Dual Loyalties

JERUSALEM — Haviv Ret­tig responds to the often-repeated accu­sa­tion that Amer­i­can Jews are more loyal to Israel than the United States:

In Fed­er­al­ist Paper No. 51, James Madi­son, chief archi­tect of America’s con­sti­tu­tional sys­tem and later its fourth pres­i­dent, presents an argu­ment for the new Con­sti­tu­tion by reject­ing the very exis­tence of a uni­fied national inter­est — some­thing which must result in oppres­sion of those deemed out­side the con­sen­sus: “It is of great impor­tance in a repub­lic not only to guard the soci­ety against the oppres­sion of its rulers, but to guard one part of the soci­ety against the injus­tice of the other part. Dif­fer­ent inter­ests nec­es­sar­ily exist in dif­fer­ent classes of cit­i­zens. If a major­ity be united by a com­mon inter­est, the rights of the minor­ity will be insecure.”

In order to pre­vent the oppres­sion of the minor­ity by the major­ity, Madi­son argues for an Amer­ica that is “bro­ken into so many parts, inter­ests, and classes of cit­i­zens, that the rights of indi­vid­u­als, or of the minor­ity, will be in lit­tle dan­ger from inter­ested com­bi­na­tions of the majority.”

Only in “the mul­ti­plic­ity of inter­ests” can minori­ties and indi­vid­u­als be secure.

To remain free, Amer­ica must be a mosaic of self-interested par­ties loyal only to one shared premise — the insti­tu­tions estab­lished by the Con­sti­tu­tion. This is Madison’s under­stand­ing of national unity.

I would just add a few other com­ments. In this con­text, I can only speak for myself.

I am a cit­i­zen of both Israel and the United States. Do I have dual loy­al­ties? Of course. I love both countries. But the implicit premise in the ques­tion is that such a feel­ing is bad. “Dual loy­alty” only means that a per­son has two loy­al­ties; it does not mean that he places one over another.

I’ll let you in on a secret: All peo­ple have mul­ti­ple loy­al­ties in their lives. Peo­ple are tied to their spouses, their chil­dren, their jobs, many things. It is mean­ing­less to ask a per­son to choose between loy­al­ties because con­flicts never arise. When some­one asks an Amer­i­can Jew to choose between Israel and the United States, it makes just as much sense to ask a father to choose between his two children.

The issue is not dual loy­alty; the issue is that anti-Semites fre­quently use this tired accu­sa­tion to hide their irra­tional hatred.