Jerome Slater Pulls Intellectual/Historical Rug Out From Under Goldberg

Jerome Slater is an important scholar for at least 2 reasons: he brought Israel's New Historians to realist/leftist academic circles in the U.S. and then made his own contribution to that school many years ago. And lately he has demonstrated that the elite American press  has provided watered-down reports to the American establishment surrounding the true state of affairs in Israel/Palestine, thereby undermining the opinion-making and policy-making process.

Today Slater sent me an incisive criticism of Jeffrey Goldberg's recent shift. On lead guitar, Jerry Slater:

Jeffrey Goldberg is perhaps today’s most prominent American journalist specializing in Israel and the U.S.-Israeli relationship.  His work regularly appears in all the best places: the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker,  Atlantic, the New Republic.  That fact alone reveals the wretched state of American discourse on Israeli matters. 

Here are just a few of Goldberg’s recent contributions to public discourse:

In a 2006 Washington Post review of Jimmy Carter’s book, Palestine: Not Apartheid, Goldberg wrote: “Carter, not unlike God, has long been disproportionately interested in the sins of the Chosen People.  He is famously a partisan of the Palestinians…And God, unlike Carter, does not manufacture sins to hang around the necks of Jews when no sins have actually been committed.”

In the same article, he repeated an absurd contention he has made elsewhere: “The Arabs who surround Israel have launched numerous wars against it, all meant to snuff it out of existence.”  Really? Which ones?  His best case no doubt is the 1948 war, but it is still a poor one, for the serious historical scholarship has long challenged the argument that the invading Arab armies intended, let alone had the capability, of snuffing Israel out of existence.  The next Arab-Israeli war was the 1956 Suez War—but that was initiated by Israel, not “the Arabs,” and it was part of  a coordinated British-French-Israeli attack designed to humiliate Egypt’s Nasser and for Israel to seize the Sinai Peninsula.

The third war was that of June 1967, but that was also initiated by Israel, not by the Arabs.  To be sure, initially the Israeli attack was widely seen as a justified Israeli preemptive attack against an Egyptian arms buildup in the Sinai that was intended to destroy Israel; however, for many years that view has been challenged by serious Israeli and other historians, who argue that Nasser blundered into a war he did not intend.  Indeed, it is not just historians who now reject the notion that Israel’s existence was at stake; none other than Menachem Begin, not known as a leftist New Historian, publicly called the 1967 war “a war of choice.”

What about the next war, the 1973 Suez conflict?   Initiated by Egypt, yes—but just about no one thinks that Sadat’s intention was to snuff out Israel.  Rather, his purpose was to seize part of the Sinai in order to force Israel to negotiate a settlement that would return the rest of Sinai—seized by Israel in 1967—to Egypt.  And the strategy worked—much to the true interests not only of Egypt, but Israel.

What’s left—the various Israeli attacks on Lebanon, as in 1982 and 2006?  Wars of “no choice,” Israel’s very existence on the line?

Now we come to Goldberg on Mearsheimer and Walt.  In his notorious 2007 New Republic review of the Israel Lobby, Goldberg returned to his Carter review tactic of smearing serious critics of Israel with the barely-concealed charge of anti-Semitism: “the book remains true to the malignant and dishonest spirit of the [earlier M/W London Review] article. It represents the most sustained attack, the most mainstream attack, against the political enfranchisement of American Jews since the era of Father Coughlin.”   Gosh, that bad?   I had thought Mearsheimer and Walt were criticizing the power of the Israel lobby in the formulation of American policy towards Israel; I must have missed the part where they called for denying the Jews their political rights.

In the same review and elsewhere, Goldberg challenges the M/W contention, shared by nearly all serious observers and indeed by bin Laden himself, who ought to know, that an important part of the motivation for al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attack was rage at U.S. support for the Israeli occupation of the Palestinians.  Here’s how Goldberg characterizes the M/W assessment: “This is not QUITE the view, commonly heard in the Arab world, that Israel had a direct hand in the destruction of the World Trade Center…but it is still heinous.” (emphasis added).

Remarkably enough, it turns out the Goldberg actually agrees with what is clearly Mearsheimer and Walt’s central contention, that the power of the Israel lobby is the main reason for U.S. support of Israeli policies that harm the national interests of both countries. Even in his New Republic attack, Goldberg wrote that he thought that Israel should “slowly wean itself from American aid, BUT AIPAC HAS TO AGREE WITH THIS" (emphasis added),  evidently failing to notice that he was providing powerful support for the M/W argument.

Most recently, in a May 18 New York Times oped that is already becoming famous—or notorious—Goldberg again attacks M/W (in passing), but concludes that the U.S. government won’t be able to “talk, in blunt terms, about the full range of dangers faced by Israel, including the danger that Israel has brought on itself…until Aipac and the leadership of the American Jewish community allow it to happen.”   What?  As Max Boot in Commentary in effect protests: Isn’t that precisely what Mearsheimer and Walt are arguing? Goldberg angrily denies it, but of course Boot is right—indeed, if anything Goldberg’s wording is less qualified than that of Mearsheimer/Walt.  Speaking personally, I wouldn’t go quite as far as M/W, let alone Goldberg. My own view is that Mearsheimer and Walt sometimes exaggerate the power of the Israel lobby, and those exaggerations have unfortunately caused their much more important and compelling arguments, concerning the irrational policies of both the United States and Israel, to be largely ignored.

I suppose Goldberg is entitled to deny, however lamely, that he has again accepted the message, even as he attacks the messengers. But he is certainly not entitled to do so by calling his adversaries (in an interview with Shmuel Rosner in the May 22 Haaretz),  “the vile Walt and the vile Mearsheimer.” John Mearsheimer and Steve Walt are two of the most internationally eminent and renowned scholars and public intellectuals in the field of international politics, chaired professors at two of America's greatest universities, and their book is without a doubt a most serious work that is bound to have a major impact on both scholarship and general public discourse.  To sneer at them as anti-Semites and refer to them--personally and for emphasis, individually--as “vile” is simply, well, vile,  and far beyond the pale of any intellectually or morally respectable discourse.

Will Goldberg’s latest travesty discredit him as a serious pundit in all those famous U.S. newspapers and magazines?  If you believe that, then I am the Queen of Sweden.

Weiss's comment: I'm especially grateful to Slater for a few points here. One, reviewing the history of Israel's wars. Fascinating, and Tony Judt agrees. Will our mainstream discourse ever entertain these ideas? First it has to have some Nakba, for breakfast.Another vital point is Slater's defense of Walt and Mearsheimer as the serious scholars they are. I applaud Slater for affirming this, and it's the more stirring because he disagrees with them on key points. Let's not forget thededication of their book, to Samuel Huntington: "Sam has always tackled big and important questions, and he has answered these questions in ways that the rest of the world could not ignore. Although each of us has disagreed with him on numerous occasions over the years--and sometimes vehemently and publicly--he never held those disagreements against us and was never anything but gracious and supportive of our work."[my emphasis] And also I'd note Slater's defenestration of Goldberg on the smear that it is antisemitic to say that the Israel/Palestine issue played a role in the motivation of the hijackers on 9/11. Craziness. 

Comments

[David]

May 29, "Israel, Palestine, and the U.S. Congress: Realities and Opportunities"

Council for the National Interest is gathering an interesting group on Capitol Hill next week. Participants are--

-Dr. John Mearsheimer
-Uri Avnery
-Menachem Klein
-Honorable Edward Peck
-Honorable David Newton
-Honorable James Abourezk

http://www.cnifoundation.org/

[MM]

But the CFR, the lite imperialism of the Harvard Carr Center people (Obama's crowd), bad genocide theory (genocides not committed or caused by American/Zionist interests), all that is fine, Phil?

Afghanistan is a just war, is that it? To "get Bin Laden"?

Seriously?

How can M&W discuss the Israel Lobby without a critical word about the military industrial complex in the U.S. since WWII? I mean what do people like Richard Perle really do for a living? (M&W won't say: they "occupy positions," "[are] signatories," "[are] among [USCFL's] major activists.")

It's just kinda funny because I don't know anyone who gets paid merely to "occupy [a] position", or for just signing things, or just being an "activist"... Certainly not on Perle's paygrade. (He has a vacation home in the south of France, unlike most activists and letter signers I know.)

What type of thing does Richard Perle actually do?

Sy Hersh, do you know?

"Perle is also a managing partner in a venture-capital company called Trireme Partners L.P., which was registered in November, 2001, in Delaware. Trireme's main business, according to a two-page letter that one of its representatives sent to Khashoggi last November, is to invest in companies dealing in technology, goods, and services that are of value to homeland security and defense. The letter argued that the fear of terrorism would increase the demand for such products in Europe and in countries like Saudi Arabia and Singapore.

The letter mentioned the firm's government connections prominently: "Three of Trireme's Management Group members currently advise the U.S. Secretary of Defense by serving on the U.S. Defense Policy Board, and one of Trireme's principals, Richard Perle, is chairman of that Board." The two other policy-board members associated with Trireme are Henry Kissinger, the former Secretary of State (who is, in fact, only a member of Trireme's advisory group and is not involved in its management), and Gerald Hillman, an investor and a close business associate of Perle's who handles matters in Trireme's New York office. The letter said that forty-five million dollars had already been raised, including twenty million dollars from Boeing; the purpose, clearly, was to attract more investors, such as [Saudi Arabian arms broker and former BCCI client Adnan] Khashoggi and [Saudi Arabian industrialist Harb Saleh al-] Zuhair."

http://www.variant.randomstate.org/17texts/17seymorehersh.html

(The New Yorker has knocked the piece into the memory hole, I'm sure it was only an honest mistake.)

So ok, Richard Perle is making his money financing war, basically. Not unlike Abrams and Iran-Contra.

How can W&M discuss Israel without discussing the disastrous path of American militarism, the arms industry, the arms trade, Iran Contra and BCCI, all of these phenomena directly related to zionism's special relationship with the U.S.?

That's where the lobby-centric arguments kind of fall apart--zionism has gotten America the wars its military machine needs (lest it--god frobid--SHRINK a little!!!)

It's not just the lobby; the superpower too needs flogging.

M&W are too timid in the Israel Lobby, they don't want to expose the extreme immorality of American imperialism by calling zionism what it is, a colonial racket. They decide not to open the can of worms, maybe it's wanting to retain SOME vestige of establishment status, maybe it's K.I.S.S.

So they focus on the Israel Lobby solely, and then Jeffrey Goldberg can turn around and explain to the Richard Wittys of the world that W&M're against us, they're "vile."

The superpower is vile. The profiting off of war is vile. The neoliberal/neoconservative consensus masquerading as a representative democracy is indeed extremely vile.

[syvanen]

In Jan 2002 I suggested that our support for Israel was part of the reason for 911 and was publicly accused of antisemitism. That was the only time that ever happened. Not one person condemned the accuser but I received many private messages of support. People were angry but felt they had to protect themselves by not publicly getting involved.

We will know that the times have changed as Phil is predicting when that accusation will no longer be made.

[patrick]

Time Magazine article.

"I'm worried that by November it's going to be too late," to stop Iran from gaining the ability to produce nuclear weapons, said Yossi Kuperwasser, the former senior intelligence officer for the Central Command of the Israeli Defense. On military action against nuclear sites in Iran, he said, "Just do it. For Christ's sake, do it and solve our problem."

Kuperwasser has chutzpah. He takes the Lord's name in vain while demanding the goyish American Christians attack Israel's enemies.

Admiral Fox Fallon and General Anthony Zinni were wise to these types. No doubt from studying at (Saint Thomas of) Villanova University in suburban Philadelphia.

[Chris]

Norman Finkelstein is in prison in Israel. this might be a hoax though, I'm not sure.

http://desertpeace.wordpress.com/2008/05/23/norman-finkelstein-arrested-in-israel/

[Chris]

Ah, more information here:

http://www.monstersandcritics.com/news/middleeast/news/article_1407232.php/US_political_author_Norman_Finkelstein_denied_entry_to_Israel

[Joachim Martillo]

-Dr. John Mearsheimer (non-Jewish American)
-Uri Avnery (Jewish Israeli)
-Menachem Klein (Jewish Israeli)
-Honorable Edward Peck (Jewish American Diplomat)
-Honorable David Newton (American Diplomat possibly with some Jewish ancestry)
-Honorable James Abourezk (Arab Christian American)

-------------------

I prefer not to use ethnicity in evaluating the validity of ideas or arguments, but doesn't the ethnic composition of the group seem somewhat skewed?

Maybe someone like Rashid Khalidi, Hamid Dabashi, Nadia Abu el-Haj, Hamid Dabashi, Ali Asani, Mahmood Mamdani or Abdi Samatar was asked to participate, but I have the impression of exclusion.

[LeaNder]

The first is the Democracy Now Version, so it's probably correct.

http://www.democracynow.org/2008/5/23/headlines

Below the latest article he published on his site. If he moves from fringe to mainstream, than of course he is much more dangerous.

http://www.normanfinkelstein.com/article.php?pg=11&ar=1690

Accurate report in mainstream Jewish perioidical

A question of motives, not of legitimacy

05.16.2008 | JTnews.com
By Manny Frishberg
JTNews Correspondent

[LeaNder]

I didn't expect you to be faster then me, Joachim but:

"but I have the impression of exclusion."

Why not? Would be interesting to watch. But in such honorable circles we probably won't be invited videowise. Dialogue is fine, Buber would tell you.

[Joachim Martillo]

Buber was big on the Ich-Du dialogue and tended to neglect the Ich-Es (i.e., other) dialogue especially when he was living in the other's house.

It is interesting that it really does not make much difference whether the finite being confronts the abyss like Heidegger or faces the eternal Thou like Buber.

[DK]

"His best case no doubt is the 1948 war, but it is still a poor one, for the serious historical scholarship has long challenged the argument that the invading Arab armies intended, let alone had the capability, of snuffing Israel out of existence."

Then what exactly was their intent in 1948? To climb Masada?

[peters]

Joachim,
The CNI has Paul Findley as one of it's board members or advisors or whatever so I doubt it's excluding gentiles.

[peters]

Joachim,
The CNI has Paul Findley as one of it's board members or advisors or whatever so I doubt it's excluding gentiles.

[David]

"... so I doubt it's excluding gentiles"

Joachim just meant that here in America our Middle East foreign policy has come to be treated as a "Jewish" topic, even by a groundbreaking organization like CNI. That the panel is not 100% Jewish is at least a step in the right direction.

[Joachim Martillo]

In a talk panel addressing Israel, Palestine and the Congress, wouldn't it have been nice at least to have some Palestinians or perhaps some Arabs or other Middle Easterners with closer connection to the region that Senator Abourezk, who probably will speak on the Congressional aspect in any case.

[LeaNder]

"... or faces the eternal Thou like Buber."

Reminds me that I still have not read Buber's Gog and Magog.

Let's leave out Heidegger, I have a rather mixed relationship with him. ... OK, shortly: it may be connected to the fact that the Heidegger classes I took (?) were in the same university were he taught under the Nazi reign. [And we took a closer look at his conduct.] Plus the prof, who taught him, showed a sadistic tendency to torture student colleagues, English/and American native speakers, with Heidegger's coinages, which of course they would not find in their dictionaries.

****************************************

Back to the context. Considering the treatment of W/M in Jewish American circles isn't it a good sign, that some open the dialogue?

[Charles Keating]

Intersesting that Strauss was a student of Heidigger, and some of the key two-dozen neocons, students of Strauss, no?

[LeaNder]

Both Leo Strauss and Hannah Arendt took courses with Heidegger in Freiburg. Hannah Arendt was closer to him. Strauss sometimes makes me feel he is a lot closer to Carl Schmitt, but I haven't read much of either.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carl_Schmitt

The Wikipedian's are a very active crowd:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heidegger_and_Nazism

Good work, on first sight. They even have an article on his neologisms, which often are rather common words which he defines differently like Lichtung:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heideggerian_terminology#Clearing

[Charles Keating]

Schmitt has lived a second ghostly life very vigorously under Bush2's regime. The neocons have changed the nation drastically in the last 8 years or so yet most Americans are hardly aware we've been living in a soft fascist state.

[LeaNder]

Difficult question. Initially my whole being revolted against the use of US - Nazis and/or Hitler comparisons.

"Soft fascism" I can accept, but strictly I am wondering, if it is not a feature of all contemporary Western societies, heavily connected with bureaucracy "machinery". (that of course is indeed a parallel to our Nazis) The problem is US military power; and as we have been reminded lately the checks and balances of this power machinery. I wrote this before: It often feels to me that many, many in the US are fighting a fight for democracy for all of us at the moment.

I am reading Finkelstein's Beyond Chutzpa, it helps me to understand many things that puzzled me so far about the US-Israeli context; e.g. one often repeated topic of the US mythical conspiracy mind. The UN as a "New World Order" tool? From a US perspective had it more power, it would have stopped this war. That is pretty obvious.

In his introduction from 2006 (I bought the 2008 revised and updated paperback edition) he mentions International Law distortion attempts, by the way. I thought of you, while reading it. Featuring prominently: Israel and US power against the UN. Wonderful how he simply juxtaposes myth and reality: Rights of course are always connected to duties.

Look at this: "international law, and those who administer it, must understand that old rules" do not apply in the unprecedented war against a ruthless and fanatical foe, and "that laws of war and the rules of morality must adapt to these [new] realities."

Finkelstein citing Dershowitz. Reminds me of Yaron Brooks new "morality" of war and utter - atomic, if needed - power.

Dershowitz' book which he discusses extensively is: Preemption: A Knife that Cuts Both Ways, 2006. The quote is not from this book but from two articles in 2006. So he seems to hammer it into people's head. First step in propaganda and learning: repeat.

He has a brilliant very factual style, with the occasional hilarious sarcasm, which admittedly I enjoy. I was expecting him to be far more polemical from a statement by Raul Hilberg.

My first Finkelstein, but it seems this is the start of a longer bookish friendship.

[5 dancing shlomos]

LeaNder | May 25, 2008 at 05:17 AM

finkelstein like many has a number of street creds statements. i rely on some of his research. i first came across NF with his analysis of joan peters nonsense, "from time immemorial". i liked what he said because he agreed with my own research.

but

i keep in mind that his solutions for the palestinians are israeli and his avoidance of the lobby(if i remember correctly) is chomskian - that is deception

[Joachim Martillo]

I have a brief comment in Judonia Rising on Schmitt.

See http://members.aol.com/ThorsProvoni/JudoniaComplete/JudoniaCompleteA.htm#_edn59 .

As far as I can tell, no one has of yet truly sorted out the links (if any) in Leo Strauss’s thought to Heidegger, Schmitt, and Jabotinsky. The book review entitled THE USE AND ABUSE OF LEO STRAUSS IN THE SCHMITT REVIVAL ON THE GERMAN RIGHT—THE CASE OF HEINRICH MEIER by Robert Howse is interesting ( http://faculty.law.umich.edu/rhowse/Drafts_and_Publications/Meierbookrev.pdf ). At the very least they all partook of and participated in the same intellectual milieu.

[Charles Keating]

"Neoconservatism, based on Leo Strauss's teachings, was influenced by Schmitt. Most notably the legal opinions offered by John Yoo et al. justifying controversial policies -such as introducing unlawful combatant status which purportedly would eliminate protection by the Geneva Conventions, enhanced interrogation techniques, NSA electronic surveillance program, unitary executive theory- in the war on terror mimic his writings."--excerpt from Carl Schmitt at Wikipedia.