In 1992, shortly before the election of Bill Clinton, I took a job as a publicist for Public Citizen, a consumer-rights organization founded by Ralph Nader. It was a time of idealism, a time of hope — and a time when I was unemployed, with an infant at home, and desperately in need of a job.
In general, I supported the organization’s goals, which at the time included lobbying for safe pharmaceuticals and universal health care, access to government records, campaign finance reform, and improved auto safety.
But you can safely say I was no “Nader’s Raider.” If there was a single moment when I knew that I never would be, it came on Sept. 13, 1993.
That morning, at Public Citizen’s Dupont Circle offices, I was sitting restlessly at a planning meeting, probably strategizing over the group’s opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement.
Meanwhile, a few blocks away, President Clinton was bringing Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat together for their famous Handshake. At Public Citizen headquarters, no one even had a television set tuned to the ceremony.
I left a few months later and landed back at a Jewish magazine. I’ve lost contact with my Public Citizen colleagues, but I thought about that experience again as I read about Nader’s recent comments on U.S. support for Israel. Speaking earlier this summer to a gathering of Muslim activists on Capitol Hill, Nader pinned the impasse in Middle East talks on America.
Said Nader: “The Israeli puppeteer travels to Washington, meets with the puppet in the White House, and then proceeds to Capitol Hill, where he meets with hundreds of other puppets.”
The Anti-Defamation League wrote Nader, saying the puppet metaphor fit into “age-old stereotypes,” but Nader was unfazed.
Focused or narrow?
Nader’s response to the ADL reads like it was co-written by Michael Lerner and David Duke. From Lerner, the editor of Tikkun Magazine, he seems to borrow the reasonable critique that the White House needs to do more to bring Israelis and Palestinians to the table and that the first move must come from a militarily superior Israel.
From white supremacist Duke, he borrows the usual stuff about a cowardly Congress subservient to the all-powerful Jewish lobby. He repeats the “puppet-puppeteer” charge. And he describes the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s “ditto machine on Capitol Hill,” where “many members of Congress … against their private judgment, resign themselves to sign on the dotted line.”
The letter is a muddle, even without the conspiracy theories. Nader writes that “about half of the Israeli people over the years have disagreed with the present Israeli government’s policies toward the Palestinian people” — raising but not answering the question: Which policies?
Is he talking about Ariel Sharon’s call for a dismantlement of settlements in Gaza, which has support on the left and middle and is widely unpopular on the right?
He quotes, in support of his thesis, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak to the effect that “Israel should take the initiative itself unilaterally and start disengaging from the West Bank and Gaza and not keep looking for the right Palestinian Authority.” Again, that’s Sharon’s position as well.
The puppeteer stuff also falls down on the facts. He asks the ADL if the Congress or the White House “have pursued a course of action, since 1956, that contradicted the Israeli government’s position.”
Well, the Reagan administration did, condemning the bombing of the Iraqi nuclear reactor and selling AWACs spy planes to the Saudis. Both Presidents Bush have reduced U.S. loan guarantees to penalize the Israelis for settlement activities.
As for members of Congress voting pro-Israel “against their private judgment,” can Nader prove this? Even if you want to argue that some lawmakers have private reservations about pro-Israel actions, you’d have to acknowledge that politicians are in the vote-getting business.
The Israel lobby is powerful, but poll after poll also shows that support for Israel’s security is a grassroots issue, certainly in urban areas and across the evangelical heartland.
Besides, for any politician in the post-9/11 era, what is the viable alternative to voting pro-Israel? Supporting Arafat and his violent rejection of a peace deal the previous Israeli government was ready to sign? Joining an anti-Israel bloc in the United Nations that can’t seem to condemn the terrorism that inspires Israeli retaliation? Muslim Americans don’t need to “study” the pro-Israel lobby’s methods, as Nader suggests. They just need to find a cause that rejects terrorism as a negotiating tactic.
It’s the “puppeteer” charge, however, that shows how out of touch Nader is. It’s one thing to argue that the United States needs a more assertive Arab-Israeli policy. Many of us do, loudly and consistently.
But the “puppeteer” charge, suggesting that American politicians are voting against American interests at the whim of a foreign government, is straight out of Der Stürmer.
I don’t know enough about Nader to call him an anti-Semite, and I reject suggestions that just because he has Lebanese ancestry, he has a visceral distrust of Israel or the Jews. Perhaps, like my colleagues gathered around the conference table on the day of the Handshake, he isn’t able to see much beyond his focused — some might say narrow — agenda.
Often that leads to good things, like safer cars, and better medicines, and a more responsive government.
And sometimes it leads to a complete lack of empathy with those whose agendas may differ, and to words that label good public citizens as traitors.
Andrew Silow-Carroll is editor-in-chief of the New Jersey Jewish News.
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