Middle East

At last, the put-upon Boston Globe has found a New York Times Company policy it can go along with: O  read more »

My dad's real smart, even if he doesn't agree with me on my Middle East politics, and a couple weeks ago he said something that stuck. He was saying that Jimmy Carter's book is a sign of rising anti-Semitism (something I disagree with), a sign we're entering a new phase for Jewish power in the U.S. That the result of Carter's book and Walt-Mearsheimer and other developments that I cheer and my dad fears is that Jews will have less power. I said, "So are you talking about pogroms?" My father made a little face. He's very poetical and ironical. "No. Without fireworks."

Not to belabor the obvious, but my father was saying that these big sociological questions are going to be brokered and renegotiated beneath the surface, quietly, and Jews and gentiles will adjust to a new reality. Smart guy, my dad.

I bring all this up because I just watched Obama in Springfield. You can prepare all you want for a big moment, but then the moment happens, and we're all changed. I'm excited. And I have to think one of the consequences of Obama's globally democratic dream is that, without it being explicit, without his having a fight with big Jewish backers—without fireworks—U.S. policy in the Middle East is going to shift.

I'm an optimist. But I think what's happening right now in the Jewish community is part of it. Jews are being forced to confront the contradictions in Zionism (as playwright David Zellnik says, describing his play, "Ariel Sharon Stands at the Temple Mount and Dreams of Theodor Herzl"). Despite the AJC's best efforts, all Jews are Wrestling With Zion (to quote the title of Alisa Solomon and Tony Kushner's great anthology on the subject that the AJC attacked). This is the water we're all swimming in now, questions about Zionism; and I'm betting that without fireworks, the next generation of Jews is going to think differently about this, the ground is changing under them.

I'll cite one little fact that I think makes my point. In a Zionist history I was reading the other day, I read that the purchases of land in Palestine by Jewish agencies in the early part of the last century had covenants on them. The covenants said, This land can only be sold to Jews. (When I remember the citation, I'll stick it in.) Those covenants still exist, I'm sure. You can try and justify that type of discrimination in a million ways, but there it is. Real estate covenants barring sales to blacks and Jews are what my generation helped destroy in this country 30 years ago. Obama was borne up on that idealism, and his campaign is about bringing that idealism to America's actions in the world. He's half-everything, right? The ideology of Zionism is simply out of step with that spirit, and if Obama succeeds, Zionism will lose its hold on Jewish-American intellectual life. Without fireworks.

The AJC's report on "Only Self-Hating Jews Don't Like Israel"—it's actually called "'Progressive' Jewish Thought and the New Anti-Semitism"—is officially an embarrassment. I say officially because the report's theme that it is "illegitimate" for Jews to question the nature of the founding of Israel, that such inquiries represent a "betrayal" of Israel, based on "tangled psychological" motives, is being criticized in the mainstream press around the world, as it should be. The Op-Eds pile up one after another. The report has exposed the Jewish leadership's underhanded methods: smearing intellectuals as "self-haters."

It has also got the AJC into a fight it doesn't want with Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen, a longtime friend of Israel, who is named in the report because of his column last summer saying the founding of Israel was a well-intentioned "mistake." Cohen is upset.

Among the first to call me after the Times piece appeared was the AJC itself. It apologized. It did not mean to include me with the others, and it would, its representative told me, soon set matters straight. It issued a news release saying that Rosenfeld's characterization of me does "not reflect the totality of [my] occasional writings on the Middle East."

Well, the AJC has not set matters straight with Cohen. It is still fiddling. On its website the AJC crows that it got the Times to run a correction of its characterization of the AJC as a "conservative" group. This is a pure expression of vanity (Jewish groups like to think of themselves as liberal). In the Jerusalem Post, David Harris, the AJC's director, goes on for several paragraphs about the good news that he obtained a correction, and then seeks to justify the report: "[T]he individuals [author Alvin] Rosenfeld mentions are on the political fringes in asserting that Israel has no right to exist and should either be destroyed or morphed into a so-called binational state, which means the end of Israel as we know it."

Harris then says this is not true of Richard Cohen, but he has nonetheless made "disturbing" comments about Israel.

This is called digging yourself deeper into a hole.

Today in the American Prospect, Gershom Gorenberg echoes the charge that the AJC is unfair to Richard Cohen—while by and large defending the report, by adding his own attack on anti-Zionists and non-Zionists:

They affirm the right of Palestinians to return to a remembered homeland, but negate Jews' right to repatriate themselves to their remembered homeland. Jewish nationhood alone is a scandal. Morally, this is no different than deciding that everyone but black Africans has the right to self-determination...

Gorenberg's analogy of the Palestinian refugees' claims to the claim of, say, a former Diaspora Californian like himself to emigrate to Israel out of ideas he studied in a yeshiva that include religious messianism (as he states in his book The End of Days) is highly problematic. I think Gorenberg, a wonderful journalist by the way, is wrong.

Cohen undertakes a broader defense of the AJC's targets: "It's sad that the American Jewish Committee commissioned and published Rosenfeld's report. I can't imagine what good will come out of it. Instead, it has given license to the most intolerant and narrow-minded of Israel's defenders so that, as the AJC concedes in my case, any veering from orthodoxy is met with censure... Shame." Cohen gets at the great (backfired) achievement of the AJC paper and its coverage in the Times. It has ennobled the critics, and not just the critics Gorenberg, who made aliyah, wishes to defend.

Zionism's DNA is being examined by American Jews. Tony Judt and Alisa Solomon are at last being heard widely, in their call on the American Jewish community to examine the religious nationalist ideology that has helped foster violence in the Middle East. Liberal integrationists like myself, who chose not to make aliyah, are at last being heard. Call it poison, call it illegitimate: the world seems interested in what we have to say.

A reporter called me yesterday and said I was wrong in declaring there's a movement of progressive Jews who are criticizing Zionism. He asked for my evidence. I started with Jewish Voice for Peace, which runs muzzlewatch and rallied in the cold to support Jimmy Carter at Brandeis. He said, "But they're kind of a fringe organization."

Well, gee. That's actually what movement means, a rearrangement of the political hierarchy (of which that reporter is a part) to include a formerly marginalized group. The women's movement. The settlers' movement. The evangelical movement.

Now here are a few more straws in the wind, demonstrating that the formerly-marginalized progressives are movin' in.

—In Australia, the Age today does a piece on perestroika in the Jewish community (saying that author Antony Loewenstein is leading a breakaway to challenge the Israel lobby), and The Age's sidebar exposes as objectionable a regular practice in the Jewish community: Zionists use the word "self-hating" to describe Jews who dissent from the program;

—The Times piece on the American Jewish Committee's report on these matters of 1/31 devotes real space to a book that nettled the AJC: Wrestling With Zion, edited by Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon. This wonderful book, which includes a great number of Jewish writers who are uncomfortable with Zionist ideology (and some who aren't so uncomfortable with it), came out nearly 4 years ago. It was never reviewed by the Times, mentioned only once in passing. Now it is mentioned prominently in the Times, and in a positive light. Change.

—In Washington last week, Theater J held a reading of the heterodox historical play I saw performed in N.Y. last spring, David Zellnik's amazing "Ariel Sharon Stands on the Temple Mount and Dreams of Theodor Herzl". The reading went well, before a good-sized crowd in the Jewish Community Center in Northwest D.C. No one jumped up and screamed antisemitism, they wanted to talk about Zionism.

—In yesterday's Washington Post, an aggrieved victim of the AJC (as opposed to one of the victims who's reveling in it), Richard Cohen, says "Shame" on the AJC for "promiscuously" throwing around the word anti-Semite.

—Australia again. Today's Australian features a sharp opinion piece by TAMU's Michael Desch, a Holocaust scholar, who hops on the self-hating thing again. Dismissing "Jews who deviate from the pro-Israel line" as "self-hating" is the kind of "dirty pool" regularly practiced by the lobby.  read more »

O.K. So it's a movement. We're gaining traction. What do we stand for?

The latest battle in the ideological war over Israel/Palestine took place the other day at a high school outside Boston. Andover High had invited a pro-Palestinian group called Wheels of Justice to talk at the school. Local Jewish groups rose in opposition; the event was cancelled. Then the ACLU stepped in and the event took place, 300 people jammed into a library, with loud protest.

A few comments:

1. As Jimmy Carter has shown, there is a new actor on the political stage: liberal Christians. (Per the Globe):

The Rev. Ralph Galen, minister of Andover's Unitarian Universalist Congregation and a member of Merrimack Valley People for Peace, said [Rabbi Robert] Goldstein's stance against Wheels of Justice has disappointed him. "The situation in the Middle East is so complex that it's already at a boiling point," said Galen, who helped bring The Wheels of Justice to neighboring North Andover two years ago with less resistance. "It just pushes us over and it's so hard to maintain our rationality, but we must."

Liberal Protestants used to be quiet about the Middle East, now they're demanding to be heard; the Presbyterian church, for instance, is debating divestment. This is part of the rage at Jimmy Carter: rightwing Jews want to keep the Middle East club exclusive. 2. Contrast the liberal churches' position with the strength that pro-Israel groups are drawing from the religious right. See Zev Chafets's new book, A Match Made in Heaven, about evangelicals' support for Israel, reviewed lately in Commentary Magazine. Chafets calls it the "wonderful Judeo-evangelical alliance." I wonder how wonderful it is. To preserve Israel from criticism, the American-Jewish community is being drawn further and further right.

3. The Globe article features a student at Andover High calling for a balanced panel discussion of the issues, rather than "just" Wheels for Justice. The pity to me here is that a Jewish kid is being mobilized in an argument about a country he probably has never been to, and whose apartheid-like practices he has no idea of. The pressure on Jewish kids these days is sure intense! I feel for them. When I was a little Jewish kid, I was protesting the Vietnam War with my parents and hearing about the Freedom Riders. What larks! True enough, I was being indoctrinated, too, but it was a hopeful set of values, one I still choose to embrace, liberal universalist ideas going back to abolitionism. These kids are being indoctrinated in a narrower set of religious-nationalist values: basically, Arabs Bad, Israelis Good.

I'm in L.A. One of the liberating things about being here is that while there's Jewishness all around me, it is not as confining a Jewishness as the one in New York. The definition is looser.

At a Christmas party of people in the movie business two nights ago, I talked to three Jews. 1 was a movie producer who said he welcomed Jimmy Carter's statements about the Middle East and couldn't believe the smearing he was getting, then went off to play with his child by a gentile woman. With 2 and 3 I had longer conversations about Jewishness.

2 was a producer married to a Jewish woman. He was the son of Holocaust survivors and in 1967 had been pressured by friends to move to Israel. He had refused and, feeling angry about the pressure, had come to the understanding he was American, and had moved west. He said he got along with his businessman father-in-law completely, agreed on all politics, till he'd had the worst argument ever with him over Carter's book. The father-in-law said Jimmy Carter was an anti-Semite. He didn't agree, he thought Jimmy Carter was saying important things.

3 was a beautiful woman who it seemed to me had traveled widely, using the powers of her beauty, and her mind. She had grown up here then gone to live in the middle of the country, where she had married and had kids with a gentile. Now she was going out with a non-Jew back here. She told me she felt really Jewish; it was her "core." I found that moving. And her father had said to her, "Israel is very important." But she was afraid to examine Israel. From what she had heard it was a place that prized violence and ethnic chauvinism. That wasn't her way. The soul of Jewishness, she said, was to participate in the modern world, and see the best in everyone, and reach out for greatness in other groups and add our greatness to the mix unselfishly. "High five," I said, mimicking Borat when the hotel clerk reads him the telegram saying his wife has been eaten by a bear. We high-fived. Her boyfriend came over, and our conversation petered out.

Comments. My focus group was self-selecting; of course this is a party an assimilationist like myself ends up at. In fairness to the body of American Jewry, it doesn't go to Christmas parties like this one, by and large, and has a stronger sense of Jewish chauvinism than anyone at the party. Still, we assimilationists have close connections to that more-conservative body. I bet that 3's father and 2's father-in-law both give money to Jewish organizations, maybe to arms of the Israel lobby. While notwithstanding their strong feelings, 3 and 2 are not having much effect on our foreign policy.

On the East Coast I feel a lot more pressure to be Jewish-identified in a chauvinist way. People who live in New York tend to be more particularist-Jewish than California Jews. (It's no wonder that Michael Lerner, one Jew to endorse Jimmy Carter, is in S.F.) And affluent Jews on the east coast form the heart of the Israel lobby. They have been given that role, by history, by the Jewish people, by Israel—someone—to stand with Israel and insist that America do so too, because they believe that America if left to its own devices would abandon Israel.

There is a Hebrew word for me and my Christmas-party Jews. We are galut. Galut means diaspora, homeless, exiled. To make aliyah in Israel (to emigrate) means to go up—because Israel is the highest spot. We are down. And galut is a judgmental word, it carries the hint, spiritually-alienated.

I'm still in that high-five moment with 3, a core Jew, not feeling alienated, offering a non-chauvinist way of identifying Jewishly to an America that, mimicking Israel, is mired in a bloody, racial clash with the Arab world. Happy holidays.

Just as one controversy over alleged racism begins to settle down, the New York Police Department is  read more »

Holocaust denial is a particularly insidious evil.  read more »

“The United States, in a way, is trapped in Iraq,” Kofi Annan recently said.  read more »

Jimmy Carter's use of the word "apartheid" in the title of his new book has generated a lot of controversy—the Washington Post reporting that a Middle East scholar has angrily resigned his affiliation with the Carter Center over Carter's book. The Democratic Party has of course banished Carter over the word, and, inevitably, Dershowitz has castigated the gentlemanly old prez.

The word is obviously loaded, as it echoes the South African regime that oppressed blacks, denying them many rights. Apartheid literally means separateness; and it's worth pointing out that the Israelis themselves call their forbidding wall, which goes well east of the Green Line, sometimes encircling Palestinian villages, a "separation fence." More importantly, if you've visited the Occupied Territories, apartheid seems a fair description of the isolation and abuse the Palestinians experience, and the denial of so many rights, including the freedom to move about, the freedom to seek employment. In this interview on Youtube, you can watch Avichai Sharon of Breaking the Silence describe how as an IDF soldier he used to confiscate Palestinians' cars for minor infractions and seize their keys and never return them, simply forget about them. There was a box of keys at his headquarters; no one had bothered to give them back. Jimmy Carter and a South African church leaderI met in Hebron both say that the Israeli treatment of Palestinians is in some ways "worse" than apartheid.

Apartheid is now a general term (with of course a South African shadow). According to the U.N.'s description, it means denying a subject group of different ethnicity "basic human rights and freedoms, including the right to work, the right to form recognised trade unions, the right to education, the right to leave and to return to their country, the right to a nationality, the right to freedom of movement and residence, the right to freedom of opinion and expression, and the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association."

The journalists who are now piping the Israel lobby's objections should visit the Occupied Territories and report for themselves on the real conditions of the Palestinians.

Many, many intellectuals are now being called on to perform a backflip on Iraq. Alas, few have attempted it, and few of those have pulled it off with any grace. I mean the mea culpa for supporting the Iraq war. After all, how seriously should any writer be taken who hasn't come to terms publicly with his own bad judgment on one of the great questions of our time? Not very.

Leon Wieseltier does a pretty good job of it in the last New Republic, in a forum on what to do in Iraq.

"Since I was a supporter of the war, I have its consequences also on my own conscience. I do not believe that American troops should die for some heartless Kissingerian notion of American credibility in the world, or the like. (Anyway, it is the war itself that is doing the most damage to American credibility. After terrorism, the most immediate problem for American foreign policy in the age of Bush is anti-Americanism.)"

There's some other stuff to nod your head to here, like the frank admissions that more troops wouldn't have made any difference, that the war has increased terrorism and emboldened terrorists, that it's been a great setback to the dreams of universalists in the Middle East. (A new key on Wieseltier's piano, universalism; though of course he particularistically dismisses the Palestinians.) But I admire Wieseltier's moral tone on this one. He's taking some personal responsibility, and doing so in an open and sincere manner.

BEIRUT, Lebanon, Nov.  read more »

BEIRUT, Lebanon, Nov.  read more »

The elections were scarcely over when the country was hit by a bucket of bipartisan treacle.  read more »

George Bush is being stubborn. He should change the strategy, indeed he should call again upon the bold neoconservative imagination that helped envision our invasion in the first place, and take a page from the book of our main Middle East ally, Israel, when it found itself in possession of a hunk of Arab lands, 40 years ago: he should encourage settlements.

settlers would be displacing no one. Anyone who has seen a documentary about Iraq knows that there are vast stretches of the country that are barren and unsettled or, even worse, abandoned by people who have thrown up their hands and left the country. Settlers would be making the desert bloom. They would be bringing advanced American know-how and practices to an Arizona-like environment, and doing for it what snowbirds have done to Scottsdale and Canyon Ranch. Irrigation, fertilizer: American ideas.

Some will say this is colonial, but look, we liberated the country. Yes the British and Spanish helped, but not really. More important, settlements would completely alter the strategic and tactical landscape. We would, at last, have Americans with a stakehold in pacifying Iraq; they would own real estate. It would give fresh purpose to the military presence in Iraq and fresh legs to the vision of implanting democracy. Americans have a long tradition of democracy; the Iraqis, brutalized by Saddam, have zero. We would be setting an example.

Anyone who watches the news knows that it is chaotic right now in Iraq, no doubt. The settlers would be a calming force from the jump. They would have superior arms to the Iraqi locals and would police their own borders and keep the peace. They would have the Second Amendment, which the Iraqis don't have yet. They would demonstrate a principle that has held true in Israel: give an Arab a gun and you have trouble, give an Israeli a gun and you will have peace.

The IEDs are a giant problem. But we should take a page from the book of our main Mideast ally, Israel, and build a separate set of roadways for the settlers, so that they could get to and from their jobs in the Green zone. Initially that is where all the jobs would be; that is the infrastructure and as Willie Sutton said, that's where the money is. But I imagine an Iraqi silicon valley spreading slowly and inevitably. Sand=silicon. What is Arabic for no-brainer?

You say that it is getting impossible to find soldiers to go to Iraq, why would an ordinary civilian go? Easy. The soldiers dont have a stakehold. They have nothing to show for their two years service except a Purple Heart, and maybe a prosthetic foot or leg. When people own land, different story. Money changes everything. You would give them cheap prices. An acre near where I live goes for as much as $100,000, more. The middle class is getting it in the teeth. In Iraq it would be a tiny fraction of the price. Location, location, location: settlements by the fancy Mansour district would go for more, settlements nearer to the Sunni Triangle cities of Tikrit and I'm blanking on the other name would be way less.

Maybe some of it would be "free" land. Again, ask the Israelis how they did it.

Who would go? Are they insane, are they coerced? Read my headline again: Encourage. That's the American way, no one is ordered to do anything. It's a free country. Yes it would take an enterprising type, that is American. Some Guatemalans walked 1000 miles to get into Texas and drank their own urine on the way, now they are good citizens. It wouldn't have to be that bad. We would incentivize. Tax breaks, Bush is good at that.

Of course security concerns are not going to go away for a long time. I have an idea! Build a 36-foot concrete wall around the settlements. This would prevent attacks on the settlers.

I left Israel last summer with the awareness that the people there live in misery. I was moved by a friend's grim summary of the situation: "The Arabs don't want us here, they just don't. So we have to accept that there will be one war after another." One war after another? That's misery.

David Brooks got the same quote I did, in a column a week ago (September 28) from a "veteran of the 1948 Arab-Israeli war." How long will our war with the Arab world last? "This is forever."  read more »

Surely this is how many (maybe most) Israelis think. But there are two huge problems in parroting these thoughts, as Brooks did, to guide American relations with the Arab world. 1, is the widespread Israeli belief that Israel deserves no share of blame for the 60-year history of violence with "an existential foe," as Brooks says. It's simply wrong: "nationalist propaganda," in the words of Simha Flapan, one of the Israeli "new historians" who have in the last generation transformed historical understanding of the Middle East. 2, and more dangerous, is the conflation issue: Brook's neoconservative claim that Americans should think about the Arab world as Israelis do "who have more experience with Islamic extremism." Why? Why must we recapitulate the experience of an ally in the Arab world?

I have a fantasy about Chris Matthews. It's the 1980s and the height of the violent "Troubles" in Northern Ireland, and Hardball is on. Matthews goes to political turf he knows well, Irish Boston, and gathers a group of American Catholic activists on air. Then he screws these guys to the wall. He asks them what being Irish-Catholic means to them, he grills them about whether they are sending money to the Sinn Fein or the Provisional IRA. He shows us from the inside out why an American interest group feels as passionately as it does, and how it is heating up a hot zone overseas.

But here's the rest of my fantasy: Matthews does the same thing now, for Jews and Israel. Only this time he isn't gathering Catholic corner boys like himself, he is gathering neocons at think tanks and publications and White House offices.

Chris Matthews should do this because as he now demonstrates nearly every night, he believes (as I do) that devotion to Israel on the part of socially- and politically-empowered hawkish Jews helped to distort our leaders' definitions of American interests. He should stop hinting, and put his money down on the counter. Matthews is probably the smartest guy about politics—if not ideas—on air, and if he is holding himself back, it just demonstrates the influence of the Israel lobby. People are afraid to take it on.

Matthews is losing his excuses on this. As it is, night after night, Matthews goes after the Iraq hawks for their deluded Middle East agenda. On Hardball on Friday night he kept shaking his head and saying WHY did they believe this line of nonsense? He seems to have just woken up to the tremendous imposture that Israel-centric right wingers represent  read more »

HAIFA—Cpl. Michael Mizrahi’s Merkava tank crew had given up.  read more »

ERICA: Call me crazy, but I assumed just giving my bridesmaids a color and allowing them to choose ANY dress, ANY style or ANY length they wanted was a fairly easy request. I actually gave myself a pat on the back for being such a progressive bride. Little did I know that by choosing white as their color, I was offering up an assignment comparable to that of negotiating peace in the Middle East.

Yesterday I got a phonecall from my sister Robyn, my Maid of Honor, who inquired:

"I know you said white, but is ivory OK? How about cream? Or how about white with a colored sash?"

Apparently, white dresses are a dime a dozen if you are lucky enough to be a bride, but as any other contributing member to a sacred union, finding a white dress is not so freakin' easy. And, of course, I've asked all of my bridesmaids as well as my mom, grandma and mother-in-law to wear white.  read more »

This morning I received the following email from my best friend Cara, another one of my bridesmaids. She's studying to be a yoga teacher half way around the world and, apparently, our "white situation" has now reached international proportions, as Cara relates below:

The war in Lebanon and Israel doesn’t have much to do with Lebanon, and scarcely more to do with I  read more »

In a recent column, neocon Daniel Pipes openly questions the loyalties of British Muslims.

Polling indicates that a majority of Muslims perceive a conflict between their British and Muslim identities. Two polls show that only a small proportion identifies itself first as a British (7% and 12%), but they differ widely on the number who identify first with their religion (81% and 46%).

Pipes concludes, "Britain's potential terrorists live in a highly nurturing community."

His point is well taken. Terrorism is a hearts-and-minds issue. Terrorists draw strength, both in finances and in morale, from law-abiding communities. One reason I am for Islamic reformers.

Pipes's point also opens the door on my question: How important is Israel, politically/religiously, in the hearts and minds of the neoconservatives and other Jewish hawks? I think, very large. For instance, former Bush speechwriter David Frum describes America as "this new Israel," while Elliott Abrams, Bush's aide on Middle East matters, writes:

Outside the land of Israel, there can be no doubt that Jews, faithful to the covenant between God and Abraham, are to stand apart from the nation in which they live. It is the very nature of being Jewish to be apart--except in Israel--from the rest of the population....

The neocons, along with a lot of Democratic hawks, have thoroughly conflated American and Israeli interests, to the detriment of U.S. foreign policy. They honestly believe our interests and Israel's are congruent. I think they're wrong, and Americans should debate this. And if it's legitimate to talk about how Muslims identify themselves, and I think it is, it is also fair to ask how important Israel is to rightwing Jewish-Americans who have pushed for war with Iraq, Syria and Iran.

This is about the power of ideas. The neocons were on the outs for a long time after Reagan left office. To their credit, they lived quietly in their cells exchanging crazily logical ideas about the Middle East—and were well paid to do so. They won over a lot of Democrats. Then through a concatenation of events, Cheney, 9/11, they were suddenly sitting in the Oval Office.

That's over, of course. The proof of which is all the noise they are making in the neoconservative press, from the Sun to the Weekly Standard, about taking on Iran and Syria.

Meanwhile, the left is on the outs, but all the talk about the Israel lobby is of course fueling the left's response to the neocons, and to Democratic hawks. On Sunday the Washington Post magazine published its brave cover on the Israel lobby and author Glenn Frankel included a fabulous psychological insight from Henry Siegman:

While American Jews may have become powerful, they don't feel powerful. A new set of pogroms or a new Holocaust? It could happen, even in America. "There's a certain dynamic to organized Jewish life as to all so-called defense organizations created to protect a supposedly vulnerable group," says Henry Siegman, who once served as executive director of the American Jewish Congress and now directs the U.S./Middle East project at the Council of Foreign Relations. "It creates a culture of victimhood, and it often attracts people who feel like they're victims as well."

Juan Williams obviously read that article before he went on Fox News Sunday, where he struck out at Bill Kristol in a way that drew on Siegman's analysis.

You just want war, war, war, and you want us in more war. You wanted us in Iraq. Now you want us in Iran. Now you want us to get into the Middle East, where I think there's a real interesting dynamic at play. I think it's psychological on the part of Israel and many of its supporters, and I'll throw you in here. Somehow you see Israel as weak, and you see Ehud Olmert as weak. And the defense minister as weak. Everybody is weak in the aftermath of Sharon, and so everybody has to prove what a man they are in the Middle East, including -- you're saying, why doesn't the United States take this hard, unforgiving line? Well, the hard and unforgiving line has been, we don't talk to anybody. We don't talk to Hamas. We don't talk to Hezbollah. We're not going to talk to Iran. Where has it gotten us, Bill?

Apparently Kristol threw up his hands and didn't answer. As if to say, Antisemitism! While Williams must have felt indemnified by Siegman's Jewishness in saying what he did.

When I tuned in C-Span for the White House briefing today, they were reairing this morning's Washington Journal call-in. In the space of five minutes I heard two attacks on the closeness of U.S. policy to Israel. Both callers described Israel as an aggressor. One call was reasonable, the other was clearly antisemitic, in a comment about "letting the Jews" run America. This is hardly the first time I've heard such attitudes on C-Span. A few weeks back a caller asked Sen. Russ Feingold and his host why all the guests on the show were Jewish. Quick on his feet, Feingold said that Jews are good at talking.

I get attacked a lot for my critique of American policy in the Mideast. I'm not generating those call-ins, though. They are a genuine reflection of shifting American attitudes towards our joined-at-the-hip alliance with Israel. As someone here said a few weeks back, the Israel lobby may be looking at its Elian Gonzales moment, that moment when a special interest's precious interest suddenly becomes the property of national attention.

Plainly the new focus on the Middle East is going to generate some antisemitism. The way to respond to it is condemning it but also opening the subject up to wider discussion. Just yesterday a big editor I saw in the city marveled that the Times had managed to all but suppress the raging controversy over the historic Mearsheimer-Walt paper, the Harvard/UChicago profs who say that the Israel lobby skews America's true interests in the region. The Times has done one skimpy piece about the paper, on B8 (yes, followed by the (majestic) Tony Judt op-ed). That is inexcusable.

The two items below that attack neocons are really the reason I'm blogging. I have tried for years to write about these issues in the mainstream media. They're not interested, though I think these issues are central to the disaster that is Iraq and the misguided and radical thinking that guides our policy in the Middle East. Our country is in a crisis of leadership. I needed to speak out somewhere about what I know and think. Blog.

My point of entry here is my own struggle with my Jewish roots. Yes I'm an assimilator, but I know that I'm very Jewish in my thinking and approach, and part of my distaste for the neoconservatives has to do with the way that the Jewish presence in American life has changed in my generation.  read more »

Is USA Today emerging as an idealistic voice? It broke the big story on wiretapping citizens. Now Jimmy Carter, once again distinguishing himself as a moral voice, says that Israeli Prime Minister Olmert's plans for fences deep inside the occupied territories of the West Bank, preserving settlements, are a landgrab.

It is inconceivable that any Palestinian, Arab leader, or any objective member of the international community could accept this illegal action as a permanent solution to the continuing altercation in the Middle East. This confiscation of land is to be carried out without resorting to peace talks with the Palestinians, and in direct contravention of the "road map for peace," which President Bush helped to initiate and has strongly supported.

What if George Bush were to say tomorrow that our motivation for going into Iraq was to secure oil wealth for the west and to protect Israel—might that reverse his slide in the polls?

A splendid post on Syria Comment, Oklahoma U. Prof Josh Landis's blog, says that Bush needs to do just that to win support in the Middle East. "Ehsani2" writes that Osama Bin Laden has always been transparent about his motivation: He wants Islamists to take full control of the oil fields, rid the region of dictators, and then deal with the west from a position of strength. Ehsani says that Bush should take a page from Osama's book.

Rather than articulate the need to secure the long term security of the region's oil fields, the need to cut off any possible future state-sponsoring of Jihadist movements and to ensure the security of the state of Israel, when it comes to explaining the rationale behind America's Middle East policy, this administration decided to use the "spread of democracy" as the stated objective. In my opinion, President Bush made the strategic error of failing to explain how the spread of democracy is the "means" and not the "end" when it came to conducting his Middle East policy.

Ehsani suggests a program for Bush that includes these points:

We have an enormous strategic interest in the Middle East. We must make sure that the region's critical energy resources do not fall into the wrong hands...Our support for the state of Israel will not dissipate. This admitted policy bias towards Israel will mean that we will always have a credibility problem in the Arab world.

Ehsani lives in the Middle East (and Landis says he doesn't know who he is). But a lot of the rage in the U.S. toward Bush springs from the same feeling: Bush was not upfront about the gravest decision a President can make. I would still oppose his policy if those hidden agendas were out on the table. But other Americans might rally to his side. God knows he can't do any worse.

Maybe you haven't followed the on-line feud over whether rightwing columnist Christopher Hitchens's alleged alcoholism led him to publish on Slate a statement by the influential scholar Juan Cole that Cole believed to be confidential. Cole had made the statement on a confidential listserv called "Gulf 2000." He felt violated when Hitchens quoted from it, and mused that Hitchens may have done so because he's an alcoholic. Cole writes

Well, I don't think it is any secret that Hitchens has for some time had a very serious and debilitating drinking problem. He once showed up drunk to a talk I gave and heckled me. I can only imagine that he was deep in his cups when he wrote, or had some far Rightwing think tank write, his current piece of yellow journalism. I am sorry to witness the ruin of a once-fine journalistic mind.

Whether or not you think Hitchens is an alcoholic (and what I saw of him years ago would support that belief then), it's great the conversation is happening. It's probably relevant, to begin with. And it's Cole's honest opinion. And it would never appear in the mainstream press. That's because the print press is so monetized. You get paid so much for issuing opinions in the mainstream press, and they make so much off those opinions, that libel concerns encircle every loaded statement. (Let alone the usual social groupthink questions: Unh, can we really say this??) In the blogosphere it's about information and true opinion. Hitchens's friends get to counter the claim or ignore it. There's a free discussion, closer to what intellectuals are saying to one another on telephones and in bars (sorry!), not a stilted and false one.

Though Andrew Sullivan's claim that his countryman was sober at the time—

I was at Hitch's yesterday as he filed the piece. He was stone-cold sober. And on top form.

doesn't seem entirely relevant. As Dan Swanson points out to me, the nastiness and self-centeredness of alcoholic behavior doesn't require having had a drink..

Not that I would come down on Cole's side here (as I do on his views of the Middle East). Cole is a very important thinker, for good reason; he has great judgment and knowledge. I gather that Hitchens is not in the listserv. If someone in the listserv passed on Cole's confidential statement to Hitchens, and Hitchens chose to publish it, how different is that, in form, from what the New York Times so nobly did in breaking the story about Bush's illegal wiretaps? Yes, the leaker violated an oath in giving the journalist info; the journalist shared the leaker's view that the info was important, and passed it on to his readers.

Some time back I was interviewing a prominent academic who was disturbed by American policy in the Middle East but said he didn't want to stick his head up too high on the question. "Who wants to have Dershowitz coming after him?"

Good point. Dershowitz is brilliant and aggressive and intimidating. In their paper on the Israel lobby, Mearsheimer and Walt correctly identify The Dersh as an important part of the lobby. Because when anyone challenges the morality of our one-sided policy in the I/P world (Israel Palestine), Dersh is sure to land with both broad feet, hard and fast.

He's done so again, in responding, on the Kennedy School website, to the Walt-Mearsheimer paper. http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/research/working_papers/dershowitzreply.pdf His attack is emotional and forceful, accusing the authors of distortion and anti-semitism. And it's wrong. He argues in essence, this paper is a neo-Nazi tract that twists evidence out of hatred for Jews and therefore must not be taken seriously. (In fact, as I've said before, Walt-Mearsheimer is a considered, provocative and heretical analysis that must be taken seriously...)

But let's consider one of Dersh's key points: Osama bin Laden couldn't care less about the Palestinians.

Prior to September 11, Israel was barely on bin Laden's radar.

Here he echoes a central claim of the Israel lobby, that the 9/11 attacks were about Saudi Arabia, Arab male social frustration, Arab dictatorship, Arab lack of opportunity-- anything but American policy in I/P. And to some degree, the lobby is right. The hijackers apparently had a wide range of motivations, which historians will be parsing for a long time to come--about as long as they're trying to figure out why the U.S. invaded Iraq!

The lie the lobby and The Dersh spread is that the unbalanced American policy in I/P had nothing to do with the attacks. When Osama bin Laden and his associates clearly were angry about the Palestinians. Here is Max Rodenbeck, in a thorough piece called "Their Master's Voice," about bin Ladenism in the New York Review of Books. (http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18750)

... the notion of payback for injustices suffered by the Palestinians is perhaps the most powerfully recurrent in bin Laden's speeches. It has become fashionable to assert that al-Qaeda's attachment to the Palestinian cause is relatively recent, and has been cynical and deliberately manipulative. That is simply not true. As long ago as 1984, witnesses report bin Laden shunning American goods to protest American support of Israel.

Speaking just before the 2004 presidential elections, bin Laden himself voiced amazement that Americans, deceived, he supposed, by their government, had yet to understand that he had struck America because "things just went too far with the American-Israeli alliance's oppression and atrocities against our people." As he goes on to relate in some detail:

The events that made a direct impression on me were during and after 1982, when America allowed the Israelis to invade Lebanon.... I still remember those distressing scenes: blood, torn limbs, women and children massacred.... The whole world heard and saw what happened, but did nothing. In those critical moments, many ideas raged inside me, ideas difficult to describe, but they unleashed a powerful urge to reject injustice and a strong determination to punish the aggressors.

Yes bin Laden is evil. No, we don't let a madman dictate our policies. But the point is, when people ask, Why do they hate us? the answer must include the understanding, We've sided almost absolutely with an occupying power in a very morally ambiguous situation, Israel-Palestine.

And that's the strongest evidence of the Israel lobby's power. You cannot make this simple statement in the mainstream. Most significantly, the 9/11 Commission report on the attacks included not one word about Israel as a motivator for the hijackers. That is a true national disgrace: The official response to the most important event of our time, drafted by politicians, and it cannot honestly address a principal sore point in the Clash of Civilizations. Because the commission is afraid to raise questions about the evenhandedness of our policy and the Israel lobby. Afraid to bring down the Wrath of the Dersh. It's time to free ourselves of this bugaboo.

For months or even years a conversation has been boiling just beneath the surface in political circles, in dinner parties or offices, and finally it's come up for air. That's the discussion of the pro-Israel lobby, and how large a role it plays in a, our Middle Eastern foreign policy and b, the (disastrous) decision to invade Iraq. The worst thing about this discussion is that it has essentially been suppressed. It's not in the newspapers, not on television. Imagine talking about the politics of social security and not talking about the elderly bloc-- that's the kind of omission our media have had when it comes to the pro-Israel lobby, whatever its strength. Happily, the seal may lately have been broken by two leading American professors in an article in the London Review of Books. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n06/mear01_.html As the professors point out, their article would likely not have been published in the United States, though the shockwaves of the explosive article are being felt here more than abroad. Indeed, their standing-- John Mearsheimer is at the university of Chicago, Stephen Walt is a dean at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government-- has granted their argument an audience that other analyses of this question has never gotten. In other words, everyone I know is talking about it. I'm going to be writing about this article off and on in days to come-- it's that important, I think historic. It makes two controversial assertions. One is the argument that the pro-Israel lobby has exerted a "stranglehold" on American policy in the Middle East-- that our actions have reflected Israel's interests, often damaging our own. The second is the idea that the Iraqi war came out of a pro-Israel agenda within the Bush administration, fostered of course by the neconservatives. I tend to agree with Mearsheimer and Walt on both points. Our politicians' passive acceptance of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories, an ongoing neocolonial tragedy that is doing no one any good, can be laid to some greater or lesser degree at the feet of the lobby. And second, the Iraqi war-planning party in the Bush Administration included as an important and even necessary component a Likudnik faction that often confused American interests with Israeli interests. Making the Middle East safe for democracy has turned out to mean mirroring and thereby validating Israel's experience-- occupying Arab lands, suffering grisly terrorist attacks, rationalizing indiscriminate attacks on locals as a justifiable response to amorphous "terror." Oh, and demonizing Arabs. The paper has drawn sharp attacks from the usual suspects. Alan Dershowitz has said that its argument draws on neo-Nazism, the New York Sun would like to see its professors defunded, Christopher Hitchens has said (on Slate) that the paper is a "vapid" effort to escape the truth: that we're in a clash of civilizations. The most interesting thing about the response so far is the resistance to it among the Jewish left. Daniel Fleshler, a longtime activist in the Peace Now crowd, reluctantly put himself behind AIPAC in a piece in the Forward http://www.forward.com/articles/7511 And here is Adam Shatz, the literary editor of the Nation, demurring on the paper in the Guardian. http://commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/adam_shatz/2006/03/post_9.html "The vision of Mearsheimer and Walt of a lobby with the power to recast American foreign policy in its image strains credulity," Shatz says, arguing that Israel's location and ideology and militarism make it an appealing ally any way you cut it. I'm not convinced. If the lobby doesn't sway politicians, then a lot of rich shrewd people are spending a lot of money that they could better spend on other things. If it didn't exert a stranglehold, why is it that only retired politicians, like Fritz Hollings and Jimmy Carter, dare to criticize Israel openly? That John Edwards interrupts his vice-presidential debate with Dick Cheney to pander to the lobby? Or, tragically, that the 9/11 Commission Report, the official word on why they hate us, says not one word about our Israel policy as a motivation for Osama bin Laden when bin Laden has said that the Palestinian cause was high on his list of grievances against the west? I'm not sure what the lobby's true dimensions are. The one thing I'm sure about is that there is fear about examining it. Many friends of mine in the media seem to think that crediting the lobby with any power at all publicly amounts to trading in antisemitic conspiracy theories about Jewish influence. I know where the fear comes from, but it doesn't show any faith on their part in the democratic process. The issue has become simply too important to keep ignoring, and meantime the prohibition against discussing it raises real issues about how free our speech is. That's the great thing about the Walt and Mearsheimer paper. It's torn down a wall. Let the discussion begin openly.

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