Ronald and Allis Radosh: When the Left Loved Israel
[Ronald Radosh, adjunct fellow at the Hudson Institute, and Allis Radosh, are co-authors of a forthcoming book about Harry S. Truman and the creation of Israel.]
On the 60th anniversary of Israel’s founding, the argument that the Jewish state should cease to exist as a Jewish state may still be found in the pages of the flagship publication of the American left, The Nation. Last year, in a special issue devoted to Israel, the magazine’s editors noted that, although for many years the publication had supported a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a shift of “realities on the ground” mandated a shift in their thinking. If the age-old goal of a two-state solution fails—and the magazine’s editors suspect it might very well—then “the calls for inclusion on fully equal terms in one state will grow.” Americans thus have to “rethink our assumptions.”
The magazine had been engaged in just such a rethinking for years. Writing in The Nation in 2002, law scholar Richard Falk argued that the “state terrorism” engaged in by Israel is “greater” than the Palestinians’ use of terror. In any case, Falk interpreted suicide bombings as “reactive and understandable” responses to the U.S.-backed occupation of Palestine. Writing in July 2007, Falk went even further, identifying Israel’s “treatment of Palestinians with …[the] criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity.” The problem, as Neve Gordon of Ben-Gurion University added in the same issue, was that “Most Jews consider themselves victims in this conflict, not aggressors.” Since Gordon and The Nation believed otherwise, Gordon on The Nation’s behalf called for major protests against Israel from abroad, “not unlike the sanctions imposed on South Africa.” Most recently, Henry Siegman, a former executive director of The American Jewish Congress, concluded that a once noble Jewish “national liberation struggle” has been transformed into “a colonial enterprise.”
In arguing their case, The Nation’s writers rely on an absurdly selective and tendentious reading of history. Nowhere has the airbrushing been more thorough than in their treatment of the antecedents of the present crisis, among them the role that the left itself played in Israel’s creation. When Israel had not yet been born, the idea of a Jewish state had the support of substantial numbers of Americans, drawing special enthusiasm from members of the left intelligentsia. This was especially true of The Nation magazine. In fact, no journal of opinion or media outlet campaigned more vigorously and vocally for Israel’s creation. For The Nation’s publisher and editor-in-chief, Freda Kirchwey, the struggle for a Jewish Palestine was nothing less than the sequel and parallel of the Spanish Civil War, the other struggle to which she had dedicated the opinion journal.
Freda Kirchwey’s credentials on the left were impeccable. Her father had been dean of Columbia University Law School, a well-known pacifist, and president of the American Peace Society (a sponsor of this journal). After graduating from Barnard College in 1915, she began a career in journalism, working for various New York newspapers. In 1918, she joined the staff of The Nation, eventually becoming its editor in 1933 and its publisher from 1937 to 1943. That same year she launched The Nation Associates, a mechanism to fund the poorly financed magazine and influence policy on the issues of the day....
Read entire article at worldaffairsjournal.org (Summer)
On the 60th anniversary of Israel’s founding, the argument that the Jewish state should cease to exist as a Jewish state may still be found in the pages of the flagship publication of the American left, The Nation. Last year, in a special issue devoted to Israel, the magazine’s editors noted that, although for many years the publication had supported a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a shift of “realities on the ground” mandated a shift in their thinking. If the age-old goal of a two-state solution fails—and the magazine’s editors suspect it might very well—then “the calls for inclusion on fully equal terms in one state will grow.” Americans thus have to “rethink our assumptions.”
The magazine had been engaged in just such a rethinking for years. Writing in The Nation in 2002, law scholar Richard Falk argued that the “state terrorism” engaged in by Israel is “greater” than the Palestinians’ use of terror. In any case, Falk interpreted suicide bombings as “reactive and understandable” responses to the U.S.-backed occupation of Palestine. Writing in July 2007, Falk went even further, identifying Israel’s “treatment of Palestinians with …[the] criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity.” The problem, as Neve Gordon of Ben-Gurion University added in the same issue, was that “Most Jews consider themselves victims in this conflict, not aggressors.” Since Gordon and The Nation believed otherwise, Gordon on The Nation’s behalf called for major protests against Israel from abroad, “not unlike the sanctions imposed on South Africa.” Most recently, Henry Siegman, a former executive director of The American Jewish Congress, concluded that a once noble Jewish “national liberation struggle” has been transformed into “a colonial enterprise.”
In arguing their case, The Nation’s writers rely on an absurdly selective and tendentious reading of history. Nowhere has the airbrushing been more thorough than in their treatment of the antecedents of the present crisis, among them the role that the left itself played in Israel’s creation. When Israel had not yet been born, the idea of a Jewish state had the support of substantial numbers of Americans, drawing special enthusiasm from members of the left intelligentsia. This was especially true of The Nation magazine. In fact, no journal of opinion or media outlet campaigned more vigorously and vocally for Israel’s creation. For The Nation’s publisher and editor-in-chief, Freda Kirchwey, the struggle for a Jewish Palestine was nothing less than the sequel and parallel of the Spanish Civil War, the other struggle to which she had dedicated the opinion journal.
Freda Kirchwey’s credentials on the left were impeccable. Her father had been dean of Columbia University Law School, a well-known pacifist, and president of the American Peace Society (a sponsor of this journal). After graduating from Barnard College in 1915, she began a career in journalism, working for various New York newspapers. In 1918, she joined the staff of The Nation, eventually becoming its editor in 1933 and its publisher from 1937 to 1943. That same year she launched The Nation Associates, a mechanism to fund the poorly financed magazine and influence policy on the issues of the day....