“I have never compromised on Israeli security, and never will,” wrote then Anti-Defamation League (ADL) National Director Abraham Foxman in his 2003 book, Never Again: The Threat of the New Anti-Semitism. Yet analysis of his views on Israel and related matters in this book raises serious questions about his previously discussed endorsement of former Vice-President Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election over the pro-Israel President Donald Trump.
“Sometimes people accuse me of being too much of a hard-liner issues related to the state of Israel. I plead guilty to the charge,” Foxman, who served as ADL director from 1987 to 2015, wrote. He emphasized the importance of this Jewish national home for Jews, both in terms of cultural self-determination and security. “Israel is a land with a majority Jewish culture, where there are no phobias or hang ups about being Jewish, where being Jewish is natural and normal and requires no apologies.” Past exoduses of Jews from the former Soviet Union and Ethiopia to Israel manifested that following the “Holocaust Israel is also the place of last refuge for endangered Jews, the country where Jews can go when they are rejected everywhere else.”
However, Foxman worried about how endangered this precious Jewish state was, for
today 40 percent of the Jewish people are centered in a single geographic location, the state of Israel. It’s a small nation surrounded by a large collection of hostile neighbors, some with access to weapons of mass destruction, determined to wipe it from the face of the earth. If the Jews of Europe were physically vulnerable in the era of the Nazis, the Jews of the Middle East may be even more vulnerable today.
Days after President Barack Obama’s administration approved the Joint Comprehensive Plan Of Action (JCPOA), or Iranian nuclear deal, on July 14, 20115, Foxman’s concern for Israel became apparent. On July 21, 2015, in his last official act as ADL director, he wrote to oppose this agreement which facilitate the Islamic Republic of Iran’s development of nuclear weapons, a dire threat to Israel. Now Biden has eased sanctions on Iran and is considering reviving the JCPOA, from which Trump had withdrawn in 2018.
Biden’s energy policies must also surely worry Foxman. “The United States and world economies,” Foxman had written in 2003, “are heavily dependent on Arab oil. This dependency creates a natural wedge between American and Israeli interests.” Yet Biden has damaged America’s newly-won energy independence by canceling the Keystone Pipeline project that would have carried Canadian tar sands oil, and curtailing oil exploration on federal lands.
Foxman rightly worried about the wider, often toxic ideological environment surrounding policy decisions about Israel. He wrote in 2003 that “what some like to call anti-Zionism is, in reality, anti-Semitism.” Accordingly, “Israel is frequently judged more harshly, more unforgivingly, than any other nation…every casualty in the Arab-Israeli conflict is trumpeted as an atrocity unparalleled in history.”
Israel-hatred is often a unifying element among diverse anti-Semites, Foxman observed. “In today’s new mutant strain of anti-Semitism, traditional elements of the extreme right and the extreme left are working together, often in concert with immigrants of Arab descent and terrorist organizations based in the Middle East.” The lead villain in the racist video game Ethnic Cleansing, he noted by example, was the late Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon.
Antisemitism among African-Americans particularly troubled Foxman. He devoted to the topic the entire book chapter “Troubled Alliance: The Rift Between American Blacks and Jews.” Given the historic mutual support among the two groups for various civil rights causes, for him it was “disheartening to feel that the African American community may be changing from a close partner into a potential antagonist.”
Nonetheless, Foxman soberly observed:
For as long as ADL has surveyed anti-Semitic attitudes, we have found that some 30 to 40 percent of Black Americans are infected with a significant degree of anti-Semitism. Forty years ago this figure was matched in the white population. That’s no longer the case.
Foxman explained how in the 1960s many African-Americans alienated themselves from Jews by joining a “‘new left’ with an aggressively anti-American slant” and exploring Islam. There “was a natural progression from this position to joining many Arabs in opposing the existence and security of the state of Israel.” Israelis “were relatively wealthy (by Third World standards), largely of white, European origin, and allied with the same American establishment that was seen as supporting dictatorships in Vietnam, Latin America,” and elsewhere.
In turn, Foxman has had his disagreements with leftist African-American leaders and causes. He condemned the despicable Al Sharpton for having “flirted with anti-Semitism in his checkered career.” Like many Jews, the affirmative-action opponent Foxman was also “offended by the use of race or any similar personal characteristic as a way of categorizing people and modifying how they are treated.”
By contrast, Foxman welcomed Christian conservative support for Israel, even as this traditional liberal worried about the “religious right” and its positions on matters such as abortion or America’s Judeo-Christian character. “I believe that for Jews to reject the political support of Israel by the religious right would make no sense, especially at a time such as today when Israel is so isolated on the world scene,” he wrote to his liberal-leaning fellow Jews. “We must manage our relationship with the Christian right with care and vigilance.”
Foxman acknowledged Christianity’s deep Jewish roots, even while extensively analyzing Christian antisemitism’s history. He personally had experienced such Jew-hatred as a boy while hiding out from Nazi genocide in Lithuania during World War II. Nevertheless, he clearly concluded that:
Any knowledgeable Jew who reads the Christian Gospels is struck by the extent to which the teachings of Jesus echo Jewish tradition; in fact, a large proportion of Jesus’ utterances as recorded in the Christian Bible are actually quotations, free or exact, from the Hebrew scriptures. It’s clear that Jesus was immersed in Jewish teaching and regarded himself as another in the line of Jewish sages and prophets, not as the founder of a new faith.
Precisely pro-Israel Christian conservatives would agree with Foxman, but his support for Biden hardly squares with Foxman’s defense of Israel. Biden’s initiatives to drive the sexual revolution into high gear, such as the draconian LGBT provisions of the misnamed Equality Act, are nothing less than a declaration of war against Christian faithful. Meanwhile, after riding into office a wave of support from the radical, anti-Israel Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, Biden has made numerous disturbing appointments with respect to Israel.
Suffering Trump Derangement Syndrome, Foxman had denounced the former president as a threat to American democracy, but it is hard to see how Foxman’s advocacy served specifically Jewish concerns. In a troubling, telling sign of the times, his ADL successor, Jonathan Greenblatt, a former staffer for Democratic presidents Bill Clinton and Obama, partnered precisely with the venomous Sharpton in a campaign against online hate speech. While Foxman has rightfully stood for Israel and recognized Islamic antisemitism, his reflexive liberalism has bound him to an increasingly radical Democratic Party. This raises unsettling questions about Jewish organizational leadership at the ADL and beyond for a future article.
Roland says
Your case is well-made, Mr Harrod. Trump is a more reliable friend of Israel than Biden and his mandarinate. Yet, why do Trump and the Republicans strive to privatize (destroy) Social Security and Medicare as we know them? As a US citizen, that troubles me.
mortimer says
90% liberal Foxman is fairly tolerant for a Leftist, but he will not persuade his Leftist friends to join him. Most Leftists believe in their own infallibility. Their minds are made up, and they consider facts as impertinent and fabricated, Thus, facts that contradict their narratives are easily and swiftly brushed aside without any examination. Not scientific, not open-minded, not ‘liberal’.
mortimer says
The Leftists said that moving the American Embassy to Jerusalem would start WW III, but that failed to happen. As a result, Arab countries decided to join with President Trump in normalizing relations with Israel and admitting that Temple Mount has little or nothing to do with Islam.
mortimer says
If Foxman were truly concerned about Israel he would have joined the Republican president who delivered!
gravenimage says
Abe Foxman Inadvertently Makes the Zionist Case for President Trump
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Good article from Andrew Harrod.