AMERICAN JEWS AND ISRAEL

"Are you more hopeful about a Middle East settlement now than you were a month ago?" The question was asked at a kind of political rap session held last week in the Jewish Community Center of Greater Washington in Rockville, Md. The leader was Hyman Bookbinder of the American Jewish Committee's capital office. The participants were 65 mostly middleaged, upper-middle-class Jews who gather with him each month. Lately the discussion has been chiefly about Israel and its prospects for peace and survival. Bookbinder watched carefully as slowly, hesitantly, one hand after another was raised until a clear majority signified yes.

The cautious vote of confidence was based on Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's latest diplomatic foray into the Middle East. The participants were well informed. They knew that another Israeli withdrawal from the Sinai seemed in the making, in exchange for a declaration of nonbelligerency in some form from Egyptian President Anwar Sadat. Yet the group was uneasy. Asked a woman: "But what will Sadat's successor do? Will he honor an agreement?" Replied Bookbinder: "Perfidy is always possible, but we cannot live on the basis that an adversary may not live up to an agreement."

Later he said: "There is no erosion of support for Israel in the polls or in Congress. Yet there is talk of erosion of support for Israel. I think it's a feeling of impatience, of wanting progress."

Bookbinder probed deeper. If Congress cut off aid to South Viet Nam, he asked, might that endanger the solidity of U.S. commitments to any nation, including Israel? "That's crap," insisted a booming voice in a corner. "Israel is different from Viet Nam." On moral grounds? Yes, but the group also groped to define the harder, geopolitical reasons why the U.S. needs Israel as an ally in the Middle East. Finally one man said: "We have to convince others that the interests of Israel remain basic to the interests of the American people because Israel is a free democracy." Bookbinder agreed, observing as the group dispersed: "As Jews, we've learned never not to worry."

American Jews are indeed worried today, worried about Israel's future. They know that if Kissinger achieves the second state of disengagement, the move will involve concessions by both sides; but they fear that the concessions made by Jerusalem will be more important than those made by Cairo. They well know that all this follows a Kissinger campaign in which he seriously warned the Israelis (and the U.S. Jewish community) against being too rigid. Above all, it is plain that the next step down the road will be far more hazardous. The Geneva Conference is likely to be reconvened, and it will almost certainly raise the issues of the Golan Heights, the Palestinians, the West Bank, Jerusalem--on none of which the Israelis so far show any sign of flexibility. What worries Jews--and by no means Jews alone--is what might be asked of Israel by the U.S. in later rounds of bargaining.

Thus a number of questions hover in the air: Is American support for Israel weakening? What happens if U.S. interests and Israeli interests, which have always seemed to coincide in the past, should diverge? Has Jewish influence in the U.S. become an obstacle to U.S. foreign policy?

Without benefit or need of formal treaty, the U.S. and Israel have enjoyed a unique historical relationship. Without U.S. support, it is unlikely that Israel would have been created out of British-controlled Palestine in 1948. Without U.S. aid and contributions from U.S. Jews, it would not have survived. Though there have been differences about tactics and policies, the U.S. Government and people have never wavered in firm support of Israel's right to exist and its ability to defend itself against the hostile Arab countries that surround it. It has been one of the few uncritically accepted constants of U.S. foreign policy in the postwar era--and it has sometimes puzzled foreign leaders. Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin put it directly to Lyndon Johnson when he met the President at Glassboro, N.J., in 1967. Asked Kosygin: "I don't understand you Americans backing Israel. There are 80 million Arabs* and only 3 million Israelis. It does not make sense. Why do it?" Replied Johnson: "Because it is right."

Most Americans still feel that way, and U.S. policy remains consistent, if not automatic, in its basic support of Israel. But there has been a marked change in the public atmosphere and diplomatic stance. One cause for this is the Arab discovery of the use of oil as a weapon, which began with the Arab embargo during the 1973 Middle East war and culminated in the fourfold increase in the world oil price. The effect has been to make Israel's enemies vastly richer and more powerful, while severely taxing the economies--and therefore the loyalties--of its friends.

The U.S. was also impressed by other facts. The Egyptians and Syrians fought well, at least in the early phases of the 1973 war, destroying the myth of inevitable Israeli victory. Arab nations were finally able to form a common front, destroying the myth of inevitable Arab disunity. The diminution of the cold war made Israel's role as a bastion of U.S. influence in the Middle East seem less vital to U.S. interests.

Belatedly, the Arabs discovered public relations and began to cultivate U.S. opinion. For all of these reasons, Americans paid more attention to the area's problems than ever before and began to examine the Arab cause more sympathetically.

Partly because of their continued insistence on security through territory, the Israelis suddenly seem intransigent to many people. The perception comes at a time when, globally, Israel is increasingly isolated. The nations of Western Europe appear willing to bargain away Israel's security in return for access to Arabian oil. Arab petropower seems aimed at blacklisting Jews from many transactions in international finance, causing President Gerald Ford last week sharply to condemn such practices (see ECONOMY & BUSINESS). Last fall UNESCO voted to exclude Israel from some of its activities, and the United Nations General Assembly applauded the Palestine Liberation Organization's Yasser Arafat, who frankly spoke at the U.N. of generations of war against Israel, as a legitimate spokesman for Palestinians.

In this atmosphere, minor and major events are seen as portents. Kissinger jokingly tries on an Arab headdress in Jordan; to some Jews this symbolizes his wooing of the Arabs (and because he himself is Jewish, he is believed by some other Jews to be bending over backward to demonstrate his impartiality). General George Brown, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, declares that there is strong Jewish-Israeli influence on Congress (true) and that Jews dominate most U.S. banks and newspapers (false). The simplistic statement is seen as a harbinger of antiSemitism. There is also alarm when such longtime friends of Israel as Senators Charles Percy and Henry Jackson dare to urge Israel to be flexible.

Says Newton Minow, former head of the FCC: "I sense a reappraisal is now being made by Americans generally, and I sense a confusion on the part of American Jews about what it all means." Says Brandeis University President Marver Bernstein: "From a Jewish point of view, the danger is that the sentiment in favor of Israel is now counteracted by declining guilt over the Holocaust and an increased sympathy for the Palestinians. And we are under great pressures of both military and economic policy that we were not under before." Says Myron Kolatch, executive editor of the New Leader: "How do most Americans feel about the Catholic-Protestant civil war in Ireland? My guess would be 'A plague on both your houses.' And that's probably how most Americans are getting to feel about Israel and its Arab neighbors."

President Ford's in-house professor, Robert Goldwin, serves as liaison man with the Jewish community. "The more extreme view expressed," he says, "is that the world is turning against Jews and is willing to sacrifice them up. The more common view is that there is some loss of support for Israel that for a very long time Jews have relied upon." In December, Ford received a delegation of Jewish leaders and tried to reassure them of the U.S. commitment. The message has not yet filtered down. Says Goldwin: "There is a deep concern that support for Israel isn't sufficiently fervent."

This change of mood has produced some alarmist rhetoric. In his book American Jews: Community in Crisis, Gerald S. Strober, a former staff member of the American Jewish Committee, predicts that current trends will make "life rather unpleasant for the individual Jew" in America, and that U.S. Jews are now entering "the most perilous period" in their history. Author and Playwright Elie Wiesel, survivor of Nazi concentration camps, claimed, in the New York Times, that for the first time he could "foresee the possibility of Jews being massacred in the cities of America or in the forests of Europe" because of "a certain climate, a certain mood in the making." According to Author Cynthia Ozick, writing in Esquire, Israel's survival is in grave doubt, and with it Zionism and thus all Jews. "The Jews are one people... you cannot separate parent from child, the Jews from Zion."

Most American Jews pitch their worries in lower tones. Political Scientist Hans Morgenthau, an early critic of U.S. Viet Nam policy, sees the possibility of a new Arab oil embargo and the U.S.'s forcing Israel to accept peace terms that fall short of guaranteeing its survival.

"Are we going to allow Western Europe and Japan to go down the drain to support Israel?" Morgenthau wonders. Other observers find a distinct decline in what one study calls "the new and hard-won status of American Jewry--which by the early '60s had virtually reached a point of ludicrous enchantment with all things Jewish." If an Arab oil squeeze further deepens the U.S. economic recession, Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, president of the American Jewish Congress, fears that the interests of both Israel and American Jews will suffer. He warns: "When people are out of work and hungry, they get angry; they start looking for scapegoats."

It is hard to say just how widespread such fears are. A great many American Jews, perhaps a majority, hardly worry about their own condition in the U.S. They know that Jews have never done better in America (see box page 24).

Rabbi James Rudin of New York City echoes other slogans of ethnic pride: "Jewish is beautiful. Jews in America are now well integrated into society, but a sense of self is considerably stronger." There is, however, some concern about a heightened sense of "double identity." Speaking not only of Jewish Americans but of Italian Americans and other ethnic groups, Chicago Psychiatrist Robert Gronner declares that "it is always difficult to have a double identity."

Does double identity, to the extent that it exists, mean double loyalty? American Jews find the very phrase offensive and wrong, because it implies some future crisis when they might be forced to choose between their native allegiance to the Stars and Stripes and their complex devotion to the blue and white Star of David, Israel's flag. Most American Jews do not believe that such an agonizing choice will ever be necessary; if it were, they have no doubt that they would act as Americans.

Moreover, American Jews are far from monolithic, even in their support of Israel. Anti-Zionist Jews are only a tiny minority today, as are the pro-Arab Jewish radicals who emerged in the '60s. Still, individual Jews have questioned Israeli policies. Some have criticized the Israelis' wisdom in occupying Arab lands for so long after the 1967 war and in not trying harder to make a land-for-peace deal. Others deplore Israel's treatment of Arabs in occupied territories.

But there is no doubt that the Jewish position is different from that of other ethnic minorities. The latter retain strong bonds with their mother countries for which they rally support (says California Congressman Thomas Rees: "Look what the Greeks did here during the Cyprus situation"). But no other foreign power is so crucially situated in the world today, or has comparably strong emotional claims on an American minority, as is the case with Israel and American Jews.

Part of the reason lies in the historic uniqueness of Judaism, which is not merely a nationality, or a race, or a culture, or a religion, but an inextricable mixture of all these. No other ethnic group has a religion that is so centered, in its very rituals and prayers, on a particular land. Many American Jews have long worried about the "crisis of freedom"; being freer in the U.S. than in any other country in history, with government, the professions and all walks of life open to them, the concern was that Jews would forget their traditions and simply merge with the population. Where the ghetto served to preserve Judaism, it was feared the American suburb might subtly undermine it. Since World War II, the spectacle of Israel--brave, threatened, struggling for survival against heavy odds--did much to avert this danger and became a strong source of American Jewish consciousness and identity. The 1967 war, with its stunning display of Israeli military prowess, made Jews elsewhere both proud and aware of Israel's vulnerability. Finally, the 1973 war and the Arabs' initial successes tapped emotional springs of agony and empathy for Israel's fate that many American Jews were surprised to find they possessed.

For all that, American Jews are so American that their participation in Israel's fate has been mainly vicarious. Contributions, yes, on an astonishing scale of more than $4 billion over the years, principally raised and funneled through the United Jewish Appeal (see box below). But from 1948 to 1968, only 8,800 of America's Jewish population (now 6 million) emigrated to Israel, and a majority of those changed their minds and returned to the U.S.

Since then, in the peak year of 1971 some 7,800 American Jews emigrated, but the rate dropped sharply after the 1973 war to only 3,400 last year. That war also cut into American tourism to Israel--down from 281,000 in 1972 to scarcely over 200,000 last year. Only the rate of those Americans, mostly young, going to work for a time on kibbutzim has increased since the war; the number was about 5,000 last year, but applications appear off.

One important service American Jews perform for Israel, apart from collecting money, is to try to influence American opinion and policy in ways favorable to Israel. So effective do they seem at this that sooner or later every U.S. visitor to Arab lands will be asked to admit that the pro-Israel bias of U.S. policy is surely the work of the mysteriously omnipotent and sinister American Jewish lobby.

The accusation is simplistic, if understandable from an Arab perspective. It ignores the general American support for Israel that is really the subsoil that enables the Jewish lobby to flourish. Non-Jewish Americans harbor profound sentiments toward Israel that have nothing to do with Jewish lobbying: a sense of something owed the Jewish people after the Nazi Holocaust; shared religious roots and democratic ideals; admiration for the pioneer spirit of the Israeli nation builders, so seemingly akin to America's own beginnings; empathy for the underdog diminished after the Israelis' victory in 1967. Besides there were the geopolitical, cold war realities of the 1950s, when Arab governments turned to the Soviet Union for aid in their efforts to destroy Israel.

Arabs, of course, say that this would not have happened had it not been for America's pro-Israel policy in the first place. Still, there is much truth to the argument that even if the U.S. had no Jewish population, U.S. policy would have been very similar to what it was. But the U.S. does have a Jewish population, one that is articulate and aware, and a much smaller Arab population with few influential spokesmen for the Arab cause. That surely did make a difference in the images of both sides in the conflict that were presented to the American people, and in the quantity of news about the Israelis, as opposed to the Arabs.

Doubtless, the impact of Jewish political activism has been vast. Shortly after the pistol-packing Arafat addressed the U.N., an unusual public letter to President Ford appeared as an advertisement in the Washington Post. The letter urged firm support of Israel and rejection of the P.L.O., and it was signed by no fewer than 71 Senators. When Senator Jackson offered his controversial amendment to link preferred trading status for Communist countries with freer emigration, notably for Soviet Jews--an intervention in Soviet domestic affairs neither advocated nor understood by much of the U.S. public and opposed by the White House--78 Senators and 289 members of the House joined in co-sponsoring it.

Other instances of congressional support of Israel were also impressive: 71 Senators wrote to Secretary of State William Rogers on May 26, 1970, to urge shipment of jets to Israel. The Senate in 1971 supported, without even public hearings, an extra $500 million to finance weapons sales to Israel (the vote: 82-14, even though the bill as finally approved deleted this provision). In 1973, 70 Senators and 264 Representatives co-sponsored resolutions calling for the U.S. to send additional jets to Israel during the Yom Kippur War.

Overall, Congress approved $3.7 billion in credits or loans so that Israel could buy U.S. arms between 1950 and 1974, making Israel the third largest purchaser of U.S. arms in the world (behind Iran and Germany). In straight economic aid, Congress provided Israel with $1.2 billion from 1953 through 1973. Until the 1973 war it merely asked to buy the weaponry rather than expecting it as a gift. Since that war, the U.S. has been providing military aid without repayment.

Was that remarkable legislative record the work of the Jewish lobby? What is it and how does it work? Some Senators, whose lonely votes were cast in vain against the lobby's wishes, including former Senator J. William Fulbright and South Dakota Senator James Abourezk (a Lebanese American and a Christian who is the only Arab in the Senate), see it as an overpoweringly efficient steamroller. Those who have championed its causes tend to view it as an amorphous, largely spontaneous expression of diverse Jewish groups and individuals who respond quickly and spiritedly to issues about which they feel deeply.

Both perceptions are partly correct. The lobby in practice is a blend of a well-staffed professional nucleus in Washington and the normally undirected but highly effective outpouring of articulate and intense sentiment from Jews throughout the nation. Jewish contributions to political campaigns also build influential allegiances with legislators and other officeholders. The money can be pivotal in launching a new political career but is rarely critical to re-election except in states where Jews are heavily concentrated, especially New York and California.

The organized Washington operation is carried out by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the only group formally registered to lobby on behalf of legislation affecting Israel. Some 12,000 members throughout the nation last year contributed $400,000 to its budget--a sum substantially larger than the budgets of most major lobbying groups. That money supports AIPAC's savvy eleven-member staff (average salary: about $15,000). A separate budget of $200,000 pays for an informative newsletter, Near East Report, which is distributed to some 30,000 subscribers, including Congressmen and other policymakers. The staff was directed since its founding in 1954 by I.L. ("Si") Kenen, 70, a Canadian-born lawyer and former Cleveland journalist who often downplayed his influence. "I rarely go to the Hill," he said recently. "There is so much support for Israel that I don't have to."

With his contacts, of course, Kenen did not have to depend on a lot of legwork in Congress; friendly phone calls would often do the job. But his staff does scurry all over Capitol Hill when a key vote is pending. Kenen stepped aside early this year to reduce his workload. The new executive director is Morris J. Amitay, 38, a former foreign service officer and assistant to Senator Abraham Ribicoff. While with Ribicoff, the energetic Amitay was influential in pushing Jackson's proposed help for Soviet Jews. One key to AIPAC's effectiveness is that the leaders of a number of major national Jewish organizations sit on its executive committee.

These other leaders, in turn, can alert their large memberships whenever extra pressure is needed in Congress on an impending issue, and the blitz of mail and telegrams can be impressive. Just as often, however, local Jewish leaders and activists are keenly aware of any approaching crisis and closely monitor their home-district Representatives on their own. Especially when no one else seems to care or even know much about the specifics of legislation dealing with Israel, the resulting courting of Representatives, often in face-to-face meetings, can swell the pro-Israel vote.

All of this activity is, of course, not only legitimate but even an admirable use of the machinery of democracy. The effect is further amplified by influential Jews in the arts, universities, press and broadcasting--who are, however, far from united except on the basic issue of Israel's survival. Thus Jewish voices undoubtedly come through more loudly than the Jewish share of the U.S. population (3%) would suggest. New York's Conservative Senator James Buckley, who has little Jewish support, wistfully concedes: "The Jews are extremely effective in doing what the Constitution encourages; that is, peaceful assembly and the right to petition. I only wish others were as good at it as the Jews are."

That senatorial letter to Ford about the P.L.O. is a good example of how the process works. The $1,481 ad was paid for by AIPAC after the idea was pushed by Amitay, then working for Ribicoff. The signatures were gathered in just ten days--through industrious buttonholing by Amitay and aides to Senators Jackson, Jacob Javits and Clifford Case, and an AIPAC telegram appeal. In contrast, support of the Jackson Amendment on Soviet Jewry developed in a far more complicated fashion.

When Jackson first proposed his amendment, there were serious reservations about it among Jewish leaders. An extreme view expressed by an influential Jewish Democrat was that "many Jews were worried about an anti-Semitic backlash as a result of the Jackson Amendment." If this would work against Israel or, more personally, Jewish families in the U.S., then, he said, "to hell with the Jews in Russia." When Jackson persuasively argued his case and calmed fears of a backlash, the Jewish lobby swung behind him.

But, as on much pro-Jewish legislation, the lobby was aided immeasurably by non-Jewish support. The amendment came at a time of discontent on both the political left and right with some byproducts of Nixon and Kissinger's detente policy, including the initial SALT agreement and the wheat deal with the Soviet Union. Thus many conservatives, as well as the Americans for Democratic Action, joined Jackson, and the support snowballed. Later, as some Senators saw serious implications in the move, they had second thoughts but felt that trying to get off the hook would be politically awkward.

As for the continuing supply of arms and economic aid to Israel, this has not been a matter of much debate in the U.S. since the 1967 war. The contribution of the lobby has been to capitalize on that popular sympathy and to watchdog each aid request, supplying broad position papers on the needs as well as answering questions on details from any wavering legislators. That is the routine usefulness of any efficient lobby, and it helps rack up impressive votes for its cause. Contends Harvard Law Professor Abram Chayes: "There is absolutely no difference in the process of raising the minimum wage from that of providing defense for Israel."

Observes Congressman Rees, a gentile who represents a heavily Jewish Southern California district: "When an American Jew is concerned about Israel, he is going to get in touch with me, not because some lobbyist tells him to, but because he wants to. I know that and I expect it." Another California Congressman felt this kind of pressure--and in a pleasant way--after telling two Jewish businessmen that he simply did not know enough about the details of Middle East issues. They promptly set up a free red-carpet trip to Israel for the Congressman. They gently rejected his last-minute request, however, to "fly a Phantom over Egypt." Recalled one of the men with a laugh, "Can you imagine a U.S. Congressman shot down over Egypt in an Israeli Phantom?"

That same activism hit a California senatorial candidate in a less welcome manner. U.S. Representative George E. Brown Jr., challenging John V. Tunney for the Senate in the 1970 Democratic primary, made a fuzzy statement about the need to place a lasting peace above the interests of Israel. Jews were irate, and a meeting at the home of Max Palevsky, Brown's campaign manager, erupted in angry shouting. Says Palevsky with some hyperbole, "I was really afraid for my life and George's."

Any misstatements about Israel as seen from the Jewish perspective can lead to a quick curtailment of a politician's financial support. Georgia State Senator Julian Bond discovered that to his sorrow after he commented favorably about Palestinian Arabs. When he appeared at a recent lunch in New York to seek money, not for himself but for the Southern Elections Fund, which helps blacks gain public office in the South, he was rebuffed. His Jewish guests, who had given to the fund before, said they would give no more.

Another encounter with the use of Jewish campaign contributions as a political weapon befell South Dakota's Abourezk. He was initially welcomed by wealthy Manhattan Jews at a series of teas and cocktail parties in 1972. They liked his liberal views on domestic issues, agreed to support substantially his campaign for the Senate. When he won, they thought they were getting their money's worth as he compiled one of the Senate's most liberal voting records. But when the 1973 war broke out, Abourezk offered a reasoned defense of the Arab position, and was promptly denounced in letters written to newspapers by Jews throughout the country. He was told he would get no more money from Jews.

The 20 Jews in the House of Representatives are also a potent arm of the Jewish lobby. Their informal leader is Illinois Democrat Sid Yates, in whose office they assemble whenever a legislative emergency affecting Israel is at hand. Each of these Congressmen also operates independently.

During the Yom Kippur War, one of them, New York's Edward Koch, recalls, "I couldn't sleep. I thought I was witnessing the death of the Jewish state. Tears came to my eyes." After meeting in Yates' office, the Jewish Congressmen pushed a resolution urging that the U.S. resupply Israel. One black Congressman demurred, suggesting that he was unhappy with the wording of the preamble. Koch declared, "Look, I've signed a lot of your resolutions and I never ask you to cross the t's or dot the i's. This is the crunch." The man signed.

Perhaps the most illustrative confrontation with the Jewish lobby at the grass-roots level was that of Illinois Republican Charles Percy. Returning in January from a Middle East tour for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he told a group of reporters that Israel was too "intransigent" and ought to consider dealing with the P.L.O.'s Arafat, whom he described as "relatively moderate," compared with other terrorist leaders who might succeed him.

Those adjectives triggered angry reaction when the news reached Chicago, where 250,000 Jews live. Jews charged in an avalanche of mail that he was selling out Israel. Letters in Chicago newspapers protested that Percy was asking Israel to "commit national suicide" and complained that the man responsible "for the murders at Munich and Ma'alot" cannot be termed "a moderate." Asked another letter: "Can Percy and others be bought by petrodollars?" Jewish leaders demanded that Percy return to Chicago and explain himself.

Gamely--and prudently--Percy did so. He talked to 125 irate Jews at a hastily called meeting. "You are pouring oil on the fire of the Middle East problem," charged a retired U.S. Army general, Julius Klein. Percy insisted that Israel should make adjustments now in order to avert another, bloodier war. Percy also answered questions from Irv Kupcinet on Chicago television. He noted that he had long criticized Arab leaders as more intransigent than Israel's but now saw some give in the Arab position. He said no fewer than twelve Arab leaders had told him that Israel's borders would be respected. "I'd hate to see us blow the present opportunity to move forward," he argued. "Both sides now must prevail in moderation." Chicago's main Jewish newspaper The Sentinel criticized local Jewish leaders for their "verbal lynching" of Percy in "absolute white-hot anger" and warned that eventually Percy's suggestions "would become a fact."

The assault on Percy suggested that Jewish reaction depends a lot upon how and where a sensitive Israeli topic is approached. Percy's senatorial colleague, Democrat Adlai Stevenson III, expressed similar warnings against Israeli foot-dragging on negotiations, but at a Bonds for Israel banquet and without the inflammatory words. Even AlPAC's Si Kenen, writing in the Jerusalem Post, warned that "there may be erosion of support if Americans grow weary and come to believe that Israel is the obstacle to progress toward peace." He urged Israel to "pursue an imaginative and flexible policy." In gentler words, that was Percy's advice against intransigence. "All options are freely discussed in Israel," Percy observed wryly. "But apparently you can't do it here." Senator Buckley agrees: "Among many Jews, if you aren't 100% behind their position, you are anathema."

Although most of its attention focuses on Congress, the Jewish lobby does not ignore the White House, Pentagon or State Department--although one Kissinger aide claims that Jewish lobbyists have just about given up on the Secretary and work through Congress instead. Friction arose, for example, over Nixon's opposition to helping Soviet Jews through the Jackson Amendment, but Jewish leaders had no difficulty discussing it with him. One of Nixon's Jewish backers, Industrialist Max Fisher of Detroit, arranged such a talk. Fisher also set up a meeting with Nixon in which Jewish leaders urged intervention with the Soviet Union to lift the death sentences given two Leningrad Jews who had tried to hijack a plane and flee the Soviet Union. Nixon and Kissinger did petition Moscow, and the death penalty was avoided.

The most direct pressure on the Executive Branch is exerted by the highly active Israeli embassy in Washington and by visiting officials from Israel. Ambassador Simcha Dinitz is regularly seen in the West Wing White House office of Lieut. General Brent Scowcroft, Deputy Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs. Dinitz, subtle and clearheaded, is fully aware of the current concerns of American Jews. "There is more talk of a second Munich in the United States than in Israel," he observes. "As Foreign Minister Yigal Allon has said, Ford is not a Chamberlain, Sadat is not a Hitler, and Israel is not a Czechoslovakia. But great apprehension exists."

At the Pentagon, Defense Secretary James Schlesinger was sensitive enough to Israel's possible reaction following J.C.S. Chairman Brown's comments to call Dinitz before the remarks became widely public. According to several Washington sources, Schlesinger apologized to Dinitz and asked if he was concerned. Said Dinitz: "General Brown's remarks should worry you" Replied Schlesinger: "They do. I ask myself: What ever is our purpose? To destroy Israel or to break the oil chain the Arabs have put around us? If the purpose of U.S. policy is to break that chain, then the U.S. must build a strong Israel. It is not General Brown's stereotyped approach that bothers me but his stupidity."

Some Jews wanted to demand that Brown be fired--an effort that, had it succeeded, would have seemed to give substance to his remarks. But calmer heads prevailed and agreed with Dinitz who argued, "We should not be for burning the witch of Salem in the name of General Brown."

The present ambassador carefully avoids the direct U.S. politicking engaged in by his predecessor Yitzhak Rabin. Under Rabin, the embassy openly supported the 1972 candidacy of Richard Nixon, thus offending much of the U.S. Jewish population. Rabin supported Nixon's Viet Nam policy precisely at a time when some antiwar Jews were trying to articulate a clear distinction between Viet Nam and Israel. He even appeared at fund raising rallies for Percy's campaign. By contrast, Dinitz cautions that such intervention is risky for Israel "because you never know where the chips will fall."

All of these diverse Jewish activities do add up to a potent pressure group in American politics. Yet if there is one fact that all of the Jewish leaders and scholars, as well as nearly all of the elected officials who feel the heat of the Jewish lobby, agree on, it is that the lobby would be relatively ineffectual if the other 97% of the U.S. population did not share a widespread sympathy for Israel. Certainly the lobby packs no political weapons that could overcome strong popular resistance to its aims. Other lobbies that have successfully bucked popular sentiment on particular issues are generally seen on Capitol Hill as more potent. They include the oil lobby, which protected the oil depletion allowance until it now seems doomed in the face of soaring oil company profits; the American Medical Association, which until recent years fought national health insurance; and the gun lobby, which still manages to defeat stringent gun controls.

American Presidents and their campaign opponents have long been aware, of course, that the concentration of Jews in New York and California, the two states with the largest Electoral College votes, can magnify the Jewish political impact in an election that looks close. Harry Truman undoubtedly had that in mind when, as early as 1945, he urged Britain to admit 100,000 Jewish refugees to Palestine. He was moved as well by humanitarian concerns over the Holocaust, and by pressure from American Jews that he later described as the most severe he had ever encountered.

There was nothing inevitable about the need to create a Jewish state. In religious terms, "Zion" traditionally was not an earthly realm but the Kingdom of God and "the return" would be through divine intervention, not the setting up of a secular state. Some Jews felt that their people's destiny was not to become a small state among other states in the Middle East but to seek opportunities--and make contributions--in other cultures the world over. Hitler did much to resolve that debate and to seal through horror the belief that Jews must have a country where they will never, under any circumstances, be outsiders. Thus, Israel was born in an extraordinary confluence of prophecy and politics.

As the 1948 election approached, Zionism was favored by 80% of U.S. Jews, according to a survey. Against the advice of his own State Department, but spurred by some 500,000 written pleas, Truman supported the U.N. plan for partition of Palestine in 1947. He announced recognition of Israel eleven minutes after its formation and promptly received Israel's first President, Chaim Weizmann, in Washington. (But he lost New York to that state's Thomas Dewey by 60,000 votes.)

The first and only serious split between the U.S. Government and American Jews came in the Eisenhower Administration, when Secretary of State John Foster Dulles sought to pull the Arab nations into an alliance with the West. This, as Dulles saw it, would also protect Israel. The U.S. increased financial aid to the Arab governments and 3 rejected one large Israeli loan request. As the DEG Soviet Union began arming Egypt, the U.S. refused to supply matching weaponry to Israel, which turned instead to France. After Egypt's Nasser nationalized the Suez Canal in 1956, Israel attacked with the support of British and French troops. The U.S. pressed for an armistice, then forced a pullback of all foreign troops from Egypt.

That U.S. action still bothers many American Jews, who feel that it merely set the stage for the ensuing series of wars that has yet to achieve a settlement in the Middle East. But U.S.-Israeli relations quickly improved, and so did the satisfaction of American Jews with policy. Now the overwhelming American Jewish concern is Israel's survival. Nathan Wolf, an Orthodox New Jersey college student, feels certain that the U.S. will never abandon "its own democratic ideals for some oil." If it did, he might leave the U.S., since "the country will have already left me." Moreover, insists Commentary Editor Norman Podhoretz, "feeding Israel to the Arabs would not bring down the price of oil," which he sees as an issue apart from the Arab-Israeli dispute. N.Y.U. Professor-Editor Irving Kristol sees little danger that the U.S. will push Israel into a settlement that risks its survival. But if the U.S. did, he feels, "the moral commitment of the U.S. to Israel would grow, not diminish." Harvard Sociologist Nathan Glazer once worried about the residual effect of Viet Nam. "If the country as a whole adopts the intellectuals' feeling that intervention is evil," he said, "maybe Israel will be sacrificed." But today he sees no sign that such an attitude is spreading. John Roche, a former adviser to President Johnson and a gentile, agrees; he doubts that "the isolationist ambience has permeated so deeply that the American people would stand by and watch an ally in the free society be exterminated."

Harvard Government Professor Michael Walzer believes that Kissinger is working toward a withdrawal of Israel from the lands it occupied in 1967. He thinks the Israeli government will accept that if it gets "a credible guarantee" from Kissinger, backed by the Arabs, that its borders will be protected and adjacent areas demilitarized. This means not only that the U.S. must gain concessions for Israel from the Arabs, as Walzer sees it, but in the end, that America must be prepared to establish a military presence to ensure withdrawal in the area and, as a last resort, be prepared to take military action if the peace is broken. Do the American people fully realize, Walzer wonders, the immense responsibility and political implications of providing such a guarantee?

There is considerable evidence that both Washington and the American people do indeed realize those risks and implications, as well as the opportunities. An eventual guarantee will have to be multilateral, with the idea that not only the U.S. but others as well will be pledged to Israel's security. Such a guarantee may still be a long way off: as Kissinger and others have pointed out, it cannot be a substitute for a settlement, only a supplement to one. Israeli Premier Rabin last week still sounded hostile to any heavy reliance on U.S. military guarantees. But the very fact that it is being seriously considered is a sign of progress. For the first time, the U.S. is not allowing Israel and its enemies to define the Middle East situation in terms of force. It is trying to shift from a military to a political process, goading and pushing both sides in that direction. Some facts are overriding: more wars would be bad for all countries in the area, and worst of all for Israel; Israel cannot achieve peace through military means; the Arabs must accept Israel's existence. All this has actually been clear for a long time, but it was not acted on because of rigidity and fear. If it is to be acted on now, what will be needed is compromise, concession, risk and even (rarest of all) an element of trust. These will be required not only from the countries of the Middle East but also from Americans, including American Jews.

*The Premier was a little off: at the time the population of the Arab countries was 110 million. Today it is 125 million.

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