Westchester County Executive and NY-16 Congressional Candidate George Latimer

How will the reputations of local politicians, some of whom are holding fast to the Israel government in a time of alleged genocide, age?

In the case of previous humanitarian disasters, such as Japanese-American internment during World War II, contemporary responses were often muted. Existing power-arrangements favored the commission of acts later found to be disreputable, and speaking out was a lonesome and unpopular job, or even invited retaliation.1 Years later, it became much easier or even popular to decry these historical crimes. George Latimer, the current County Executive and now Congressional candidate who has accepted 42%, or more than $ 600,000, of his Congressional campaign funding from the the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (“AIPAC”),2, 3 is silent in the face of alleged Israel government war crimes today, but, from the safety of historical distance, happily promoted an event reviewing and condemning the midcentury Japanese-American internment.4

Standing up for protecting civilians is in no way a disparagement of the Jewish people, or the idea of a Jewish state, even if it is a disparagement of the current instantiation of Israeli parliamentary government. Calling such conscientious discomfort with the war “anti-Semitic” – a tactic frequently deployed by AIPAC operatives – raises the stakes terribly for objectors, contributing to the environment of conformity that causes the public to overlook human rights violations. In our history, as in the case of Japanese-American internment, it was generally conformist impulses of one type or another – which seemed perfectly reasonable at the time – that suppressed conscious awareness of violations. Labeling objectors “anti-Semitic” also erases acts of profound decency and conscience by Jewish people themselves, such as the Jewish professor and scholar of historical genocides who is discussed later in this essay for his service as an expert witness that resulted in a Federal court’s stark warning to the nation about the likely fate of the Gaza civilians.

Those who study the most serious human rights abuses usually remark on the critical role of the complicit, the enablers, not just the direct perpetrators.5 Even so, the reputations of those who become complicit in major human rights incidents often survive for quite a while after. Sometimes complicit bureaucrats and elected officials make it to the end of their careers successfully before their reputations come into serious jeopardy. But in the end, they cannot escape the judgment of history, and even now we see old debts coming due for certain figures.

Although Henry Kissinger was still welcome in many courts and many rooms at the end of his life, none of his obituaries in major newspapers were unmarred by the allegations of war crimes that he could never shake. The New York Times’ obituary described him as “both celebrated and reviled,” noting that he accomplished his career, in part, by “sometimes trampling on democratic values.” The Wall Street Journal summarized his life, “German-born academic was a hero to war-weary Americans, but many blamed him for brutalities abroad.” The Millennial-generation editors of the democratic-socialist Jacobin magazine (including founding editor Bhaskar Sunkara, a graduate of Westchester public schools) were less measured in their criticism of Kissinger. “Henry Kissinger is finally dead,” they wrote. “To say he was a bad man verges on cliché, but it is nonetheless a fact.”6

When Kissinger’s descendants one or two generations hence read about their ancestor, they will be robbed of the sense of a bright inheritance, and will each have to find their own way to make peace with his brutality as they incorporate his memory, if at all, into their sense of self.

Local politicians should realize that even though their base of support is older constituents (and financial support skews older still), younger generations, Millennials and Generation Z, are watching them. A January 17-18, 2024 Harvard/Harris poll asked voters, “Do you think that Israel is committing genocide against those in Gaza or is it just trying to defend itself and eliminate Hamas?” By a margin of 57% to 43%, young voters (defined as those in the 18 to 24 age group) said that Israel is “committing genocide against those in Gaza,” far outpacing other age groups in their willingness to reach such a stark conclusion. Will we take their viewpoint, and the weight of the word “genocide,” as a serious complaint based in active and sophisticated consciences, or dismiss it as the overreaction of callow youth?

Just as the criticism of the Japanese-American internment policy became louder and more open with time, I believe that the younger people will never forget when their leaders fell silent in the face of an ongoing genocide because it was more convenient to receive money from AIPAC. The names of figures like George Latimer will always have a certain dark resonance in the minds of the younger generations – generations, who will, in the inevitable circle of life, inherit everything, occupy every position of power and responsibility, and write the history books.

The evidence of extreme war crimes is there, if you are willing to see it. It is not there, if you consider it a career or social necessity to avoid seeing it.

The January 26, 2024 order of the International Court of Justice, which was in parts a 16 to 1 decision, is one canary in the coal mine.

Another canary is the January 31, 2024 decision of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The nonprofit organization Center for Constitutional Rights brought a claim which sought to enjoin the U.S. Federal government from sending military aid to the Israel government. There was a hearing, with submission of evidence and a presentation by an expert witness, Barry Trachtenberg, a professor at Wake Forest University who studies genocide and the Holocaust. The Judge dismissed the claim. The Judge’s grounds for doing so were solid jurisdictional grounds, based on the separation of powers.

But the Judge, Jeffrey S. White, a George W. Bush appointee, took a further step, choosing to include a technically unnecessary comment with no binding legal effect – what lawyers call an obiter dictum, a remark by the way – which morally condemned the Biden Administration for its policy of uncritically supplying the Netanyahu Administration’s military, in astonishingly stark terms.

Judge White also commented, “[T]he undisputed evidence before this Court comports with the finding of the ICJ and indicates that the current treatment of the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip by the Israeli military may plausibly constitute a genocide in violation of international law. Both the uncontroverted testimony of the Plaintiffs and the expert opinion proffered at the hearing on these motions as well as statements made by various officers of the Israeli government indicate that the ongoing military siege in Gaza is intended to eradicate a whole people and therefore plausibly falls within the international prohibition against genocide.”

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Just beneath the surface of the sanitized story we are told regarding the U.S.-Israel relationship is evidence of crimes so disturbing that our natural instinct is to disbelieve them. The existing power-arrangement, influenced by both AIPAC and the broader military-industrial complex, exploits this very natural human tendency to disbelieve the uncomfortable and the disturbing. This very same experience of cognitive dissonance is likely what our forebears experienced when living amidst events like Japanese-American internment. They were not bad people, nor disconnected from their consciences. But many aspects of their contemporary society and its arrangement of political power sent them explicit and implicit signals to doubt and disbelieve the available evidence, to defer to those who appeared credible or authoritative at the time, to stay quiet, to focus on purely local issues, or to simply go along to get along. And, in a striking parallel to the current situation, the backdrop of an existential war made it far easier to accept the government’s claim that its actions were necessary expedients.

In some cases, the judgment of history is the only justice that those who have no contemporaneous defenses will ever get. It’s the only justice available for the slain children of the Gaza strip, or for those Japanese-Americans who were confined in wartime concentration camps7 and passed away before reparations were finally ordered in 1988. Will the reputations of politicians like George Latimer survive this form of judgment?

  1. In the 1940s, only 1% of Americans opposed the internment of Japanese-American non-citizen immigrants, and 25% opposed the internment of Japanese-American citizens. The near-universal condemnation of the policy today makes it easy to forget that those of our forebears who chose to speak out against the policy, especially against the backdrop of wartime passions, must have felt like Quixotic figures who were going against the grain and inviting social ostracism. See West Virginia University Historical Review, Nicholas Taylor, Sept. 2020, “The American Public’s Reaction to the Japanese American Internment.” ↩︎
  2. See The Intercept, Akela Lacy, Feb. 1, 2024, “AIPAC is the Largest Donor, By Far, to Jamaal Bowman’s Primary Challenger.” ↩︎
  3. By cooperating with AIPAC’s determined effort to enforce unreservedly pro-Israel stances among all members of Congress, Latimer is arguably providing cover for the human rights abuses of Israel’s Netanyahu Administration, which has come under scathing criticism from non-governmental organizations, the U.N., and foreign governments. Even though Latimer is not a Federal official yet, the presence of heavily AIPAC-funded candidates like him in the Congressional elections could be seen to embolden Netanyahu, by signaling that the Netanyahu government’s questionable conduct of the Israel-Gaza war will continue to be without serious consequence even under the next Congress. AIPAC’s funding of Latimer is part of a larger pattern, in which Latimer is now a witting or unwitting participant: “The heavy spending in Bowman’s district is part of AIPAC’s wider plans to spend at least $100 million to oust progressive Democrats in the House.” (The Intercept, Akela Lacy, Feb. 1, 2024, “AIPAC is the Largest Donor, By Far, to Jamaal Bowman’s Primary Challenger.”). ↩︎
  4. On February 18, 2024 George Latimer posted on his personal, but public, Facebook page, promoting an event on the same Sunday at the Jay Heritage Center (the historic home of John Jay, a Revolutionary War-era President of the Continental Congress) entitled “Why Did the Internment Camps Happen?” The event was co-sponsored by the Japan Society of Greater Fairfield County and per its announcement would explore “the genesis of the internment camps in America and the long road to reparations.” ↩︎
  5. John Stuart Mill, 1867, Inaugural Address at St. Andrews: “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject.”; Utah Law Review, Victoria J. Barnett, Aug. 2017, “The Changing View of the ‘Bystander’ in Holocaust Scholarship: Historical, Ethical, and Political Implications” (“The role of ‘bystanders’ has been a central theme in discussions about the ethical legacy of the Holocaust.”). ↩︎
  6. Jacobin, René Rojas, Bhaskar Sunkara, and Jonah Walters, Nov. 29, 2023, “The Verdict on Henry Kissinger”; see also (reprint) In These Times, René Rojas, Bhaskar Sunkara, and Jonah Walters, Dec. 4, 2023, “Henry Kissinger Died a Better Death Than He Deserved.” ↩︎
  7. The Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum’s article on the Japanese-American internment describes the wartime internment camps as “concentration camps,” but also indicates the use of a contemporary euphemism: “These concentration camps were called ‘relocation camps.'” Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum, “Japanese-American Internment.” ↩︎