Taking on mighty Jewish lobby in US
THE course of Israel’s nearly seven-month-old war on Gaza is not the reason for the protests that are now convulsing campuses in the US. It is only a symptom, not the disease. The disease is the stranglehold that Israel and the near-omnipotent Jewish lobby in the US have systematically developed and put on almost every important aspect of American life over many decades. Young Americans finally want to break free from the vice-like grip of the Jewish lobby, which makes a mockery of the choices and freedom that they are taught in schools to be embedded in the soul of the US.
Joe Biden’s bravado against students is beginning to sound hollow after Brown University’s compromise with the protesters.
For Indian readers to understand this state of affairs, take the case of Arun Gandhi, grandson of the Father of the Nation. He moved to the US in 1987 to do research at the University of Mississippi. In 2001, he founded the MK Gandhi Institute for Nonviolence, initially at a university in Memphis, Tennessee, where Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated. The institute later shifted when the University of Rochester in New York State offered to house it on its campus. In 2008, Gandhi wrote an article in the ‘On Faith’ section of The Washington Post, in which he perspicaciously foretold some of what is now going on in Israel. The American-Jewish lobby was unforgiving. It got the University of Rochester to extract Gandhi’s resignation from the institute he founded. Hundreds of Jews, mostly American, trolled him on The Washington Post website, where the moderators of the ‘On Faith’ section had to grovel and apologise to save their own skin and close the matter. Gandhi never wrote for this newspaper again. Other US newspapers attacked Gandhi in a media trial clearly influenced by the Jewish lobby. He profusely apologised for his initial post, but the American Jewish Committee said his apologies were inadequate. The redoubtable committee called his views ‘reprehensible’, as if he were a neo-Nazi, though he had only written a fraction of what today’s campus protesters are saying about Israel.
The end result was that Gandhi’s career in the US was finished. For successive years, he had been feted in state Capitols, at the iconic John F Kennedy Library and Museum in Boston, and became associated with the Parliament of the World’s Religions, first held in Chicago in 1893, when it was addressed by Swami Vivekananda. But once the American Jews turned on Gandhi, no one in the US could stand up to their lobby. After several attempts to salvage his legacy, he returned to India and died a broken man in Kolhapur last year.
Shorn of the flood of disinformation, what are the US students demanding? Firstly, they want their rich alma maters, like Columbia University in New York — home to Wall Street — to disinvest from companies which profit from Israel’s war against the people of Gaza. It is a legitimate demand. In such activism, the students are merely taking a leaf out of similar campus agitations in the 1980s demanding that US companies stop investing in racist South Africa. Those countrywide student protests forced the US Congress to sanction White-ruled South Africa under its Comprehensive Anti-Apartheid Act. The student protests subsequently spread to Europe and forced continental conglomerates to stop investing in countries that practised apartheid. Secondly, they want Columbia’s prosperous university endowments to be transparent about their investments — a fair demand. Thirdly, they call for amnesty for all students and faculty who have participated in protests. Agitators in other US campuses have similar demands.
Last week, students at Brown University, an Ivy League institution in Providence, Rhode Island, ended their protests after the university’s governing body agreed to vote on a proposal to divest its $6.6-billion endowment from companies with any affiliation to Israel. US President Joe Biden’s bravado against US students is beginning to sound hollow after Brown University’s compromise with the protesters, which may well be a precedent in ending the ongoing campus agitations. Historically, from racial segregation through the Vietnam quagmire and the more recent Iraq war, US students have been harbingers of change. However, taking on the Jewish lobby and Israel will be a more formidable task than anything that they have done before.
In 1985, the US government had arrested Israel’s most valuable spy to date. Jonathan Pollard was first an employee of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and later worked for an important unit of the US Naval Intelligence Command. Over the years, Pollard sold to Israel several volumes of the National Security Agency’s manuals on America’s intelligence-gathering process. He also compromised the safety of thousands of people who cooperated with the CIA worldwide by giving their names and other details to Israel. Pollard pleaded guilty in court and was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1987.
Such is the audacity of the Jewish-American lobby and Israel that shortly after Pollard was sentenced, they began a campaign within the US for his release. In 2011, they managed to enlist the support of former US National Security Adviser and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, who wrote to then President Barack Obama, seeking commutation of Pollard’s sentence. Kissinger was a Jewish émigré from Germany to the US. Nearly 40 Jewish-American Congressmen sought clemency for the man who other Americans viewed as an unforgivable traitor in their midst. Prominent non-Jews, including half a dozen former US Defence Secretaries, were aghast and opposed clemency. As Vice-President, Biden opposed commutation of Pollard’s sentence.
No one could stand in the Jewish lobby’s way. At the end of 2015, the convicted Israeli spy was released on parole. While he was in jail, Israel granted Pollard citizenship. Three-and-a-half years ago, he emigrated to Israel, flown to Tel Aviv like a hero on the private jet of a Jewish-American billionaire.
Unlike older Jewish-Americans, who have memories of the Holocaust, their new generation is more American than Israeli — like the younger Cuban-Americans in Miami who are not inimical to a Communist Havana. That explains the large presence of Jewish students in the ongoing protests. It is a good augury for the US and the future of the Jewish community in America.
