feeling deliberately misled, told Carter that if Young did not leave, he would, giving the president no choice. “I love Andy like a brother, and I want to guide him. But he has embarrassed us too many times in the past,” Carter told his aide Stuart Eizenstat. Carter would later call accepting Young’s resignation “one of the most heart-wrenching decisions I had to make as president.”33
The complicated details of the Young affair notwithstanding, by 1979 some kind of reckoning between Blacks and Jews was already a long time coming. The relationship had soured in the aftermath of the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. Black radicalism grew in influence following the 1968 murder of Martin Luther King Jr., who was staunchly pro-Israel (“Peace for Israel means security, and we must stand with all our might to protect its right to exist, its territorial integrity,” King had said. “I see Israel as one of the great outposts of democracy in the world.”) As Black leaders grew less and less comfortable deferring to white elites, they turned on those whites who were closest to them, both physically, in cities such as New York, and politically and socially. King had rhapsodized about the “centuries-long common struggle of the Negros and Jews, not only to rid ourselves of bondage but to make oppression of any people by others an impossibility.” Now that Jews had reached the highest echelons of American society, however, many Blacks saw them to be purposely pulling the ladder out of reach of their former friends and allies.34
In addition to the Young contretemps, other issues had arisen to upset the former alliance. American Jewish organizations had adopted hostile positions toward any number of Black political initiatives—most importantly, affirmative action, most notably in the infamous case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke in 1978. In the Bakke case, Jewish organizations lined up against Black ones to convince the US Supreme Court to outlaw quotas as a means of reaching affirmative-action goals. Under Podhoretz’s editorship, the AJC’s Commentary relentlessly attacked Black leaders, occasionally edging into racist tropes and stereotypes, as the social and political agendas of the Black Power movement grew ever more ambitious. Anti-Zionist and antisemitic publications began emanating from groups such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee after the 1967 Six-Day War. A bitter New York City teachers’ strike in 1968 pitted mostly Jewish teachers against mostly Black parents and school boards, featuring much ugliness in both directions before the teachers won their victory in court, leaving the Blacks angry and embittered.
This conservative drift in Jewish organizational life was accompanied by alarm about the perceived growth of Black hostility toward Jews in general. Speaking to a plenary meeting of allied Jewish organizations, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, Benjamin Epstein, had recently presented the thesis of his 1974 book, The New Anti-Semitism (coauthored with the longtime ADL attorney Arnold Forster). In it, the authors attacked what Epstein defined as the new “Radical Left,” led by Black and student activists, and its “all-too-frequent blindness to the centrality for Jews of Israel’s survival as an independent and sovereign Jewish state.” In such rhetoric, one could see the turn away from social justice and toward the defense of Israel—a historical shift from Jewish universalism to particularism. That particularism had come to define much of the professional Jewish community while simultaneously encouraging Israeli intransigence and alienating American Jews both from their historical commitment to liberalism and from their former allies among society’s downtrodden.35
While some, mostly older, Black leaders were genuinely distressed by these developments, most appeared ready to air what they considered to be a whole package of grievances that had been building over time. An editorial in The Afro-American insisted that Young had been forced out of the administration due to “Jewish pressure,” while reporting “rumors” that the Israelis had “bugged” Young’s meeting. It advised Jews to stop “acting like spoiled children in their responses to all these events.” At a meeting of two hundred Black leaders sponsored by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), called in the wake of Young’s resignation, speaker after speaker rose to praise Young and denounce both Israel and American Jewish leaders for their role in what one resolution called the State Department’s “callous, ruthless behavior” toward Young in particular. But they denounced the conduct of US foreign policy in general as well. Little, if any, dissent on these points was evident. The respected psychologist and educator Kenneth B. Clark received a standing ovation while reading a resolution attacking Jewish organizations and intellectuals as “apologists for the racial status quo,” along with Israel for what was called its “trade and military alliance” with the racist South African regime. This relationship, the Black leaders agreed, was yet “another manifestation of pro-Israelism taking precedence over American Jews’ moral values and domestic political alliances.”36
Not surprisingly, Jewish leaders chose not to turn their collective other cheek. The AJC’s Bookbinder was hardly alone in accusing Black leaders of “out-and-out anti-Semitism.” Others pointed to survey data demonstrating that while Jews were more sympathetic to Blacks than any other white ethnic group, Blacks were more likely than any other ethnicity to embrace negative stereotypes about Jews. Many Jews believed that Carter had cast them as scapegoats for Young’s forced departure. Rabbi Schindler called the president’s unwillingness to rebuke Black leaders “a pure and simple exploitation of anti-Semitism for political purposes.” This was yet another false accusation against the beleaguered president. Carter had clearly said that no “American Jewish leaders or anyone else” had lobbied him to fire Young, a statement considerably more generous than a strict commitment to truthfulness would have allowed.37
Carl Gershman’s seven-thousand-plus-word missive on the Young affair appeared in the now aggressively neoconservative Commentary in November 1979. Sounding like a prosecuting attorney, he accused Young of trying to turn the United States against Israel. Young, he wrote, had called Israel “an expansionist power” that engaged in “terroristic” raids on Lebanon and had “become the oppressor” of the Palestinians, and was now claiming that the Israelis “do not want peace with the PLO.” Gershman also held Young responsible for boosting both the Palestinian cause and anti-Jewish feeling in the Black community. But Gershman’s brief against Andrew Young was filled with McCarthyite insinuations that, together, painted a false picture both of Young and of the politics he practiced. In truth, Andrew Young, like Martin Luther King Jr., had long been a friend to Israel. In Congress, he had joined the Black Americans in Support of Israel Committee, and he had cosponsored a resolution calling for the United States to reconsider its membership in the United Nations if the organization tried to kick Israel out. He had spoken critically of the PLO’s terrorist tactics and its failure to accept Resolution 242, and had said it was “vital to our own interest to guarantee Israel’s survival as an outpost of democracy in the Middle East.” It was also “imperative,” he had added, “that the United States continue to do all that is necessary to maintain Israel’s security as a nation.”38
By this time, however, holding such views made Young something of an outlier among Black leaders, who for the most part had come to see the Palestinians’ struggle as consistent with their own. This transformation was evident in the statements and travels of any number of Black leaders who made high-profile pilgrimages to Palestinian refugee camps and posed for pictures with Arafat in the aftermath of the Young affair. It can perhaps be seen most clearly in the personality of the Reverend Jesse Jackson, the former aide to King, who was present at his mentor’s assassination (and literally waved his “bloody shirt” in its aftermath).
Jackson had been working to achieve a status akin to being King’s successor, the symbolic “president” of Black America. And, at least insofar as the US media were concerned, his efforts were largely succeeding. In this context, Jackson soon became an almost physical lightning rod for the increasing intensity of Black-Jewish mutual recrimination. In the aftermath of the Young affair, he called Zionism a “poisonous weed” that was choking Judaism, and complained of Carter’s “capitulation” to “our former allies.” He added that while Jews had once been willing to “share decency” with Blacks during the civil rights movement, they had become opponents “once we began to push for our share of universal slots in institutions.” Already critical of what he called Jews’ “persecution complex,” which he said “makes them overreact to their own suffering,” he began calling for the recognition of “the just demands of the dispossessed Palestinian people.” In September 1979, Jackson traveled to the Middle East, first to Israel—where Prime Minister Begin refused to meet him—and then to the Qalandiya refugee camp and to the West Bank, where Palestinian residents carried Jackson on their shoulders and chanted “Jackson! Arafat!” Next, he went on to Beirut, where he was photographed in an awkward embrace with the PLO chairman himself.39
Jackson’s embrace of the Hitler-admiring, Jew-hating Louis Farrakhan, leader of the Nation of Islam, further enraged Jewish leaders. Jackson would later catch all kinds of hell for confiding, in what he thought was just off-the-record “black talk” with a Black reporter, that New York was “Hymietown,” and that “all Hymie cares about is Israel.” It would take the civil rights leader literally decades to shake the antisemitic reputation he created for himself. Jewish groups and neoconservative pundits demanded an endless series of mea culpas from him as he grew in stature during his two presidential runs—campaigns in which he was almost always greeted by Jewish protesters, catcallers, and critical op-ed articles. Even as Commentary’s editorship passed from Norman Podhoretz to his son John, decades later, the magazine ran regular attacks on America’s Black leadership and its alleged tolerance, if not embrace, of antisemitism. These appeared with clocklike consistency (with titles such as “Black Anti-Semitism on the Rise,” “The Rise of Black Anti-Semitism and How It Grows,” “African Americans vs. American Jews,” “Facing Up to Black Anti-Semitism,” and “The Rise of Black Anti-Semitism”). Each one drove another nail into the liberal political coalition that had sustained the Democratic Party for the previous half-century.40
In March 1980, after Young had been replaced by his deputy, the veteran Black State Department official and establishment think-tank denizen Donald McHenry, another snafu at the United Nations further intensified anti-Carter sentiment among Jewish leaders. The United States voted to approve a Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements that failed to distinguish between those on the West Bank, which was under continuing Israeli military rule, and those in East Jerusalem, which Israel had effectively annexed. Carter insisted that the United States had intended to abstain, owing to the Jerusalem issue, and the vote had been “a genuine mistake—a breakdown in communications.” This was true, but the excuse did little to assuage the anger the vote provoked among Jewish leaders. Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts had been trailing Carter in the New York presidential primary in the weeks leading up to the UN vote, but he ended up winning it by a significant margin, rejuvenating his campaign and further weakening Carter for the general election. New York’s loud-mouthed Jewish mayor Ed Koch, whom Carter had invited to lunch at the White House after the vote, went on a kind of personal public (verbal) jihad against the president for allegedly harboring anti-Israel officials in his administration—a category in which he included not only Young and McHenry, but also, rather crazily, Brzezinski, Vance, and Assistant Secretary of State Harold Saunders. He attacked the president personally, called McHenry a “bastard,” and, in Carter’s view, acted “like a fanatic.” But Koch’s campaign had its intended effect. Carter’s pollster Patrick Caddell blamed “the UN vote in the Jewish community,” adding, “We’re getting wiped out. It’s almost as if the voters know that Carter’s got the nomination sewed up but want to send him a message.” If so, it was a message with implications that carried over into November 1980, when Jimmy Carter became the first (and still only) Democratic presidential candidate since the 1920s to fail to win a majority of the Jewish vote.41
In a postmortem assessment titled “Joining the Jackals,” published (of course) in Commentary, Moynihan, now a senator, attacked Carter for even suggesting that Young’s successor, McHenry, should abstain—rather than exercise the United States’ veto—on “this particularly vicious anti-Israel resolution.” Moynihan did not mention that the resolution, condemning Israel’s West Bank settlements, was consistent both with announced US policy and with international law—to say nothing of the commitments Carter understood Begin to have made at Camp David. The issues had become defined almost by pure emotion; facts, context, commitments, and even laws had no place in the discussion.42
All this set the stage for Ronald Reagan, whose presidency was characterized by an insistence that America was always right and therefore its allies were (almost) always righteous. American Jews were generally opposed to Reagan, but they found themselves in a profound conundrum when it came to Israel for this very reason. And yet, as a new constellation of pro-Israel forces came together during the Reagan years, what most American Jews felt or thought about Israel came to matter less and less. There were new political stars rising in the United States, and almost all of them presaged a powerful new Israel both in Middle East and in the corridors of power in Washington, DC.