Co-editors: Seán Mac Mathúna • John Heathcote
Consulting editor: Themistocles Hoetis
Field Correspondent: Allen Hougland
Lenni
Brenner: The Iron Wall - Zionist Revisionism from Jabotinsky
to Shamir (1984) It's April 2002, and the results are
in for the latest American elections to the World Zionist
Congress. They show the continuation of the steep decline of
Zionism within the country's Jews. According to the 4/19
Forward: Participation declined by
nearly 20,000 from the last elections in 1997, with only
90,000 Jews casting their ballots this year.... Of the
total 145 delegates elected by Americans, ARZA/World
Union, the Zionist arm of the Reform and
Reconstructionist movements, won 61 seats, down from 70".
The Religious Zionist Movement,
supported by the Orthodox, took 29 seats, up from 16, the
Conservative arm's Mercaz USA finished second with 32
delegates, down six from the last election.
Some Zionists who are not members of
the World Zionist Organization must be added to these
figures. Meir Kahane's terrorists are not allowed in. They
are dangerous, but not numerous. My estimate is in the low
hundreds, nationally. More important are the ca. 15,000
Lubavicher Hasidic sect, with its stronghold in Boro Park in
Brooklyn. The immense majority of these believe that their
late rabbi is the Messiah, and that his spirit hovers over
his grave, in NY City. These deep thinkers are major funders
of the Israeli Likud, and the New York Democratic Party.
Some readers may be wondering what
happened to the traditional American branches of Israel's
Likud, Mapai and Mapam. Without going into unnecessary
detail, they got some of the rest of the delegates. They are
letter-head organizations, mostly very elderly.
Every political movement, right to
left, has its lunatic fringe. So to these must added X
number of phantom members. In their heads, they are
Zionists, Trotskyists or whatever, but they do nothing,
& are unknown to their alleged movement. But, even
allowing for all of these elements, liars figure but figures
don't lie, and all the stats say that, even with fanatic
suicide bombers murdering innocent Israeli youths, US
Zionism has no appeal for Jewish youth or intellectuals.
According to the 5/26/95 Jewish Sentinel (NY):
With the drop in the latest
election, be certain that less than 22% are now Zionists.
The central reason is religious, not political. The 11/2/01
Jewish Week (NY) headlined "Jews Turning From Judaism." The
article, based on prepublication stats from the latest
American Jewish Identification Survey (2001), says "just 51
percent of American Jews... say that they are Jewish by
religion." One Survey sociologist, Barry
Kosmin, says, in Ha Aretz, 11/9/01, that this is "a decline
of 12 percent since the last national survey I directed in
1990." Math wiz I ain't, but it looks like sometime in 2002,
a majority of American Jews will have checked out of any
form of Judaism. That's a major sociological event, bound to
bring forth a lot of discussion. In addition to these dropouts, many
members of the Reform & Conservative Jewish sects can't
take Israel's legal discrimination against their rabbis, who
are not allowed to perform legal marriages, grant divorces,
etc. Only 44% of Jews are synagogue members. Of these, 30%
are Reform, the Conservatives are 24%. All Orthodox, modern
dress and Hasids, are 6% to 8%, depending on the poll.
For certain, the majority of members
of Reform Temples are not Zionists. According to Aliyah
Vinikoor, in the 4/02 Blueprint (NY): Economically, America's Jews are its
top religion, per capita, surpassing the traditional
Episcopal-Presbyterian elite, and 92% have traveled abroad.
Yet no more than ca. 40% of them have visited Israel. Of
these, many were on package tours. Egypt, Jerusalem, Greece.
I just listened to a 1981 interview
I did with rabbi Joachim Prinz, former head of the American
Jewish Congress. I jokingly asked which free ticket most
American Jews would take, if they had to pledge to go to
Greece, and see the acropolis, and promise never to go to
Israel and the wailing wall, or the reverse. His laughing
answer: "Greece! These stats have the additional
value of highlighting the depravity of the generality of
American pols. They hand over $3 billion/year to Israel,
when the majority of US Jews don't give a penny to Zionism
in their lives. Proverbially, a fanatic is 'more Catholic
than the Pope.' Lets update that: An American fanatic is a
politician running for office - anyone, Jewish, white,
black, cat, dog, rat or snake - anywhere, even in the
Aleutians - hustling Jewish campaign contributions, by
yelling for Sharon, is more Zionist than the Jews.
The Political Future of American
Jews, a 1985 American Jewish Congress pamphlet by Seymour
Martin Lipset and Earl Raab, pre-eminent scholars, estimated
that "as much as a quarter of Republican funds have come
from Jewish sources.... Financial contributions are a much
more certain and bankable political item than Jewish voting
margins in most cases; and Jewish political effectiveness
has been less closely tied to voting margins than to the
access which has been gained by Jewish contributors to
campaigns". The 1/5/93 NY Times declared that
"Jews contributed about 60 percent of Mr. Clinton's
noninstitutional campaign funds. (Take that as private
money.) In the 80s, former Democratic
Senator James Abourezk, founder of the Arab-American
Anti-Discrimination Committee, was surely historically
correct when he gave me his read on the two parties: "The
GOP is more concerned about placating Arab sheikhs in the
ME, while the Democratic Party seeks to please rich Jews
here". But, I would update this. Rudy the
ever-ready has proven that the GOP is just as greedy for
Zion-slush. However, their recent ability to get it is
connected to a shift in the NY Jewish vote to the right,
locally, re crime, etc., rather than anything motormouth
said about Israel. The epicenter of Jewish municipal
political clout is real estate money. As long as these
pro-Zionist Realtors thought they had to be in the Mayor's
party, and his party was always Democrat, the GOP got
nothing to little from them. Demographers and mapmakers have a
handy technical term: Choroplethics. Literally, chorus
filling. The choroplethics of corruption are always in
motion, but these stats are a good general picture of
Zionism's present status in the US. Jews are only 2.3% of
Americans. Zionists are less than 22% of Jews, and going
down. And the rich are a minority among Zionists. One half
of one percent of the donors to pro-Zionist charities, give
60% of what the charities take in. That same minuscule
clique are the source of most of Zionism's political payola.
Some on the left are ill at ease
when they hear talk about "Jewish money. Hitler comes into
mind. But none of those delicate souls is a Jewish scholar.
Walk into any serious Jewish library. Hear shelves groan
from the weight of scholarly treatment of Jewish campaign
contributions. The same scholars say that anti-Semitism is
dropping like a shot, that no one (but these lefts) thinks
that talking about Zionists bribing politicians is going to
create anti-Semitism. In case you haven't noticed, America
is so corrupt that much of the public, including Arabs and
Muslims, thinks that, since everyone bribes politicians,
that the Zionists are to be imitated for their success.
What we are witnessing here are
three separate but connected sociological entities, the
United States, Judaism and Zionism, each evolving.
Bush gives off a sho-nuf mad quality. Half his allies
think he's demented re Iraq. But capitalist A-murica - land
of the freak, home of the knave - will be around for a
while. However, Judaism is collapsing everywhere in the
world except in Israel. No matter what happens in the ME,
the stats are inescapable in their conclusions: Most young
Jews will bail out of their parents' theological
broomcloset, intermarry and live happily ever after. The
remnant will become ever more sectarian, sententious,
intellectually sterile. I have been in active politics for
50 years, come November. I've seen many organized movements,
theological, political, artistic. One commonality stands
out: If they enter terminal collapse, the relatively
intelligent and sane leave, the fools and loons stay to the
end. That is contemporary Judaism's fate. Of American Zionism, one truth must
be said, even if with all charity: It is the dirty ring in
the bathtub after the water has gone down the drain. Nature
imitating art. Certain proof of the axiom of decline
presented here. It has its scholars. Not many, and
not getting younger. But beyond them acres and acres of rank
and file fanatics. The 4/19 Forward describes their April 15
Washington national rally, and Yes. In every book on political
cunning, there is a special chapter on how to impress friend
and foe alike, with your sophistication, by howling down
your best friend in power, for world TV. A closing personal word. My brother
was Bar Mitzvahed when I was seven. He was given a book, The
Story of Mankind, by Hendrich Willem Van Loon. Thirteen is
girls and football. He never read the book. I did. From then
til now, history has been my passion, and I turn 65 later
this month. The definition of a historian varies
in time and place. But my description of my personal role is
simple. Go to a Barnum & Bailey Circus. The elephants
are dancing, everyone is looking at them. But, off on the
side, is a guy with a pooperscooper. Its his job to rush out
and get it all, if one should happen to dump.
That's me. Historian in the human
circus. Being a historian and born into an Orthodox family,
I write about Jews, and I pride myself on getting it all. An
American historian, who wrote a history of the Democratic
Party, I pride myself on getting it all. But there are lots
of other animals in the human circus, and I pride myself on
getting it all. Other tasks prevent me from
immediately critiquing the Palestinian movement. But that is
needed, if anything is. Indeed Zionism survives, in
Palestine, only because the Palestinians have not cleaned up
their act, i.e., have not developed a movement that even
looks like it has a winning strategy. So, dear reader, you will hear from me, asap, but not
before. Until then, please pass around these stats.
Palestinians and defenders of their full rights need to have
a realistic picture of their foes. If I may be forgiven a
parting Americanization of the rather Victorian 'dustbin of
history,' visual signs of your enemy's decline should make
all rejoice, and - more important - think as to how to
seriously accelerate its rush down history's toilet bowl.
"The Reform movement
finished first in this year's American Zionist elections
to the World Zionist Congress - but lost ground from the
previous election five years ago. Meanwhile, the Orthodox
linked Religious Zionist Movement virtually doubled its
representation, nearly surpassing the Conservatives for
the No. 2 spot.
"A recent American
Jewish Committee study found that only 22 percent of
American Jews today consider themselves to be Zionists,
and that 32 percent feel distant from Israel."
"Orthodox Jews comprise
about 60% of the North American olim (settler wannabes),
though they only make up about 6% of the American Jewish
population".
"the chilly reception
given to the man dispatched as President Bush's personal
representative to the rally, Deputy Defense Secretary
Paul Wolfowitz. Known as the most hawkishly pro-Israel
voice in the Administration. Wolfowitz was greeted with a
chorus of boos when he referred in his speech to
Palestinian suffering and the eventual creation of a
Palestinian state."