Cheating on a Friend

I HAVE A FRIEND who keeps asking me to prove to him that Zionism isn't racism. He's not a liberal egalitarian who thinks every place should be open to everyone without restrictions, nor does he believe some oppressive power dynamic always exists between different ethnic groups.

In fact, he's a scholarly conservative who generally looks with suspicion on the hurling of "isms" as a substitute for debate. Yet on this issue, and many similar ones, he assumes that the burden of proof rests on Israel and the Jews to demonstrate their moral legitimacy.

He's far from alone. In most of the public debates surrounding America's relationship with Israel, the question is framed in a way that focuses on what Israel, or American Jews who support Israel, must do to retain America's respect. The only other place we have seen such an obsession with the importance of ethics in politics is in discussions of Bill Clinton's sex life. No other country and no other ethnic group in America is guilty until proven innocent.

TAKE, FOR INSTANCE, the current problem of the loan guarantees. As matters stand now, someone who denounces the link between loans and settlements and who thinks Bush should not meddle in the Israeli election process by humiliating the incumbent will probably be accused of trying to take ethics out of politics. Before we give a cent to Israel, we have to be assured of its moral probity and commitment to human rights.

It's hard to deny that concern for human rights should play an important role in our foreign policy. But the phrasing of the debate was biased against Israel from the start.

The argument has revolved around whether or not our moral obligation to safeguard the rights of the Palestinians is greater than our diplomatic obligation to refrain from using our money to manipulate Israel's internal politics. George Bush has decided the former is more important. This is a dangerously wrong approach.

The issue should not be human rights versus the Israeli government's autonomy--a dichotomy that turns support for Israel into an endorsement of political amoralism. Rather, it should be how to weigh the rights of Palestinians against the equally pressing human rights of the Jews who occupy the new settlements, many of whom are fleeing religious persecution greater than the abuses that the Palestinians suffer.

Moreover, the same politicians and news analysts who turned Israel's stature into a front-page story are silent about the money that America gave to dictators like Saddam Hussein and Hafez El-Asaad of Syria, not to mention the military regimes in Latin America that are backed by the U.S.

Had Hussein not become a threat to our own economic aims, we would never have heard of his brutality, and the U.S. government would have gone on giving him money. Yet as soon as Israel wants a loan to shelter refugees that no other country will take in, the president begins his moral posturing and the rest of America follows suit.

American Jews' sentiments toward Israel are subjected to the same unusual scrutiny. I call it unusual not because I believe citizens' loyalty and countries' moral character are trivial matters, but because no other group is the object of such concern.

Jewish support for Israel is taken as a sign of dual loyalty, or of disloyalty to America. Does that mean that Arab-Americans who feel a personal stake in the Palestinians' fate would also be considered "un-American" if they opposed U.S. policies favorable to Israel? Or that African-Americans who call Africa their heritage are not "true Americans"?

Every other group is encouraged to celebrate its ethnicity, almost to the point that insisting on a common American culture is considered racist. But in September, Bush appealed to "the American people" to stand by him against the Jewish lobbyists for loan guarantees, whom he portrayed as a hostile foreign power hemming him in.

Apparently Jews who support Israel are no longer part of the American people. The point is that he would never have dared try this with any other group.

IF THIS DEBATE is not re-framed in a less biased manner, the question of loans and settlements cannot be resolved without creating more diplomatic problems than it solves.

If Israel halts settlements due to U.S. pressure, its government will lose face for having bowed to coercion. Yet if Bush decides to loan Israel money with no strings attached, he will do it in a way that makes him look like a martyr to Jewish lobbyists. We can hardly expect the Arab nations to respect Israel's right to exist when we implicitly refuse to recognize it ourselves.