CHAPTER 17

“BASICALLY, A LIBERAL JEW”

During a friendly interview at New York’s venerable Temple Emanu-El in January 2018, America’s first Black president joked to the audience that he was “basically, a liberal Jew.” This was actually awfully close to the truth. All that was necessary was to substitute the word “Zionist” for “Jew,” as so many American Jews implicitly do. Obama shared the liberal Zionist belief that Israel had to be pushed and prodded into saving itself from an illiberal, anti-democratic, quasi-apartheid future. But like so many liberal Zionists, Obama was better at inspirational speeches than political combat. In his post-presidential memoir, he recalled a moment when his deputy national security adviser, Ben Rhodes, arrived in his office “looking particularly harried” after spending an hour with a “highly agitated liberal Democratic congressman” who had expressed nervousness about the president’s opposition to Israel’s settlements. “I thought he opposes settlements?” Obama asked. “He does,” Rhodes replied, but “he also opposes us doing anything to actually stop settlements.” Little did the president know that this ironic quip would end up defining his own administration as well.1

In many respects, Barack Obama’s career can be viewed as the realization of what the independent scholar Marcus Raskin once called “the We Shall Overcome Moment” in American politics. This was especially true for America’s still quite liberal Jewish community. In 1992, barely more than thirty years old, Obama, a recent graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, married Michelle Robinson, and the couple moved into a condominium in Chicago’s leafy and unusually integrated Hyde Park neighborhood. The building happened to be located across the street from the KAM Isaiah Israel synagogue, then led by Rabbi Arnold Jacob Wolf. Back in 1973, Wolf had been one of the founders of Breira, the liberal Jewish group that had called for recognition of “the national aspirations of the Palestinians.” During Breira’s brief life, which lasted only until 1977, the American Jewish establishment had vociferously denounced Wolf and his fellow organizers for making their criticisms of Israel in public. By the time the Obamas became Wolf’s neighbor, however, many American Jews had moved closer to the beliefs Breira had enunciated way back then. Obama and Wolf became friends, and Obama found himself in sympathy with much of what Wolf had been preaching all those years.

When he was a young lawyer and budding politician, Obama’s most significant mentors and generous political donors were also liberal Jews, as was his most important political adviser, David Axelrod. In his memoir, Obama noted that some of his “most stalwart friends and supporters” came from Chicago’s Jewish community. He admired how Jewish voters remained progressives while other white ethnic groups did not. He said he felt himself bound to Jews by “a common story of exile and suffering,” and that this made him “fiercely protective” of their rights. But Obama’s friendship with the pro-Palestinian scholar Rashid Khalidi, then teaching at the University of Chicago, together with the now decades-long links between the Palestinians and Black leaders, which initially flowered during the Carter administration’s Andrew Young controversy, had also helped to sensitize him to the Palestinian narrative of the “Nakba” and “the conditions under which Palestinians in the occupied territories were forced to live.” And from a purely pragmatic viewpoint, Obama had come to the conclusion that, in the wider world, America’s association with Israel’s mistreatment of the Palestinians and West Bank occupation “continued to inflame the Arab community and feed anti-American sentiment across the Muslim world.” The bottom line was that “the absence of peace between Israel and the Palestinians made America less safe.”2

Here, Obama was stating something taken to be obvious in many, if not most, places in the world. It was especially well understood at the time within the US military. General James Mattis, who later became Donald Trump’s first secretary of defense, told a 2013 meeting of the Aspen Security Forum, “I paid a military security price every day as a commander of CENTCOM because the Americans were seen as biased in support of Israel.” General David Petraeus, Mattis’s predecessor at CENTCOM, who went on to become Barack Obama’s director of central intelligence, had made strikingly similar comments three years earlier when, testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, he admitted that “Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples in the region.”3

Candidate Obama had proven remarkably candid about his disagreements with Israel while at the same time demonstrating an unusually intimate relationship with Israeli culture. In an interview with the influential Jewish journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, Obama spoke with impressive sophistication and (for him) considerable emotion about his attachment to the Jewish people and their culture as well as Israel and its culture, but also of the dangers he believed Israel faced if it continued on a path of endless occupation. He mentioned his fondness for the novels of Philip Roth, and of the work of Israeli writer David Grossman, especially the latter’s searing 1988 book on Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, The Yellow Wind. (Being a skilled politician, in addition to a bona fide intellectual, Obama said he also enjoyed “more popular writers like Leon Uris.”) He waxed eloquent about his “enormous emotional attachment and sympathy for Israel, mindful of its history, mindful of the hardship and pain and suffering that the Jewish people have undergone, but also mindful of the incredible opportunity that is presented when people finally return to a land and are able to try to excavate their best traditions and their best selves”: “And obviously,” he went on, flipping what had become the now traditional identification of the Black freedom struggle with that of the Palestinians, “it’s something that has great resonance with the African American experience.” Sounding more like Martin Luther King Jr. than his successors in the civil rights movement, Obama called “the idea of a secure Jewish state… a fundamentally just idea,” and said his commitment to Israel’s security was “non-negotiable.” At the same time, he publicly advised a Jewish group in Cleveland not to buy into the view that “unless you adopt an unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel, you’re anti-Israel.” Anticipating pushback, he noted—again, truthfully, but also bravely—“One of the things that struck me when I went to Israel was how much more open the debate was around these issues in Israel than they are sometimes here in the United States.”4

Not surprisingly, Obama’s mild criticisms inspired multiple attacks of heartburn in official Jewish circles, whose members had grown accustomed to candidates who spoke exclusively in the language of “shared values,” the “only democracy in the Middle East,” and “unbreakable partnerships” as they pocketed generous donations. In his post-presidential A Promised Land, Obama identified what he called a “whisper campaign” in this period that sought to portray him as “insufficiently supportive—or even hostile toward—Israel.” And “as far as many AIPAC board members were concerned,” he wrote of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, “I remained suspect, a man of divided loyalties.” It was hardly AIPAC alone. As The Forward said in an editorial, during the 2008 Democratic primary season, “the attacks on Obama have metastasized into a wide-ranging assault on his associations.” Debra Feuer, counsel for the American Jewish Committee, sent a confidential memo to her counterparts at other organizations criticizing Obama’s views on the Middle East, Iran, and Syria and attacking him for having once appeared at a fund raiser headlined by Edward Said. Morton Klein, head of the far-right Zionist Organization of America, complained that “Barack Obama doesn’t understand the continuing Arab war against Israel”; he called the notion of an Obama presidency “frightening.” Klein was joined by Malcolm Hoenlein, then executive vice president of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, who told Haaretz that Obama’s talk of “change” could prove “an opening for all kinds of mischief” and expressed what he termed “a legitimate concern over the zeitgeist around the campaign.” (He later denied using these specific words and said he had been discussing the candidates generally, but others who were present confirmed Haaretz’s report.) A number of press releases highlighted Obama’s middle name, Hussein, as well as his deceased father’s background (Barack Hussein Obama Sr., a Kenyan, was originally Muslim and later atheist; father and son had long been estranged). Sidney Blumenthal, a close confidant of Hillary Clinton, circulated a picture to journalists and politicos of Obama dressed up for his half-brother’s wedding in Indonesia in what appeared to be traditional Muslim garb, no doubt to imply the possibility that the future president was really a Muslim. Blumenthal also implored journalists to go to Kenya to investigate Obama’s family background.5

Obama’s alleged “foreignness” became a familiar trope in the mainstream media. For instance, during a Democratic presidential debate, Tim Russert, host of NBC’s Meet the Press, demanded over and over that Obama reject the kind words spoken about him by the antisemitic leader of the Nation of Islam, Louis Farrakhan, so that Jews might feel a bit more comfortable with him. Obama repeatedly did this, but it hardly ended matters—even in Russert’s own questioning that day, much less among Jewish leaders. It is impossible to say how much of the conservative hostility toward Obama was driven by racist fears and prejudice. But given the ease with which Donald Trump took over the Republican Party eight years later, at the end of Obama’s two terms in office—earning himself nearly a quarter of the Jewish vote in the process—one may fairly conclude that the correct answer would not be “none.” Obama himself endorsed Ben Rhodes’s view that, together with his “expressions of concern for ordinary Palestinians” and his “friendships with certain critics of Israeli policy, including an activist and Middle East scholar named Rashid Khalidi,” his real problem among the haters was the fact of his being “a Black man with a Muslim name who lived in the same neighborhood as Louis Farrakhan.”6

Obama was elected president in 2008 with an estimated 79 percent of the Jewish vote at a moment when neoconservatives were still licking their wounds. Boosting the disastrous and dishonestly promoted Iraq War had discredited neoconservatives with the larger public, and their eagerness to question the patriotism of those who—like Obama—had had the good sense to counsel caution had all but eliminated their remaining influence in the Democratic Party. Meanwhile, the evangelical “pro-Israel” movement had grown enormously and embraced ever more extremist views of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. Its new public face was the Pentecostal pastor John Hagee, head pastor of an eighteen-thousand-member San Antonio church, host of a popular television program, and a massively best-selling author. Hagee had overtaken many of his competitors in both popularity and influence. A “Spirit-centered Zionist,” Hagee’s preaching focused foremost on Genesis 12:3, in which God said to Abraham, “I will make you into a great nation.… I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” What this meant, he said, was that Israel was “the gateway to God’s blessing.”7

Like his predecessors in the pro-Israel evangelical political space, Hagee looked forward to a final rapture and the confrontation between Jesus and Satan that it would ultimately usher in. The best way to get things going, he mused, was for either Israel or the United States—preferably both together—to launch an attack on Iran, which he hoped would lead Russia to invade Israel. Then, as outlined in the Book of Ezekiel, the world would experience an “inferno [that would] explode across the Middle East, plunging the world toward Armageddon.” And woe unto those who failed to get with God’s program. “Could it be that America,” Hagee asked, “who refuses to defend Israel from the Russian invasion, will experience nuclear warfare on our east and west coasts?” Here again, it’s a yes, due to Genesis 12:3. In the meantime, Hagee explained, the head of the European Union, who was really, in fact, Satan at that future time (incarnated as the Antichrist), would rule “a one-world government, a one-world currency and a one-world religion” for three and a half years, accompanied by a “false prophet,” whom the Bible also foretold. All of this was imminent, he said, something he considered so obvious as to require no explanation (“One need only be a casual observer of current events to see that all three of these things are coming into reality”). At this point the Antichrist would declare himself to be God and demand to be worshipped from within a rebuilt Temple in Jerusalem. Another three and a half years would pass, to make up the complete seven-year “tribulation” period, and then the Antichrist would find himself confronted by China at Armageddon. At the end of that great final battle, Jesus would finally make his long-awaited return on a white horse and send these two evildoers—the Antichrist and the false prophet—into a “lake of fire burning with brimstone” (Revelation 20:10). He would also dispense with the rest of the world’s nonbelievers, including, unfortunately, all the world’s remaining Jews, except for the ones who had become Christians after the rapture.8

Hagee also had some interesting things to say about the Shoah. It seems that the Jews of the Holocaust had perished because “God sent a hunter,” meaning, of course, Adolf Hitler. In explaining why God would allow this to happen, Hagee had a ready-made answer: God’s “top priority for the Jewish people” was “to get them to come back to the land of Israel.” Had it not been for “the disobedience and rebellion of the Jews,” in refusing to accept Jesus Christ as their lord and savior, maybe God (and Hitler) would have allowed them to catch a break. But because the Jews had continued to manifest their stubbornness “to this very day,” they should not expect things to go well when all the accounts were finally settled, theologically speaking. Should anyone—say, a Jew who lost a loved one during the Shoah—find these remarks at all problematic, Hagee had a reply at the ready: “I didn’t write it, Jeremiah wrote it. It was the truth, and it is the truth.”9

In 2009, Hagee founded what immediately became the largest pro-Israel membership organization in the world, Christians United for Israel (CUFI), which claimed two million members at its founding, later rising to seven million. He later added a lobbying arm to it called the “CUFI Action Fund,” run by the former head of the right-wing Christian Family Research Council, Gary Bauer. It began with a multimillion-dollar budget and dozens of paid lobbyists, who set their minds to working against President Obama and on behalf of Prime Minister Netanyahu. Hagee warned, “If I were a candidate, especially in the Republican Party, I’d be aware of how many voters will cast their vote principally on Israel.”10

Polls of Jewish voters during Obama’s presidency remained strongly negative on Hagee, with polls finding those who opposed cooperating with the man and his organization outnumbering those in favor by five (or even ten) to one. But the people who put themselves forth in the media as Jewish spokespeople did not see a problem. Elliott Abrams and The Weekly Standard’s Jennifer Rubin were happy to sign off on the same bargain that their ideological forefathers—and in Abrams’ case, his in-laws—had made in the past with Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson: forget the antisemitism and the rooting for the rapture, they advised. Business was business and Israel came first. “American Jews ought to notice that there are actually more evangelicals in this country than Jews by about 20 or 30 to 1,” Abrams insisted. “With the Jewish population shrinking as a percentage of the American people, Christians are an increasingly critical base of support for Israel—and groups like CUFI are begging us to accept their help. We should accept it with gratitude and enthusiasm.”11

Invited to address AIPAC’s annual conference in 2007, Hagee had chosen to keep his theological ruminations to himself. Instead, speaking as “an emissary of 50 million Christians,” he said, “Please know that what I say to you now is a sentiment shared by millions of Christians across America and around the world. Today, in the world of freedom, the proudest boast is ‘Ani Yisraeli—I am an Israeli.’” Of the countless ironies embedded in this moment was the fact that Hagee was talking to a group with the word “American” as the first one in its name, and yet here he was praising an entirely different country as the world’s “proudest,” and receiving massive applause for having done so. Rabbi Eric Yoffie, then president of the Union for Reform Judaism, attacked AIPAC’s leaders for inviting Hagee, arguing that they were whitewashing his offensive beliefs in exchange for the massive funds that evangelicals raised for pro-Israel organizations, and further alienating young Jews from their cause. But nobody in AIPAC really cared what a bunch of Reform rabbis—or even the vast majority of American Jews—thought. AIPAC had become a “pro-Israel” lobby—not, as antisemites and people using incautious or outdated terminology thought, a “Jewish” one. The conservative Christian takeover of the Republican Party, together with AIPAC’s rapid right-wing drift, meant that to the degree that any genuine debate on Israel and the Palestinians was to be had, it would have to happen exclusively among Democrats.12

The political space on the leftward side of the debate expanded during Obama’s presidency as well. This manifested itself in two ways simultaneously. The first was the launching of J Street, which called itself a “pro-peace, pro-Israel lobby.” J Street was unique in that it played on the same field as the other respectable Jewish establishment organizations while at the same time openly criticizing the Israeli government. This meant redefining the term “pro-Israel” and taking on AIPAC in the process. That AIPAC was now behaving as a weapon that Bibi Netanyahu aimed at Obama gave J Street a perfect opportunity to define itself as an organization of unapologetic liberal Zionists who promised to have the back of their popular president. In ending the policy of omertà regarding public criticism of Israel, J Street gave voice to political positions far more consistent with the ambivalence American Jews felt toward Israel than AIPAC did with its unswerving fealty to Netanyahu’s aggressively illiberal government. And Obama did what he could for the organization, inspiring the unconcealed consternation of the leaders of traditional Jewish organizations by including J Street’s president, Jeremy Ben-Ami, in his presidential briefings.

Just how comfortable were American Jews seeing their misgivings about Israel expressed in public, however, remained a complicated question, one whose emotional resonance ran far deeper than could be measured by any opinion poll. Leonard Fein, the thoughtful liberal Zionist founder of Moment magazine, offered a glimpse of these sorts of conflicting crosswinds when he averred, during the Walt/Mearsheimer debate, “We don’t trust the Palestinians, we worry about Iran, we haven’t a clue about how you get from here to peace, we don’t take America’s support for granted and even if we did, we are not exactly proud to have to depend on that support.” And therefore, he admitted, despite whatever disagreements many liberal Jews had with the hardline positions that leading Jewish organizations adopted, “we are not entirely upset that ‘out there,’ in the public square, those who speak authoritatively on Israel’s behalf—meaning, principally, AIPAC and the Conference of Presidents—are considerably more rigid, more hawkish, if you will, than we are.”13

Early in his presidency, Obama learned the price of crossing AIPAC. Consistent with the policies he campaigned on, he sought to restart peace negotiations by asking Israel to freeze West Bank settlement expansion, as this show of good faith might help bring the Palestinians back to the negotiating table. As he explained in his memoir, “given the asymmetry in power,” he “thought it was reasonable to ask the stronger party to take a bigger first step in the direction of peace.”14

“Reasonable,” alas, was likely the last quality that might impress anyone involved in America’s Israel/Palestine debate. AIPAC responded with a letter signed by 329 House members asking Obama to make his requests to Israel “privately”—that is, without any pressure to actually address them. As if reading from a time-honored script, Alan Dershowitz, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “Has Obama Turned on Israel?” quoted the Conference of Presidents’ Malcolm Hoenlein, warning that “President Obama’s strongest supporters among Jewish leaders are deeply troubled by his recent Middle East initiatives, and some are questioning what he really believes.” (Dershowitz also made reference to Obama’s “friendships with rabidly anti-Israel characters like Rev. Jeremiah Wright and historian Rashid Khalidi”—a quote that also appeared virtually word for word in another Journal op-ed by Norman Podhoretz.) The Republicans, meanwhile, committed to opposing literally everything Obama proposed, but especially whatever he proposed that the Israelis also opposed. According to Obama, “the White House phones started ringing off the hook, as members of my national security team fielded calls from reporters, leaders of American Jewish organizations, prominent supporters, and members of Congress, all wondering why we were picking on Israel.… [T]his sort of pressure continued for much of 2009.”15

Obama was hardly naïve. Sounding like a sophisticated student of the more reasonable aspects of the arguments that Walt and Mearsheimer had made, he said he fully understood that taking on Israel and its allies “exacted a domestic political cost that simply didn’t exist when I dealt with the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Japan, Canada, or any of our other closest allies.” That was why “members of both parties worried about crossing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee,” and “even stalwart progressives were loath to look less pro-Israel than Republicans.” Almost all American politicians had to face up to the fact that “those who criticized Israeli policy too loudly risked being tagged as ‘anti-Israel’ (and possibly anti-Semitic) and confronted with a well-funded opponent in the next election.”16

But Obama stuck with his plan, at least at first. With the greatest reluctance, Israel eventually agreed to freeze new settlement building for ten months, albeit with exceptions for all of East Jerusalem, all public buildings “essential for normal life,” and all buildings whose foundations had already been laid—and only for ten months. Key was the exemption for construction already underway, which, according to figures provided by Peace Now, would be fully 1,712 buildings that had been begun in the year of the proposed freeze alone. And within eight days of the freeze’s alleged commencement, Israel announced a planned expansion of the Gilo neighborhood in annexed East Jerusalem, before issuing tenders for new construction in three more such neighborhoods. Despite these gaps—and following intense lobbying by both the Obama administration and European governments—the Palestinians eventually agreed to rejoin the peace talks, which began again in late 2010, just three weeks before the putative “freeze” was to end. Vice President Joe Biden flew to Jerusalem to help get the talks off the ground. But just as the wheels on Air Force Two hit the ground, Israel’s interior minister announced a near doubling of the number of proposed dwellings for the ultra-Orthodox East Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramat Shlomo. Biden was furious: “I condemn the decision by the government of Israel to advance planning for new housing units,” read a Biden statement that his office issued after he chose to show up ninety minutes late for dinner with Netanyahu. Obama’s secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, also unloaded on Netanyahu, in a forty-eight-minute phone call in which she ticked off numerous demands. Netanyahu ignored all of them and, soon enough, political reality set back in. Just in case the House members’ letter had failed to impress, AIPAC secured seventy-six senators’ signatures on an April 2010 letter asking the president to “reaffirm the unbreakable bonds that tie the United States and Israel together and diligently work to defuse current tensions” with Israel.17

As Obama saw it, AIPAC had adopted Israel’s position “even when Israel took actions that were contrary to U.S. policy.” While J Street made progress building itself into an institution with the power to survive in an unfriendly atmosphere, it was hardly a counterweight to the power amassed by its rivals. Ben Rhodes would later lament that vis-à-vis Israel and Palestine, “there was constant pressure from the right, and I never felt any from the left.… You had J Street and you had public-opinion polls, but… I don’t think there was a significant set of people representing a left point of view in Congress.” In the mainstream media, the balance of power was, if anything, even more one-sided. Rhodes found it “striking” the degree to which “the drivers of opinion on foreign policy come almost entirely from the right. If you look at who’s on television and the opinion pages, it’s dominated by the right.” Moreover, “if you look at the right, it’s all the same people revolving through the foreign-policy establishment over decades, and it’s not the power of their ideas, it’s the power of financing and coordination. Every one of these little groups like the Emergency Committee for Israel had a bigger budget than anyone pushing back against them.”18

Rhodes was certainly right. While Arab American groups did seek to organize themselves on AIPAC’s model, they met with precious little success. As a result, there was really no such thing as a pro-Palestinian or Palestinian American group sufficiently influential to make itself felt on the presidential or even congressional level. The net result, as a Congressional Quarterly report put it two years into Obama’s first term, was that “President Obama, who came into office with grand hopes of revitalizing the peace process, quickly found himself isolated and eventually boxed in by the ferocity of lawmakers’ support for Israel.” That Obama’s position consistently proved to be the most popular one among not only all Americans, but also among American Jews, carried no politically measurable weight in this debate.19

It should shock no one that playing handmaiden to Likud proved profitable for Republicans. They began raising “pro-Israel” money at a far faster clip than ever before and even overtook Democrats on this score during the 2014 midterm elections. Part of the credit belonged to Hagee and his fellow evangelicals, who gave generously to fund settlements and West Bank land grabs as well as to support candidates who advocated these policies. But the real hero of this effort would turn out to be the right-wing Jewish billionaire and Las Vegas–based gambling magnate Sheldon Adelson.

“It is impossible to overstate the significance that Sheldon Adelson along with his wife Miriam had on shaping US policy with regard to Israel,” observed Republican Jewish Coalition executive director Matt Brooks in a tribute to the couple. This was no exaggeration. Adelson liked to call himself “the richest Jew in the world.” He wasn’t, but he was certainly the richest Jewish Republican funder devoted to an extremist position in the Arab-Israeli conflict. Adelson told Jewish Week that “the two-state solution is a stepping-stone for the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people.” And if “Israel won’t be a democratic state,” Adelson said in a 2014 address, “[s]o what?” To The New Yorker he said he hoped the United States would bomb Iranian cities with nuclear weapons because “I really don’t care what happens to Iran. I am for Israel.” Adelson even abandoned AIPAC in 2007 over the organization’s (admittedly reluctant) willingness to support then Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert’s request for direct US funding to the Palestinian Authority, during a brief moment when peace between the parties appeared at least remotely possible (but remained threatened by the rejectionism of Hamas, then growing rapidly in influence among Palestinians).20

Adelson frequently found himself under criminal investigation for his alleged ties to organized crime, official bribery, money laundering, and the use of prostitution for his business interests. (An average of forty to sixty prostitutes walked the floors of Adelson’s Venetian Macao Resort Hotel in Macau on weekends, outnumbering security personnel, according to company documents, which also reported that the women were “frequently under 18 years” old and were trafficked from China’s inner provinces by “vice syndicates.”) He paid $47 million in fines in 2013 to avoid criminal charges. His money stayed clean enough, however, to be deposited in Republican coffers.21

The billionaire’s special status in Israel first made news in 1991, when Adelson and his Israeli/American bride-to-be received permission to hold their wedding reception inside Israel’s Knesset. According to the body’s Speaker, this extremely unorthodox use of Israel’s parliament had been arranged, without the knowledge of its members, as “a private evening honoring donors to Israel” by its then deputy foreign minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. Adelson continued to fund Netanyahu’s career and the luxurious lifestyle he and his wife enjoyed. But it was not until July 2007, when Adelson launched a shamelessly pro-Netanyahu free daily newspaper, Israel Hayom (Israel Today)—and later named his wife, Miriam Adelson, as its publisher—that the extent of their alliance was fully revealed. The only political interventions he insisted upon involved Netanyahu: the prime minister was to be the hero in all the stories in which his name appeared.22

Israel Hayom proved to be something new and perhaps unique in the history of journalism: a free daily newspaper that people actually wanted to read. The Adelsons spent freely enough on talent that many of Israel’s best journalists could not resist their entreaties. The “Bibi-ton,” as Israelis called it—combining Netanyahu’s nickname with the Hebrew word for newspaper, iton—was also sometimes referred to as “Bibi’s Pravda” by Jews from the former Soviet Union. By 2010, Israel Hayom was the highest-circulation newspaper in Israel, dwarfing the left-leaning Haaretz, one of the world’s great newspapers, by more than six to one in circulation numbers. It put other formerly profitable newspapers out of business entirely. Adelson soon bought up a number of other media properties in Israel, which then took the same pro-Netanyahu editorial stance. In doing so, he skirted Israel’s otherwise tough political funding restrictions and made the equivalent of uncontrolled, unaudited contributions to Netanyahu’s various political campaigns. Over time, the value of the resulting PR Netanyahu received would be worth many hundreds of millions of dollars. No other politician in the country enjoyed anything like it.23

In the United States, Adelson’s method was to fund politicians, pressure groups, and media properties and devote all these resources simultaneously to shifting US policy in Israel in a direction consistent with Netanyahu’s interests and demands. Money was no object when it came to this objective. Adelson bought Nevada’s largest paper, the Las Vegas Review-Journal, using a cut-out holding company to hide his identity. To accomplish this, he paid $140 million for the paper, which happened to be $38 million more than what the entire chain that it was part of had sold for just nine months earlier. Adelson’s family foundation also secretly funded JNS.org, a right-wing Jewish news service that passed its propaganda on to the American Jewish news organizations that subscribed to it. JNS.org was just one of countless organizations Adelson and his wife funded to further their far-right agenda for Israel in both Israel itself and in the United States.24

Nowhere was the power of the Adelsons’ purse more evident than inside the Republican Party. During the 2012 presidential campaign, Adelson’s millions literally dictated the positions taken by GOP presidential candidates. The disgraced former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich told NBC’s Ted Koppel that Adelson supported him because “he knows I’m very pro-Israel. That’s the central value of his life.” Well, now Gingrich was pro-Israel. But back in 2005, he had authored an article calling on the US government to defend “the Palestinian people’s right to have a decent amount of land,” and condemned “the desire of some Israelis to use security as an excuse to grab more Palestinian land.” If necessary, he had argued, the United States should even be willing to “employ financial or other leverage to compel the Israeli government to behave reasonably on the issue of settlements.” And, going even further, Gingrich had called it “vital to our credibility in the entire Middle East that we insist on an end to Israeli expansionism,” and also “vital to our humanitarian duty to the Palestinian people that we protect the weaker party from the stronger power.” The Newt Gingrich who had been gifted with a $20 million contribution from Sheldon and Miriam Adelson for his presidential campaign turned out to have very different views in 2012. Gingrich had decided that the Palestinians were merely an “invented” people who “had a chance to go many places” but apparently preferred military occupation and refugee-camp living. When Gingrich flamed out in the contest for the Republican presidential nomination, Adelson provided another $30 million to the Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, eventually bringing his overall giving to the party in that cycle to $92.7 million. At the time, this was by far the largest amount any one donor had ever given to candidates in a single campaign. But Adelson himself set new records in 2016 and again in 2020. He also cohosted an event for Romney inside Jerusalem’s famous King David Hotel, where Benjamin Netanyahu, the candidate’s former colleague from the Boston-based investment firm Bain Capital, now prime minister of Israel, showed up to support the Republican nominee.25

Two years later, in March 2014, as the 2016 Republican presidential primary was still in what pundits call its “beauty contest” phase, Adelson summoned all the contestants to his Venetian hotel in Las Vegas under the aegis of the Republican Jewish Coalition to have them parade their ideological wares. Those who came all sought to leave with the crown of his multimillion-dollar contributions. They were joined by Ron Dermer, Netanyahu’s close confidant, who had emigrated to Israel from the United States after working for the right-wing Republican pollster Frank Luntz and was now Israel’s ambassador to the United States. During New Jersey governor Chris Christie’s turn before the party’s putative godfather, he committed the apparently unforgivable faux pas of using the term “occupation” to refer to the occupation. Christie soon rushed back and, according to press reports, “apologized in a private meeting,” though this failed to secure him the prize of Adelson’s beneficence.26

Adelson, however, was not the only Republican Jewish billionaire who committed tens of millions of dollars to Republicans to push the Likud line during the Obama era (and after). The New York hedge-fund magnate Paul Singer not only gave millions of his own, but created a network of similarly minded right-wing Jewish multimillionaires to do so as well. Barack Obama was likely being overly kind in his memoir when he wrote that “most congressional Republicans had abandoned any pretense of caring about what happened to the Palestinians.” If any one of them did actually care, he or she understood the need to keep this information to themselves. The financial power of Adelson, Singer, and others, combined with the intense commitment of the party’s evangelical base to Israel’s permanent control over the Golan Heights, the West Bank, and every inch of Jerusalem, defined an extremely narrow path for any Republican politician who hoped for a successful political future. (Adelson and prominent evangelicals often joined forces. Since the beginning of 2012, Adelson has donated at least $4.6 million to Hagee’s Christians United for Israel [CUFI], for example, and since 2015 he has given over $22 million to another organization, called the Maccabee Task Force, headed by CUFI’s former executive director. The task force was dedicated to defending Israel on college campuses.)27

Over time, the radicalism of these extremely well-funded anti-Obama forces grew to a fevered pitch. “I’ve never seen as much enmity toward a president by American Jews as I do toward Obama,” said the Adelson-funded Zionist Organization of America’s Morton Klein. “I’ve never heard people say, as they say to me, ‘I hate him,’” as if that somehow negated Obama’s sky-high approval ratings among Jews. Klein repeatedly tried to convince AIPAC to bar Obama from its annual meetings, because “every chance he gets he blames Israel.” Media mogul and Presidents’ Conference chairman Mortimer Zuckerman complained that “from the start of his presidency, Mr. Obama has undermined Israel’s confidence in U.S. support.” Taking a page from Adelson, he was particularly angry about Obama’s use of the term “settlements” to describe Israel’s settlements. Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum rather crazily insisted that Obama was “enforcing Islamic law, a precedent that could lead to other forms of compulsory Shariah compliance.” The uber-Islamophobic Jewish blogger Pamela Geller, who is funded by mainstream Jewish philanthropies and was a frequent speaker on cable TV and at conservative political gatherings, even more nuttily accused Obama of “advancing jihad against the oath of office that he took,” and “agitating Muslims against Jews.” With apparent seriousness, she asked, “Will he declare war on Israel?”28

While such talk was not only profoundly divorced from reality—to say nothing of its distance from the views of the vast majority of Jewish voters—it only occasionally resulted in any sort of rebuke from polite society, even among liberal Jews. The novelist Cynthia Ozick remained a beloved figure in literary Manhattan even as she described America’s first Black president, in 2010, as “a clever, sly, shrewd, ideologically radical Third-World minded enemy of Israel” who was committed to “sell[ing] Israel down the river.” Incredibly, she also compared President Obama to Hitler, musing that “the German Jews at least had enough perspective not to vote for der Fuhrer… but American Jews, content in our fleshpots, are likely to be fully self-destructive.” When an apparently disturbed owner of an Atlanta Jewish newspaper suggested that perhaps it would be a good idea if the Israelis had Obama assassinated (and was then forced to resign and sell the paper), it became clear that the price of such talk was higher than the Obama-hating Jews had calculated. And yet it hardly abated at all.29

When, shortly after his January 2009 inauguration, President Obama announced he would fly to Cairo in April to give a high-profile speech addressing the Muslim world, without so much as a stop in Israel in either direction, Israelis began to complain. Speaking with friendly journalists and others, they said Obama lacked the typical American “special feeling” for Israel they had come to expect from American politicians. Deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes noted that, to address this alleged problem, American Jewish groups working on behalf of Israel frequently sought to script the president, hoping to help him show that he felt Israel’s concern in his kishkas—a Yiddish word meaning, in this context, “gut,” that Rhodes said he heard more than any other from Jewish leaders.30

Obama finally traveled to Israel in March 2013, and he wowed the place. He spoke to an audience of mostly young Israeli Jews and Arabs at Hebrew University in Jerusalem in a manner so “deft, nuanced, broadly empathetic,” in the judgment of New Yorker editor David Remnick, that he successfully “soothed anxieties about American commitment” while simultaneously mollifying Israelis’ concerns about his kishkas. “Make no mistake,” the president assured his audience. “Those who adhere to the ideology of rejecting Israel’s right to exist might as well reject the earth beneath them and the sky above, because Israel is not going anywhere. Today, I want to tell you—particularly the young people—that so long as there is a United States of America, Ah-tem lo lah-vad [You are not alone].” At the same time, however, Obama sought to prick Israeli consciences over the increasing inhumanity of what was now looking to be a permanent occupation. “It is not fair,” he insisted, “that a Palestinian child cannot grow up in a state of her own. Living their entire lives with the presence of a foreign army that controls the movements not just of those young people but their parents, their grandparents, every single day. It’s not just when settler violence against Palestinians goes unpunished. It’s not right to prevent Palestinians from farming their lands; or restricting a student’s ability to move around the West Bank; or displace Palestinian families from their homes.” Then, demonstrating some of the audacity of hope that had guided him on his amazing journey in the first place, he declared, “Neither occupation nor expulsion is the answer. Just as Israelis built a state in their homeland, Palestinians have a right to be a free people in their own land.”31

Most reviews of Obama’s talk echoed Remnick’s enthusiasm, occupying a space somewhere between reverential and rhapsodic. The New Republic’s usually quite skeptical Israeli analyst, Yossi Klein Halevi, termed it “the most passionate Zionist speech ever given by an American president,” and credited it with “end[ing] the debate here about whether or not he is a friend of Israel.” On the opposite end (or perhaps just outside) of the relevant spectrum of opinion, Hussein Ibish, then a resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington, called the speech “without question the strongest ever made by a senior American politician on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” He judged it “plainly designed to speak directly to the Israeli and Palestinian peoples over the heads of their political leaderships. It was an exercise in public diplomacy par excellence, intended to change the tone and atmosphere, and public perceptions of Obama himself, presumably as an adjunct to actual diplomatic efforts to lay the groundwork for eventually resuming negotiations.” But there was the rub. As Jeffrey Goldberg noted at the time, had Obama given the same speech to AIPAC at one of its annual conventions, “he definitely would have been booed.”32

Before leaving for Israel, Obama sat down with Goldberg in order to set the stage for his trip and boiled his concerns down to a set of questions, the same ones, as it happened, that formed the most pressing concern of the rapidly dwindling tribe of liberal Zionists: “I think, there comes a point where you can’t manage this anymore, and then you start having to make very difficult choices. Do you resign yourself to what amounts to a permanent occupation of the West Bank? Is that the character of Israel as a state for a long period of time? Do you perpetuate, over the course of a decade or two decades, more and more restrictive policies in terms of Palestinian movement? Do you place restrictions on Arab-Israelis in ways that run counter to Israel’s traditions?” he asked, before adding that “nobody has provided me with a clear picture of how this works in the absence of a peace deal.” Invoking Hillel the Elder, the famous Jewish philosopher from the first century BCE, Obama asked, “If not now, when? And if not you, Mr. Prime Minister, then who?” Alas, the question did not much interest Bibi Netanyahu. And as Netanyahu went, so went AIPAC et al. Barack Obama was brilliant at reaching hearts and changing minds. What he could not do was alter the increasingly brutal “facts on the ground.”33

In Washington, AIPAC and its allies continued their assault on Obama’s policies, undermining the political appointment of anyone whose positions on Israel did not jibe with their own. AIPAC tended to work quietly among staffers on Capitol Hill, and with journalists, off the record. The most frequently quoted individual on matters of Jewish concern in the mainstream media was almost certainly Abe Foxman, the Anti-Defamation League’s national director. A veritable perpetual motion machine when it came to returning journalists’ emails and phone calls, Foxman displayed a kind of genius when offering up Solomonic soundbites on deadline. His primary concern was to draw lines in the sand over which forms of criticism of Israel might be considered permissible and which revealed the dark heart of an antisemite lurking beneath a person’s comment. But in doing so, Foxman was not speaking merely for himself. By the end of his three-decade reign in 2015, he headed up a powerhouse organization boasting a $60 million budget and a full-time staff of over three hundred, with countless consultants, part-timers, National Commission members, and others who brought the number well into the thousands. And while these individuals were spread out across twenty-seven separate offices, they were answerable only to Foxman. (With one of Sheldon Adelson’s private jets at Foxman’s disposal, the threat of a visit from headquarters was never far away for potential deviationists.) When asked, for a sympathetic New York Times profile, who in the organization besides himself a reporter might interview, Foxman was unable to come up with a single name. While he no doubt enjoyed the limelight, behind the scenes he turned the ADL into “first and foremost a fund-raising organization,” according to a staffer there. He owed his super-hero status to what another Jewish professional termed the “guilt and gelt generation” of American Jews. “You worshiped at the altar of Israel by contributing. Jewish observance [became] raising money, not going to the synagogue,” said David Clayman, a high-ranking American Jewish Congress official, of Foxman’s success. The ADL cannot be said to have ignored other forms of alleged discrimination under Foxman’s reign, but it prioritized only one. As one of Foxman’s top lieutenants once informed an ADL regional representative, who was apparently too distant from home base to have gotten the memo, “Your little Christian-Jewish dialogue is very nice but remember, whatever you do with your inter-group relations, the end game is always Israel.”34

During the 1990s, the ADL had operated a spying operation devoted to the activities of left-wing organizations, including the American Civil Liberties Union, Arab American groups, dovish Jewish groups, and even a congressman, Ronald V. Dellums (D-CA), sharing what it found with the Israeli government. As a result of these illegal activities, the FBI raided its San Francisco and Los Angeles offices in 1993. But even when acting lawfully, Foxman’s ADL often behaved as if it were in the “defamation” business, rather than its opposite. For instance, when in 2009 the enormously respected PBS journalist Bill Moyers broadcast a less than laudatory commentary about Israel’s Gaza invasion, Foxman accused the liberal icon of “moral equivalency, racism, historical revisionism, and indifference to terrorism.” When Human Rights Watch issued a critical report of Israeli actions in the same war, Foxman told reporters, “Human Rights Watch’s approach to these problems is immorality at the highest level.” Under Foxman, the ADL’s moral calculations grew so complex that he somehow concluded that it was the job of the organization to lend its help to prevent Congress from passing resolutions condemning the conduct of genocide—specifically, that committed by Turks against the Armenians during World War I. Foxman did not dispute the (undisputable) fact that the genocide took place. Rather, he argued that it would be inconvenient for Turkish (and Israeli) Jews if Congress took note of it.35

The liberal journalist Peter Beinart raised a series of complicated questions about the role of American Jewish organizations in an article in the New York Review of Books published in 2010, as well as in a book published two years later. The former boy-wonder editor of Martin Peretz’s New Republic was part of the way along in what would become a lengthy journey leftward into dovish Jewish politics. His credibility as a critic was augmented not only by his former hawkishness, but also by his observant Jewish lifestyle, Orthodox synagogue membership, the Jewish day-schooling of his children, and his generally respectful attitude toward his Jewish elders. In other words, he was no Stephen Walt or John Mearsheimer, much less a Pat Buchanan, and therefore a much tougher target for the slings and arrows that such open criticism could be certain to inspire.

In his article, Beinart warned that “for several decades, the Jewish establishment has asked American Jews to check their liberalism at Zionism’s door, and now, to their horror, they are finding that many young Jews have checked their Zionism instead.… Because their liberalism is real, they can see that the liberalism of the American Jewish establishment is fake.” He predicted that if American Jewish leaders did not “change course, they will wake up one day to find a younger, Orthodox-dominated, Zionist leadership whose naked hostility to Arabs and Palestinians scares even them, and a mass of secular American Jews who range from apathetic to appalled.”36

Beinart’s thesis was “examined… in the uppermost precincts of organized U.S. Jewry and became fodder for lunchtime chats,” according to “insiders” quoted by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “Everyone’s read it and everyone is talking about it,” said Mark Pelavin, the associate director of the Reform movement’s Religious Action Center. This may have been true behind closed doors, but before the public, the reaction was pretty much déjà vu. Beinart’s bona fides did not protect him from being called “strident” by The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait, and “pseudo-courageous” by its literary editor, Leon Wieseltier. Peretz’s former assistant there, James Kirchick, complained that Beinart was “joining the anti–‘Jewish establishment’ bandwagon.” The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg (who later hired him) termed Beinart’s argument “utopian” and not “too interested in the forces that seek the elimination of Israel.” Commentary’s Noah Pollak insisted that Beinart was eager to join “the Israel bashers” before going on to equate Beinart’s criticism with those of Noam Chomsky, the post-Zionist historian Avi Shlaim, and, of course, Walt and Mearsheimer. AIPAC’s Steven Rosen responded, with unintended irony, that Beinart could not possibly be correct, moreover, because “AIPAC’s income from donations is now five times what it was in 2000, and sixty times what it was when I joined the organization in 1982.”37

Beinart’s warnings were vindicated in 2013, when the Pew Foundation published the most in-depth look at American Jews’ beliefs and values in many decades. While the vast majority defined themselves as pro-Israel, just 43 percent of those questioned agreed that “caring about Israel” was an “essential” part of being Jewish. In fact, Israel was only one percentage point more popular as a definitional category than “having a good sense of humor.” What’s more, Israel’s centrality declined precipitously among younger Jews—“caring about Israel” fell to just 30 percent among those under thirty.38

It was hard not to notice, moreover, that when questioned about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, the views of most American Jews were far closer to those of the liberal Zionists at J Street than to those of the hardline hawks represented by AIPAC and the Presidents’ Conference—which continued to bar J Street from membership—to say nothing of those even further to their right. While these organizations almost always parroted the Likud line, American Jews remained stubbornly dovish: only 17 percent supported Israel’s settlement policy, and just 38 percent thought Israel’s government was sincerely seeking peace. And, once again, consistent with Beinart’s arguments, a mere 23 percent of Jews between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine believed the Israeli government was sincerely pursuing peace. Quizzed about how out of touch (and undemocratic) they were, the leaders of these organizations basically responded that it was the fault of the people whose views they failed to represent. Asked about this, Foxman was unmoved. What mattered, after all, were the funders. “Listen,” he explained in one interview, “there’s a lot of organized Jewish life, and these are the people that pay the bills.”39

The power of money to dictate the parameters of allowable speech was the reason why so many synagogues barred J Street president Jeremy Ben-Ami from speaking, and instead sponsored trips to the annual AIPAC convention. It took only one donor threatening to withhold a major donation to ensure that a specific voice went unheard—something that was almost always done in secret. A 2013 report by the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, based on an online survey of over five hundred mostly Reform and Conservative rabbis, found that nearly half held “views on Israel that they won’t share publicly, many for fear of endangering their reputation or their careers.” The survey found that 43 percent of rabbis who identified as dovish reported feeling “very fearful” of expressing their true views on Israel, compared to just 29 percent of moderates and 25 percent of hawks. A full 74 percent of the dovish rabbis reported feeling “very” or “somewhat” fearful of expressing their views. Rabbi Jill Jacobs, executive director of T’ruah, a liberal rabbinic human rights organization with 1,800 member rabbis, admitted that “rabbis are just really scared because they get slammed by their right-wing congregants, who are often the ones with the purse strings. They are not necessarily the numerical majority, but they are the loudest.”40

The undeniable truth was that by the middle of Barack Obama’s second presidential term, American Jews could rarely discuss Israel among themselves without participants erupting in anger and acrimony. The gulf between American Jews’ dogged commitment to liberalism and their emotional attachment to Zionism had grown too vast to bridge. Some chose one, and some chose the other, but almost all felt that their opponents were not merely wrong but engaging in fundamental betrayal.

The Jerusalem-based Jewish People Policy Institute, which was created by the Jewish Agency in 2002 to bridge gaps of understanding between Israeli and diaspora Jews, in its 2015 report, said there was “a sense of crisis” within American Jewish communities, whose members found it “increasingly difficult… to discuss Israel because of the bitter political disputes these discussions spark.” Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and apparent lack of interest in genuine peace was the most frequently voiced complaint, but it was hardly the only one. The report’s authors also addressed “a long litany of complaints about Israel’s refusal to respect American Jewish identity as legitimate in areas that relate to them directly,” such as conversion, the treatment of non-Orthodox streams of Judaism, chief rabbinate policy, the never-ending “Who is a Jew?” question, and, in particular, Netanyahu’s failure to keep his word on a long-negotiated compromise that would have allowed women to pray at the Western Wall in Jerusalem with rights (almost) equal to those of men. In addition, their dogged liberalism “led to alienation from Israel on numerous civil rights issues, especially those related to Israel’s treatment of its minorities, whether among Arab Jews, immigrant Jews, or foreign, non-Jewish workers.”41

More and more, it was becoming clear that despite the efforts of American Jewish officialdom to paper over differences to create the pretense of a united front on behalf of Israel, this had become a losing battle. The rise of Israeli illiberalism was everywhere evident, with increasing ultra-Orthodox influence over politics, creeping West Bank annexation, and consistent attempts, on the part of Netanyahu, to bend Israel’s once proudly independent judiciary to his will. The American/Israeli pollster Dahlia Scheindlin credited Israel’s 18th Knesset (2009–2013) with having “introduced anti-liberal and anti-democratic legislation and normalized offensive, ultranationalist, anti-Arab rhetoric in social discourse.” As a result, the sorts of Israeli civil society organizations US liberals funded as a reflection of their own values saw themselves targeted for censorship and defunding and often received violent, threatening messages that were amplified by the Adelsons’ Netanyahu-friendly media landscape. The demands being made on American Jews by an increasingly illiberal Israel that consistently demonstrated its disdain for diaspora life became ever more obvious and unbridgeable.42

Michael Oren, an American-born and Ivy League–educated Jewish historian, had emigrated to Israel, served in the IDF, and launched a political career that eventually landed him as ambassador to the United States during Obama’s first term. In the spring of 2015, he published a memoir and a series of provocative op-ed articles that helped to demonstrate the gulf that had arisen between the views of Israeli and American Jews. Like so many of his fellow Israeli Jews, he believed the worst about Obama. He postulated that what he termed the president’s “abandonment” by his mother’s “two Muslim husbands” had left behind a psychological need for “acceptance by their co-religionists,” which would explain his allegedly anti-Israel foreign policy.43

Even Abe Foxman found Oren to be “veer[ing] into the realm of conspiracy theories” regarding Obama. But the balance of Oren’s armchair psychiatry can be properly understood as an attack on American Jews, given how much the community admired him. Lest there be any confusion on this point, however, Oren was good enough to make his attack explicit: he “could not help questioning whether American Jews really felt as secure as they claimed. Perhaps persistent fears of anti-Semitism impelled them to distance themselves from Israel and its controversial policies. Maybe that is why so many of them supported Obama.” Oren singled out the “malicious” op-ed page of the New York Times, “once revered as an interface of ideas, now sadly reduced to a sounding board for only one, which often excluded Israel’s legitimacy.” He complained that the “unflattering dispatches” at the Times were “written by Jews working for a paper long under Jewish ownership.” (In fact, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr., who had been at the helm of the paper since 1997, was raised Episcopalian, and one can only wonder about Oren’s nostalgia for a newspaper whose Jewish owners were famous for their anti-Zionism.) Sadly, Oren noted, “the presence of so many Jews in print and on the screen rarely translates into support for Israel.… The pinch I felt reading articles censorious of Israel sharpened into a stab whenever the names on the bylines were Jewish. Almost all of the world’s countries are nation-states, so what, I wondered, drove these writers to nitpick at theirs?”44

Oren’s attack embodied two time-honored antisemitic canards. The first was that American Jews remained politically paralyzed by the fear of antisemitism. This is a profoundly ridiculous contention given the size and scope of the American Jewish organizations devoting themselves to supporting Israel and the amount of money they were able to raise. The second was that the true country of America’s Jews was not the one in which they lived and to which they pledged their allegiance, but Israel, where they did not live, vote, or pay taxes, and in whose military they did not serve. To triple the irony implicit in his attack, he went on to equate American Jewish distaste for Netanyahu to historical antisemitic attitudes, as if this were the only conceivable motivation for criticism of a politician whose values consistently offended their own, and who treated their concerns as a matter of indifference when not openly demonstrating his contempt. Oren insisted that “the antagonism sparked by Netanyahu” among American Jews somehow resembled that traditionally triggered by the Jews in gentiles. “We were always the ultimate Other—communists in the view of the capitalists and capitalists in communist eyes, nationalists for the cosmopolitans and, for jingoists, the International Jew.” And he did not stop there. At one point he claimed that some “saw assailing Israel as a career enhancer—the equivalent of Jewish man bites Jewish dog—that saved several struggling pundits from obscurity.” Others he compared to “upper class American Jews of German ancestry,” noting their historic scorn for Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe—“the Yiddish speaking rabble who allegedly made all Jews look bad.” Still others, he wrote, “largely assimilated, resented Israel for further complicating their already conflicted identity.”45

Oren is no doubt sincere in his complaints. But the irony of a former American Jewish academic achieving political success (together with book sales in the United States) by deploying age-old antisemitic slanders against the American Jewish journalists and scholars who had been his friends and colleagues in his past life is a little too thick to escape notice. Such have long been a staple of Israelis’ political and cultural rhetoric. Throughout their history, Israelis have proven unwilling to demonstrate respect for the ways and mores of American Jewish religious practices, refusing legitimacy to their denominations, refusing to recognize conversions practiced by their rabbis, and denying women equal access to religious sites, while simultaneously demanding 100 percent fealty to what Israel defined as its security interests, no questions asked.

This contempt became ever more naked under Netanyahu as Christian Zionists and wealthy right-wing donors provided whatever resources he felt he needed without having to listen to the constant complaints of American Jewish liberals. Gary Rosenblatt, the longtime editor and publisher of the Jewish Week of New York, tells of attending briefings with journalists that Netanyahu held during his visits to the United States. In one case, he attended two held on the same day. At the first, Netanyahu met with “major media figures”; at the other, with “the same number of editors of Jewish newspapers from around the country.” At the former, Netanyahu was “warm, friendly and upbeat from the outset.” At the latter he was “ornery… challenging and dismissive.” Rosenblatt said he witnessed many similar scenes over the years and believed they represented “the prime minister’s attitude not just toward the Jewish press but toward American Jewry in general,” adding that “Netanyahu has said in private that as long as he has the support in America of evangelical Christians, who vastly outnumber Jews, and the Orthodox Jewish community, he is in good shape.” And yet, for most of this period, American Jewish organizations had not only reinforced the Israeli view, but also enforced a policy of omertà regarding all criticism. By the end of Barack Obama’s presidency, many Jews had opted out entirely from the essentially vicarious experience of defining their Jewishness in terms of the interests of a country where Jews did not appear to be physically threatened, whose values increasingly conflicted with their own, and whose leaders apparently held them and their religious identities in contempt.46

Their power and influence in Congress notwithstanding, Netanyahu and AIPAC could not, ultimately, control every aspect of US foreign policy. Presidents, as Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush had shown, could take on Israel and win if they were willing to take the fight public. The Israelis were forced to relearn this lesson in 2015, when a reelected Obama, together with the leaders of China, Russia, the United Kingdom, France, and Germany (approved and partially financed by the European Union), signed an interim nuclear deal with Iran. The agreement included lifting some important international sanctions in exchange for Iran pausing its nuclear program for the coming ten years and came with impressively invasive verification measures. Its signatories hoped and expected that it would be the first step toward not only blunting the threat of a “Muslim bomb,” but eventually reintegrating Iran into the international community. That was not how Netanyahu saw it, however. The Israelis had been lobbying for a joint US/Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities and were at times poised to undertake one on their own, but had been dissuaded by the president’s advisers. Netanyahu was furious when US officials informed him of secret negotiations with Iran (and he was immediately suspected by US officials of having leaked it to the media). The two leaders already had a tortured relationship—Netanyahu treated Obama with even greater condescension than he had previous presidents. During one meeting, as Netanyahu delivered a lengthy political lecture to the president, the latter, struggling to maintain his cool, patiently said, “Bibi, you have to understand something. I’m the African American son of a single mother, and I live here, in this house. I live in the White House. I managed to get elected president of the United States. You think I don’t understand what you’re talking about, but I do.” He did not need any political lectures from Israel’s prime minister.47

But Netanyahu, apparently unimpressed, kept at it over the next weeks and months. He could not believe that Obama had acted against both his advice and the political pressure he had brought to bear on the president over the Iran nuclear deal. Furious, the Israeli prime minister went beyond what any leader of any putative US ally had done before and tried to publicly undermine a sitting US president’s policy. Israel’s ambassador to the United States, the former right-wing US political consultant Ron Dermer, cut a deal with the Republican Speaker of the House, John Boehner, to have Netanyahu invited by Republicans—who controlled both houses of the legislature at the time—to address a joint session of Congress in order to attack the deal. Neither the Israelis nor the Republican leaders even mentioned the plan to the president, who learned about it, along with the rest of the world, in a press release.

Although most polls showed majority Jewish support for Obama’s position, Citizens for a Nuclear Free Iran, an AIPAC offshoot, reportedly raised between $20 million and $40 million for a campaign to oppose it. As Peter Beinart later noted, one AIPAC official called it “one of the most significant mobilization efforts in our organization’s history.” The head of the Orthodox Union Advocacy Center concurred, terming the campaign “the biggest mobilization in the community that we have ever seen.” The relentless propaganda campaign had its effects, even with liberal American Jews, who remained vulnerable to stoked fears of a “second Holocaust”—this time in the form of a potential Iranian nuclear attack on Israel. When Obama granted an interview to the editor of the Jewish newspaper The Forward, its editor, Jane Eisner, accused him of employing “incendiary language” against opponents of the deal, citing his use of the phrase “warmongers” to describe them. But, as Obama told her, he never used the phrase. The fact that the editor of a small, liberal Jewish paper, whose editors had to be thrilled to be granted a presidential interview, could level a false accusation against the president himself on behalf of Netanyahu’s defenders demonstrates just how deep the reach of the prime minister’s anti-Obama campaign went. As Obama felt compelled to explain, he had “at no point… ever suggested that those who are critical of the deal are ‘warmongers.’” Instead, he had argued, “if we reject the deal, the logical conclusion is that if we want to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, military strikes will be the last option remaining.”48

The lengths to which “pro-Israel” AIPAC allies would go to police the Israel debate was again made clear by a series of incidents around this time involving Washington’s premier Democratic think tank, the Center for American Progress (CAP). The center’s founder and first president, John Podesta, previously Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, had headed up Barack Obama’s presidential transition team. He had successfully sought to avoid arguments about Israel during his seven-year reign, which began in 2003. But after Podesta turned over the reins to CAP’s cofounder, longtime Hillary Clinton staffer Neera Tanden, at the end of 2010, the issue crept to center stage. The problem lay with the center’s newsy weblog, Think Progress, whose contributors, in late 2011 and 2012, published a series of posts and tweets critical of Israel, of AIPAC, and of what these mostly young writers judged to be efforts to draw the United States into war with Iran. It’s fair to say that more than a few of these posts and tweets might have been more thoughtfully articulated had they been accorded closer editorial scrutiny before they were posted. But anything critical of Israel published by the center would have done the trick.

Thanks to a public campaign led by Josh Block, a former spokesperson for AIPAC, these posts and tweets inspired a multipronged attack against CAP. Ben Smith, then reporting for Politico, noted that CAP’s stance had “shaken up the Washington foreign policy conversation and broadened the space for discussing a heretical and often critical stance on Israel heretofore confined to the political margins.” Jason Isaacson, of the American Jewish Committee, told reporters of his concern about the “very troubling things that have been written on a pretty regular basis by certain people associated with the organization.” Abe Foxman also worried about statements made under CAP’s aegis that he felt were “anti-Semitic and borderline anti-Semitic.” Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate director of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, joined in with a complaint to President Obama’s Jewish community liaison, Jarrod Bernstein, who called the situation at CAP “troubling” and not reflective of “this administration,” though, of course, the Obama administration played no role in dictating content in blog posts at Think Progress.

As the controversy rose in prominence, an apparently panicked Tanden emailed Podesta and other top CAP officials to say she had received a furious phone call from Ann Lewis, who was another close adviser to Hillary Clinton, as well as a frequent speaker at AIPAC events and those of its sister organization, the American Israel Education Fund. Lewis was speaking, as Tanden understood her, both on behalf of AIPAC and, as both women no doubt understood, out of concern for Hillary Clinton’s future presidential campaign. Lewis read Tanden the riot act about Think Progress’s treatment of Israel, accusing it of, among other sins, failing to balance its criticism of Israel with compliments for its virtues. Tanden responded by instituting a policy under which any mention of Israel on the website would be subject to its own, organization-wide, prepublication editorial review. The Iranian-born contributing writer Ali Gharib was told to expect to “never” again be allowed to write about AIPAC or any other American Jewish organization. Tanden also apparently directed the retroactive removal of all references to Israel and American Jewish groups from a previously published CAP report on Islamophobia in the US media. Gharib and another Think Progress writer, Eli Clifton, soon left the organization under murky circumstances. Matt Duss, who oversaw much of CAP’s Middle East policy work, was told to rein in his staff and his own writings. He left CAP in 2014 to become president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace before rising to prominence as chief foreign policy adviser to Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT).^*

CAP soon reaped the rewards of these actions. Again, according to internal emails later published in the media, its officers celebrated the fact that AIPAC’s deputy director of policy and government affairs, Jeff Colman, had been “very positive” in his response to the steps taken and was pleased to see that the organization “now was moving in the right direction.” An AIPAC event was coming up, and CAP’s chief of staff, Ken Gude, enthused, in one email, “I bet we get a lot of invitations to attend.” He added, “And it’s very likely that I’m going to Israel on one of their upcoming trips.” Leaders of other groups, including officers of the American Jewish Committee and the National Jewish Democratic Council, joined in the praise.49

But this response did not satisfy Tanden, who decided, in November 2015, that in order to further cement CAP’s “pro-Israel” credentials, she would host none other than Benjamin Netanyahu for a friendly, public chat in the think tank’s offices. According to a report in the Huffington Post, the decision came after intense lobbying by the Israeli embassy augmented by “pressure” from AIPAC. The announcement of the invitation, however, led to an uproar among CAP’s liberal staffers. After all, not only had Israel become a clearly conservative cause, and Netanyahu the leader of what were increasingly illiberal forces in Israel, but he was also waging a not-so-secret war against America’s Democratic president at the moment of the invitation. Why in the world, wondered much of Washington, was Washington’s premier Democratic Party–aligned think tank appearing to side with his tormentor? Reports of angry internal meetings were leaked to the press by CAP staffers. Matt Duss said, of his former employer, “the idea that CAP would agree to give him bipartisan cover is really disappointing,” since “this is someone who is an enemy of the progressive agenda, who has targeted Israeli human rights organizations throughout his term, and was re-elected on the back of blatant anti-Arab race-baiting.” The public discussion came off, however, largely without incident. Tanden asked the prime minister a series of mostly friendly questions, as did the invited members of the audience. In another leaked email, from Tanden to Podesta, Tanden expressed her relief that, while the Netanyahu invitation had been a difficult decision to make, and the internal rebellion unpleasant to handle, angry AIPAC complaints would now be a thing of the past. By the time Hillary Clinton made Podesta CEO of her 2016 presidential campaign, with Tanden a top unofficial adviser (and Ann Lewis head of “Jewish Women for Hillary”), the matter was pretty much forgotten. AIPAC and company had forced yet another showdown between Zionism and liberalism, and the latter again lost.50

These events came on the heels of the Iran debate’s most dramatic moment: Netanyahu’s speech to both houses of Congress denouncing the deal. The Israeli leader became only the second person ever to enjoy the honor of speaking to Congress three times, the other being Winston Churchill. But while his harsh words played well with Israelis at home and with Republicans in the United States, for Democrats this was a bridge too far. Netanyahu’s previous embrace of Jerry Falwell and John Hagee, his open support for Mitt Romney, and his airtight alliance with the Adelsons did not help him get the votes he needed to defeat the president on the Iran agreement and may have cost him. Signing one’s name to an AIPAC-drafted letter was one thing; humiliating the president in the midst of a hard-fought battle, in which the opposing party had lined up 100 percent on the other side, was quite another. What’s more, the Netanyahu speech plus AIPAC’s massive campaign against the deal had failed to sway a majority of American Jews, who, according to a survey conducted by the Jewish Journal in July 2015, found that 49 percent of American Jews supported the nuclear deal with Iran while just 31 percent were opposed. More than fifty Democrats refused to attend the speech. Netanyahu got himself twenty-nine standing ovations as he bet the house on his persuasive powers. As far as Iran went, however, he went home with empty pockets.51

The Obama era ended much as it had begun, with impotent, futile gestures toward Israeli-Palestinian peace by the administration and hysterical and dishonest attacks on the president and his advisers by the Israelis and their champions. The proximate cause—much as it had been for another scorned champion of peace for Israel, Jimmy Carter—was a UN vote. Having seen his diplomatic efforts go down in flames, in December 2016 US secretary of state John Kerry laid out a potential peace plan that had no hopes whatever of being adopted—as Donald Trump had already been elected president. Kerry then instructed the United States’ UN ambassador to abstain rather than vote no on a Security Council Resolution declaring Israeli settlements in the Palestinian territories to have “no legal validity,” and thus to constitute “a flagrant violation under international law.” The resolution therefore passed unanimously.52

Obama had not allowed any such anti-Israel resolution to go forward during the previous seven years and had been alone among American presidents in having so protected Israel. Literally every other American president since the occupation began had either supported these condemnations or abstained on the vote. Between 1967 and 1988, fully fifty-seven resolutions condemning Israeli actions had made it through the Security Council, with twenty-one of them coming during Reagan’s presidency. The two Bush presidencies along with Bill Clinton’s yielded eighteen more. Yet Obama’s single abstention, coming after seven years of shielding Israel, was somehow taken as evidence of his administration’s perfidy. Netanyahu attacked it as “old-world bias against Israel,” and immediately announced the construction of thousands of new homes in East Jerusalem (the Obama presidency had already seen the addition of over 100,000 Israeli settlers on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem). Israel Katz, a senior government minister from Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party, speaking of a president who had negotiated with Congress to ensure the passage of literally the largest military aid package from one country to another in the annals of human history, said Obama had “reached a new low when he turned his back on America’s ally Israel.”53

These views were consistently echoed in the United States, especially on the nation’s most influential editorial pages. Seventy-eight senators signed a letter condemning the vote, and one, Lindsey Graham (R-SC), told CNN he planned to ask Congress to rescind all funding for the United Nations unless it reversed the entire world’s virtually unanimous position on the illegality of Israel’s settlements. But with what was becoming typical irony, the Obama position was actually much more popular than Lindsey Graham’s with a plurality of Americans: indeed, according to an extensive poll by the Pew Research Center, fully 60 percent of Democrats supported far stronger action in opposition to Israel’s occupation, including imposing economic sanctions or more serious action. And for the first time ever, more self-described liberal Democrats, a category that included a near majority of America’s Jews, said they sympathized with the Palestinians more than they did with Israel. These sympathies had no policy implications to speak of in the present, but they were evidence of a possible transformation of the debate in years to come.54

Footnote

^* I was a Senior Fellow at CAP from its founding in 2003 through the end of 2016. Although I was not involved with Think Progress, I authored a weekly media-focused column titled “Think Again” for much of this time. One such column was referenced in the coverage of this controversy, and when it was over, Tanden asked me to please avoid the subjects of Israel and AIPAC in future columns. I agreed to do so, as foreign policy generally was not a topic I had been hired by CAP to address in my work. I should also note here that it was in his capacity as president of the foundation noted above that Duss oversaw the grant I received that I mention in my acknowledgments to this book.

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