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.”

For the past 36 hours, I’ve been reading and listening to analyses of the terms and implications of the recent hostage deal. More will appear in the coming days, and I’ll try to put the best of them in this newsletter. But today I want to share a comment made on Tuesday by the Palestinian analyst Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib. While he and I would probably disagree on numerous points about the current conflict, this analysis is spot on, and goes entirely against most arguments made by those who consider themselves pro-Palestinian, and certainly those chanting for a cease-fire at all costs:

When a cease-fire in Gaza is announced, Hamas’s fascists will do everything they can to frame this as the ultimate victory; they will wear their military uniforms, emerge from their tunnels, stop hiding in schools and displacement centers, and very quickly reassert their control over the coastal enclave. They’ll even get a few Gazans to celebrate and dance for them.

This, I should note, is exactly what has happened. Alkhatib continues:

The reality is that the Islamist terrorism of Hamas, masquerading as “resistance,” has achieved nothing for the Palestinian people except for billions of dollars in wasted resources and tens of thousands of needless deaths, with Gaza in ruins after twenty years following the withdrawal of settlements in 2005. . . . Hamas’s propaganda machine, run by Qatari state media, Al Jazeera Arabic, will work overtime to help the terror group turn a catastrophic disaster into a victory akin to the battles of Stalingrad and Leningrad.

Hamas will also start punishing anyone who criticized or worked against it, and preparing for its next attack. Perhaps Palestinians would have been better off if, instead of granting them a temporary reprieve, the IDF kept fighting until Hamas was utterly defeated.