A Match Made in Heaven

by Zev Chafets

  Saddam struck on the first night of the war. We were awakened in Tel Aviv at two in the morning by air-raid sirens, and by the time we had put on our masks and sealed ourselves in our safe room (which was also the bathroom), the first Scud missiles had already fallen, one not far from my house. We felt the impact, heard the sirens, and tightened the straps on our masks. A government spokesman on the radio warned everyone to stay put until it could be determined if the missiles had released poisons.

  They hadn’t, but I didn’t want to take chances on the future. I called a friend of mine, a senior Israeli official with a lifetime of experience in security matters and access to the country’s most sensitive information. “I’ve got to ask you one question,” I said. “I know you can’t tell me details, but if you were me, and you had an eight-year-old son, would you bring him to Jerusalem or let him stay in Tel Aviv?” Speculation was that the Iraqis wouldn’t dare fire missiles at Jerusalem and risk hitting the Dome of the Rock and the Mosque of Omar, among Islam’s holiest shrines.

  My friend, a Holocaust survivor, prided himself on his unflappable stoicism. Once, when we were both in Egypt on Israeli government business, we had been stalked for a week by a Palestinian hit team. When the terrorists were caught, and the plan exposed, I learned that my friend had known about it the whole time. He hadn’t said anything, and I hadn’t sensed a problem. When I had mentioned this to him later, he had shrugged and said, “What happens, happens. You didn’t need to know.” That was the kind of dismissive macho attitude I wanted to hear from him now. But without hesitation he said, “I’d bring my son to Jerusalem.”

  A lot of people came to the same conclusion; Tel Aviv and other coastal cities emptied out. School was called off, men and women didn’t go to work or leave the house at night. Movies, concerts, and shows were canceled, restaurants and bars closed. The national radio broadcast a silent channel—you could leave it on while you slept and it would only activate for alerts. The Iraqis fired thirty-nine salvos at Israel over the course of the Gulf War. Every time I had to look into my son’s eyes as I fitted him with his gas mask.

  Seven years later, Saddam Hussein kicked UN weapons inspectors out of Iraq, and the United States threatened action. We feared that Israel would once again be Saddam’s default target. Chief UN inspector Richard Butler told interviewers that Saddam had biological weapons sufficient to wipe out Tel Aviv. The Israeli government instructed the public not to panic—and announced that it would be passing out updated gas masks.

  By now my son Shmulik was fifteen, old enough to put on his own mask. But Lisa and I had little kids, a two-year-old son and a baby daughter. They were too small for gas masks. We went to the Yad Eliahu basketball stadium, suddenly transformed into a civil defense center, and picked up tiny protective tents for the kids. Then we went home and waited to see if Richard Butler was right.

  So, when the United States went to war in Iraq in 2003, did I believe that Saddam Hussein might very well have weapons of mass destruction? Did I think he would fire them at Tel Aviv? Did I want him—for Israeli reasons, Jewish reasons, personal reasons—gone? Damn right I did. Saddam was far more than a Jewish or Israeli problem—if he had been only that, George H. W. Bush would never have gone after him in the first Gulf War—but, like so many enemies of civilization, past and current, he had a special thing about Jews, Israel, and Zionists. He gave stipends to Palestinians who killed Israelis. He talked openly of torching Israel. George H. W. Bush exaggerated in the first Gulf War when he compared Saddam to Hitler, but Saddam had a Nazi attitude toward the Jewish state. Getting rid of him was, in my opinion, good for the United States and for Israel.

  THIS OPINION WAS not universally shared by the Jewish community. By the 2004 presidential election, Iraq had become a partisan issue—and most Jews are Democrats. In November, at the Reform movement’s biennial convention in Houston, Eric Yoffie used the occasion not only to castigate the evangelical right but to attack the war. He steered through a resolution excoriating Bush’s “failures before and during the war” and called for a “clear exit strategy with specific goals for troop withdrawal.” These demands were couched in biblical and Talmudic citations on the subject of “just war,” but the stance was political, not theological; the resolution itself made that clear.

  “American opinion, and Jewish opinion in particular, has turned against the war,” it said. “Nearly two-thirds of Americans disapprove of the Administration’s handling of the situation in Iraq and would favor removing some or all troops from Iraq. Moreover, Americans are uneasy about the rising price tag for the war, which has already cost over $200 billion, diverting money and resources that are urgently needed at home. Some have argued that future generations will continue to have to pay this cost, as a result of concurrent tax cuts coupled with spending of borrowed funds. Two-thirds of American Jews now describe the war as a mistake and a majority seeks to bring American troops safely and speedily home.”

  Passing this resolution made Yoffie’s movement the first mainstream Jewish group to join the antiwar coalition. But this created a problem. The antiwar coalition was led by stridently anti-Israeli factions.

  “Sadly,” the resolution noted, “within the organized opposition to the war there are a number of groups espousing radical, anti-Israel rhetoric (including a number of members of ANSWER—Act Now to Stop War and End Racism). In a second major coalition, United for Peace and Justice, there are fewer such voices. But the absence of mainstream American Jewish organizations from this debate has created a vacuum in which other voices are manipulating messages about Jews and Israel in the context of and in opposition to the Iraq war.”

  This Houston convention marked a return to the 1960s, when the Reform movement had been an integral part of the antiwar camp. But this time it was an uncomfortable fit. Back then, we were thrilled when Muhammad Ali refused induction into the army on the grounds that “no Vietnamese ever called me nigger.” It wasn’t his fight, and it wasn’t ours, either. But the war in Iraq was a different matter. Like it or not, Saddam Hussein had not only called Jews “nigger,” but fired weapons at them. The forces battling in Iraq after Saddam’s fall—Sunni Ba’athists, Arab nationalists, Al Qaeda terrorists, Shiite Iranian surrogates—were all bitter enemies of Israel and the Jews. The future governance of Iraq, the military posture of the United States in the Middle East, the broader war on Islamic terrorism—all these were inescapably Jewish issues whether Jews wanted them to be or not.

  Jewish denial of the obvious implications of Iraq, and the broader jihad, was reflected in the fact that few young American Jews joined the U.S. military. The community dealt with the armed forces as alien territory, of interest primarily for their discriminatory policies toward gays and women, their role in the military-industrial complex, or, in the case of the Air Force Academy, as a supposed hotbed of right-wing evangelicalism.

  Rabbi Carlos Huerta is the Jewish chaplain of West Point. I met him not long after the Reform movement passed its anti-Iraq resolution at the military academy’s Jewish Chapel, a small, modern building whose walls are decorated with laminated baseball cards of Jewish major-leaguers, military scenes from the Old Testament, and plaques bearing the names of 16 Jewish Congressional Medal of Honor winners and the 821 Jewish graduates of West Point since Simon Levy, class of 1802.

  Huerta is a giant, six feet five at least and close to 300 pounds, with an open, friendly face that looks more Aztec than Ashkenazi. He was just back from a tour of duty in Iraq and expected to be going again soon, and he was still wearing combat fatigues.

  “I have kids who come here, they don’t want the people at their synagogue to know they’re going to West Point,” he said. “Jewish kids in America know everything, but if you ask them to name some Jewish Medal of Honor winners, they don’t know what you’re talking about. Ask them about General Shaknow [a concentration camp survivor who came to the United States and became the commander of the Special Forces] and they look at you blankly. ‘General Shakn
ow? Never heard of him.’”

  Huerta knows there are charges that the Jews aren’t doing their share in the fight against Islamic radicals. “I’ve heard people say, ‘Jews consume freedom, they don’t manufacture it,’” he said. “That kind of talk hurts morale. We just buried a young Jewish woman MP in Iraq. There were plenty of Jews over there. I was in a Special Forces compound not long ago, near Mosul, where some guys came over to me and said, ‘Hey, Rabbi, can you get us siddurs [prayer books]?’ Plenty of Jews.”

  Plenty is a relative term. The army doesn’t publish statistics, but the usual estimate is that Jews make up less than 2 percent of the military, and many are recent immigrants from the former USSR or Israel.

  There are about seventy Jews at West Point. They have a choir, a Hillel, and a newspaper, The Tablets, whose masthead bears the words of George Orwell: “We sleep at night because rough men stand ready to visit violence on those who would harm us.”

  That weekend, the Jewish cadets were scheduled to host the Jewish students of the Naval Academy and the Air Force Academy for a long Shabbat. One of the planners was Britney Berkoff, a tall, blond cadet, daughter of a Jewish Special Forces officer who graduated from West Point in 1981 and a Hispanic mother who converted to Judaism.

  “I got into the Academy as a Hispanic minority admission,” Berkoff told me, “but during Beast Barracks I noticed that the Jewish upperclassmen didn’t haze us. They were actually nice to us. They even let us use their phones. So I decided to join the Jewish Club.”

  Berkoff has discovered that, beyond the walls of the academy, the Jewish club isn’t so easily approached. “We went to Vassar for a Shabbat at the Hillel not too long ago and it was very uncomfortable,” she recalled. “Everyone was so against the war. They said, ‘The army? Why do that?’ I mean, they were nice and welcoming in a way. We had ser vices together. But it was like they were almost attacking us. We said, ‘We want to serve our country,’ which they didn’t seem to understand exactly. But for me, it’s pretty simple. I plan to lead troops into battle and bring them back alive.”

  Donald Benjamin, class of ’08, wouldn’t be attending the Shabbat weekend. A sturdy-looking young man with a baby face and an excitable disposition, he was due to spend the weekend at home, in Phoenix. He was sorry to miss the occasion, because he saw himself as a role model. “Most of the Jews here are only half-Jewish,” he said. “I’m a full-blooded Jew, on both sides. My goal here is to shatter every Jewish stereotype. If I go someplace and you’re supposed to bring flowers, I buy twice as many as anyone else. I don’t want people to think I’m cheap. I went to high school in Phoenix with about seven Jewish kids, and they upset me with how stereotypical they acted.”

  “Stereotypical how?”

  Benjamin glanced at my notebook and paused. “Chicken shit,” he said.

  He had been in Israel the previous summer and fell for the macho spirit of the place. “Israelis are a different breed of Jew,” he said approvingly. He told me he keeps an Israeli flag folded up in his barracks room. “I’m super pro Israeli.”

  Benjamin feels—as most American Jews his age evidently do not—that the jihad, including the war in Iraq, is his fight. “[The kind of anti-Semitism in the Middle East] enrages me,” he said. “I do take it personally. Here, the way we live, everything seems to be happening worlds away. You grow up in a rich neighborhood and you learn to look out for yourself. I hate to say it, but most American Jews look at what’s happening in the world and they say, ‘It’s not my problem.’”

  ELEVEN

  JEWS ARE DEMOCRATS, ISRAELIS ARE REPUBLICANS

  In May 2004, President George W. Bush had the strange experience of giving a speech to a mostly Democratic Jewish audience that loved him. He was interrupted twenty times with wild applause, and won himself a standing ovation. “The Israeli people have always had enemies at their borders and terrorists close at hand,” he told the national convention of the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). “Again and again, Israel has defended itself with skill and heroism, and as a result of the courage of the Israeli people, Israel has earned the respect of the American people.”

  Bush tied Israel to his policies in the Middle East:

  On September 11, 2001, Americans saw that we are no longer protected by geography from the dangers of the world. We experienced the horror of being attacked in our homeland, on our streets, and in places of work. And from that experience came an even stronger determination, a fierce determination to defeat terrorism and to eliminate the threat it poses to free people everywhere.

  Not all terrorist networks answer to the same orders and same leaders, but all terrorists burn with the same hatred. They hate all who reject their grim vision of tyranny. They hate people who love freedom. They kill without mercy. They kill without shame. And they count their victories in the death of the innocent….

  Freedom-loving people did not seek this conflict. It has come to us by the choices of violent men, hateful men. See, we seek peace. We long for peace. Israel longs for peace. America longs for peace. Yet, there can be no peace without defending our security. There is only one path to peace and safety. America will use every resource we have to fight and defeat these enemies of freedom.

  Bush’s reception at AIPAC was a source of great expectations for Republican strategists. Some predicted that the president would get 35 or even 40 percent of the Jewish vote in 2004. Bush had the tacit endorsement of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. He was the man who toppled Saddam Hussein (which, in early 2004, was still regarded as politically positive). He was the commander in chief of forces fighting Bin Laden and his “jihad against Jews and crusaders.” He had vowed, in strong, clear language, not to allow the genocidal Iranian regime get its hands on nuclear weapons. All of this got George W. Bush 24 percent of the Jewish vote. American Jews might be grateful, and they might be Zionists, but they were, first of all, Democrats.

  BACK IN THE days of Abe Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt, American Jews (at least in the North) were mostly Republicans. But then came the huge influx of Eastern European immigrants, many of whom, like my father’s father, were socialists. In the 1920 presidential election, a plurality voted for Socialist Party candidate Eugene V. Debs, who was so revered that the Yiddish-speaking Workmen’s Circle, which owned a radio station in New York, gave it the call letters WEVD, the candidate’s initials.

  FDR turned these Jews into Democrats, and the conversion has, with a few wobbles, stuck. As Richard Brookhiser once observed, the only difference between the Democratic Party and Reform Judaism is the holidays. In a 2005 survey, 54 percent of Jews identified as Democrats, 16 percent as Republicans. According to a study conducted at Denison College in 2000, about 95 percent of Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist clergy (and 75 percent of the Orthodox) called themselves Democrats.

  These are statistics that the man I’ll call The Professional knows by heart. He is a Democratic operative, a pro who has mastered every nuance of Jewish politics in the United States, starting, as politics often do, with the Democratic Party’s finances.

  “You can replace Jewish votes, which might be four percent nationally,” he told me one day over lunch in Washington. “But you can’t replace Jewish money. Big-donor lists begin at twenty-five thousand dollars, and at that level of national politics, forty to fifty percent are Jews. The higher the bracket goes up, the higher the percentage.”

  The Washington Post once estimated that Jews contribute 60 percent of the Democratic Party’s money. This made The Professional laugh. “We have an internal survey that puts it closer to eighty percent,” he said. “We don’t publicize it, but Jews contribute more to the party than any other ethnic group. Hell, we contribute more than everybody else put together.”

  This is not quite the Zionist cabal that Mearsheimer, Walt, and their fellow conspiracy theorists believe. For one thing, Jews—even Democratic Jews—are far from monolithic in their support for Israel. In 2004, when so-called 527 Organizations were the ch
ief conduit for serious political money, the top four contributors were George Soros, Peter Lewis, Steven Bing, and the Sandler family. They gave pro-Kerry groups a combined $73 million. This figure was roughly as much as the next twenty contributors, Republican and Democrat, combined. But Soros is no Zionist; in fact, he believes that Israeli policies are a cause of anti-Semitism. This is an extreme view among Jewish liberals, but it is by no means unique. Israel’s main supporters in the United States may be Jews, but so are many of its most prominent critics.

  A well-known political cliché holds that American Jews earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans. This is meant to convey the idea that Jews are so liberal and altruistic that they vote against their own interests. But voting Democratic is a Jewish interest. Jews are major stakeholders in the party, which tends to reflect both their economic concerns and their cultural and ideological sensitivities. Internationalists like Soros and show business figures whose foreign income is dependent upon American popularity abroad tend to take a “European” view of the Arab-Israel conflict. Less exalted, grassroots Jews often belong to “helping” professions, the trial bar, or academics—all areas with a direct interest in big government.

  Republicans sometimes talk about the critical influence of Jews in the Democratic Party in code—“liberal elites,” “the Upper West Side,” or “Hollywood.” These are euphemisms, of course, but not necessarily bigoted. On the contrary, they are a polite way of describing a reality that causes uneasiness among some Jewish Democrats.

  “You and I can tell who’s Jewish and who isn’t,” The Professional told me. “Most Americans can’t.”

  Actually, most Americans probably can. It doesn’t take much ethnic acuity to notice that Jews comprised 20 percent of the Democratic senatorial delegation in the 109th Congress or that both Democratic Supreme Court justices, Ruth Bader-Ginsberg and Stephen Breyer, are Jews, or that a very high percentage of the Democratic policy intelligentsia—at magazines like the New Republic, The Nation, and American Prospect, and think tanks such as the Saban Institute (named for Haim Saban, an Israeli-American and one of the party’s chief West Coast moneymen)—are Jewish.