Are the Palestinians an "Invented People?"

Top-tier Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich recently caused controversy--mostly outside of the GOP--by stating that the Palestinians were an "invented people." He said this in an interview with a New York cable television channel, Jewish TV, that as the name implies is geared towards Jews. He also referred to the Palestinians as terrorists. Gingrich understands the Palestinians as "invented" i.e. phony because in the past they merely called themselves Arabs. In this he is correct. But this is not unique in the Middle East. The area was until the end of World War I part of the Ottoman Empire and the inhabitants of the Levant thought of themselves as Ottomans, Muslims, and Arabs (or Jews or Kurds or Turkomans). Until the end of World War II the Union of Reform Synagogues, then the largest Jewish denomination in America, insisted that the Jews were not a people but only a religion. (I couldn't provide a link to this because it is something that Reform Jews are ashamed of today, but read any standard history of the denomination and it is found.) This sentiment was shared by the vast majority of Orthodox rabbis in Europe and even Palestine at the time. It was mainly secular Jews who were Zionists. They reached back two millennia in time to a time when ordinary Jews spoke Hebrew (or at least Aramaic), lived in Eretz Israel, and regarded themselves as a nation. Are the Jews an invented people as well?

Actually all peoples are "invented." That is to say nationalism is a business or process of selection of bits of culture, history and even language to create a common national identity. In Yugoslavia it involved selecting a particular dialect to become the basis of Serbo-Croatian that was then taught in the schools for both Croats and Serbs. After the breakup of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s the opposite process occurred and the Serbs, Croats, and Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims) all infused their new "languages" with different words to differentiate them. The easiest job in the world was to be an inter-Yugoslav translator or interpreter. Select episodes in history are emphasized and heroes who are useful at the time are set up as exemplars for the population. Needless to say many of the German heroes from the Nazi period are no longer taught in schools as German heroes. 

But none of this is really important to Gingrich, the man who continually reinvents himself. He knows that pro-Israel anti-Arab rhetoric is red meat to Republican audiences. If he is someday elected president and decides to deal with the Middle East diplomatically he can always use the Foreign Service to explain what he really meant (or to explain to the Arab rulers that it was all political rhetoric, which they should understand without too much of a problem). Here is why Evangelical Protestant conservatives have replaced American Jews as Israel's main American constituency. And here is what that may mean for Israel down the road. And here is a post from one of the HaAretz blogs on what the problems with Gingrich's claim are.

American Jews and the 2012 Election

Next to blacks, Jews have been the most consistently loyal ethnic constituency of the Democratic Party. And considering that until 1965 blacks could not vote in the South, and that many in the North do not vote, Jews have been a more electorally important one. Jews are concentrated demographically in the states with the largest electoral votes: New York, Illinois, California, Florida, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Texas (in roughly that order). Jews are only between two and two and a half percent of the American population, but because they vote in much higher numbers they are about three or four percent of the electorate on election day.  Jews have voted consistently Democratic since the Progressive Era when they voted for Woodrow Wilson.

About eighty-five percent of the affiliated Jewish community--Jews that participate in Jewish communal life through membership and attendance at synagogues or through other Jewish organizations--is made up of either secular Jews or Jews of non-Orthodox denominations that aren't officially recognized in Israel (Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist).  The fifteen percent of Jews who are Orthodox, either ultra-Orthodox or Modern Orthodox, tend to vote Republican because their religious views are more in line with Republicans on matters of personal morality than with Democrats. For secular and Reform Jews so-called Jewish values (tolerance, aid to the poor, equal rights) have replaced Orthodox ritual as the expression of their spiritual values. Most of these Jews consider themselves moderates or liberals/ Progressives politically and vote Democratic. About an additional ten percent of non-Orthodox Jews, roughly equal in number to Orthodox Jewish voters, vote for Republicans. This has been the situation for the past century, but with exceptions in individual presidential elections. Eisenhower and Reagan received about double the normal Republican  percentage of the Jewish vote. Eisenhower probably in gratitude and recognition for his role in defeating Hitler and Reagan in 1980 because Jimmy Carter was so disliked for attacking Menahem Begin over settlements. This previous analysis is based on several of the essays collected in Arthur Hertzberg's Jewish Polemics, a 1992 collection of his essays published over the previous decade. Hertzberg is a professor of religion who specialized in Judaism and the intellectual history of Zionism.  The present incumbent seems to attract the same disdain, contempt, and outright hatred among Jews that Carter did. But even Carter won 60 percent of the Jewish vote!


Obama is hated by those American Jews who are either already Republicans or who are Democrats but who identify with the Likud Party in Israel. Typical of this group is Martin Peretz, the publisher and former senior editor of The New Republic.  Peretz supported Obama in 2008, but then felt betrayed after Obama made overtures to the Arabs in 2009 and pushed for a settlement freeze in Israel. These Jews tend to put Israel at the top of their considerations when considering for whom to vote in presidential elections. Most American Jews, like other Americans, tend to vote on domestic issues and although Israel is important to them it is important as a homeland from which they can derive pride just as Irish-Americans identify in a vague way with Ireland, Italian-Americans with Italy, and Polish-Americans with Poland. These Israel-first voters might be compared to the Cuban exile community in Miami, where opposing Castro has traditionally been the only issue on which it votes.

The Republican Party now sees the 2012 election as an historic opportunity to part Jews from the Democratic Party in record numbers by casting the vote in terms of loyalty to Israel. Ironically, the insinuation that Jews were more loyal to Israel than to the U.S. was seen as an anti-semitic aspersion. Now some Jewish Republicans are making the charge that those who vote for Barack Hussein Obama are disloyal to Israel. I predict that this will backfire and that Jews will vote for Obama in their traditional percentages, if for no other reason than that they find the Evangelical Right supporters of the Republican Party to be more of a threat to their interests than they find Obama. This will be especially true if the GOP nominates a candidate other than Mitt Romney such as Rick Perry, Herman Cain or Newt Gingrich. And if that weren't enough there is always this Likud rally of Rick Perry to persuade all those J-Street supporters. And even Mitt, after flipping on all major social and economic issues from when he was governor of Massachusetts in order to win the nomination, will then be hard pressed to credibly flop back in order to win the general election.

The Republicans and Foreign Policy

About a month or two ago--I never saved the article--Real Clear World ran an article on the foreign policy experts advising the candidates. The only one to have many names I recognized was then frontrunner and establishment favorite Mitt Romney. He had three names I recognized: Richard Haass, Stephen Hadley, and Mitchell Reiss. Richard Haass was/is an expert on regional conflicts especially the Arab-Israeli conflict and Northern Ireland. He served as a Middle East specialist on the National Security Council in the George H W Bush administration. For Dubya he served as the first American envoy to Northern Ireland, where he played a major role in convincing Gerry Adams that the IRA was actually disarm. Upon leaving there he took up a position with the Council on Foreign Relations that puts out the establishment Foreign Affairs magazine. Stephen Hadley served as Condi Rice's assistant at the National Security Council and then took over during Dubya's second term as National Security Advisor to George Bush. Mitchell Reiss was an expert on nuclear proliferation and a country expert on North Korea. When Haass left Belfast for New York, Reiss became his successor as American envoy. Reiss recently wrote a book exploring the question of when terrorist movements should be co-opted by negotiation and power sharing and when they should be shunned.

Perry relies on figures that he met while serving as governor of Texas. I did not recognize any names. The other candidate who had some recognizable names is Ron Paul. Paul has Leon Hadar, a former journalist working for the Jerusalem Post and the author of two books on American policy in the region, Sandstorm and Quagmire. He advocates an American military and political disengagement from the region. The opinion would be considered mainstream in the Democratic Party but is unsaleable to the Republicans. Because Paul is a libertarian running in a conservative party--a square peg in a round hole--he has no chance of being nominated.

Jon Huntsman, the former governor of Utah and American ambassador to China, basically serves as his own foreign policy advisor. He was a Mormon missionary in Taiwan as a young man, speaks fluent Mandarin Chinese, and is quite knowledgeable about trade matters and economic policy. But he registers at about two percent in the polls and is betting his whole future on New Hampshire, where he will have to compete with Romney, the other Mormon.

So far foreign policy, as distinct from immigration, has hardly registered in the Republican debates. The party is agitated by economic and social policies: abortion, immigration, health care, tax levels and debt. By slowly withdrawing from Iraq and continuing to oversee the assassination of leading Al Qaeda figures around the Middle East, Obama has effectively removed terrorism as a major political issue. Democrats still debate the American presence in Afghanistan; Republicans do not. It is almost a repeat of Vietnam forty years ago, but with the roles of the two parties reversed. The Democrats got us involved in Vietnam and then Nixon oversaw the withdrawal and the GOP spent twenty years talking about the Democrats as the party that was unreliable on national security. Maybe the Democrats can do the same about the Republicans for the next twenty years.

Should Perry or someone else other than Romney end up as the nominee, he (or she) can inherit the establishment foreign policy advisors by default. After all, Kissinger was never a Nixon advisor in the 1960s. He was a Nelson Rockefeller advisor whom Nixon inherited after he won the election in 1968. Obama inherited Clinton's stable of foreign policy advisors once he named her as his secretary of state. But he could have done so even without naming her--anyone who wanted to serve in government in a senior position had nowhere else to go in the short term. 

In American politics the conservatives determine who the Republican nominee is; the progressives determine who the Democratic nominee is. It is then up to the independents, who rarely vote based on foreign affairs, to determine which party's foreign policy establishment serves in office.

As a postscript let me add that on Friday Oct. 7, 2011 Romney gave his first foreign policy address of the race. Here is a link to a commentary on it. (See the article by  James Joyner in the Atlantic on the Sat. Oct. 8 panel.)                        )