Mondoweiss

'New Yorker' Makes Adelson Out to Be Nutjob Likudnik-- and Fails to Describe His Broad Following in the Jewish Establishment

I've finally read Connie Bruck's profile of the self-proclaimed richest Jew in the world, Sheldon Adelson, in The New Yorker and I'm a little dismayed. I think it's great the magazine ran the story, and great that it spoke so openly of Adelson's efforts to shape Israel policy here and in Jerusalem, ideas heretofore suppressed in the U.S. press, great too that Bruck did a ton of reporting on Adelson's dance moves. But still, I'm left a little lukewarm.

The problem with the piece is that it lacks any real social and political context. Adelson is presented as a "crazy Jewish billionaire," as George W. Bush reportedly described him, a complete outlier. A nutjob with yes, real influence, but an independent wildman. There's no sense of Adelson's political context, and his broad support within the American Jewish community. For instance, Adelson has worked closely with Freedom's Watch and AIPAC, but there is little effort to talk about Freedom's Watch's importance to the Republican Party. Briefly, Bruck picks up the idea that Adelson may be the rightwing answer to George Soros. Then she drops it. Where are Matt Brooks and Ari Fleischer, important figures in the Republican establishment who have worked with Adelson? Where is Charles Bronfman of birthright, which Adelson has funded? Where are Mel Sembler and Richard Fox, fellow Republican travelers to Adelson, beloved friends of neocons in high places? The brilliant Michael Steinhardt is quoted, with a smart quote, but there is no effort to put Adelson's publishing efforts in the context of Steinhardt's at the Sun, or Hertog's at the New Republic, or any of the rest of the ardent pro-Israel establishment's. Oh, Adelson is a crazy man. Well what about Hertog and Steinhardt? And what does it mean that Haim Saban, an ardent Zionist, and Martin Indyk have associations with Adelson? It means that he is part of a continuum of Zionist belief in the Establishment.

Late in the piece Bruck says by way of parenthetical disclosure that she is married to Mel Levine, the former California congressman now serving in Obama's Middle East braintrust. Well Levine is a former board member of AIPAC, according to Janet McMahon of WRMEA. I'm not saying it's a conspiracy. I'm saying that Zionism is so deeply imbedded in American Jewish life that it is almost impossible to look to the turrets of the Jewish cultural establishment for detached examination of what Zionism is doing to our politics. Bruck makes hay of the fact that Adelson is trying to nullify the Annapolis peace process and is a big backer of One Jerusalem. I share her p-o-v on this. But she fails to say that a former Under Secretary of Defense, Doug Feith, was a founder of One Jerusalem-- let alone raise the possibility that Feith and other neocons got their jobs in the Bush Administration because of the largesse of Adelson et al. Isn't that how it works? Bruck owes us more here.

Yes, I agree, Netanyahu is a bad guy. But he has adherents all over the American Enterprise Institute. Adelson is not an outlier on Jerusalem. 58 percent of American Jews are for an undivided Jerusalem and Bruck's husband's man (and mine), Obama, called for an undivided Jerusalem in his speech to AIPAC, to curry favor with powerful Jews. Adelson's rightwing views are widely shared in the American Jewish community, especially the older members, and in the political establishment. His support for neocons has surely helped to destroy the American image in the Middle East. Bruck doesn't go near any of this. Oh well. I'm still grateful.

Generational Divide: Young Jews Embarrassed by Older Jews' Censorship of Palestinian POV

Last week I picked up reports of censorship by Spertus, a Jewish museum in Chicago, of a show called "Imaginary Coordinates" that gave a lot of airtime to Palestinian views of the conflict in Israel/Palestine. I'm returning to the subject because today I got a mocking email from a Jewish literary friend about the censorship, in turn quoting a contemptuous Jewish friend of his--and it struck me that younger Jews find the episode ridiculous and embarrassing. Consider: Jewschool and JTA both were angered by the censorship. And here is Time Out's coverage by Lauren Weinberg (who I'm guessing is Jewish and younger), appropriately titled "Let's All Go to the Spertus Museum of Censorship."

Latest Israel Abuse Story Has More of a Soviet Union Vibe Than a South Africa One

Inter Press is reporting that its correspondent in Gaza, Mohammed Omer, who is also working for the Washington Report, was stripsearched and assaulted at the border crossing from Jordan on Thursday. Omer, pictured here in London, where he lately won a Martha Gellhorn prize for his journalism, says he was forced to undress, then battered and kicked, dragged around, head banged. Every cavity of his body was probed, and he vomited and lost consciousness, woke up in a Palestinian hospital. The soldiers seemed angered by his having won a prize. You can see him accepting his prize in London here, describing how hard it was to get out of Gaza, and dedicating his prize "to the voiceless people of the Gaza Strip."

The incident is sickeningly reminiscent of a strip-search story told by Hedy Epstein, an 80-plus-year-old Holocaust survivor from St. Louis, who has made it a mission in her 80s to visit Palestine. Here is Hedy telling about her 2004 humiliation, on youtube. They called her a terrorist.

'J Street' Seems to Be Finding a Niche

J Street, the leftish Jewish lobby, is having an effect. Here is a piece urging Obama to make common cause with the "other Jewish lobby"-- not the Likudnik-neocon lobby, AIPAC. Here is J Street's great ad in the New York Times the other day, in which it urges American Jews to give support to Israel when it is negotiating with Arabs (not just when it's killing them). Here is Ralph Seliger (of Meretz-USA) supporting J Street, and noting that Avrum Burg and Henry Siegman are associated with the new lobby, two prophets.

Last night I was reading about an effort by progressive Jews to take on the lobby 30 years ago, Breira. In his book on American Jews and Israel, Steven T. Rosenthal says that Breira formed in the mid-70s in alarm over the occupation. The Jewish establishment promptly stuffed the group in a bag and dropped it off a bridge. Breira people were blacklisted, the group seems to have disappeared.

This time round J Street has plenty o' room to run. Israel looks a lot worse, for one thing; Zionism has worked out to be an extremist ideology by and large. I think the biggest factor in its favor is assimilationism. As Rosenthal writes, the American Jewish devotion to Israel served as a "bulwark against assimilation...While their love affair with Israel has never guaranteed a viable Jewish identity, it has at least prevented the decline in Jewish identification from becoming a total surrender and has kept alive that sense of communal obligation indispensable for the well-being of both Israeli and American Jews." Ah, now you know what it's about, huh! Rosenthal said that, presciently, 7 years ago. Since then Jewish identification has softened even more in the U.S. One of my principal impressions of going to the AIPAC policy conference was how old the crowd was, and old-world too.

Where Is Jeffrey Goldberg Now That Feith Needs Him?

I have some limited sympathy for Doug Feith as a guy who's been abruptly marginalized; it's hard to imagine a more precipitous farewell. It reminds me of seeing former Cheney aide David Wurmser speaking at a New York law firm this spring. Small crowd, Wurmser had the slightly-hysterical edge of the complete outsider.

Why hasn't Jeffrey Goldberg reviewed Feith's book? Three years ago Goldberg was kind to Feith in a New Yorker profile. And in his new book, Feith returns the favor, quoting long sections of a Goldberg piece in The New Yorker from March 2002 purporting to show connections between Iraq and Al-Qaeda-- a central claim in Feith's efforts at rehabilitation. The same Goldberg piece is now quoted in the latest Commentary--a piece not online, by Arthur Herman, arguing that war with Iraq was "inevitable." It's no favor to Goldberg, actually, to bring this reporting up; it reminds us that he helped to promote this disastrous war. Goldberg's protean; I bet he's trying to put his Feith chapter behind him. Yes, I want to have a Zionist conversation with all these guys. Goldberg once served in the Israeli army, Feith worked for the maximalist Netanyahu. They have surely each believed at times that the west wasn't a safe place for Jews. Happily, Joe Klein is nudging this conversation into the mainstream.

Feith Seeks Rehabilitation. The World Ignores Him

The Washington Independent runs a story by James Risen of the New York Times that makes a half-hearted effort to rehabilitate Douglas Feith. Feith says the piece was killed by the Times.The Washington Independent calls the story "The Return of the Neocons." What if no one wants them back?

Feith sounds bitter:

Yet it is Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Feith who were left holding the bag for the failures in Iraq, while pretty much everyone else seems to have skated from the judgment of history, Feith seethes.

Former Dutch Premier Says He Is 'Ashamed' of Support He Gave Israel While in Office

Only in Haaretz. Here is a profile of the "Dutch Jimmy Carter," a former premier of the Netherlands, Andreas Van Agt, who has accused Israel of terrorism and describes his awakening:

[H]e became vocal after 1999, when his "eyes were opened" during a traditional Catholic pilgrimage trip to religious sites in the Holy Land.

'Dual Loyalty' Debate Edges Into the Center Ring

The Joe Klein dual-loyalty assertion is being debated everywhere, including here by Shmuel Rosner, who goes thru some formalities about being an Israeli so he can't comment then promptly tosses that aside to speak as a member of the Jewish community, and to imply that Klein is using religion against those with whom he has policy differences. Klein has refused to back down--

"You want evidence of divided loyalties? How about the 'benign domino theory' that so many Jewish neoconservatives talked to me about - off the record, of course - in the runup to the Iraq war, the idea that Israel's security could be won by taking out Saddam, which would set off a cascade of disaster for Israel's enemies in the region?"

Klein was equally bracing when it came to the violence of the Clinton machine, in Primary Colors.

The amazing thing about this argument is that time and again, thru the Walt and Mearsheimer skirmishes, Jews wrung their hands (wringed?) over the dual-loyalty canard. But this duck keeps popping up again (from Eric Alterman and John Judis, among others) because it truly describes the hearts of the neoconservatives. As Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz told us long ago when they shifted parties, they were for a strong military because the U.S. had to protect Israel. Then their son and son-in-law became actual policy makers, and brought their parochial beliefs to the White House, and shut up about their Israel agendas. Klein is a blunt man, god bless him. This conversation is coming into the open.

Israel's Leading Publisher States that His Country Is an 'Apartheid State'

Amos Schocken is the publisher of Haaretz. Today in that great newspaper that his family has published for three generations he prints an amazing editorial stating that Israel has become an "apartheid" state because for the eighth time the government has extended a "temporary" citizenship law that in essence forbids someone from living in Israel with his/her spouse if he/she married a Palestinian form the West Bank. It is worth quoting this editorial at length:

Obama Letter Urging Action on Peace Process Says Not a Word About Settlements

Obama wrote a long letter to President Bush Tuesday urging him to press forward with the peace process now. It is two pages long and speaks of our unshakeable commitment to Israel's security and says that Israel's security has been hurt by U.S. "policy choices." Not sure what that means. The letter is filled with imprecations about Hamas and pressure on the Arab states. There is not a word about the ever-expanding Israeli colonies in the West Bank. Even Yahoo was featuring this great story from McClatchy yesterday on Israel's defiant settlements policy. I assume Obama's cravenness has to do with his wooing of Hillary's donors. Our politics are broken.

(Thanks to Chris Varley for the heads-up.)