A brief history

Editorial note: The following is the text of a talk given at the National Summit to Reassess the US-Israel “Special Relationship” held in Washington, D.C., on March 7.

As is the case in so many other ways, the conservative movement’s
position on the state of Israel isn’t what it used to be. Just as what
we call the Old Right,
the pre-[William F.] Buckley right was anti-interventionist and good on
civil liberties, so the conservatives of the 1940s and 1950s were
hostile to Israel. A good example of this is a letter from the
neoconservative guru Leo Strauss to the editors of National Review: he was objecting to an article in the November 17, 1956 issue of the magazine that contained the following sentence:

It is unimaginable that such a sentence would ever find its way into the National Review
of Rich Lowry, because he represents a movement that has been
thoroughly co-opted and corrupted by, first, the cold war, and secondly
our endless “war on terrorism.”

The conservative movement of the 1940s and 50s openly challenged the entire
conception of the Jewish state: this argument was made in several books published
by the pioneering conservative book publisher, Henry Regnery, who issued a whole
series of books reporting on the dispossession of the Palestinian people and
calling into question the whole Zionist project. Nejla Izzeddin’s The
Arab World (1953), is noted by the Kirkus Service as follows:

Regnery also put out Freda Utley’s Will
the Middle East Go West?, which expressed a viewpoint just as fresh
today as it was back in 1957: “Freedom and justice for Israel,” she
wrote, “depend on freedom and justice for the Arabs.”

That same year Regnery even put out a book of photographs depicting life in
Palestinian refugee camps, entitled They
Are Human Too, as well as a novel about Palestinian refugees. And then
there was What
Price Israel?, by Alfred M. Lilienthal, which made what was back then
the mainstream Jewish argument against the idea of a specifically Jewish state.

On the other hand, we see the same reversal on the left, albeit in
the opposite direction. In the beginning, in 1948, the left was very
much pro-Israel. Henry Wallace made support for Israel a major issue in
his presidential campaign that year as the candidate of the leftist
Progressive party, which had the fulsome backing of the American
Communist Party.

The Soviet Union was initially sympathetic to the Israelis, with
Andrei Gromyko arguing at the UN in favor of the creation of a Jewish
state in Palestine. And this wasn’t just talk: the Soviet bloc provided
the arms that made the establishment of Israel possible. Indeed, the
Czech Communist government was single-handedly responsible for arming
the Haganah, and the Irgun. Soviet propagandists even commented
approvingly on the Stern Gang when they blew up the King David Hotel.
What’s more, 200,000 emigrants from socialist countries in Eastern
Europe and the Soviet Union came to Israel to fight the British in the
war for independence. A US arms embargo prevented all but a trickle of
aid from reaching the Israelis.

Harry Truman was not inclined to support Israel, but was persuaded by
the challenge coming from Wallace and the left to recognize its
existence. Yet the Soviets were the first to recognize Israel as a
specifically Jewish state: in the original copy of Truman’s declaration,
the word “Palestine” is still used and the phrase “Jewish state” is
crossed out.

What happened to change things into their exact opposite?

What happened was the cold war. When the arms embargo favoring the
Arabs was repealed by the US, the Israelis began to warm toward the
West. Although the Soviets had allowed Jews to emigrate to Israel, the
huge numbers of applicants from the Soviet Union itself made them
nervous: after all, who would want to leave their workers paradise? When
the Korean war broke out and the Israelis sided with the UN, the
Soviets dropped their support for Israel, started selling arms to Egypt
and Syria, and initiated a series of show trials targeting Jews in the
Soviet bloc: the infamous “Doctor’s Plot” and the Slansky trials in Czechslovakia

On the right, the big turnaround was also due to the cold war. The
shift can be seen as a tribal reaction to the left’s growing
anti-Zionism. It was also due to the incursion of a number of former leftists who gathered around National Review
magazine and later became known as the neoconservatives. The neocons,
as we affectionately call them, are partisans of Israel who have often
been accused – sometimes unfairly – of putting Israel’s interests over
and above American interests. The truth is that they see no dividing
line: as long as Israel’s interests are served, they believe, so are
America’s. This has become an increasingly hard position to defend since
the 9/11 terrorist attacks and subsequent efforts by the US government to minimize the influence of Islamist radicals.

Another factor in the turnaround of the American right on the Israel
question has been the growth of the evangelical “born again” movement as
a force to be reckoned with among conservatives. Here is where theology
impacts politics – and this in turn has a direct effect on US foreign
policy.

The doctrine of premillennial dispensationalism,
which holds that the coming together of the Jews in Israel marks the
beginning of the end of days, has exerted a powerful attraction to
millions of evangelicals. Dispensationalists hold that the promises made
to Abraham and to the Jewish people have been held in abeyance but will
be fulfilled when the so-called “time of tribulation” comes to pass –
an era of wars and turmoil that will prefigure the end of history and
the return of Christ to earth. What this means, among other things, is
that the borders of the land supposedly given to Abraham and his
descendants – the Jewish people – will extend from the Nile to the
Euphrates. In the dispensationalist theology, Christ will return to a
Jewish kingdom, the epicenter of which will be a rebuilt Temple in
Jerusalem.

According to the theology, the “time of tribulation” is imminent: the rapture, the rebuilding of the Temple,
and the coming of the Antichrist will all signal the end of days – and
the final battle between good and evil on the plain of Armageddon. Many
dispensationalists explicitly state that this will be a nuclear war – another Holocaust, in which Israel and all mankind will perish, with only the pure of heart ascending to Heaven.

The single largest – and, arguably, the most effective – component of
the Israel lobby consists of a highly organized and very resourceful
Christian dispensationalist element. They have their own lobbying
organizations such as Christian United for Israel (CUFI), which is run by the Rev. John Hagee
and is very active. They are particularly active in the Republican
party and pose a mighty obstacle to any politician who seeks to restore
balance to American foreign policy in the Middle East.

There is hope, however: there is a resurgence of foreign policy
realism in the GOP and in the conservative movement generally: this is a
response to the general war weariness. Opposition to US intervention
overseas, embraced as a principled position by the increasingly
influential libertarian wing of the party, will tend to distance the
Republicans from a pro-Israel lobby that is perpetually trying to draw us into Israel’s wars.

For those of us who want to change American foreign policy and steer it in
a less interventionist direction, the road ahead is going to be hard, long,
and filled with many obstacles, not the least of which is the tremendous motivation
the pro-Israel lobby possesses in all its aspects. Yet the costs of maintaining
this “special relationship” have long since outweighed the gains,
and America is slowly but surely waking up to this fact. Let us hope this event
is going to be a milestone in that awakening.

source: antiwar.com 3/10/14