Understanding AIPAC

Against a background of sharp disagreement between Washington and Jerusalem, the annual policy conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee winds down today.


On Monday, the 7,500 delegates—Jews, Christians, African Americans, as well as European and Canadian activists—heard Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declare that the United States would tell Israel the "truth" when "difficult but necessary choices" had to be made. Today, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is scheduled to meet President Barack Obama. Delegates from all 50 states planned to spend Tuesday on Capitol Hill speaking with their respective Senators and Members of Congress.
But what is AIPAC, and what does it mean to be pro-Israel at a time when many American Jews are said to be discomfited by actions of the Israeli government and tensions with Washington?

Its name notwithstanding, AIPAC is not a political-action committee created to give money to friendly politicians. Nor is it a foreign lobby. Founded in the 1950's, AIPAC aimed at becoming America's premier, bipartisan, homegrown pro-Israel pressure group. The group's incumbent president is usually a communal leader, Republican or Democrat, with strong ties to the administration then in power. Its current head, Lee Rosenberg from Illinois, was among Obama's staunchest Jewish supporters during the 2008 campaign.

But AIPAC has also become a lightning rod for the animus of those who essentially oppose all Israeli security policies while insisting they favor the country's "right to exist." In The Lobby: Jewish Political Power and American Foreign Policy (1987), the journalist Edward Tivnan charged AIPAC with unprecedented influence over Congress. In The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (2007), the "realist" academics John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt updated and amplified Tivnan's critique, positing that an all-powerful lobby was "silencing any debate at all" on the Middle East, rendering impossible the proper pursuit of American interests, and, through its blind support of Israel's West Bank policies, helping to foment anti-American terrorism.

In reality, AIPAC's leadership includes both supporters and opponents of Israel's West Bank policies. What the organization embraces is a pro-Israel model that leaves to Israelis themselves decisions of existential consequence, reached through the consensus of the country's body politic. AIPAC thus emphatically favors a two-state solution; insists on direct talks between Arabs and Israelis; holds the Palestinians to be the recalcitrant party; and robustly rejects any outside imposition of a "solution."

Is this any different from the model embraced by the overwhelming majority of the American people, and confirmed in survey after survey of national opinion?



-- March 2010

Russia & Israel

Nineteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Communist empire, Russia has reconstituted its role as a significant player in the Middle East and Islamic world. What does it want? Mainly, influence, stability, and the opportunity to make a great deal of money selling weapons. While not driven by ideology, as in the cold war, these goals are mostly out of sync with Israel's.


Cases in point: Moscow has announced that the nuclear-power plant it has been intermittently constructing and fueling outside the city of Bushehr in Iran will go into operation by the end of the summer. After a meeting in Damascus between Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Syrian President Bashar Assad, it emerged that Russia would sign a major arms deal (apparently underwritten by Iran) to supply Syria with MIG-29 fighter planes and cruise missiles. Disregarding the stated policy of the "Quartet on the Middle East," of which his country is a member, Medvedev also conferred with Hamas head Khaled Mashaal. During a subsequent meeting in Ankara with President Tayyip Erdogan, he said that no party—meaning Hamas—should be excluded from the diplomatic process.

On the other side of the ledger, relations between Jerusalem and Moscow may be better today than at any time since the late 1940s. As distinct from the cold-war era, Israeli leaders nowadays deal directly with the Kremlin. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu made a hushed visit last year to Moscow to talk about Iran. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has hoped to nudge the two countries closer by emphasizing cultural affinities, symbolized by the presence in Israel of a million Russian-speaking immigrants. While asserting that he would never weaken Israel's bonds with Washington to curry favor in Moscow, Lieberman has also said that in today's multipolar world, Jerusalem needs to cultivate relations with other powers. President Shimon Peres, in Moscow to help mark the 65th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe, presumably reiterated what Israel hopes to get from Russia: a limit on the kinds of weapons it sells in the region; help, rather than hindrance, in the effort to stop Iran from acquiring a nuclear bomb; pressure on Syria to adhere to its contractual obligations not to transfer Russian-manufactured weapons to Hizballah.

Where to draw the balance?

There has been some collaboration between Russia and Israel's armaments industry, but Jerusalem's commitments to Washington greatly constrain any enlargement of such ventures. Although Russia shares with Israel an interest in combating Islamic terrorism, it insists that the Islamic uprisings in the Caucasus are a criminal matter and emphatically rejects any connection between them and the larger confrontation between jihadist Islam and the West. It may even be that Moscow's fairly consistent diplomatic support of Iran's mullahs (despite the occasional spat) is a quid pro quo for their refraining from fomenting Islamist terror within Russia's borders.

And this is not to mention other factors, including Moscow's renewed rivalry with the U.S.; the persistence of its traditionally autocratic form of government; its long history of antipathy to Jews; and the plethora of economic incentives awaiting it in the Muslim and Arab worlds. In short, warmer as Russia-Israel relations have become in some respects, there is a sharp limit to how good they can get.

-- June 2010

Meeting Irving Finkel

On the way to work from his home in south London, Dr. Irving Finkel often finds

A British Museum scholar offers a Darwinian explanation for Judaism's survival.

On the way to work from his home in south London, Dr. Irving Finkel often finds himself sitting on a bus reading the Hebrew Bible while surrounded by black church ladies studying their Bibles. "If they only knew what I was thinking," he muses.

Unlike his fellow passengers, what the Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian Inscriptions at the British Museum is thinking is that the Bible is not the literal word of God, but that it was crystallized during the sixth-century B.C.E. Babylonian exile by a displaced people from Judea who had lost their country, whose deity was invisible, abstract, and unforgiving, and whose monotheism had gone wobbly. Their decision to create "scripture," something that had never before been attempted, saved the refugees' civilization and enshrined their religious identity. The result was Judaism.

Finkel outlined his thesis in a late-February talk at the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Jerusalem entitled "New Light on the Babylonian Exile." He is in the midst of writing a book on the subject, and an American literary agent stands ready to help place it.

Barefoot, with his flowing white beard and long white hair offset by a tee-shirt and black jeans—which is how I found him when we sat down for this interview—Finkel looks more like an ancient Hebrew prophet than a buttoned-down London librarian.

Your job has an interesting designation.

Yes, people think an Assistant Keeper must work for the zoo. It's actually a 19th-century title.

What languages do you work in?

I read the ancient languages of Iraq: Sumerian and Babylonian in cuneiform script. They are written on clay tablets that were uncovered in British Museum excavations in the 1800's. We have roughly 130,000 fragments, some as small as your miniature tape recorder. The clay came from the river banks of the Tigris and Euphrates. They were perfect for making clear inscriptions. Miraculously, they survive in the ground unless deliberately destroyed.

What we have in our collection is a potpourri of fascinating material like the Epic of Gilgamesh, as well as what amount to grocery lists.

How did you get interested in cuneiform?

Well, I always wanted to work at the British Museum and to study a difficult language. My plan was to study Egyptian hieroglyphics at the University of Birmingham, but the professor upped and died after just a day of classes. It was suggested that I switch tracks.

Just how many scholars alive today can do what you do?

All the people who can read cuneiform can fit into this living room.

When was cuneiform used?

Between 3200 B.C.E and the 2nd century C.E. In the meantime, the Semitic alphabet came into being in Canaan around 1000 B.C.E., and for a millennium the two forms existed side by side.

Only a handful of people, people in power, could read or write in cuneiform, while the Semitic alphabet was easier to learn and could be written in ink on leather and wood.

There is a misconception that cuneiform—and hieroglyphics—are primitive forms of communications. In fact, they preserve sophisticated languages capable of complex ideas, imagery, and even irony.

Have you ever visited Iraq?

I'm afraid that "Finkel" is too Jewish a name. Under Saddam Hussein and even before, visitors had to prove they were not Jewish in order to visit.

When were the ancient Judeans in Babylon?

It started during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar in the early-6th century B.C.E. To hear the Bible tell it, everything regarding Nebuchadnezzar centered on the Jews. But from Nebuchadnezzar's vantage point, Judea was a minor though bothersome state strategically placed between Mesopotamia and Egypt. In 597 B.C.E, well before the Temple's destruction, he looted gold from the Temple and took King Jehoiakin captive to Babylon.

And when the Temple was destroyed in 586 B.C.E. and the city razed and the people sent to Babylon, what made their exile so different from the expulsion of the Northern Kingdom's population by the Assyrians a century and a half earlier?

The Assyrians deported the Israelites en masse, and the tribes then disappeared from history. But Nebuchadnezzar took mainly the intelligentsia, with the intention of acculturating them—of getting them to be "Babylonianized"—so that, once reeducated, they might be reinstated back home. All this is detailed in the first chapter of the Book of Daniel.

How did that go?

I've tried to visualize what happened with these displaced Judeans. Some were, let's say, ultra-Orthodox, fiercely loyal to tradition; some were proto-Zionists who starting in 538 would return to Israel under the decree of Cyrus. There were also those who became so acculturated that they would stick around forever, all the way until the rise of the modern Ba'ath party. And there were those who would marry out and disappear.

You might be describing New York or London.

That's right. I start with the idea that, fundamentally, people are no different today from what they were in ancient times. The human mind is the same, and so is the range of human intelligence and behavior.

My own approach is not to adumbrate the study of ancient religion in a way that makes it seem irretrievable and remote, but to think of it as the same as contemporary religions but with some differences. Humanity is unchanging.

Where does that lead you with regard to Jewish life?

The Judeans had been ripped out of their surroundings and dumped in a huge, complex, bewildering urban capital: the greatest city in the Near East. This people, the Judeans, were at a point of transition. They had a unique monotheistic tradition in which nobody could see God. All the other ancient gods could be seen; once an effigy was created, the god came to inhabit the space created for him. By contrast, not only was the God of the displaced Judeans invisible, He was unforgiving and He was interested only in men.

That last bit helps explain the pattern of wobbly monotheism reflected in the biblical narrative. Women were not served functionally by the austere male deity, and were therefore attracted to house gods. I believe the whole trouble confronted by the biblical prophets had to do with women—for instance, Jezebel's bringing in the cult of Baal. The sense we get from the prophets is of sexual betrayal, the betrayed party being God.

The exile challenged the Judeans to refine their ideas about their single God. Thinking of God as an elusive abstraction did not serve to maintain cohesion. To complicate matters further, there were local theologians in Babylon who were also arguing for one god: their patron deity was Marduk, and they held that all the other gods were but manifestations of his powers. We have cuneiform records encapsulating this dispute among Babylonian theologians.

As a single god, Marduk contributed to the insecurity of Jewish belief. The great fear was that the Judean flock would succumb to idol worship or to marrying out, or both. If that happened, the population would disappear just like the Northern Israelites in Assyria. This threat engendered the need for the biblical text to be finished, in order to solidify the Judeans' belief in their superior understanding of monotheism. What was needed was a theology.

So the "Jews" did something to prevent a replay of the Assyrian outcome. What they did was to produce the Bible, a work that practically screams out that it was written by humans.

Remember, the Judeans arrived already literate. They had with them the chronicles of their kings; trunk-loads of scrolls. They wove these into a narrative, while the missing bits—meaning, from the start of humanity until the point where their historical records began—they took from the local tradition and bent to fit ethical Jewish ideas.

You're referring to parallels between the Bible's flood story and the Epic of Gilgamesh?

No, not parallels. The flood story in Genesis basically overlaps with the Babylonian story. The two are interdependent, cut from the same cloth. What I mean is that the Judean intelligentsia knew Babylon's folk tales, but gave them a Jewish twist. The same holds for the similarity between the baby-in-the-bulrushes story of Moses and the story of the Assyrian king Sargon, whose mother also placed him in a reed basket.

And the rest of the Judean sources?

The whole narrative of scripture was simple and lucid: begat, begat, begat. It's like a phone book. The idea was to connect your beautiful and eligible daughter to a genealogy intended to maintain cohesion and identity.

Nothing was composed in Babylonia; they already had the foundation. But existing scripture was crafted to demonstrate that God is present. He moves the chess pieces. You get a canonization of religious identity. Monotheism is streamlined.

So Judaism as we know it was born in Babylon as a direct consequence of the exile. This experience created the Jewish people, and eventually also set the pattern for Christianity and Islam.

You are describing the evolutionary development of Jewish civilization.

What I am offering is a form of Darwinism that transforms disparate phenomena into a continuum. I am saying that the exile was responsible for Judaism. That the Judeans behaved in the way we would have expected them to behave, based on what we know about how Jews in New York or London behaved upon their arrival millennia later.

Even the intellectual approach of the Talmud is a product of the larger Babylonian culture, reflecting three generations of learning during the period of exile. The rabbinic method of taking innocuous sentences and getting them to demonstrate just about anything reflects a specific heritage of learning. We find similar intellectual exercises in Babylonian cuneiform that illuminate otherwise obscure statements. There are linguistic similarities; there is the idea of the alphabet having numerical value (gematria); there is the idea that statements can have double meanings, leading to a particular form of textual analysis. In cuneiform, each syllable has multiple meanings, so there has to be a mechanism for explanation. Thus the Judean scholars molded Babylonian concepts to the needs of their own tradition.

How do your ideas fit with those of other scholars on this period?

Frankly, I have distilled my thesis simply on the strength of my own knowledge of the Bible coupled with a lifetime acquaintance with the cuneiform sources that are relevant to the whole issue. In writing my book, I have decided simply to present my argument as a logical and lucid explanation that accommodates the diverse issues that make up the whole problem. Consequently I have turned my back on the mountains of existing writing and theorizing on different aspects of the phenomenon. As far as I know, no one has proposed this larger idea before, and I have no interest in defending it or contrasting it with other schools of thought or argument; to me it is simply correct.

-- Feb 2010

Zionism Derangement Syndrome

A smoldering resentment, bordering on political paranoia, is palpable in sectors of Israel's Left these days. Everywhere, it seems, powerful enemies are conspiring to undermine the centers of cultural influence that leftists have long regarded as their own property, and as beyond criticism. Their response bears a resemblance to the left-wing American affliction that the columnist Charles Krauthammer memorably labeled "Bush Derangement Syndrome."


One recent challenge to Left hegemony is a proposed law now winding its way through the Knesset's legislative process. The bill, prompted in part by an independent report on certain Israeli pressure groups, including Peace Now and B'Tselem, would require political-advocacy organizations to reveal how much money they receive from foreign powers. On the face of it, this seems unexceptionable enough: in the U.S., the Foreign Agents Registration Act has long stipulated that persons paid to act in a political capacity by a foreign principal must declare their relationship; the proposed Israeli law, by contrast, would merely require the reporting of donations from foreign states and state-funded foundations.

Another challenge comes from a new grass-roots student effort called Im Tirtzu. The organization, which insists its political platform is centrist, has declared its intention of urging Diaspora Jewish donors to reconsider their support of Israeli universities whose humanities and social-science departments are bastions of anti-Zionist teachings and whose tenured faculty work to propel the boycott, divestment, and sanctions campaign against the Jewish state. The group will also urge students to avoid academic departments that silence or intimidate those voicing Zionist convictions.

Finally, a meticulously documented and scathing 141-page report, "Post-Zionism in Academia," released by the Institute for Zionist Strategies, a conservative think tank, has found that nearly all social-science and humanities departments at Israeli universities are dominated by faculty advocating radical positions anathema to the country's mainstream. The situation is said to be particularly egregious at Tel Aviv and Ben-Gurion universities, where, according to the report, most curricular readings in sociology are "post-Zionist"—really anti-Zionist—in orientation.

To each of these initiatives, the Left's panicked response has been not to question or rebut facts and arguments but to cry outrage and to accuse the critics of engaging in attempted censorship and intimidation—in, to use the much-favored scare word, "McCarthyism." Thus, the New Israel Fund, borrowing in its own way from the late Wisconsin demagogue's playbook, has denounced Im Tirtzu as "ultra-nationalist" and "extremist"—and, in a final sign of the student organization's turpitude, as a recipient of money from evangelical Christians. The president of Ben-Gurion University has branded Im Tirtzu for engaging in a "witch hunt"; Haifa University's president has protested that it is the one politicizing academia; and Yossi Sarid, former chair of the Meretz party, has lambasted the group as a "gang of hoodlums." Says the president of Tel Aviv University, dismissively, "It's impossible to divide the world into Zionists and anti-Zionists."

The president might have been channeling the editors of Haaretz, the influential newspaper that has devoted the fullest coverage and highest dudgeon to the unfolding events. There is indeed a genuinely Zionist Left in Israel, though its strength is waning, but the paper's editors have veered unpredictably between supporting this tendency and voicing an empathically anti-Zionist line—thereby contributing to the definitional muddle seemingly endorsed by the president of Tel Aviv University. In its own heated blast at Im Tirtzu and the Institute for Zionist Strategies, Haaretz referred to their principals as "political commissars," to their work as "shameful," and to their aims as "spreading fear . . . and undermining freedom of expression." As for respecting the views of Israel's mainstream public, the paper wrinkled up its editorial nose at so patently "illegitimate [an] ethnocratic distinction."

What next? As the rather unhinged nature of these reactions suggest, Israel's Left is beginning to fear that its uncontested hold over major centers of the country's elite culture may be as vulnerable as its hold over political power has proved to be. One thing to watch will be the behavior of the remaining Zionists on the Left, and in particular whether, like Haaretz, they will wish to continue providing intellectual cover for a cadre of overtly anti-Zionist radicals. Another is the behavior of Diaspora donors, and in particular how much they really care that Israeli universities have been nurturing a political culture inhospitable to the Zionist enterprise.

As for those now challenging the Left's hegemony in academia and elsewhere, their own challenge will be how best to resurrect the Zionist ethos whose destruction they have accurately diagnosed and faithfully reported.

The Arab Peace Initiative

Among the things remaining unclear in the aftermath of the visit to Washington last week of Israel Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is the next negotiating move of the Palestinians. President Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority has warned that if his objectives in the "proximity talks" mediated by the U.S. are not achieved by mid-September, he will ask the Arab League to press harder with its 2002 Arab Peace Initiative. This document has become part of the verbiage of international declarations on the Arab-Israel conflict. According to the American envoy George Mitchell, it has also been incorporated into the Obama administration's peacemaking strategy. What is it?

The initiative was born after the September 11, 2001 attacks against the United States, carried out by Muslim terrorists fifteen of whom were citizens of Saudi Arabia. Recognizing that his kingdom's image as a viper's nest of Islamic fanaticism undermined its vital relationship with Washington, and in the midst of the Palestinians' murderous second intifada against Israel's civilian population, Crown Prince (now King) Abdullah invited New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman to Riyadh to present a peace plan. The plan was touted as offering Israel "full normalization" of relations with the Arab and Muslim world in exchange for an Israeli "full withdrawal" to the armistice boundaries in place from 1949 until the outset of the 1967 Six-Day War.

The following month, an already watered-down version of Abdullah's plan was officially adopted by an Arab League summit in Beirut. Its inauspicious unveiling took place on the day after the ghastly terrorist suicide-bombing of a Passover Seder in Israel's coastal town of Netanya. In a muted reaction to the plan, Jerusalem acknowledged that it did reverse the League's long-standing policy of "No peace, no negotiation, no recognition" set forth at its infamous August 1967 Khartoum summit.

Yet the plan did little else. Instead of offering the promised "full normalization," it vaguely held out a "full peace," presumably along the cold Egyptian model. It also referred to UN General Assembly Resolution 194, commonly understood to grant the 700,000 Arab refugees from the 1948 war, along with millions of their descendants, the right to "return" to a now-truncated Israel in what would amount to a demographic death-knell to the Jewish state. The initiative absolved the Arab countries of any responsibility for absorbing their Palestinian brethren. And by calling for a withdrawal from all territory captured by Israel in the Six-Day war, the initiative patently rejected Security Council Resolution 242, which since 1967 has been the sine qua non of all peacemaking efforts. Nor did the initiative make even a fleeting mention of the inalienable rights of the Jewish people to a national homeland. Finally, it was put forward as a non-negotiable, take-it-or-leave-it diktat.

In the eight years since the initiative was announced, the Palestinian polity has been torn asunder, with the comparatively less extreme Fatah running West Bank affairs and the rejectionist Hamas ruling the Gaza Strip. With the Palestinians thus fragmented and the Arab League frozen in intransigence by radical forces, can anything transform this dead-letter initiative into a linchpin for peace?

Egypt and Jordan broke with the Arab consensus to make their separate peace with Israel. No one expects that kind of courage out of Riyadh. But what if the Saudis were to announce that, from their point of view, the plan is an overture, i.e., not a diktat but a starting point for direct negotiations with Israel?