On Jewish Political Stupidity
By David Isaac
In private conversation among friends, Jewish supporters of Israel on the Right will often bemoan the political incompetence of their fellow Jews. “How could they vote for so-and-so?” is a common refrain. (We know whose name goes there at present.) This writer recalls visiting a cousin in Haggai, a small Jewish village near Hebron, and watching with consternation as the man slapped his forehead with great force and cried out, “Our people, they are so stupid! They are so stupid!”
Intellectuals have attempted to explain Jewish political behavior, which is noteworthy chiefly in that it defies self-interest. As Milton Himmelfarb famously quipped, ‘Jews earn like Episcopalians, but vote like Puerto Ricans.’ Norman Podhoretz in his book, Why Are Jews Liberal? attempts to explain it by arguing that left-liberalism has become a kind of religion replacing the religion of the Torah (think of it as a kind of Jewish Replacement Theology). In Jews and Power, Ruth Wisse takes a different view, arguing that Jews resorted to a “politics of accommodation” during their many centuries of exile and sometimes mistook political weakness for “a Jewish ideal.”
Judging Jews harshly for their political ineptitude can be habit-forming, especially as the Jews have made a habit of bungling their way through politics the same way Inspector Clouseau bungles his way through unsolved cases in the Pink Panther films. Even the most patient lover of Zion shouldn’t be faulted for developing a nervous condition similar to the one afflicting Clouseau’s boss, the long-suffering Chief Inspector Dreyfus.
As Chaim Weizmann, Israel’s first president, remarked in 1951: “My greatest difficulty is to watch and see all the mistakes that are being made in this country. You see, the Jews are a small people, a very small people quantitatively, but also a great people that builds and destroys. A people of genius and, at the same time, a people of enormous stupidity. With their obstinacy they will drive through a wall, but the breach in the wall… always remains gaping at you.”
The question is whether Jews are any more politically obtuse than other peoples. Asians like Jews are supposed to be smart, but think about the Chinese holding up their Little Red Books and chanting, “Mao! Mao!” or the North Koreans goosestepping to cries of “Glory to Dear Leader Kim Jong Il”. Clearly, Jews haven’t cornered the market on political stupidity. As Herbert Zweibon, the late chairman of Americans for A Safe Israel, summed it up, “They’re all nuts.”
Nuts is the word that comes to mind listening to President Obama’s May 19 speech on the Middle East and North Africa, in which he argued for a Palestinian Arab state along the indefensible 1967 lines. Mr. Obama made this declaration shortly after Fatah and Hamas made a pact. If there’s some confusion about what Fatah is, there’s no confusion about what Hamas is – even the State Department lists it as a terrorist organization.
Little commented on was Mr. Obama’s reference in both his speech and his tete-a-tete with Prime Minister Netanyahu to the need for this new Arab state to have “contiguous” borders. If he means connecting the Gaza Strip to Judea and Samaria – and what else could he mean? – then that requires that Israel be cut in two. A minor detail glossed over by al-Azhar University’s “student of history”. Indeed, all of Mr. Obama’s arguments would only be convincing to someone who didn’t know the details of the conflict.
In his speech to AIPAC a few days later, Mr. Obama defended his speech, saying “There was nothing particularly original in my proposal.” This is, in part, true. Since the Rogers Plan of 1969, U.S. administrations have, to one degree or another, tried to push Israel out of the areas she captured in the Six Day War in which Egypt, Jordan and Syria attempted to annihilate her.
The Rogers Plan of 1969, later the Brookings Report, are the codified expression of their [the Arabists] school’s determination to reduce Israel to its “natural” proportions — in the belief, of course, that this is good for the US.There is a long tradition in the State Department of opposition to Zionism and of efforts to thwart its purpose. It was the State Department that in 1947 counterworked President Truman’s support for the UN partition plan (because it provided for a Jewish state). In March, 1948, it succeeded in achieving a reversal of that support and its replacement by a plan for “trusteeship” which, if implemented would have postponed Jewish independence indefinitely. It was the State Department that ensured the enforcement of an arms embargo, which might have been lethal to the newly-born-and-already-battered Israel if the Soviet Union had not come to its aid.The story is a long one. Presidents, with their ideas and sympathies and foibles come and go. So also secretaries of state. But the spirit of the makers of policy in the State Department has not changed. With increased subservience to Arab demands it has only become more intense, more urgent.
The tenor of official U.S. pronouncements, of inspired unofficial statements by public figures, and of comments in the press reinforce the evaluation that Israel is no more than a "client" state for one-sided favors. U.S. foreign policy is indeed governed by a myopia reminiscent of Britain in 1935-39 in her attitude to the victims and prospective victims of the Nazis.
Myopic is an understatement for describing British policy toward the Jews at that time. The British betrayed their obligations to the Jews as set forth in the League of Nations Mandate which entrusted them with the establishment of a Jewish National Home. Step-by-step the British sold out the Mandate, even preventing Jews fleeing Nazi Germany from reaching Palestine. As Col. Richard Meinertzhagen, the political officer of the Palestine administration and one of the few Zionists within it, wrote:
“The Nazis mean to eradicate Judaism from Germany and they will succeed. Nobody loves the Jews, nobody wants them and yet we are pledged to give them a home in Palestine. Instead we slam the door in their faces just at the moment when it should be wide open. We even whittle down their home at a moment when we should enlarge it. The action of His Majesty’s Government in Palestine is very near to that of Hitler in Germany. They may be more subtle, they are certainly more hypocritical, but the result [for the Jews] is similar – insecurity, misery, exasperation and murder.”
Yet, the Arabists at the British Foreign Office were intent on wooing the Arabs. Just how unrealistic their policy was became evident in World War II. A look at the yawning gap in the numbers of Jewish vs. Arab volunteers for the British army tells the story.
According to David Niv in his Ma’arachot HaIrgun HaTzvai HaLeumi (Vol. 3, p. 127), “At the end of August 1943, four years after the breakout of war… nearly 23,000 men and women, among them 280 officers and 40 female officers, and also 120 doctors who received officer rank were mobilized. Twenty-five Hebrew army companies stood under the direct command of Jewish officers in the Land of Israel.
“Organized Jewish mobilization to British Army units received no encouragement whatsoever from the administrative authorities in the Land of Israel and during a considerable time it encountered great difficulties. Against this the authorities urged Arab mobilization: ‘Draft officers and officials of the civil administration (among them high-ranking British officials) toured Arab villages, gathered the notables, lectured at parties and banquets entreating the Arabs to enlist.’ Nevertheless, Arab enlistment proceeded at a lazy pace. Up to August 1943, 8,661 Arabs enlisted and of this a great number were Syrians and Lebanese, but the number who served in active service were no more than 4,000: ‘Close to 300 fell captive, the remainder fled, died, quit or were released’”.
The situation was far worse than even the above suggests. In Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s book A Place Among The Nations, (Bantam Books, 1993), he writes:
“In Iraq, in Egypt, and in Syria they openly allied themselves with the Nazis, flocking to Berlin to enlist in the war effort and lobby Hitler for favors. They even formed an Arab Legion in Berlin that eventually became part of the SS.
“A popular song at the time caught the spirit of the Arab masses as they enthusiastically waited to rid themselves of the detested British and French who were working so hard to win their affection:
“No more Monsieur, no more Mister
In heaven Allah, on earth Hitler”.
The reason any of this matters is that the U.S. pursues essentially the same policy. In fact, the U.S. received the policy from the British. British appeasement, as Netanyahu writes, “had yet another pernicious result whose effects are very much alive today: the transmission of British policy preferences to almost every foreign ministry and foreign policy establishment in the world. Britain, after all, was the dominant international power between the two world wars, its diplomats venerated, its policies everywhere emulated.”
The policy of appeasement, no matter its obvious failings, always seems to find new adherents. Mr. Obama has given such a policy renewed vigor with his May 19 speech. The result, if realized, will destroy a faithful ally and strengthen the hand of those bent on global Islamic domination. It’s a policy which is weak, naïve and cowardly. It’s also a policy, we might add, that is the product of goyische kops.
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