Having been, at least in the eyes of fellow Democrat Harry Truman, “an over-educated son of a bitch,” Senator William Fulbright indeed was a strange bird in American politics.
A former law professor and university president, he entered politics only because he lost his academic position after the governor of Arkansas settled a personal account with a newspaper that Fulbright’s mother owned.
Fulbright ran for Congress and won. Two years later, he became a senator whose 29 years in the upper house included 15 years as chairman of the foreign relations committee, a record-setting period in which he became a pain in multiple butts.
Fulbright irked John F. Kennedy by saying East Germany had the right to wall West Berlin; then provoked Lyndon Johnson by crusading against the Vietnam War, and then flabbergasted Richard Nixon by accusing him of organizing antiwar riots in order to discredit the antiwar movement.
It thus came as no surprise that the contrarian foreign affairs expert also targeted the Jewish state, promoting refugee-return plans, weighing in on its arms purchases, and opposing American trade sanctions in the struggle to free Soviet Jewry.
This history comes up now because, in his era, Fulbright was the exception to the rule that being American meant espousing Zionism and backing Israel, since both represented American ideals in a region that despised them. Now this consensus is gone, as the saga of Josh Shapiro’s vice-presidential candidacy has made plain. A GRADUATE of Philadelphia’s Akiba (now Jack M. Barrack) Hebrew Academy, Pennsylvania’s leading Jewish day school, Shapiro became the kind of American Jew that the non-sectarian school set out to mold: an American patriot, an involved citizen, a curious self-achiever, a proud Zionist, and a conscientious Jew, which in his case includes eating kosher and observing Shabbat.
These credentials are, of course, insufficient for a vice-presidential bid. For that, Shapiro had his record as a major swing state’s accomplished attorney-general and popular governor who defeated a Trump-backed rival by 15%.
This is how he entered the shortlist from which Kamala Harris ultimately chose Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.
The wisdom of choosing Walz will be judged on November 6. If he and Harris win, then good for them and the Democrats. If they lose, the defeat will mean Harris’s choice alienated the swing vote that the centrist Shapiro has shown he could harness.
Understandably, some now wonder whether in sidelining Shapiro, Harris took orders from her party’s anti-Israeli circle. Well, that’s far-fetched.
Married to a proud Jew herself, Harris chose the man she thought she would best get along with – a consideration that is indeed crucial.
It’s a choice that made sense, considering that the 60-year-old Walz says for the record that if he wins, the vice presidency will be his last public office, whereas the 51-year-old Shapiro would have seen it as a stepping stone for bigger things. Harris’s presumed fear that Shapiro would overshadow her might have been cowardly but was not unrealistic, much less antisemitic.
An anti-Jewish plot?
So fair enough, Shapiro’s non-nomination was not an anti-Jewish plot. That doesn’t mean there is no anti-Jewish engine at play in American politics. There sure is, and the prospect of a Jew in the White House made it roar. THE CAMPAIGN against Shapiro raged in social media, where an obviously organized flood of tweets was helped by initiatives like a “No Genocide Josh” website, and by inquisitions like those of the Qatari-financed website Middle East Eye about Shapiro’s pro-Israeli statements over the years, and volunteer work at an IDF base and a kibbutz.
The campaign message was as clear as its tone was bullying and its subtext was baseless: Israel’s war is illegitimate, Democrats want a ceasefire, supporting Israel is incriminating, and Shapiro’s pro-Israel record is morally scandalous and politically suicidal.
In fact, Shapiro’s Middle Eastern blend – a quest for peace, frustration with its saboteurs, and unbridled love for the Jewish state – is the standard among the vast majority of seven million American Jews. It follows that those who set out to delegitimize his candidacy were attacking not only Josh Shapiro, and not only the Jewish state, but millions of American Jews.
Clearly, the stealthy anti-Shapiro campaign was orchestrated, and its spirit pervades four arenas: politics, where it is fueled by a set of Democratic lawmakers known as “the squad”; academia, where it is joined by radical faculty and impressionable undergrads; Arab-American communities; and cyberspace, where thousands of scribblers incite millions of ignoramuses.
The problem Israelis and Americans face
This is not the Fulbright case, in which an unusual individual represented mainly himself and was clearly an American patriot. What we Israelis and our American brethren now face is a massive effort to delegitimize us and stigmatize them.
It’s a lethal effort, but also a vulnerable one. It’s vulnerable because in its tactic, it’s anti-American, and in its substance, it’s antisemitic. The tactic is the bullying that is designed to obstruct free speech by muzzling pro-Israeli voices and derailing pro-Israeli careers. The arguments fall apart once deployed exclusively against Israel, which is all the time.
Demands to boycott Israel, ostensibly driven by opposition to military occupations, disappear when it comes to Turkey’s occupations in Cyprus and Syria, or China’s in Tibet. Demands for “freedom” vanish when it comes to Palestinian and Iranian women, dissidents, and gays. “Genocide” cries end when it comes to the butcheries in Syria, Yemen, and Sudan.
This is besides the rekindling of classical antisemitism’s fingering of the Jew as a bloodthirsty enemy of mankind, and also denying the Palestinian use of civilians as human shields – a profoundly anti-American strategy.
American Jews must understand that this gathering attack is aimed at them. It’s not about this or that Israeli policy but about Israel’s existence, America’s ideals, the Jewish people’s dignity, and American Jewry’s pride. www.MiddleIsrael.netThe writer, a Hartman Institute fellow, is author of the bestselling Mitzad Ha’ivelet Ha’yehudi (The Jewish March of Folly, Yediot Sefarim, 2019), a revisionist history of the Jewish people’s political leadership.