NOVANEWS
Say you are a Congressman from a community of 862,000 of which 4,000 (0.4%) are Jews. Say you have to vote on the proposal of adding $250,000 (“for the Iron Dome”) to the annual “aid” sent to Israel and you decide that it is in the best interests of the state you represent to vote against the measure, although the measure is supported by the Jews in your community. What happens to you?
This is the story of Beto O’Rourke, freshman Democrat from Texas, gloatingly recounted with glee and admiration by Nathan Guttman in the Daily Forward, as an example of how the Jewish lobby “works its magic.”
O’Rourke tried to explain his vote this way:
“I could not in good conscience vote for borrowing $225 million more to send to Israel, without debate and without discussion, in the midst of a war that has cost more than a thousand civilian lives already, too many of them children,” he wrote. He also stressed that with an aid package for Israel up for a vote in two months, he felt no need to rush more spending without adequate debate when Congress was all but empty.”
Silly freshman. Clearly, as Guttamn subtitle opines, he must have “missed the memo.”
The 0.4%ers alerted bigger guns (AIPAC) and for starters he was subjected to “a mass email blast labeling O’Rourke as “an anti-Israel congressman” and denouncing his vote as “shameful.” Critical local press coverage included a public comment by one of his own Jewish donors to the El Paso Times that in voting as he did, O’Rourke “chooses to side with the rocket launchers and terror tunnel builders” of Hamas.”
At O’Rourke’s office, emails flooded his inbox. The El Paso Jewish federation sent out an alert to members, urging them to take action. It contained O’Rourke’s contact information and a suggested sample letter. Another email, for which no one will now take responsibility, circulated among Jewish activists urging supporters not to re-elect him.
“I really don’t understand how he makes his decision,” Rabbi Stephen Leon of Congregation B’Nai Zion, a local synagogue, told the El Paso Times even before The New Yorker piece picked up on the pushback.
“It’s a great, great disappointment to the Jewish community here. We had meetings with him prior, to talk to him about the importance of Israel, and the way he voted makes very little sense.”
A meeting was arranged for O’Rourke with a group of 10 pro-Israel local leaders, including key members of AIPAC, along with heads of the local synagogues and of the Jewish federation. Then a second, then a third.
Finally, he was properly ‘educated’ and he even mumbled something about having some Jewish ancestry in his family. Pro-Israel activists came out satisfied by his abjection, and generously attributed the vote against Iron Dome to a freshman’s mistake rather than to a pattern of anti-Israel voting. “A bump in the road,” in the words of Schwartz.
“He told us he is a lot less optimistic about a diplomatic solution with Iran than he was in our first meeting, and that was only a month and half ago,” he said. “This means he is doing his homework.”
This coming spring O’Rourke is scheduled to join a group of lawmakers going to Israel on a trip arranged by an AIPAC-affiliated organization. That should work out any lingering misunderstandings on his part as to who is in charge. No more lip from him in the future, but he will be carefully watched, of course.
So if a Jewish 0.4% of the population is able to impose its will on the 99.06%, as is the 2% Jewish segment nationwide, how many Jews are too many for the safety of the latter? The serial expulsions of Jews from Europe over the centuries may have been based on the conclusion that one is too many.
Nevertheless, I don’t think it is about numbers, but about the strength of the entire networkand its strategic positioning to control the key levers of a society: banking, politics, media. A chain can strangle a giant not by its length but only if its links are solid and unbreakably strung together. The giant must be asleep.
By self-perception and conscious identity, Jews, like no other ethnic group, are an insolubly alien, hostile and damaging (“revolutionary” or “iconoclastic” are the terms they would prefer) presence in any nation. Failure to recognize this has been at the expense of the host nation.
Some critics accuse them of acting purely out of narrow self-interest. I don’t think that is essentially true in the great picture. Ordinary egoists act in their individual self-interest, whereas Jews act against their own local interests, striving for a messianic goal symbolized by a state where more than half of them would and will never live.
Of all the answers given to the “Jewish question” so far, the only one that seems to work is the “Iranian solution.” Iranian Jews have reserved representation in the Assembly, are protected by the state laws, and are allowed, even encouraged, to manifest their hard-wired “apartness,” aliens with special status, inward looking and quietly waiting for “Moshiak.” But they can never become a state within a state or own the country’s finances, as they do in the Western world, much less have an influence on the country’s culture, traditions, religion, let alone foreign policy. Funny thing: the Iranian Jews seem to be the only happy Jews today and the ceaseless anti-Iran campaign is led by the … unhappy Jews worldwide, the ones who outwitted Moshiak and grabbed the Promised Land ahead of schedule.
