Letter from the Home Front

by

David A. Harris

Executive Director, American Jewish Committee

August 12, 2002

            The well-being, security, and quest for peace of Israel depend, first and foremost, on the will and resolve of the Israeli people. Time and again, their determination has left us in awe. We should never underestimate it or, heaven forbid, succumb to despair. 

But in the final analysis, Israel is simply too small to survive over the long haul without powerful friends, principal among them the United States.

            While other major countries, notably Germany, Britain, Australia, Canada, Turkey, India, China, Russia and Japan, all play an important part in Israel’s political, economic, or strategic life, none begins to approach the American role or is likely to in the foreseeable future.

            No other country provides such generous and essential economic and military assistance year after year.

            No other country has the capacity to furnish state-of-the-art weapons to help ensure Israel’s qualitative, if not quantitative, edge over its adversaries.

            No other country rivals American technological know-how in the intelligence field or has closer cooperation with Israel in intelligence-sharing.

            No other country would have, indeed could have, taken on Saddam Hussein in 1991 or would even consider it again today.

            No other country has both the capacity and will to face the menace of Islamic extremism—from groups planning terrorist attacks to states seeking weapons of mass destruction.

            No other country is able to mobilize its diplomatic machinery in the Arab world as persuasively to urge moderation and the path toward peace.

            No other country could offer any credible guarantees to help ensure Israel’s security should Jerusalem cede land in exchange for the promise of peace.

            I could go on at length. Suffice it to say that Israel’s yearning for peace and security depends to an unprecedented degree on the United States.

            If the Arab world senses the prospect of any reversal in the airtight U.S.-Israel relationship, the incentive for coming to terms with Israel diminishes. It is only the recognition that all the Arab efforts over the years to drive a wedge between Washington and Jerusalem have failed that may one day lead to peace in the Middle East, with the U.S. playing an active role in monitoring compliance with any peace agreement and wielding both the carrot and stick to ensure that the Arab world does not renege on its agreement.

            Parenthetically, those in the American Jewish community who publicly call for American pressure on Israel may not fully appreciate this essential point. The Arab world might conclude that its long-desired aim of separating American Jewry from Israel—and thereby presumably giving the American government a freer hand to move away from Israel and closer to the Arabs—becomes more realistic, thus providing less, not more, incentive to reach a peace agreement with Israel.

            Let’s not kid ourselves. The U.S.-relationship is not on automatic pilot. There is no amendment to the Constitution that guarantees American support for Israel. No, what undergirds the American role in Israel’s life more than anything else is American Jewish activism. To be sure, there are other essential factors.

            It helps greatly that Israel, like the U.S., is a democracy, a reliable ally, and the cradle of Judeo-Christian civilization. It also helps that a clear majority of the American people identifies with Israel’s story line—the dramatic return to the birthplace of the Jewish people, the need for a Jewish state after the devastation wrought by the Shoah, and the successful struggle to build and defend a viable democratic country against all the odds.

            But I have long believed that if the American Jewish factor were removed from the equation, or even reduced, it might not be long before American foreign policy, driven by a more detached assessment of the narrow national interest (i.e., energy needs, Arab versus Israeli population numbers, etc.) would begin to more closely resemble the evenhanded approach of the Europeans, and that would be an unmitigated disaster for Israel.

            We American Jews have an extraordinary opportunity and responsibility. The opportunity is to help sustain and develop the state that has been at the center of Jewish prayer and yearning since time immemorial. In fact, if I describe this as an opportunity, I misstate the case. It’s more accurately a privilege that has been given us.

            And yes, it’s a responsibility. In effect, it’s the flipside of the famous Pogo line—“We have met the advocates and they are us.”

            Blessed to live in this extraordinary country, we have the chance to impact on the foreign policy of the single most powerful nation in the world and to do so in a way that harmonizes our American and Jewish selves. After all, to believe in democracy, the rule of law, and respect for human dignity is to be both pro-American and pro-Israeli. We needn’t apologize for our support for Israel; to the contrary, we should celebrate it as embodying our highest values.

            There will be those who raise questions about specific Israeli policies and ask whether they are compatible with those values. The answer, of course, is that Israel does not always live up to its own aspirations.

As Jews, steeped in a proud moral and ethical tradition, we are at times uneasy when the messy realities of statecraft clash with the prophetic values we embrace, but we dare not forget that Israel is obligated to operate in a region where no neighbor even pretends to abide by Israel’s core value system.

            So, if the United States is critical to Israel’s existence, and if American Jewry is key to the American position, what are the dangers lurking ahead as we look at the chessboard?

            Broadly speaking, there are two—one internal, the other external.

            The internal danger could emerge if the American Jewish commitment to Israel wanes. The fear is that the passage of time works to weaken the ties between Israel and American Jewry. The societies grow farther apart, the links between the two great centers of world Jewry become more tenuous, and the shared history begins to sound more like a slogan than reality.

            According to this reasoning, fewer young people feel closely connected to Israel than their parents or grandparents. As the rate of intermarriage grows, poll after poll reveals that in such families the ties to Israel are likely to be thinner. And in light of the fact that Jewish numbers in the U.S. overall have been static for decades and are only likely to decrease, if slowly, in the years ahead, the Jewish percentage of the American population will continue to drop, with all of its attendant political and other consequences.

            That’s why the current emphasis on educating our young people, taking advantage of the new communications technologies, preparing them for the inevitable discussions and debates at schools and colleges, and offering links to Israel becomes more important than ever. And finding ways to reach those in their thirties and forties – the “missing generation,” as someone dubbed this group – is absolutely vital, especially as the next generation of communal leadership will come from this age cohort.

            While these internal trends are at work, there is an external factor that must not be overlooked.

In recent years, there has been a sharp increase in Arab and Muslim American political activity in the United States. With their numbers growing—more about that in a minute—and their self-confidence developing, they have surged on to the political battlefield. They know they have an uphill struggle. They recognize the formidable strength of the pro-Israeli advocacy movement in this country, but they believe it is assailable.

            First, they believe that their communities must now be taken into account by politicians running for office in such key states as New Jersey, Michigan, California, and Illinois, where Arab and Muslim immigrants have settled.

            Second, they contend that the American public is less certain of its support for Israel since the so-called Al-Aksa intifadah began nearly two years.

            Third, they see an opportunity to create new coalitions, especially with minority communities such as African Americans and Latinos by portraying the Palestinians as the “oppressed Third Worlders” and Israelis as the “neo-colonialist oppressors.”

            Fourth, they perceive a splintering in the American Jewish community, including those who care little about Israel and others prepared to be openly critical of Israel.

            And fifth, their organizations have been encouraged by the ease with which they have gained entrée into the White House, State Department, and other center of power, even when these organizations represent extremist viewpoints.

            For years, I’ve been struck by the obvious manipulation of Muslim numbers in the United States. How else to explain jumps in estimates from two to four to six to eight million Muslims within a matter of a few years? It’s much harder to do the same for Arab numbers, since those figures are available through the decennial census and annual immigration data, but federal law prohibits any questions about religion, so it’s pretty much left to the religious groups themselves and academic researchers to come up with estimates. (The 2000 Census indicated just over one million Arabs in the United States, many of them Christians, e.g. Lebanese Maronites, Egyptian Copts, Iraqi Chaldeans, etc.)

            While the Jewish community painstakingly plans the complex methodology of the National Jewish Population Survey, some Muslim spokesmen have found a much easier – and less time-consuming – approach. They simply toss out numbers with abandon, and the media, with only a handful of exceptions, has dutifully and uncritically reported these numbers as facts.

            Last fall, the American Jewish Committee approached Dr. Tom Smith of the University of Chicago to study the numbers. We knew that some would question our motives, but we felt we had no choice. It was abundantly clear that Muslim leaders, appearing ever more frequently in the media after September 11^th, were using the opportunity to exaggerate their community’s size for obvious reasons, and no one was challenging them. We went to the blue-ribbon specialist. Dr. Smith is the head of the General Social Survey and is considered the best in his field. After months of study, he presented us with his findings. Based on all the quantitative data he could find, Dr. Smith came up with a best-guess estimate of 1.8 million Muslims, allowing for at most another million uncounted Muslims.

            Unbeknownst either to Dr. Smith or us, the City University of New York was conducting its own study of religious affiliation in the United States, and their figures became available at more or less the same time as Dr. Smith’s. Lo and behold, their bottom-line figure for Muslims in this country was 1.8 million.

            Predictably, Muslim spokesmen attacked Dr. Smith’s study by impugning our motives, and then sought to cast doubt on the CUNY study by noting that the two researchers were both Jewish and therefore, by definition, must have had ulterior motives. These spokesmen realized, not without reason, that if they simply kept repeating their numbers the media would soon forget the two studies and play along. The alternative would be to invite squabbles with Muslim organizations that would not hesitate to level racism charges at the drop of a hat, something the media would obviously prefer to avoid.

            The latest numbers I’ve heard come from the director of the American Muslim Council. In the span of one week, I saw him on two of the cable news network shows touting the fact that there are today “seven million Muslim citizens” in the United States. That’s a new one. Overnight they’ve all become citizens, no less.

            If these Muslim organizations can persuade American opinion molders and policy makers that they are truly such a formidable force in American life, the political consequences will be considerable.

            The Muslim population in the U.S. is variegated, but the organizations that claim to represent the community are not. Moderate groups have valiantly sought to emerge, but they have been kept at bay by the more extreme groups, who, strange at is may seem, have actually been helped by the government and media.

            The Islamic Supreme Council of America is a good case in point. A genuinely moderate organization that openly rejects Islamic fundamentalist politics, it can barely get its foot in the door inside the Beltway or have the chance to comment in the media, while spokesmen for such radical groups as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the American Muslim Council (AMC), and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) are openly courted.

            I confess that it’s one of the biggest mysteries to me. The Clinton Administration—both the White House and State Department—began the practice and the Bush Administration has followed suit. In both cases, there seems to have been a political calculation high up in the White House that it is important to have an open-door policy to Muslim groups, that for better or worse the more radical groups are the ones with the most prominence and longevity, and that the Muslim community has come of age as a voting bloc and therefore electoral considerations become paramount.

            Or take the recent case of the FBI. Who should know better than the FBI exactly what’s what among these groups, yet, to our dismay, Director Mueller agreed to speak before the annual convention of the American Muslim Council in June despite being presented with evidence from many sources, including the American Jewish Committee, that the group was a leading apologist for Islamic extremism.

In fact, the AMC co-sponsored the “National Rally for Free Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa on October 28, 2000, where one of the speakers, an AMC board member, declared: “We are all supporters of Hamas. I wish they added that I am also a supporter of Hezbollah.” Both Hamas and Hezbollah have been on the U.S. terrorism list for years.

More recently, the AMC honored the Holy Land Foundation for its “strong global vision.” The Texas-based organization had its assets frozen by President Bush after 9/11 for collecting funds “used to support the Hamas terror organization.” The AMC responded to the president’s action by condemning it as “particularly disturbing, unjust, and counterproductive.”

Yet, despite this knowledge, the FBI director went ahead, contending that the AMC was now a mainstream group. With great respect for the FBI and the enormous responsibility it is shouldering, I cannot for the life of me figure out why it decided in this case to turn a blind eye to reality.

Or, for that matter, take the case of the shooting incident, in June, at the El Al ticket counter at Los Angeles International Airport. Can there be any serious doubt that this was an act of terrorism, which is defined in the Federal Register as “the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives”? But then again it took the FBI six years to reclassify the 1994 murder of Ari Halberstam, the 16-year-old student killed by an Arab gunman on the Brooklyn Bridge, as an act of terrorism. Until then, the crime, believe it or not, was listed as an act of “road rage.”

What difference does the classification make? Not only is this about truth and accuracy, but it also determines the extent of the resources devoted to an investigation.

It’s important to be clear about a related matter. No major American Jewish organization has more energetically pursued Muslim-Jewish dialogue in this country. But, truth be told, we have constantly run into difficulties.

Beginning in 1992, we were among the first to highlight the plight of Bosnian Muslims and thought it might also serve as a good bridge to links with Muslim groups in this country who involved themselves in the same issue, but we quickly learned that we were wrong; these groups had a radical political agenda when it came to the Middle East and international terrorism.

We sponsored the first national conferences on Muslim-Jewish relations, held at the University of Denver, two years running, but we couldn’t continue when our Muslim partners were revealed to have a sharply different view than we of the killing of Israeli civilians by bus bombers.

At the urging of the State Department in the wake of the optimism generated by the 1993 Oslo Accords, we met with several delegations of Muslim clerics from the Middle East and elsewhere in the Islamic world, who were brought to the U.S. as guests of our government to learn about American concepts of religious freedom and pluralism.

Some of these meetings were extremely difficult. There were individuals among the visitors who clearly did not want to be in the room, others whose only impressions of Jews had been formed by reading anti-Semitic books published in the Middle East, and still others who would not have their pictures taken with us in the group shots.

What was abundantly clear was that many of these Muslim clergymen had essentially no information about Jews and Judaism from Jewish – or even dispassionate third-party – sources. Thus was born the idea for AJC to commission two volumes – one on Islam for Jews, the other on Judaism for Muslims. The goal was to bring Muslims and Jews closer together through greater understanding of the two religious traditions. It was a wonderful concept, and it generated a lot of excitement in many quarters, including the State Department.

Plans were developed to try to partner synagogues and mosques around the country to use the books as the basis for discussion and familiarization, and to invite the two authors – both distinguished scholars, one Jewish, the other Muslim – to travel together to moderate Muslim countries (and to Israel) to promote interfaith conversation.

But, as one of my favorite expressions goes, “No good deed goes unpunished.”

The books had just been published in the spring of 2000 and we issued our first press release. It didn’t take long for a Jordanian extremist cleric to issue a fatwa, endorsing the killing of the Muslim scholar, Khalid Duran, for the “crime” of collaborating with the Jews and defaming Islam. Incidentally, the cleric hadn’t even read the book because it had not yet been distributed.

In any case, it’s fair to say that he wouldn’t have liked the book, as it was written by a moderate Muslim who rejected the Islamists and their politicization of the faith. And a representative of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which defends radical Islam in this country, also immediately pounced on the Duran book and maligned our motives, although he was forced to admit to the press that he hadn’t seen the book, either.

As a result of the fatwa, Khalid Duran and his family were forced to go into hiding here in the United States. Inexplicably, the story received only brief coverage in the media and then quickly faded.

Despite these experiences – or maybe because of them – we are all the more determined to identify potential partners in the American Muslim community with whom we can talk. We know they are there. And the same goes for overseas, where we sometimes find it easier to establish links with responsible Muslim leaders, with whom we may not always agree but with whom we have a common interest in building bridges and preventing civilizational clashes.

In sum, we need to be alert to the elements of the external challenge

First, there is a physical threat to Jews. There have been enough terrorist incidents in the past decade, enough thwarted attempts, and enough warnings, especially in recent months, to put us all on notice that Jews and Jewish institutions are possible targets of the Islamic terrorist network. We have no choice but to take security issues far more seriously than we have until now, just as European Jewish communities have had to do so since the outbreak of terrorist attacks – often jointly conducted by Arab and extreme left-wing European terrorist groups – began there in the 1970s.

Second, there is a political threat. There is ample evidence that Muslim organizations in the United States, claiming exaggerated numbers, are determined to assert themselves in the political arena and no longer believe, as they once did, in the “invincibility of the Jewish lobby,” to quote one of their spokesmen. This is a long-term process, and it has already begun.

Take this year’s gubernatorial race in Michigan. David Bonior, who is leaving the U.S. Congress, where he rose to be number two in the Democratic Party, chose to run in the Democratic primary. (The primary was held on August 6 and he lost.) Here’s what he said to one predominately Muslim audience:

I think the political growth, the political sophistication, and the political understanding have increased tremendously within the (American Muslim) community. But there are still many, many steps to go. One step, of course, is electing a governor of a large state. When that happens, several other things will happen. That person will make sure that your sons and your daughters and the adults in the community are placed on the boards, the commissions, the judgeships, the staff positions, and the cabinet positions of the government. That in itself creates an infrastructure for the community to progress even further.

                        This is not the only example. The current congressional primary fight in Georgia between the incumbent, Cynthia McKinney, who has received substantial support from Arab and Muslim sources, and her challenger, Denise Majette, who is being helped by the pro-Israel community, is another good case in point, with the added dimension that both candidates are African Americans and black-Jewish and black-Muslim relations have become factors as well. A rather similar story was played out in Alabama earlier this year.

                        And third, there is the challenge of encouraging the emergence of genuinely moderate voices in the American Muslim community. They most certainly do exist, but many are cowed into silence, bullied by the extremists. As I said earlier, to date they have gotten precious little help from the government and media, who have largely ignored (or, worse, marginalized) them. The Council on American-Islamic Relations and the American Muslim Council are benignly seen as counterparts of the American Jewish Committee or the National Urban League, though they are anything but.

                        One thing that can be said about the American Jewish agenda – never a dull moment.

Note: This is No. 21 in a series of occasional letters written on topics of current interest. To receive copies of previous letters, please contact Alina Viera at vieraa@ajc.org or (212) 891-6703.