Case Closed?

Lee Smith
Tabletmag.com
01 April '10
Posted before Shabbat

“I wish they’d leave Bibi alone,” said my cab driver, an African-American born-again Christian in his mid-fifties. He was upset about the recent turn in U.S.-Israel relations over the last two weeks and complained all the way to Union Station. “What do they mean Jews can’t build in Jerusalem?” he asked. He grabbed his Bible from the dashboard and handed it to me. “You can find it right here.”

Europeans may believe that Palestine was settled by colonialist interlopers, but to many American ears this is akin to calling God a liar. Americans read the Bible as an authentic document detailing the eternal relationship between the Jews and their historical homeland. There are privileged sectors of the country that cannot comprehend the broad popularity of pro-Israel politics in America—corners of academia and the media that argue that Israel is a liability to U.S. interests. However, especially after 9/11, the rest of this vastly Christian country believes that American interests and those of the Jewish state are in sync, a conviction borne out not only in opinion polls, but electoral polls as well. There is no powerful coterie violating American laws to ensure that the U.S. Congress looks favorably on the Jewish state. If anti-Israel positions pleased voting constituencies, and campaign donors, our elected officials would adopt them as readily as they would spit at babies if such behavior ensured campaign victories.

For decades, those who work in academia or the news media have used plenty of methods to challenge and criticize the American consensus over Israel. But those who work in official Washington have taken up an even more meaningful weapon: the criminalization of policy disputes. Nowhere was this clearer that in the case of Steve Rosen, the former director of foreign policy issues for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee who was the target of an FBI sting operation that cost him his job.

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