Mondoweiss

Purging the Neocons from Mainstream Jewish Life Won't Be Easy

Tonight I was driving home from a friend's in Dutchess County, near Bruce Kovner's vast country estate, when a black cat ran across Route 82 right in front of me. I hit the brakes, missed the cat. Still, I wondered about my luck.

I was thinking about Dan Levy's acknowledgement on Huffpo today that some mainstream Jewish organizations granted asylum to the neoconservatives over the years, notwithstanding their Israel-centered ideas about spreading democracy at the point of a gun, and now Jews have got to come to terms with this. Levy says it's just a few crazy neocons. But I don't think it's that simple. I think the line between neoconservative thought and mainstream Jewish life has been really blurred over the last few years. A few examples:

--Lordly Kovner is no wingnut. He's chairman of Juilliard and also chairman of the American Enterprise Institute, yet he has provided a haven for Likudnik crazies like Dore Gold, Richard Perle, and David Wurmser.

--The New Republic is considered liberal, mainstream, a fount of young journalistic talent. Yet its editor, Marty Peretz, is described as a neocon in Jacob Heilbrunn's book, They Knew They Were Right. And the magazine is lousy with neoconservative thinking. Lawrence Kaplan of TNR hooked up with neocon Bill Kristol, now ensconced at the NYTimes, to write a book pushing for the Iraq War. Peter Beinart of TNR, author of another book pushing wars he wasn't going to be fighting, shopped himself to AIPAC all spring to give private talks on Israel's interests. And TNR's John Judis has said that Jewish organizations have made dual loyalty, to Israel, an "inescapable part" of American Jewish life. He should know.

--Thomas Friedman of the New York Times supported the American invasion of Iraq in part because Saddam had paid for suicide bombers in Israel. Paul Berman, late of the Village Voice and Dissent, offered a similar rationale in his book Terror and Liberalism. Liberals? Neocons? Hey--Doug Feith comes from a Democratic family too.

--Jeffrey Goldberg lately mused that it was a good idea to wage the Iraq war to set off a "benign domino theory" that would spread democracy to all Israel's enemies. When he was writing for the New Yorker, he published a piece in the runup to the Iraq war full of shadowy intelligence suggesting that Saddam had ties to Al Qaeda. Judy Miller ran similar malarkey in the pages of the New York Times. Were these great liberal publications captured by neoconservative fever-dreams? What is Bill Kristol doing at the Times now?

--Joe Lieberman.

I'm just saying, it's not a clear line. Neoconservatism, or that large chapter of neoconservative thought that said you bring war and suffering to Arab societies in order to produce peace in Jerusalem, gained adherents throughout the Israel-loving American Jewish community, enraged by suicide bombers. Levy, who worked for an Israeli prime minister, seems to think the dissociation will be cut and dried. No: it involves an examination of what Zionism has done to Jewish political culture here, and the degree to which Israeli/Palestinian brutality has brutalized a once-dovish American community.

Yivo Owes Walt and Mearsheimer an Apology. Or a Stage

Last fall at the behest of black-shirted Marty Peretz, who promised a "frightening" evening, Yivo, the Yiddish Institute in New York, held a panel on the book The Israel Lobby, called Walt and Mearsheimer: A Critical Response. For nearly two hours three panelists ripped Walt and Mearsheimer as antisemites. The two chief bases of the alleged antisemitism were that Walt and Mearsheimer vastly exaggerated the power of the lobby and viciously blamed Jewish neoconservatives for the Iraq war, a charge of dual loyalty.

Then in May, the most vociferous of the panelists, Jeffrey Goldberg, basically recanted the first position in this important Times piece. He said the lobby had profoundly damaged the American interest vis-a-vis a lamentable policy Israel has practiced now without abatement for 40 years, building settlements in the West Bank, and called for a "blunt" discussion of the lobby's activities in the Jewish community. Comes July and Joe Klein writes on his Time blog that Jewish neoconservatives pushed the Iraq war out of dual loyalty to Israel; and Jeffrey Goldberg hosts Klein on his blog to discuss the matter and while disagreeing with Klein never once accused him of antisemitism, let alone hurled Father Coughlin and Charles Lindbergh and the Nazis at him, as he had done at the authors.

The lesson here is pretty simple: non-Jews will be smeared for sticking their noses into U.S. policy re Israel. (Goldberg also attacked Jimmy Carter for his gall.) And consider the intellectual institution that has been damaged. Doesn't Yivo owe Walt and Mearsheimer an apology? Or at the very least, doesn't it owe them the stage to answer those hideous charges of last fall? 

The Klein Effect: Huffpo Accuses Mainstream Jewish Groups of Feting the Bloody Neocons

Joe Klein is getting an army. Here is Daniel Levy of the Century Foundation and J Street, writing in Huffpo, to say it's time for a soul-searching over the Jewish community's giving of haven to Feith and the other neocons:

[T]here was a failure within the mainstream, Jewish and non-Jewish, to identify the existence of a particular Jewish neoconservative narrative and then to challenge that narrative as being fundamentally flawed in its reading of both American and Israeli interests. One of the causes of that vacuum was the abuse and cheapening of the term anti-Semitism as it was hurled at many who went after Podhoretz, Perle, Feith, and co. They tried, and sadly rather successfully, built a wall of untouchability. Klein is taking his shofar or trumpet to that wall, as many have done before, but Joe is particularly MSM, and therefore important.

Too many Jewish communal leaders and institutions made the mistake of not standing up and speaking out more against the right-wing excesses of a small minority of their co-religionists. Some even embraced and feted the neocons -- a mistake AIPAC particularly excelled in and something I get the impression that AIPAC is at least partially trying to walk itself back from.

Two problems in that argument. The Jewish community willingly provided harbor. Ask Feith. And since when did American Jews get the responsibility to identify and argue for Israeli interests? No thanks, dude. Israel is a religious state that discriminates against minorities and maintains apartheid conditions in a 40-year military occupation. Jews in the U.S. are a minority with all the rights we could dream of. When are we going to apply the political values under our Guccis to the Middle East? Thus have Israeli values beclouded the American Jewish mind. (Levy worked for the Israeli P.M. Revolving doorism.)

Levy also says, "Are the Jews or Israel to blame for the Bush Middle East debacle? Get outta here." Alas, too blanket. The neocons were fed and lodged by the pro-Israel Jewish community for many years, even as they dandled their semiautomatic weapons and brass knuckles. Let the reckoning begin. Hark, the sound of tumbrils in the streets of New York!

'One Must Be a Jew to Tell the Goyim How To Talk About Israel'--WSJ Editor

We can't reform U.S. policy in the Middle East without reforming Jewish identity--because Jews are simply too important in American society, that's why. And reforming Jewish identity means challenging 1, Jewish parochialism--Is it good for the Jews?--and 2, Jewish exceptionalism--"We have a special role, we care about justice and healing the world" (as a relative of mine put it the other day). Yes, that and denying the destruction of the dreams of Palestinians.

Parochialism and exceptionalism bedevil Jeffrey Goldberg's discussion with Joe Klein. With notable exception, and Joe Klein is now a fine counter-example, Jewish reporters don't interrogate their Zionism publicly (even as they interrogate the Christian right every step it takes in the public square) and don't really want gentiles to weigh in on Middle East policy. Here's a passage from The Israel Lobby (order the paperback now), which reflects the same parochialism that Goldberg expressed, and Klein went along with:

In August 2003...writer Ian Buruma wrote an article in the New York Times Magazine entitled “How to Talk About Israel.” He made the obvious point that it is sometimes difficult to talk “critically and dispassionately” about Israel in the United States, and pointed out that “even legitimate criticism of Israel, or of Zionism, is often quickly denounced as anti-Semitism by various watchdogs.” In response, Bret Stephens, then the editor of the Jerusalem Post and now a columnist and editorial board member at the Wall Street Journal, published a vitriolic open letter in the Post that began by asking Buruma: “Are you a Jew?” Two paragraphs later, Stephens declared “What matters to me is that you say, ‘I am a Jew’.” Why did this matter? Because in Stephens’ view, “One must be at least a Jew to tell the goyim how they may or may not talk about Israel.” The message of this remarkable letter, in short, was that non-Jews should only talk about this subject in ways that Jews deem acceptable. Sensitivity on this point may also explain why an editor at the New York Times asked historian Tony Judt to identify himself as Jewish in an op-ed he had written defending our original London Review of Books article.

What is a parochialist like Stephens doing at the Wall Street Journal? Go back to the beginning: Jews are important in American society.

Let the Dog Wag the Tail

I turned to J Street this morning to see where they are on Netanyahu's push for an election in Israel. No comment. AIPAC also is concerned with Iran. Isn't there a strong American interest in heading off Netanyahu and Shaul Mofaz? Even as a non-Zionist, I am much less afraid of Tzipi Livni, who is negotiating hard, than I am of the anti-two-state solution right in Israel. The U.S. offers its opinion all the time re Hamas and Fatah, what about extremists in Israel? How committed are we to the two-state solution? How much power do the One-Jerusalem neocons still have? Sarkozy just interfered, charmingly, in our politics. Can't Obama do a wink-wink to Tzipi now? What does it mean that 3/4 of Netanyahu's campaign contributions have come from diaspora Zionist nuts--isn't that interference?

Everywhere I go people speak of the weakness of the political leadership of the Palestinians and the Israelis. I wonder if in the end that weakness will not mean a continued cycle of violence, international intervention, and an imposed solution--as a solution was imposed by the United Nations in 1947 in complete defiance of Arab opinion. Maybe we can head off further calamity, and let the Israelis know where we stand.

Give It Up for Joe Klein

I think I'm missing the point. Joe Klein is on fire, as they say. Here he is letting it rip again on the neocons and apologizing for supporting the Iraq war. Here are Josh Marshall and Jed Lewison standing up for him. And here is former Bush aide Peter Wehner being lawyerly and sanctimonious about him at the National Review, saying Klein shouldn't blog, he's too wild. Oh my-- Klein should keep blogging this subject, he's starting the conversation we've all been waiting for. Time Magazine should sense the moment and put the issue on the cover--Zionist claims on American Jews. And Klein should level with us, Did his own "strong" support for Israel affect his bad judgment on Iraq?

What Percentage of American Society Isn't Experiencing the Hard Times Now?

This weekend I took a truckload of my mother's junk to the Falmouth town dump. Inside the gate is a Quonset hut with a sign saying "Pick of the Litter." You can leave stuff that has a second life there. I had a bunch of plastic bins, a kid's rocking chair, and a stag head whose taxidermy had come apart at the seams. Also two cots. As I came up, a woman came over to ask for the rocking chair. Then a guy wanted the deer head. Said he'd never shot a buck. I saw a few families standing near the hut, waiting to land on the cots. But shy, ashamed.

I didn't see any signs of want, hanging out in the scientific community my parents go to. People seemed to be leading their good lives, undisturbed. Driving out of town I saw a line of SUVs trying to get in.

I know the gas prices are kicking a lot of people in the behind. And I don't like filling my heating oil tank for $1000 a pop, I'm going to keep the heat down even more this winter. My grocery bills are way high. But I sense the atmosphere of hard times more than I experience it personally; I have to admit I'm not that hurt by the gas prices. I'm not one of the people they do stories about on television. And I didn't see any of those people on my vacation, till I got to Pick of the Litter. My wife's good friend is in France right now, I'm planning a trip to the Mid East.

What's the point? I sense that the big gulf between globalized rich and poor in our society is playing itself out in this economic crisis. The bad times are hurting the middle class, such as it is, the working class, on down. But a lot of people aren't deeply affected--including most corporate journalists. I wish the networks would report on that. Who's not getting hurt? How big is this class of which I'm a part? And isn't it Obama's base?

How Did Doug Feith Become a Ridiculous Figure?

Great scandal produces great characters. Lucianne Goldberg... Matt Drudge... Gordon Liddy... Ollie North... In spite of his best efforts to rehabilitate himself in print, Douglas Feith is emerging as the neocon fool, par excellence. In the interview I just blogged about, Joe Klein lands on Feith out of nowhere, saying "you want to throttle Doug Feith, you just want to whoop him upside the head" (and Jeffrey Goldberg, Feith's former amanuensis, says not a word in his defense). In a long sagacious piece in the New York Review of Books, Samantha Power also whomps Feith out of nowhere, for saying that the Iraqis greeted us with "flowers in their minds."

How did Feith become ridiculous?

Klein and Goldberg Establish Code for Critiquing Neocons' Religious Agenda: 1, Be Jewish...

Jeffrey Goldberg has a great interview with Joe Klein on his blog, remarkable for a few things. First you see Klein unbound. He's really smart. He stands by his criticism of Jewish neocons as having dual loyalties and then sounds the realist when he says that Iran is seeking nukes as a deterrent against western threats:

[M]y reading on the nuclear issue is, given the level of threats that they've been getting from the United States, and from Israel, it's a logical thing for Iran to want nuclear weapons as a deterrent.  I don't think they'd ever actually use it.  First of all, they don't actually have it, but if they did have it, they'd contaminate at the very least the third most holy site in Islam, and they'd kill a hell of a lot of Muslims.

Brilliant. Klein also opens up the essential conversation that I have been calling for for years, for non-neocon Jews to dime out the neocons' religious agenda in the Middle East.

JG: You seem very angry at people who you specifically identify as Jewish neocons.  And you're using the word "Jewish" in ways that we haven't seen Jewish reporters and Jewish columnists use.

JK: It's about time.  I think everyone else is too afraid to do it.  Let me just make something very clear that you already know about me. I am a strong supporter of Israel. I think Israel had a perfect right in 2002 to go into the West Bank and kick the shit out of those people who were making suicide bombs.  I think if they wanted to now go into Gaza and take out the people who were hitting Sderot, they would have a perfect right to do that.  I am not a Walt-Mearsheimer guy.  I think Jews have a perfect right to have a lobby. I do believe that there is a group of people who got involved and had a disproportionate influence on U.S. foreign policy. There were people out there in the Jewish community who saw this as a way to create a benign domino theory and eliminate all of Israel's enemies.

JG: Is that such a bad idea if it would work?

JK: But I think it is a bad idea and I think it wouldn't work.  I think it represents a really dangerous anachronistic neocolonial sensibility.  And I think it is a very, very dangerous form of extremism.  I think it's bad for Israel and it's bad for America.  And these guys have been getting a free ride.  And now these people are backing the notion of a war with Iran and not all of them, but some of them, are doing it because they believe that Iran is an existential threat to Israel.

Fabulous. Klein's kicker is that rightwing Jewish networks "seem to have the power to hurt people's careers" in their effort to stifle criticism of Israel. 

A few things should be said about this dialogue. It's extremely revealing of the level of Zionism in the mainstream press. Here's Goldberg saying that it's a good thing for the U.S. to set up a benign domino theory to knock off Israel's enemies--a line you may have missed in Bush's 2003 State of the Union speech. Klein in turn proffers his bona fides as a Zionist; he says he supported the invasion of the West Bank in 2002, with all the destruction of homes and innocents, etc. He indicates that his parents are Zionist too. And neither man says a word about the fact that Goldberg actually moved there and served in the Israeli army in the conviction that Jews are unsafe in the west. The inevitable question here is, Do these guys feel they have a right to talk about Jewish neocons because they have good Zionist credentials? What about the people to the left of Klein, non-Zionists who disapprove entirely of the Israeli occupation? What's their place in the U.S. discourse?

And what about non-Jews? In criticizing Klein for injecting religion into the argument by attacking Jewish neoconservative policymakers, notice how Goldberg injects religion himself, when he says that no Jewish reporter or columnist has said this. As if to say, We expect this talk from the goyim, but in Jewish media workers it is not pardonable. And instead of dismissing the distinction, Klein plays along with it by assuring Goldberg, I'm not a Walt and Mearsheimer man, I think the Jews have a perfect right to have a lobby. (As if Walt and Mearsheimer said that. They didn't; they said just what Klein said, that anyone who likes Israel has a right to a lobby their heart out.) I must say that both Goldberg and Klein have gone out of their way lately to take public swipes at Walt and Mearsheimer, and this is because it is increasingly difficult today to distinguish their own positions, as Zionists who are critical of the lobby, from Walt and Mearsheimer's position. Jeffrey Goldberg's critique of the lobby's actions re the West Bank is virtually indistinguishable from Walt and Mearsheimer's. And Klein's assertion that Jewish neocons fomented the Iraq war is also virtually indistinguishable from Walt and Mearsheimer's argument about Iraq. The only difference I can see is that Klein just knew it to be true and was lying in the high grass as they took arrows for two years. And now we have Klein saying the same goddamn thing re Iran and nukes as Mearsheimer. (As does Fareed Zakaria; the realist center grows by the day.)

What seems to make Klein not "a Walt and Mearsheimer man" is the religious issue that pervades the interview. He's Jewish, they're not. Nah Nah! Klein and Goldberg happily play their Jewish cards in this interview. But what if you're not Jewish and don't care for Israel? Or you're an Arabist, or you're a Jewish non-Zionist? Well, you're not really invited to have an opinion that will be taken seriously. Imagine if only Christian evangelicals got to call the evangelicals out on their political agendas! We'd be nowhere today on gay marriage or abortion rights.

Still it's a good interview. You see Klein's mind moving freely on important questions: Jewishness in foreign policy, in neoconservatism, and Zionism as a force in media life. More light, as Goethe said.

Though Goldberg's wrong when he says that Klein is the first Jewish reporter or columnist to say such things. Jim Lobe has been an intellectual leader. Glenn Greenwald has done some very good work, so has John Judis in TNR (an entry that remains inaccessible at TNR but available at the Carnegie site). So has Eric Alterman. Jews Jews Jews. I have called the neocons out for dual loyalty for years, and Zionists at the Observer wanted the blog gone. I think I'm still Jewish.

So, let the soul-searching about the neocons' religious agenda continue. But on this democratic condition: You don't have to be Jewish to join in.

(Thanks to Brad Greenberg for the heads up. And to Ed Miles.)

Obama Uses Holocaust Template for Darfur. It Doesn't Fit

The third in a series on How to Think About Darfur, by James North:

Barack Obama’s big speech in Berlin was generally short on specifics, but he mentioned Darfur twice. He called the conflict "genocide" and later said, "never again." He thereby endorsed the Holocaust Template to understand the conflict in the Sudan, but this has not always been a helpful frame of analysis.

Take, for instance, the Sudan’s government’s announcement two weeks ago that it has appointed a high level committee to counter the International Criminal Court’s accusation of genocide against president Omar al-Bashir. The defense committee will be headed by Salva Kiir, the first deputy president, who is theoretically the second-most powerful man in the country.

Anyone who stopped paying attention to the Sudan a few years ago would be flabbergasted at this choice. Salva Kiir is also the leader of the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement, which until 2005 was waging a several-decades long war to win greater autonomy, and possible independence, for southern Sudan from the regime in Khartoum.

The southern Sudanese struggle is the longest conflict on the African continent, and it actually fits the "Arabs" against "Africans" pattern (which I described in an earlier post) better than the more recent fighting in the western province of Darfur. Sudan, Africa’s largest country, is 1200 miles from north to south. British colonialism joined millions of "Africans," who practiced Christianity or traditional African religions, to the "Arab" Muslims of the north. Fighting broke out at independence in 1956, and has continued, almost without interruption, since then. During the latest phase of the conflict (1983-2005), nearly two million people died.

But three years ago, partly due to pressure from the West, the warring sides signed a fragile peace treaty and formed a government of national unity. The truce has held despite occasional clashes. And southern Sudanese will have the right to choose independence in a 2011 referendum.

I wish I could read Salva Kiir’s mind. President Omar al-Bashir ordered the bombing raids and the military attacks that killed so many of Kiir's fellow southern Sudanese. At the same time, he recognizes that al-Bashir is a canny political survivor, who is apparently prepared to finally let southern Sudan go so he can preserve his own power over the rest of the country. Kiir may well feel that if you haul al-Bashir off to the Hague to face the International Criminal Court, the peace deal could unravel, and hundreds of thousands more could die in renewed fighting.

If we really wanted to apply the Holocaust Template, the analogy would go like this: in 1938, Chancellor Adolf Hitler appoints his number two – a Jewish leader of the Social Democratic party, with whom Hitler governs in uneasy coalition – to defend him before the League of Nations. The impossibility of this scenario shows us that the Holocaust Template does not help us much in understanding Sudan today.

P.S. The Times touched on some of these issues re Sudan yesterday. Mike Desch has written of the misuse of the Holocaust analogy in Middle East policy in this important paper.