John B. Judis, Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), 448 pp., $30.00.

THE SECURITY outside my neighborhood temple in Hyde Park, Chicago, like that around many Jewish institutions throughout the world these days, is conspicuous, though not as rigorous as at comparable buildings in Germany, France or Sweden. But in this case there is a special reason: Temple KAM Isaiah Israel stands just across the road from the residence of the Obama family. The house is rarely occupied now, but when the Obamas lived there full-time they used to “pal around” (to use Sarah Palin’s felicitous expression) with the congregation’s notoriously radical rabbi, the late Arnold Wolf.

In Genesis, John B. Judis credits Wolf with providing the future president with “his view of Israel.” The rabbi, he says, described himself as a “religious radical” and a “liberal activist.” As Judis writes, he “supported Israel’s existence, but he wanted the Israelis to pursue policies that fully recognized the rights of the Palestinians.” Wolf’s view of Israel represented “a return to the universalism of nineteenth-century Reform Judaism.” In a confessional passage at the outset of his book, Judis, a senior editor at the New Republic and the author of several well-regarded books on domestic and foreign policy, declares his own attraction to Wolf’s teaching “that the role of Jews was not to favor Jews at the expense of other people but to bring the light of ethical prophecy to bear upon the welfare of all peoples.”

Reform Judaism, as Judis notes, was historically opposed to Zionism. Yet several of the early leaders of American Zionism, notably Stephen Wise and Abba Hillel Silver, were Reform Jewish clerics. Judis traces the awkward relationship between the universalist values of Reform Judaism and the nationalist cause that these men espoused. He sees a profound contradiction between their liberal political outlooks and their general failure to recognize the political rights of the Palestinian Arabs. He admits of only rare exceptions such as Judah L. Magnes, an American Reform rabbi who became the first head of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

In some ways this is an old-fashioned book that might have been written by a member of the American Council for Judaism, an association of Reform Jews, formed in 1942, that propagandized vigorously against Zionism in the early years of the Jewish state (it still exists, albeit in diminished form). The “main lesson” of the book, Judis writes, is that “the Zionists who came to Palestine to establish a state trampled on the rights of the Arabs who already lived there.”

Of course, one does not need Reform Judaism, historical or current, as one’s guide in order to arrive at this conclusion. Others have reached the same destination by different routes. Perhaps the most effective presentation of this point of view was written a generation ago from a Marxist standpoint by the great French Jewish orientalist Maxime Rodinson in his Israel: Fait Colonial? (published in English as Israel: A Colonial-Settler State?). Even those who disagreed with its basic contention (among them the pro-Israeli Jean-Paul Sartre, who commissioned the essay in May 1967 for a special issue of his journal Les Temps Modernes) had to recognize the power of Rodinson’s argument, which derived from a scrupulous welding of theoretical framework and historical data and from an aversion to unexamined moralizing. The same cannot be said for Judis’s enterprise.

THIS BOOK is divided into three parts. The first and weakest presents a history of the Zionist enterprise in Palestine up to 1939. “The moral contours of that early history,” he writes, “are remarkably clear. From the 1890s . . . until the early 1930s, the responsibility for the conflict lay primarily with the Zionists.” Judis here develops the proposition that British imperialism and the Zionists, using the vehicle of the mandate for Palestine granted by the League of Nations, “conspired to screw the Arabs out of a country that by the prevailing standards of self-determination would have been theirs.” (The crude wording is not indicative of what is the generally elegant prose style of this book.)

The League of Nations was itself the supreme contemporary arbiter, in international law and in general public legitimacy, of international standards of conduct. Judis is fully entitled to disagree, albeit retrospectively, with those standards. But he cannot simultaneously invoke and condemn them. Yet that is, in essence, what he does in this section of his book.

Judis’s historical knowledge is sometimes shaky: the Jews of Palestine, he maintains, “suffered religious persecution” under Ottoman Turkish rule. He cites no examples; indeed, it would be hard for him to do so since this persecution is a figment of his imagination. Until the mid-nineteenth century, it is true, Jews in the empire labored under a number of irksome restrictions. But they also enjoyed some privileges, including freedom from conscription for military service and protection by the millet system, which accorded them communal autonomy in several important spheres of life. In the mid-nineteenth century, Jews, like Christians, were accorded full legal equality with Muslims. Admittedly, this did not bring immediate social equality. But to describe their condition in late Ottoman Palestine as one of “religious persecution” is quite misleading.

A number of other errors pepper Judis’s text. Earl Curzon would have been surprised to learn that he was the House of Lords representative in the war cabinet. One might as well say that President Clinton was the saxophonists’ representative in the White House. Vladimir Jabotinsky’s political movement was not the National but the New Zionist Organization. There are other bloopers: Saudi Arabia makes a premature appearance in 1915; Jordan, formed in 1946, steps on to the stage in 1919; and Guyana, born in 1966, pops up in 1937. But these are all trivial mistakes.

Of more substantial importance is Judis’s claim that the British attempted “to stoke sectarian division” in Palestine. Such an allegation is often made against the British in relation to Jews and Arabs. It is erroneous. But we need not pursue that hare further here because what Judis has in mind are relations between Muslims and Christians, which he believes the British deliberately sought to impair in pursuit of a divide-and-rule policy. The sole proof that he offers for this contention is the fact that the British sponsored the creation in 1921 of a “Supreme Moslem Council.” But there is no credible evidence in the archives of the British or Palestine governments, neither of which Judis has consulted, nor anywhere else, that would substantiate such a characterization of the motives of the British in establishing this body. In reality, as all concerned recognized, some such body was urgently required at the start of the mandate for straightforward practical and legal reasons in order to administer Muslim religious endowments and institutions in the wake of the demise of the Ottoman state.

SUCH ERRORS undermine the reader’s confidence in Judis’s historical understanding and judgment, but they do not fundamentally shake his argument. The real problem is that Judis’s thesis is based on unexamined principles. He lays great stress on the doctrine of national self-determination, which, he reminds us, was given memorable expression in President Wilson’s Fourteen Points address of January 1918—though, by the way, the precise term does not appear there. Judis asserts that early American Zionists, who were mainly liberals, had a blind spot when it came to the political rights of Palestinian Arabs. He points out that men like Justice Louis Brandeis, champions of the rights of laboring men and black people at home, tended to dismiss Arab rights in Palestine as of no great account. As a matter of historical description, he is quite right. But what he draws from this is more questionable.

In the first place, his argument rests on the assumption that the doctrine of self-determination offered a mechanical solution to all nationality problems. Here he is in good company, since many of the peacemakers at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 also thought that this concept was a supreme guiding light. But what they failed, for the most part, to reckon with was the hotchpotch intermingling of ethnic groups in many of the areas in which they were engaged in drawing borders. Just two decades later such certitude dissolved in the crises over the Sudetenland, the Polish Corridor and Danzig. The murder of six million Jews during the Second World War and the expulsion thereafter of twelve million Germans from areas of Eastern Europe where their ancestors had, for the most part, lived for many generations, put paid to the idea that national self-determination, tempered by international protection of minorities, was any kind of panacea. If any confirmation of that lesson were required, it was furnished by the events that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

The trouble with self-determination on a territorial basis was that the outcome inevitably depended on the precise area to which it was to be applied. Irish nationalists demanded freedom from British rule over all of Ireland—ignoring the political rights of the Unionist majority in the northern part of the island. One could point to similar problems in almost every region of the world, particularly in territories formerly under imperial control, among them Palestine, that achieved independence after the Second World War.

Ethnic intermingling was not the only problem. There was the related difficulty of defining the national group that was to be granted self-determination. Take Scotland. If Scots have such a right, the question immediately arises: Who is a Scot? In the referendum on independence to be held in Scotland in September of this year, all residents of that country over the age of sixteen will be able to exercise a vote. But many—perhaps a majority—of those voters are settlers from England, Ireland and Bangladesh, or descendants of such settlers over the past couple of centuries. Is it reasonable that they should have a say in this matter while most Scots living abroad have no say at all?

What that example shows is that there is a further difficulty contained within the concept of self-determination, that of indigenity. According to the principle of national self-determination, as generally understood by its advocates, a significant criterion for the exercise of national political rights is place of birth. That is why Judis believes that a great political wrong was done to the Palestinians when they were denied by Zionism the ability to determine their own destiny in their own land.

But are such rights heritable? Certainly, most Palestinian Arab nationalists and their supporters think so. Third- and fourth-generation inhabitants of Lebanon, Jordan and Syria still think of themselves not only as Palestinians but also as refugees with an inherent right of return.

How long do such rights inhere? The great majority of so-called Palestinian refugees were not, after all, themselves driven out of their homes in 1948. If Palestinians’ rights as refugees are heritable through the generations, is there some end point, or does that right endure, as Palestinian nationalists claim? Judis, while remaining silent on the issue of a right of return for the Palestinians, expresses eloquent sympathy for their plight:

Israel’s Jews had gained a world of their own but at the expense of another people. History, of course, often works that way. And if the people who are vanquished disappear, or are relatively weak and few in number, the victors can eventually lay aside the memory of what they have done. Few Georgians today remember or regret having driven the peaceful Cherokee Indians off their lands.

Perhaps the Cherokees and the Palestinian refugees deserve to have inherited rights recognized (let us leave aside, for the moment, which rights and in what form). But if so, does that not pull the rug out from under one of the chief complaints that is made against Zionism by its critics, including Judis—namely, that the Jewish claim to Palestine is based on an illegitimate appeal to inherited ancestral rights of residence and ownership? Does not Judis—as much as those he attacks—want to have it both ways?

JUDIS THINKS he has discovered the mote in the eye of the early American Zionists. He observes that while they were for the most part liberals in American politics, they were at the same time adherents of an ethnonationalist creed when it came to their ancestral homeland. He thinks the two positions are inconsistent.

They may be inconsistent, but they are not necessarily irreconcilable. What of the Italian Americans who were part of the Roosevelt coalition yet shamelessly acclaimed Mussolini? One of the main thoroughfares in Chicago is, to this day, named after Italo Balbo, the fascist aviator, brutal squadrista and colonial governor of Libya. (Conveniently for the purposes of political road naming, he fell out with Il Duce and died in an air crash before the outbreak of the Second World War.) I doubt any appeal for renaming to Mayor Rahm Emanuel would meet with success. And what of those Irish Americans, a similarly solid Democratic voting bloc for many decades, who funded and propagandized on behalf of the terrorists of the IRA, hardly liberals by any stretch of definition?

Contrary to Judis’s view, liberalism, viewed historically, was not at all incompatible with either nationalism or imperialism. Herbert Samuel, the first British high commissioner in Palestine under the mandate, was one of liberalism’s foremost theorists at the turn of the last century and yet a stout imperialist. Judis examines his record in Palestine, partly on the basis of a reading of my biography of Samuel. He asserts (here in no way reliant on my book) that Samuel “didn’t subscribe to the view of empire as an instrument of subduing and civilizing barbarous peoples.” Actually, Samuel came close to believing exactly that. So much is evident from his earliest involvement in imperial issues, when he supported Roger Casement in his denunciation of King Leopold’s murderous policies in the Congo in 1904. As home secretary twelve years later, he gave further expression to that view when he granted final approval for the hanging of Casement, who had evolved into an activist on behalf of his version of national self-determination in Ireland.

The second and shortest part of Judis’s book explores the early history of American Zionism, particularly in its relationship to Reform Judaism. In some effective and psychologically perceptive passages, Judis portrays the conflict of personalities and policies between Stephen Wise and Abba Hillel Silver for control over the American Zionist movement.

But then we quickly move on to part three, which focuses on the years 1945 to 1948, with a special emphasis on the influence of the Zionist lobby over the policies of the Truman administration. In this period, Judis contends, after a brief era of ethical uplift during the Second World War, the Zionists again descended into moral turpitude.

President Harry Truman, he shows, flip-flopped repeatedly in his attitude toward the Palestine question, as he gave way first to this, then that pressure group. There is some merit in this interpretation, but not much that will be new to readers familiar with the existing scholarly literature; for example, the works on the subject by Zvi Ganin and Michael J. Cohen.

Judis applauds the efforts of American Jews such as Magnes who opposed the movement toward U.S. support for the creation of a Jewish state. He suggests that if, in 1946, the Truman administration had exhibited more resistance to Zionist pressure, and if the United States had supported the peacemaking efforts in Palestine of the British foreign secretary Ernest Bevin and if the Zionist leadership had been ready to postpone any demand for independence, then “the Arab states might have been able to persuade their Palestinian colleagues to go along.” This chain of conditional clauses points, of course, to the improbability of such an outcome, which Judis himself is constrained to admit “may sound implausible.” Yet he is not discouraged. A little later he opines, writing now of the background to the 1947 partition vote at the United Nations, that “the Arab leaders might even have eventually accepted a small Jewish state.” There are many might-have-beens in the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict, but these two are among the more fanciful.

Undeniably there are some parallels between the irresolution of the Truman administration and that of the Obama administration in their policies toward the Middle East. The tergiversation last year over intervention in the Syrian civil war is a case in point. But Judis goes further, postulating not merely analogy but genealogy.

Indeed, the central argument of his book is that there is lineal descent: Judis traces the origin of the “pattern of surrender to Israel and its supporters” back to the Truman years. Truman’s failure to impose a just settlement in Palestine, he writes, “established a pattern that plagued his successors.” This is extrapolation masquerading as explanation.

The underlying argument does not carry conviction. After all, Israel received scant support from the United States during the Eisenhower administration, when its main great-power protector and arms supplier was not the United States but France. Dwight Eisenhower himself was distinctly hostile to the Anglo-French-Israeli invasion of Egypt in the autumn of 1956, and it was American pressure that compelled the Israeli prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, to pull Israeli troops out of every inch of Sinai as well as the Gaza Strip by early 1957. The Kennedy administration began selling limited quantities of advanced weaponry to Israel, but it was only after the 1967 Six-Day War that the United States became Israel’s main diplomatic patron and armament provider.

THE PRO-ISRAEL LOBBY, of which Judis is highly critical, is unquestionably powerful, but it is not and has never been omnipotent. Judis exaggerates, for example, when he writes that the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) was “instrumental” in the defeat in 1984 of Illinois senator Charles Percy by his Democratic challenger Paul Simon; AIPAC’s hostility was merely one element in Senator Percy’s downfall.

Moreover, AIPAC cannot always prevent an American administration from applying unwelcome pressure on Israel. In March 1975, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger announced the failure of his mission to secure a second agreement between Israel and Egypt regarding the Sinai Peninsula. Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was refusing to budge from his position that an Israeli military presence must remain at the strategically vital Mitla and Gidi Passes in central Sinai. President Gerald Ford, “mad as hell” at what he regarded as Israeli “stalling,” announced a “reassessment” of American policy toward the Jewish state. Over the next six months the Americans refused to sign any new arms deals with Israel. The Israel lobby organized frantic activity on Capitol Hill. Seventy-six senators were strong-armed into signing a letter of protest to the president. The episode is often cited as an example of the power of the pro-Israel lobby. What is not so well remembered is that the U.S. pressure on Israel in fact worked. In September 1975, further exhaustive mediation by Kissinger produced an Israeli-Egyptian agreement on Sinai and the Suez Canal. Rabin ate his words and reluctantly agreed to withdraw Israeli troops from Mitla and Gidi in return for face-saving U.S. commitments. This was no passing episode. The agreement paved the way for the secret talks that led ultimately to the Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty of 1979.

Judis tries conscientiously to analyze the different segments of opinion among American Jews but in the end he succumbs to the tendency to lump most of them in the category of donkey-like followers of guidance from Jerusalem central.

Yet, as a recent Pew Research Center survey has shown, American Jewry is differentiating, diversifying and, in important ways, disintegrating further and faster than ever before. Institutions like Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization—once the largest Jewish membership society in the country—are shadows of their former selves. The once-powerful Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations no longer carries much clout. And the Jewish federations in major cities are declining in significance.

When contemplating the declining figures for synagogue membership, I am reminded of the old joke about the editor of a Yiddish newspaper in New York who, looking out of the window and noticing a funeral procession file past, calls out to the manager of his printing press, “One copy fewer today!”

Jewish institutionalism has given way to Jewish individualism. This is true particularly among young adults who are ever less inclined to allow themselves to be mobilized for causes over which they have no control and in which they show decreasing interest.

Judis accords American Jewish influence a heavy share of responsibility for Israel’s continued retention of occupied Arab territories. Yet according to the Pew survey, only 30 percent of American Jews describe themselves as “very attached” to Israel. And only 17 percent believe that continued building of settlements has a positive effect on Israel’s security, while 44 percent declared that it hurts that security.

Many American Jews do, of course, support Israeli hawkishness, and some make noisy, self-advertising contributions to bolstering the occupation. Sheldon Adelson, a Las Vegas casino operator, has given millions to far-right causes in Israel and is the owner of the ultranationalist Yisrael Hayom, perhaps the country’s most widely circulated newspaper. (It is given away for free.) He recently called for the United States to launch a nuclear weapon into the middle of the Iranian desert. Irving Moskowitz, a Miami real-estate developer, has been an important financial backer of Jewish settlements in inflammatory locations, such as Arab-inhabited quarters of Jerusalem. (He also helped bankroll the “birther” movement against President Obama.) The head of the Anti-Defamation League, Abraham Foxman, has been so ardent an apologist for Israeli policies that a writer in the liberal Israeli newspaper Haaretz satirically recommended last year that he be appointed U.S. secretary of state. (He is unlikely to accept any such offer: he would have to take a significant cut in his salary, which in 2012 was $688,280.)

But such figures are not generally representative of those for whom they claim to speak. There are plenty of American Jews who have played a positive role in the search for Arab-Israeli peace. Even those who like to malign Kissinger can hardly deny the supple cunning of his diplomacy in the first steps toward Israeli-Egyptian rapprochement after the 1973 Yom Kippur War. In recent years American diplomats who happen to be Jewish (and perhaps it is not just happenstance) such as Dennis Ross, Aaron David Miller, Martin Indyk and Daniel Kurtzer (a former dean of Yeshiva College in New York) have tried to nudge Israel toward more realistic policies.

In fact, on every significant occasion in its history when Israeli policy makers have moved decisively toward more dovish positions, the preponderant weight of American Jewish opinion has shown support, as, for example, when Israel and the Palestinians signed the Oslo accords on the White House lawn in September 1993.

JUDIS WRITES fluently and forthrightly, but other authors have made a more persuasive case of a similar sort. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt stole a march on him with their (flawed) 2007 onslaught against the American Jewish lobby, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. In The Crisis of Zionism, Peter Beinart preceded Judis’s call for a more critical view of Israeli policy on the part of American Jews. Most recently, last year Ari Shavit, in My Promised Land, produced an influential, revisionist critique of Israel’s conventional history and of what he calls “the abnormality of occupation.”

Does all this mean, then, that the basic thrust of Judis’s conclusions is wrong? Not at all. Israel must, in pursuit of her own interests as a democracy, withdraw from the stance of colonial occupier that she has misguidedly adopted since 1967. The United States has no interest in supporting those in Israel who wish to perpetuate the occupation. American Jews, insofar as they give their voices, their money or their political influence to help sustain the occupation, do neither themselves nor Israel any favors. But we did not need dubious historical linkage between the Obama and Truman administrations nor shallow invocations of liberalism, universalism and national self-determination to arrive at these conclusions. Judis is right but for the wrong reasons.

Bernard Wasserstein is the Harriet & Ulrich E. Meyer Professor Emeritus of Modern European Jewish History at the University of Chicago.

Image: Flickr/David Lisbona. CC BY 2.0.