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Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May 2024, pp. 66-67

Middle East Books Review

Our Palestine Question: Israel and American Jewish Dissent, 1948-1978

By Geoffrey Levin, Yale University Press, 2023, hardcover, 320 pp. MEB $38

Reviewed by Allan C. Brownfeld

MANY ARE UNAWARE of the fact that American Jews have a long history of debating issues related to the rights of Palestinians. In Our Palestine Question, Geoffrey Levin, assistant professor of Middle Eastern and Jewish studies at Emory University, recovers the voices of those Jews who first called for an honest reckoning of the plight of the indigenous population of Palestine.

These now largely forgotten voices include a former Yiddish journalist, anti-Zionist Reform rabbis and young left-wing Zionist activists. They felt drawn to support Palestinian rights by their understanding of Jewish history and their commitment to the Jewish moral and ethical tradition—which they saw being violated.

Levin notes, “It was 1953 when Rabbi Morris Lazaron walked through the Shatila refugee camp [in Lebanon], witnessing firsthand the suffering of Palestinian families who had lost their homes during the war in 1948. The ‘illimitable misery’ of the refugees had a decisive impact on the former head rabbi of the prestigious Baltimore Hebrew Congregation. After his trip, Lazaron began calling on the Israeli government to recognize the right of Palestine’s Arab refugees to return to their homes and urged Israel to admit 100,000 immediately.”

Lazaron was an active member of the anti-Zionist American Council for Judaism which had been established in 1942, Levin notes, “by a group of Reform rabbis unsettled by their denomination’s endorsement of Zionist aims. The Council envisioned Palestine’s future as a nonsectarian democracy for all its citizens and encouraged U.S. leaders to coordinate with the U.N. to settle displaced Holocaust survivors in countries throughout the world.” 

Levin tells the story of a number of other Jewish Americans who embraced Palestinian rights, including academic Don Peretz, journalist William Zukerman, Rabbi Elmer Berger and philanthropists James Marshall and Lessing J. Rosenwald. 

In the case of Peretz, he arrived as a 26-year-old in Israel, a young U.S. Army veteran on his way to deliver aid to recently displaced Palestinians as part of a mission for the Quaker-affiliated American Friends Service Committee. When he returned to New York, he enrolled in Columbia University and began work on his doctoral dissertation on the Palestinian refugee question. He was soon hired by the American Jewish Committee, then proclaiming itself a “non-Zionist” group, and became the organization’s first Middle East consultant. He was told to put together an Arab refugee relief initiative with humanitarian aims.

Peretz detailed Israel’s “inflexible” position and its blaming of the refugee problem on Arab leaders ordering evacuations [of Palestinian towns and villages in 1948], for which no evidence was ever provided and Israel’s own “new historians” later showed was without any foundation. As a result of constant Israeli pressure, the American Jewish Committee ultimately ended its relationship with Peretz and joined other Jewish organizations in embracing Zionism.

Levin also tells the story of former Yiddish journalist William Zukerman, who started an English-language newsletter, supported by the American Council for Judaism, and to which Peretz became a regular contributor. Zukerman’s concern about Zionism went back many years. In April 1934, he wrote in The Nation that “Jewish fascism” was poised to take over the Zionist movement.

The American Council for Judaism’s executive director, Rabbi Elmer Berger, was a key figure in early efforts to question and oppose Zionism. Berger was active in the American Friends of the Middle East (AFME), which led to his relationship with Fayez Sayegh, who headed the Arab Information Office in New York. Berger also became close to Dorothy Thompson, the prominent anti-Nazi journalist who later became an advocate for Palestinian rights and was a leading member of AFME, which was partially financed by the CIA to counterbalance the weight of the pro-Israel lobby. 

Berger was also a valued friend and adviser to the Washington Report’s co-founders.

During the Eisenhower administration, Levin writes, “A close relationship developed between Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern, South Asian and African Affairs Henry Byroade and Berger. Berger had a hand in two of Byroade’s speeches in 1954. Byroade called on Arabs to accept Israel’s existence and on Israel to ‘drop your conqueror attitude and see your future as a Middle East state and not as a headquarters of worldwide groupings of people of a particular religious faith who must have special rights within and obligations to the Israeli state.’ This statement echoed the typical Council rhetoric.”

Also discussed is the group Breira, which attracted left-wing Jews including Noam Chomsky and Israeli Knesset member Uri Avnery. Breira, Levin points out, was the “first national American Jewish organization to openly oppose Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.” Israel finally succeeded in isolating Breira’s members from the American Jewish community, and the group ultimately disbanded. Today, of course, its successor groups—IfNotNow, Jewish Voice for Peace, Americans for Peace Now and a host of others—are thriving.

Levin concludes: “Whether Israelis want to admit it or not, the Palestinian question has always been their country’s most central, if not definitional dilemma….The circle of American Jews critiquing Israeli policies has grown larger and larger...Palestinian rights advocacy has become a realm of Jewish politics in and of itself…It will define the transnational relationship between Jews even more as time goes by.”

Geoffrey Levin has performed a notable service by casting light on a chapter of American Jewish history of which too few are aware and which is likely to grow in importance in the future.

Allan C. Brownfeld is a syndicated columnist and associate editor of the Lincoln Review, a journal published by the Lincoln Institute for Research and Education, and editor of Issues, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism.