1968_4_arabisraelwar

AMERICAN PUBLIC OPINION / 225
by deference": "The traditionalist Communists deferred to Moscow; the
militant Communists deferred to Peking; the non-Communist leftists deferred
to the Third World; and many a Jewish leftist simply deferred to the
Arabs." 25
Like Caesar's Gaul, the Left (recently) has been divided into three parts:
(1) the democratic independent Left, including the Socialist party and small
groups associated with Dissent and New Politics; (2) the nihilistic, anarchistic,
or individualistic Left, usually categorized as "New Left," whose
groups mostly align themselves with the so-called Third World; and (3) the
totalitarian Left, consisting of the Communist Party, U.S.A. (CPUSA),
whose loyalty is to the Soviet Union, and its schismatic spinoff, the Progressive
Labor party (PLP), which supports Communist China. Somewhere
along this continuum are the black nationalist groups, particularly the Student
Non-violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), whose loyalties are
sometimes with the Third World and sometimes with Communist China.
Israel and Vietnam
The only issue uniting these diverse leftist groups has been their opposition
to America's involvement in the war in Vietnam. The Israel crisis shattered
that agreement. One observer, himself active in the New Left, remarked:
It is precisely because so many of the Left rank-and-file feel both existential
and rational ties to the people of Israel, while the radical ideologues at the top
are in almost complete sympathy with the politics of Israel's enemies, that there
have developed within every part of the peace and rights constituency fissures
shattering the fragile unities cemented by the war in Vietnam. 26
The fact that many liberals and some leftists appeared to be asking the
American government to do in the Middle East what they wanted it to stop
doing in Vietnam, threatened the peace movement. The historian Arthur
Schlesinger, Jr., refused to sign a public appeal for American support of
Israel (New York Times, June 7, 1967) because he thought it was inconsistent
to favor unilateral intervention in one part of the world, while opposing
it in another. (Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith and poet
Robert Lowell also declined to sign that statement, Lowell because he opposed
all wars.)
Just as nationalism and national loyalties had torn apart and paralyzed the
Second Socialist International on the eve of World War I, so nationality—in
this case, Jewishness and identification with Israel—bitterly divided the Left
and the critics of the war in Vietnam. Penn Kemble, chairman of the Young
People's Socialist League, expressed this concern ("Crisis Splits New Left,"
New America, June 18):
25 M. S. Amoni, "The American Left and the Middle East," Midstream, January 1968, pp.
58-68.
26 Martin Peretz, "The American Left and Israel," Commentary, November 1967, pp. 27-34.