In 1942, Elmer Berger, an American Reform rabbi unhappy with Reform’s decision to drop its opposition to Zionism, founded the American Council for Judaism (ACJ). Its purpose was to oppose Jewish statehood on the grounds that Jews constitute a religious group rather than a people, that Jews should be loyal only to the countries in which they live, and that, in Berger’s words, the “integrity of Judaism” needs to be defended against the “pollutions of Zionism’s politics.” As a result, Berger developed a friendship with an Arab intellectual who would later become involved in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and gave lectures on such topics as “How Should Arabs Present Their Case to the American Public?” His writing would be translated into Arabic and cited heavily in works produced by the PLO Research Center.

Jonathan Gribetz cites one of these works:

As Anis Sayegh wrote in his foreword to the April 1969 book Isra’il wa-Yahud al-‘Alam (“Israel and World Jewry”), the links Israel claimed to Jewish citizens of other countries made it an exception in the world of modern states. Indeed, according to the author, the asserted links between Israel and world Jewry were “illegal in terms of international political principles and international law.”

[The book’s author] identified what for him was a “glimmer of hope”: that many Jews opposed Israel’s claims of responsibility for “the Jewish people.” The publications of Elmer Berger and others associated with the ACJ filled a significant portion of [the] bibliography: twenty of the 85 English-language sources listed were either written by Berger or published by the ACJ.

What’s noteworthy about Sayegh’s argument is that, even as it draws on Berger’s case against Jewish nationalism, it also boils down to an assertion that Israel is bad because it is Jewish—not because it (for instance) oppresses Palestinians. Gribetz than takes a closer look at Berger’s career:

Berger’s motivations remain open to debate. What is clear, however, is that he was right on the money in thinking that the more his views were perceived as part of internal American Jewish discourse and motivated by “authentically” American Jewish values and interests, the better these views served Arab critics of Israel.

Another layer of complexity . . . is the fact that Elmer Berger apparently had, as late as the 1950s, professional ties to the Central Intelligence Agency. The historian Hugh Wilford has argued that the network of the ACJ and the American Friends of the Middle East, on the board of which Berger served, was “both a government front and a lobby group with an agenda of its own.”

Yesterday, the beepers used by hundreds of Hizballah operatives were detonated. Noah Rothman puts this ingenious attack in the context of the overall war between Israel and the Iran-backed terrorist group:

[W]hile the disabling of an untold number of Hizballah operatives is remarkable, it’s also ominous. This week, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant told reporters that the hour is nearing when Israeli forces will have to confront Iran’s cat’s-paw in southern Lebanon directly, in order to return the tens of thousands of Israelis who fled their homes along Lebanon’s border under fire and have not yet been able to return. Today’s operation may be a prelude to the next phase of Israel’s defensive war, a dangerous one in which the IDF will face off against an enemy with tens of thousands of fighters and over 150,000 rockets and missiles trained on Israeli cities.

Seth Frantzman, meanwhile, focuses on the specific damage the pager bombings have likely done to Hizballah:

This will put the men in hospital for a period of time. Some of them can go back to serving Hizballah, but they will not have access to one of their hands. These will most likely be their dominant hand, meaning the hand they’d also use to hold the trigger of a rifle or push the button to launch a missile.

Hizballah has already lost around 450 fighters in its eleven-month confrontation with Israel. This is a significant loss for the group. While Hizballah can replace losses, it doesn’t have an endlessly deep [supply of recruits]. This is not only because it has to invest in training and security ahead of recruitment, but also because it draws its recruits from a narrow spectrum of Lebanese society.

The overall challenge for Hizballah is not just replacing wounded and dead fighters. The group will be challenged to . . . roll out some other way to communicate with its men. The use of pagers may seem archaic, but Hizballah apparently chose to use this system because it assumed the network could not be penetrated. . . . It will also now be concerned about the penetration of its operational security. When groups like Hizballah are in chaos, they are more vulnerable to making mistakes.