Colours of the rainbow
Christopher Hitchens
Washington Sooner or later there had to be a confron- tation between Walter Mondale and Gary Hart on foreign policy. As the world's most cosmopolitan city, and as the grudg- ing host to the United Nations, New York was perhaps the inevitable setting for this argument to take place. In the morning, the Candidates would be photographed wear- ing shawls and yamulkas at a midtown synagogue. By the afternoon, they were em- bracing Greek Orthodox prelates in Queens. The evening would find them relaxing over a bowl of Spaghetti alle vongole in Little Italy. Bilingual staffers were at a premium, and earnest position papers were churned out touching every global issue, from Tamil independence to Korean security, which has its 'melting pot' constituency.
New York mirrored the national cam- paign rather more closely when it came to the domestic line-up. Once again, Mondale was the candidate of the big guns and the fat cats. Both Governor Cuomo and Mayor Koch put their machines at his disposal (completely neglecting the Connecticut voters in the meantime) while Hart and his volunteers shuttled between New York and New Haven. It was Mayor Koch who made the remark of the campaign. Asked his opi- nion of the third candidate, Jesse Jackson, he replied that if Jackson were to get the nomination he, Ed Koch, would not bother to vote at all in November.
This answer laid an unmistakable emphasis on a conflict which all three can- didates have an interest in keeping quiet. The Democratic coalition is currently im- perilled by a growing split between American blacks and American Jews. When Mondale chose New York as the place to attack Hart for being soft on Israel, he knew what he was doing. When Hart panicked, and dropped his previous insistence on negotiations, he knew where he was. When Jesse Jackson opted to ap- pear before a pro-Palestinian rally, he acknowledged that he had nothing more to lose. The argument over the Middle East has become an allegory for a quarrel among Democrats — a quarrel that could be Ronald Reagan's secret weapon in November.
One says that the quarrel is among Democrats because it remains true that most Jews and almost all blacks vote the Democratic ticket. Thus, when Jesse Jackson referred to Jews as 'Hyrnies' and to New York as 'Hymietown' he was drama- tising the most awkward and painful ques- tion that the Democrats face. The remarks, which he first denied and then admitted a few weeks ago, have been forgotten by many liberals as quickly as seems decently possible. But they have not been forgotten by the mass of Jewish voters, which helps to explain the unusual pressure put upon Hart and Mondale to endorse everything Israel does. The ostensible issue — whether or not to move the United States Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem — is a minor one. It has only become emblematic because of the rending anxiety among Jews that a Democratic nominee will sell out Israel in order to make a deal with Jesse Jackson.
Jackson himself shows every symptom of the vulgar anti-semite. Even before his use of coarse epithets became publicly known, he had suggested that most exploiting mer- chants in the ghetto were Jewish, and that Richard Nixon's sinister pair of aides, Haldeman and Ehrlichman, were Jewish too. (The latter crack was especially nasty and stupid, given Nixon's well-documented dislike of Jews and the firm German ancestry of his crooked advisers.) Jackson has blamed his bad press on Jewish reporters — the man who reported the `Hymie' slur was black — and once attack- ed a non-Jewish journalist for his Zionist prejudices simply because the reporter in question had a name that sounded Jewish.
In the person of Mayor Ed Koch, Jackson has more or less met his own reflec- tion. Koch doesn't need the black vote in New York, and he doesn't mind saying so. He has been criticised even by a Republican Justice Department for the way in which his districting and allocation policies discriminate against Harlem and the black community. He retained, as his health and hospitals supervisor, a man who used the word 'nigger' in public. In his memoirs, recently published to coincide with the New York primary, he opines: 'I find the black community very anti- semitic . my experience with blacks is that they're basically anti-semitic .. I think whites are basically anti-black.'
Stirring stuff from the mayor of the world's most multi-ethnic community. Koch has also, repeatedly, demanded that the United Nations be asked to leave New York. His reasoning is that a body so critical of Israel has no place here.
Both of the historic confrontations be- tween American blacks and American Jews took place in New York. The first was the Brooklyn teachers' strike of 1968-9. The se- cond was the firing of Andrew Young as United States Ambassador to the United Nations. In the Ocean Hill and Brownsville areas of Brooklyn in the late Sixties there was a movement by parents for school integration. The initiative was opposed by
The spectator 7 April 1984 the teachers' union. Not to mince words' most of the parents were black and most of the teachers were Jewish. When the teachers went on strike rather than imPle" ment the plan for integration and what was then called 'community control', they trig- gered more fury and resentment than they can have bargained for. Low and miserable things were said by both sides, and Mayor Lindsay's brave New York was appalled by the spectacle of two historically oppressed groups saying foul and unforgivable things about one another.
Thus ended a period in which Jews had
been the most brave and prominent sup- porters of the civil rights movement. Of the white volunteers murdered by the Ku K1 Klan in the South, almost all were Jews. Most of the donations to Martin Luther King's crusade came from Jewish soure. s. So did a great deal of the political advice and Congressional lobbying. Traces of this honeymoon still persist, and opinion Polls shows consistently that blacks have the least anti-Jewish feeling of any American group. But domestic and foreign rivalries have con- spired to push the two communities apart, at least at the political level.
Ten years after the Ocean Hills
Brownsville affair, President Carter sacked his best-known black colleague because he had offended the Israeli lobby. By meeting privately with a representative of the PLO at the United Nations, Andrew young had done no more than many State Department and diplomatic officials had done. So mos blacks did not believe Carter's claim, ln pre-election year, that the firing was, justified by a violation of protocol. The fact that some Jewish groups had openlY called for Young's dismissal did not help matters. Young was an enthusiast for the causes of the Third World, and was known as a critic of Israel's intimacy with Solid!. Africa. In the eyes of many pro-Israeli groups, this made him an automatic men' ber of the Afro-Asia hypocrites' bloc at the UN, and thus fair game. In the eyes ot black Americans, his sacking was a dear, case of victimisation. After all, had no. Milton Wolf, American Ambassador .t° Austria, met the PLO and got away with It •7 It might be too facile to see a metaphor here, with Israel moving from underdog,t° superpower, and American Jews moving In- to the middle class, while black American; remain, like the Third World, at the end °„ the queue. But Reagan did rather we" among Jewish voters last time, and can ex- pect no black vote of any size at all in the autumn. He can sit the argument out. It has repeatedly been proven impossible for a Democrat to win the presidency t without the support of a coalition. Tha coalition has to include a plurality of trade unionists, of blacks, of Jews and of the bien-pensant middle class. New York show" ed that no one Democratic candidate ati!: bid for all these groups simultaneously, and that each of them was limited to one or rainbow `otwhe ernadins.bow'. We all know
other stripe of what Jesse Jackson absurdly where the
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