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http://www.haaretzdaily.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=271599
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Last update - 07:58 12/03/2003
Background/ The Iraq crisis as the War of the Jews
By Bradley Burston, Haaretz Correspondent
The Iraq crisis has triggered the largest pre-emptive anti-war movement in
history, with millions on the march against a war that has still yet to begin.
As the tide of opposition has grown, so has an undercurrent of argument
that Jewish influence in America and Israel is a crucial factor pushing
Washington into battle, in turn spurring furious debate over the line
between free expression and classic anti-Semitism.
The latest focus of the debate was a congressional district close to
Washington, where veteran Democratic Congressman James P. Moran Jr.
sparked fiery condemnation by telling an anti-war gathering at a Virginia
church why he believed mass opposition across the U.S. to an Iraq
offensive had not done more to reverse the march to war.
"If it were not for the strong support of the Jewish community for this war
with Iraq, we would not be doing this," Moran said in remarks quoted
Tuesday by the Washington Post. "The leaders of the Jewish community
are influential enough that they could change the direction of where this
is going, and I think they should."
An onslaught of criticism followed, undiminished by Moran's subsequent
apology. Voicing regret for replying as he did because his questioner had
identified herself as Jewish, Moran maintained that his views pertained to
organizations as a whole. "If more organizations in this country, including
religious groups, were more outspoken against a war, then I do not think
we would be pursuing war as an option."
Sophie R. Hoffman, president of the Jewish Community Council of Greater
Washington, was plainly unconvinced. "When Moran realized just how
outrageous his remarks were, he attempted to backpedal, saying he didn't
mean what he clearly said," she said. "This time, it just won't work."
Hoffman's spokesman went further, calling Moran's statement
"reprehensible and anti-Semitic."
Moran's remarks came amid a flood of commentary from analysts of both
the American left and right suggesting that Bush administration was taking
advice - if not outright orders - from the Sharon government and the Israeli
defense establishment on handling Saddam Hussein.
The analysts' comments have intensified as top-ranking Israeli officials have
gone on record predicting that the war could have a cure-all effect for
many of the Jewish state's paralyzing economic and security ills.
The image of such a deus ex machina has been invoked so often as to have
entered Israeli public discourse as a synonym for the positive side effects
of a war in Iraq - a solution which, if far- fetched in many of its
assumptions, may be the only remedy on an otherwise desolate horizon.
Of late, the very Jewish organizations speaking out against what they
perceive as the new anti-Semitism have themselves come in for attack for
allegedly doing the bidding of offstage Jewish and Israeli puppet-masters.
In October, the African-American poet Amiri Baraka - vowing to resist
efforts to depose him as poet laureate of New Jersey for having written
verses suggesting that Jews and the Israeli government had foreknowlege
of the September 11 attacks - told a New York poetry club that he wanted
to know "why the [B'nai Brith] Anti-Defamation League is not registered as
an agent of a foreign power."
The initial rumblings of the current debate over alleged Jewish and Israeli
influence took place years before the election of George W. Bush. The
Clinton administration was peppered with Jewish aides in key positions.
But the debate has gone fully public only during the Bush presidency.
Several of Bush's current defense advisers were instrumental in the
preparation of a 1996 position paper for then- prime minister Benjamin
Netanyahu, a darling of a number of self-described neo-conservatives,
many of them high-profile Jewish Republicans. As one of its
recommendations, the position paper advised Israeli leaders to "focus on
removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq."
The paper's authors included Douglas Feith, now Bush's Under Secretary of
Defense for Policy, Richard Perle, currently chairman of the Pentagon's
advisory Defense Policy Board, and David Wurmser, now a special assistant
to Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton.
The voices alleging undue hardline Israeli and Jewish influence on the
administration also cite the appointments of the hawkish Paul Wolfowitz as
Deputy Defense Secretary and of Perle protege Elliot Abrams, viewed as a
persuasive critic of the moribund Israeli- Palestinian peace process, as
director of Mideast affairs for the National Security Council. The Abrams
appointment spurred an unnamed senior administration official to tell the
Washington Post last month that "the Likudniks are really in charge now."
"The conspiracy theory appears in several variations, ranging from
malignant to merely cynical," wrote New York Times columnist Bill Keller in
a recent piece on contentions of undue Israeli and Jewish influence on
American policy. "But it goes something like this: A cadre of pro-Zionist
zealots within the Bush administration and among its media chorus (the
'amen corner,' as the isolationist Pat Buchanan crudely called them last
time we threatened Iraq) has long schemed to make the Middle East safer
for Israel by uprooting the hostile regime of Saddam Hussein. They have
finally succeeded, the theory goes, in pushing their agenda up to the desk
of a gullible president."
Barely two weeks after September 11, Buchanan, a Nixon and Reagan
White House aide and three-time presidential candidate, referred to the
Netanyahu-neoconservative tie when he wrote, "The war Netanyahu and
the neocons want, with the United States and Israel fighting all of the
radical Islamic states, is the war bin Laden wants, the war his murderers
hoped to ignite when they sent those airliners into the World Trade
Center and the Pentagon."
After dealing with the Taliban in Afghanistan, Buchanan asks, "Do we then
dynamite Powell's U.S.-Arab-Muslim coalition by using U.S. power to invade
Iraq? Do we then reverse alliances and make Israel's war America's war?"
With Buchanan and other rightists implicitly questioning Jewish influence,
similar arguments are being advanced by the American left. Although Jews
on the left have long been inured to being dismissed - often by fellow Jews
- as anti-Semitic for criticizing Israel, the vociferous nature of some anti-
war organizers' anti- Israel positions has convinced even fellow Jewish
leftists that anti- Semitism is indeed the proper designation.
Rabbi and peace activist Michael Lerner, editor of the leftist- Jewish
Tikkun Magazine, himself a frequent object of scorn by Jewish community
officials incensed over his attacks on the Sharon government and his
advocacy of Palestinian statehood, last month described speeches at anti-
war rallies organized by radical left groups as, in part, "a barrage of Israel
bashing and anti- Semitic garbage."
"The emotional climate at these demonstrations has been one that most
Jews I have encountered find somewhere between uncomfortable and
overtly anti-Semitic," he told LA Weekly. "So it seems to me incredibly self-
destructive for an anti-war movement - that at the moment does not have
the allegiance of the majority of Americans - to be pushing away one of
the most progressive sectors of American society, the liberal and
progressive voices of Jews" who criticize Israel but actively support its
right to exist.
Yet another source of tension is the timing of Israel's current request that
the Bush White House approve billions of dollars in new loan guarantees
and direct aid grants.
Responding to the burgeoning debate, Anti-Defamation League national
director Abraham Foxman told the U.S. Jewish Forward weekly last month
that while it is certainly legitimate to question where the Sharon
government or American Jewish groups stands on the war, the thin line is
crossed by those who portray these entities as a shadowy Jewish
conspiracy that controls American foreign policy.
"It is an old canard that Jews control America and American foreign
policy," Foxman said. "During both world wars, anti- Semites said that Jews
manipulated America into war. So when you being to hear it again, there is
good reason for us to be aware of it and sensitive to it."
According to former minister of education and culture Amnon Rubinstein,
the accusations that the imminent war "is a plot hatched by the Jews" ring
familiar. "They are reminiscent of the Arab claim that the attack on the
Twin Towers was perpetrated by Mossad ("It is a fact that that day, the
Jews didn't come to work") or the blood libel that alleges the Jews are
spreading AIDS in Egypt.
"What makes these accusations so interesting is the fact that they link
anti-Semitic propaganda with anti-Israeli propaganda," Rubinstein writes in
Tuesday's Haaretz. "True, not every criticism of Israel is unfounded and not
everyone who denounces raids on refugee camps in Gaza is anti-Semitic."
However, Rubinstein continues, special attention should be paid the
recent boycott of a Malaga, Spain art gallery against "any person related to
Israel, as we are in total disaccord with its segregationist policy and we
certainly hold an anti-Semitic attitude to any person related to that
country."
Although the Malaga case is extreme by any measure, Rubinstein cites it as
a warning of the possible revival of classic Jew-hate – even in a secular
society where the church has lost its influence.
"The incident in Malaga shows that even where there are no Jews or very
many committed Christians, there still remains a worrisome residue of that
age-old hatred. Even when the Cheshire cat of the Church has vanished,
its anti-Semitic smile remains - in Spain and elsewhere."
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