This past July, two young Americans, Max Steinberg of California and Sean Carmeli of Texas, were killed while fighting Hamas. They were serving in the Israel Defense Forces during Operation Protective Edge, Israel’s five-week war in Gaza. In the American media, their deaths became an occasion for raising the issue of lone soldiers—men and women who serve in the IDF but have no immediate family in Israel. Why, journalists asked, would Americans fight for Israel? And what does their service for the Jewish state say about their allegiance to America? As with most Israel-related matters that enter public debate these days, the discussion was grossly distorted and ultimately appropriated by those who sought to indict Israel and its American supporters. And as with many conversations concerning Israel, this one gave off more than a whiff of anti-Semitism.
The repeated charge against lone soldiers is that their sacrifice for Israel is proof of compromised or nonexistent loyalty to the United States. As a proud Jew, a proud American, and a former lone soldier who completed his IDF service in 2012, I am in a position to recognize this slander for what it is. The calumny against American Jews who fight for Israel is, in the end, a fashionable manifestation of a timeworn lie about the character of the Jewish people as a whole. And like all such lies, it makes its way into polite conversation in the guise of considered opinion.
My time in the IDF did not contradict or weaken my loyalty to America. It, in fact, affirmed and strengthened my deep belief in the United States and its founding principles. But before I explain my reasons for joining the IDF, let us briefly consider some examples of the criticisms heaped upon lone soldiers.
Days after the 24-year-old Steinberg was killed, Slate’s Allison Benedikt wrote an article blaming his death partially on Birthright, the organization founded by Charles Bronfman and Michael Steinhardt that has enabled hundreds of thousands of young American Jews to visit Israel. It was on a Birthright trip that Steinberg decided to join the IDF. For Benedikt, the very effort to get Jews interested in Israel is suspect. “You spend hundreds of millions of dollars to convince young Jews that they are deeply connected to a country that desperately needs their support?” she asked rhetorically. “This is what you get.” She was even more pointed in her assessment of lone-soldiering. Once an American Jew joins the IDF, she wrote, his “fundamental identity” becomes Israeli. That is an inescapably shabby way of speaking about a young Californian recently killed by Hamas.
But, then, American lone soldiers are often accused of harboring a shifty “dual loyalty,” with their affections divided between the United States and Israel. In some ways, this “dual loyalty” canard is more potent than an accusation of outright treason; its slightly weaker suggestion of duplicity allows for wider acceptance. In May 2014, two months before Operation Protective Edge began, the Anti-Defamation League released the findings of the “ADL Global 100,” an extensive survey of global anti-Semitic sentiment. Of 11 stereotypical anti-Semitic statements, the one concerning dual loyalty received the highest response. In the United States, 31 percent of those polled said that the statement “Jews are more loyal to Israel than [their native country]” was “probably true.” This number is more than three times higher than the 9 percent of American adults who claim to possess anti-Semitic views. Thus, the dual-loyalty charge allows anti-Zionists, anti-Semites, and those who simply don’t know any better to advance claims of Jewish deceit while they deny anti-Semitism outright.
Such perceptions are fed by figures of dubious authority who frequently defame lone soldiers. In the Arab Daily News, Aref Assaf, president of the American Arab Forum and the first Arab-American member of the New Jersey governor’s Ethnic Advisory Council, wrote that Americans who serve in Israel’s military have “unabashed dual national loyalties” and “forsak[e] their worthiness of American citizenship.” Alan Sabrosky, a conspiracy theorist and former director of studies at the U.S. Army War College, has written that “a large majority of American Jews…espouse a form of political bigamy called ‘dual loyalty,’” particularly the many “Rahm Emanuels out there who serve in the IDF but NOT in the U.S. armed forces” (emphasis in original).
Sabrosky justifies his larger slur against Jews by citing the alleged perfidy of lone soldiers. But accusing Jews of subversion is done both deductively and inductively. The deductive logic begins with the premise that lone soldiers are dual loyalists. Since they are also Jews, it is deduced that Jews in general are dual loyalists. The inductive version begins with the premise that all Jews are dual loyalists. Since lone soldiers are Jews, they are therefore dual loyalists. Either way, the claim is bandied about with surprising ease, and lone soldiers don’t get the benefit of the doubt. These generalizations are not merely the province of fringe publications. Last July, while Operation Protective Edge was under-way, William Pfaff, writing in the Chicago Tribune, noted simply, “American Jews place their loyalty to Israel first.”
One high-profile former lone soldier who has come in for repeated abuse is the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, who served in the IDF during the first intifada in the 1980s. In 2010, controversy erupted over an article he wrote about a potential Israeli attack on Iran. Glenn Greenwald, commenting on the article, wrote that Goldberg’s “loyalty to Israel is so overarching [because] he actually went and joined the IDF.” On social media, Goldberg continues to be frequently dismissed as a dual loyalist, despite his ongoing criticism of Israeli policy. The charge of a treasonous heart leaves a stain that doesn’t easily wash out.
Last September, the New York Times columnist David Brooks revealed in an interview with Haaretz that his son currently serves as a lone soldier. This made Brooks a suspect of dual loyalty by blood. His revelation prompted a debate in the media about whether he was obligated to disclose his son’s IDF service to Times readers, because he (very occasionally) writes about Israel. In a blog post from October, Margaret Sullivan, the Times’s public-opinion editor, concluded that Brooks did have such an obligation, stating that “many” of her readers were “outraged” to learn that Brooks’s son was, in the words of one, a “foreign mercenary.” It was shocking that Sullivan would even use this phrase, which suggests that its subject joined the Israeli military for the money—and Sullivan never bothered to question this vile imputation. She wrote finally: “I do think that a one-time acknowledgment [from Brooks] of this situation in print (not in an interview with another publication) is completely reasonable.”
Sullivan’s blog shifts the focus from Brooks, where it belongs, to his son, where it does not, which many readers use as a point of departure to blithely accuse lone soldiers of disloyalty. One commentator equates “choosing Israel’s military over America’s” with “choosing Israel over America,” while another states that the significant number of American Jews in the IDF “raises questions about where their loyalties lie.” More than 80 people agreed with these comments. In a separate piece, journalist Steve Sailer echoed this sentiment: “Nobody expects Jews like the Brookses [sic] to be more loyal to their fellow American citizens and less loyal to their foreign co-ethnics.”
What’s missing from the bad-faith speculation about the motives of lone soldiers are the views of lone soldiers themselves. We’re rarely asked about our motives. So here, then, is why I chose to serve in the Israel Defense Forces.
In the United States, the concept of national loyalty is different from what it is anywhere else in the world. America is exceptional because, unlike other countries, our national character is not defined by ethnicity, religion, or culture, but by our belief in liberty, representative government, and equality before the law. We are also unique in our willingness to defend these values. For any American, protecting these blessings is the noblest demonstration of patriotism. As a Jewish American who feels it incumbent on himself to defend the Jewish people, I am doubly fortunate. The Jewish state is the only Middle Eastern country that believes in and upholds the same principles. Defending the region’s only free, democratic, and pluralistic society against the forces of intolerance and extremism gave me the opportunity to safeguard the values that America holds dear, and to do so while protecting the Jewish homeland.
Just as important, my time in the IDF took me to the frontlines of the fight against the sworn enemies of both Israel and America. Indeed, American soldiers and veterans often tell me they admire my decision to join the IDF. They believe, as I do, that I fought the same ideological forces that they fought in Afghanistan and the Middle East. The primary struggle of our time is between Western, liberal democracies and radical, Islamic fundamentalism. Whether I was stationed on the Lebanese border or conducting internal-security missions in the West Bank, I defended innocent people against Islamist killers. I faced the same ideological enemy that attacked the United States on 9/11. With whom, after all, is Israel usually at war? Hamas, a terrorist organization whose leaders have said that “America is on its way to utter destruction” and that “God [has] declared war against America.” Then there’s Hezbollah, an Iranian-supported terrorist group whose leader, Hassan Nasrallah, said, “‘Death to America’ was, is, and will stay our slogan!” I joined the IDF in part to help ensure that Jews would never again face a Holocaust. But protecting the Jewish people also meant doing battle with those who live and die to see America perish. These two interests are complementary and require no reconciliation. Those who don’t readily see the compatibility of these interests are the ones whose motivations deserve rigorous questioning.
On my base every Fourth of July, we lone soldiers taught the Israelis “The Star-Spangled Banner.” And it’s no accident that the Israelis with whom I served admired the United States and were always keen to discuss American culture and politics. As the United States supplies the IDF with much of its equipment (to say nothing of political support), Israelis are acutely aware of America’s role in helping them defend Israel. My rifle was an American-issued M-4 with “Property of U.S. Government” etched on its side. Our gauze packages were, oddly enough, made near my hometown. The plane we jumped out of was a converted C-130 Hercules, with English instructions imprinted on the fuselage.
But for all the Israeli appreciation, there was a special camaraderie among lone soldiers. Contrary to Allison Benedikt’s foul suggestion, there was no possibility of forgetting that we were American. Most of us had no friends or family in Israel. Without the support network that our Israeli peers enjoyed, we relied on one another other for support. When on leave from base, the Israelis returned to their homes; lone soldiers returned to empty apartments. But we also knew we were goodwill ambassadors of a sort. Many members of my unit were shocked to learn that I chose to leave a comfortable life in America to serve in the IDF. But after I had explained my decision to serve, they were grateful to have me fighting by their side. Lone soldiers are highly motivated, and the Israeli soldiers and officers recognized our strength and determination. By our words and deeds, we fostered respect for America among Israelis.
My experience is borne out by the facts on lone-soldiering. For one thing, the U.S. government does not deem lone soldiers to be, in any sense, disloyal. It is not illegal for American Jews to serve in the IDF. In Wiborg v. U.S. (1896), the Supreme Court held that “it was not a crime under U.S. law for an individual to go abroad for the purpose of enlisting in a foreign army.” Americans constitute the single largest nationality among an estimated 2,500 to 4,000 non-Israelis in the IDF; in any given year, between 750 and 1,000 Americans serve as lone soldiers. This strong American presence is a testament to the compatibility of American and Israeli values and priorities.
Those who single out lone-soldiering in Israel universally ignore the long and well-established tradition of Americans fighting in the armies of many other foreign countries. In World War I, Theodore Roosevelt’s son Kermit served in the British military. The poet Alan Seeger fought in the French Foreign Legion and died during the Battle of the Somme. Before the United States entered World War II, American pilots formed the Eagle Squadron of the British Royal Air Force and fought in the Battle of Britain. During that battle, Billy Fiske became the first American pilot killed in the war, nearly 16 months before the attack on Pearl Harbor.
Is Israel treated exceptionally owing to some sort of problem with the American soldiers who have served there? Hardly. Critics offer no evidence that any former lone soldier who served in the IDF ever committed any act or made any statement threatening the American people or benefiting Israel at the expense of the United States. Those who accuse American Jews of dual loyalty rely on presumption, not proof. Indeed, former lone soldiers can and sometimes do join the U.S. military. Daniel Houten, for example, voluntarily enlisted in the IDF in 2009 after the U.S. Army rejected him for not having a high-school diploma. After 18 months of service in the IDF, he returned to the United States, earned his GED, and joined the Georgia Army National Guard.
The criticism of American Jews who serve in Israel comes down to a classic disparagement that predates lone-soldiering and even the State of Israel itself—namely, that Jews are disloyal citizens of whatever country in which they reside. The disapproval of lone soldiers, like the disapproval of many other phenomena concerning Israel in the 21st century, is little more than classic anti-Semitism, barely updated.
