Gawker
June 1, 2008
NY
The jews, the israel lobby, mearsheimer and walt, tony judt, joe klein,
israel, top The Video The Jewish Cabal Didn’t Want You To See
So the Dutch, ever attuned to ruffling feathers and then giving the
finger to the duck, have produced a documentary on John Mearsheimer
and Stephen Walt’s "The Israel Lobby." You might remember that thesis,
originally circulated in the London Review of Books, for its argument
that American Zionist groups, namely AIPAC, and various evangelical
backers of Israel, who believe the holy land is the return depot
of the Son of Man, control U.S. foreign policy. How much so? Well,
the word "strangle-hold" was used, until the authors wisely decided
to drop it. And we apparently went to war in Iraq as a personal favor
to Ariel Sharon ("One for the road, Bulldozer.")
You might also remember "The Israel Lobby" from its expanded version as
an eponymous book with the aesthetics of the Israeli and American flags
interwoven and which drew universally hostile reviews on both the left
and the right (when’s the last time you can remember the Nation sort
of agreeing with Commentary?), as well from both the neoconservative
and "realist" schools of foreign policy. Those who didn’t speculate
as to Mearsheimer and Walt’s tenebrous motives concluded that their
scholarship was mostly fifth-rate, and that their reasoning was just
as good.
The loud and angry chorus quietened to a murmuring panel discussion
after Walter Russell Mead of the Council on Foreign Relations came to
the cool-headed determination: "Their use of evidence is uneven. At
the level of geopolitics, their handling of the complex realities
and crosscurrents of the Middle East fails to establish either the
incontestable definition of the national interest that their argument
requires or the superiority they claim for the policies they propose."
But Mearsheimer and Walt’s biggest problem was a category
one: They depicted the "lobby" as encompassing every strain of
opinion with respect to Israel, thus nullifying its definition as
an undifferentiated, monomaniacal force. Had they written a book
entitled Jews Argue, they’d have sold fewer copies but made much the
same underlying point. As Mead put it: "Since virtually every possible
policy position is supported by some element of this lobby, the lobby
never loses no matter what happens in Washington — like the man who
always ‘wins’ at roulette because he puts a chip on every square."
Of course, the only real "lobby" the pair wound up calling attention
to was the self-martyrdom one run by simpering intellectuals. Dare
criticize the Jewish state, goes a certain kind of reverse messianic
logic, and you’ll never work in this town again. Not many reviewers
denounced Mearsheimer and Walt as anti-Semites, at least not in
public; Mead said they stupidly trafficked in all the wrong tropes, but
probably out of illiteracy and ignorance–they certainly weren’t aware
of much Middle Eastern and American history, so this rationale didn’t
seem willfully naive. Yet those who did denounce them as Jew-haters
were held up as proof of one part of their shoddy grievance; namely,
that a contingent of powerful and influential Jews and Christians
are always standing guard to protect not only the sanctity of the
American-Israeli special relationship, but to deny that such a
protection even exists.
Strange, then, that even the putative "victims" of AIPAC don’t seem all
that victimized. Mearsheimer and Walt are both still gainfully employed
academics, and the fact that the present documentary isn’t airing
on U.S. television owes to how irrelevant and old the controversy
has become, which fact hasn’t stopped the inevitable whispers about
a backroom censorship campaign. Was it censorship when the essay
and book were being blogged and written about ad nauseum in every
magazine and newspaper in the country, and eliciting puzzled laughter
from Israelis, who could never quite see what all the fuss was about?
Tony Judt, one of Mearsheimer and Walt’s more mainstream boosters,
who whether by accident or design looks more and more like Isaac
Babel, parlayed his defense of them into an occasion for a good
headline-grabbing whine. An invitation issued to him to speak at the
Polish consulate in New York was rescinded after Abe Foxman of the
Anti-Defamation League placed a hectoring phone call to the little
sliver of Warsaw on the Hudson and reminded whoever was in charge
that Judt had some provocative ideas about the future of Israel. Yet
that same Polish government, as Judt indicates in this documentary,
is "not very attractive" and therefore prone to take decisions he
would not agree with–like informing Tony Judt that his speaking
services are no longer required. He now discloses that when the New
York Times commissioned him to write an op-ed on the original London
Review article, the paper forced him to acknowledge in print that
he was Jewish. Judt might have declined to do that on principle and
instead shopped his piece around elsewhere, but he didn’t. Is his
point that no one gets away clean from the tentacular reaches of the
lobby, which is still not a "conspiracy," as his editorial plangently
announced in its title?
As for Foxman, his campaign to stifle the introduction of a House
resolution recognizing the Armenian genocide — because he was afraid
it’d piss off Turkey, Israel’s only military ally in the Levant —
failed. They don’t make Zionist praetorians like they used to, I
guess. (I should probably add here that, in my capacity as associate
editor of Jewcy magazine, I helped coordinate two Manhattan rallies
against Foxman and the ADL for their shameful agitation. It still
wasn’t enough to take me off their fucking mailing list.)
Then there is the more recent case of Joe Klein. On Time’s Swampland
blog last week, he composed a post entitled "Surge Protection," which
made some mundane observations about the state of security in Iraq
(it’s better), but then ended with this hiccup:
The fact that a great many Jewish neoconservatives–people like Joe
Lieberman and the crowd over at Commentary–plumped for this war, and
now for an even more foolish assault on Iran, raised the question of
divided loyalties: using U.S. military power, U.S. lives and money,
to make the world safe for Israel.
The little diddums. Klein must have known that would call down
the Hebraic thunder, and it did. As best I can tell, he was doing
what he’s been doing since he learned how to blog and read virulent
comments, many of which routinely brand him a neocon warmonger — he
was pandering. Not that there aren’t prominent Jewish neoconservatives
who plumped for war, mind you. But it was the crankish types who keep
track of such tribal affiliations that "raised the question of divided
loyalties," whereas Richard Perle would no doubt have preferred the
question remain recumbent.
The curious thing about Klein, though is, as Mickey Kaus noted,
"It’s now a week later, and as far as I can tell [he] still has his
job. He’s still blogging (wondering ‘why Lieberman is so fixated on
Iran’). He hasn’t been publically rebuked by his employer. He hasn’t
been forced to issue a groveling apology."
Mary McCarthy once wrote an eloquent and vigorous defense of Hannah
Arendt, and described the effect of being one of the few Gentiles
in conversation with Jews where the topic was Eichmann in Jerusalem,
Arendt’s molten treatment of the "banality of evil" that burned its way
through the salons of the Upper West Side in the early 60’s. McCarthy
said it was "like [being] a child with a reading defect in a class
of normal readers."
You can be Jewish and sometimes feel that way, too.