Let us also not forget conservative comments about the "Cultural Elite" - which have their roots in resentment against the Liberal Elite, formerly called the New York Liberal Elite and previously the New York Jewish Liberal Elite. When Dan Quayle and Pat Buchanan talk about the Cultural Elite, this is who they mean.
Michael Bindner
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
This article from NYTimes.com
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Highly recommended in the context of our current topic--a lengthy review of recent history.
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How to Talk About Israel
August 31, 2003
By IAN BURUMA
The Jewish Problem pops up in the strangest places. In the
winter of 1991, at the height of the first gulf war, I
asked a right-wing Japanese politician who still wields
considerable power in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party
to explain the Japanese role in the Middle Eastern
conflict. After clearing his throat with some perfunctory
remarks about oil supplies and United States-Japan
relations, he suddenly stopped midsentence, gave me a
shrewd look and said: ''Look, we Japanese aren't stupid. We
saw Henry Kissinger on TV. We know how America operates.
We're perfectly well aware that this war is not about
Kuwait. It's about Jewish interests. It's all about
Israel.''
Perhaps he had read too many books about Jewish
conspiracies (Roosevelt was a Jew, Churchill was a Jew,
Rockefeller was a Jew, etc.), for which the Japanese market
seems to have an insatiable appetite. He was, in any case,
not known for his intellectual finesse. But the idea that
Israel or Jewish interests are somehow at the center of
world events or, at the very least, at the center of
American foreign policy in the Middle East is widely held,
and not only outside the United States. No matter what the
current American administration does to save the tattered
''road map'' toward an end to the conflict between Israelis
and Palestinians, sinister motives are still bound to be
imputed.
Earlier this year, Representative James Moran, a Democrat,
said that ''if it were not for the strong support of the
Jewish community for this war with Iraq, we would not be
doing this.'' In Britain, Tam Dalyell, a longstanding Labor
member of Parliament, expressed a similar view. Tony Blair,
he opined, was listening too much to a ''cabal'' of Jews
around President Bush that included Deputy Defense
Secretary Paul Wolfowitz; an under secretary of defense,
Douglas Feith; Richard Perle, a member of the Defense
Policy Board; Elliott Abrams, director of Middle East
Affairs in the White House; and the former presidential
spokesman Ari Fleischer. ''Those people drive this
policy,'' Dalyell said.
Dalyell was ''worried about my country being led up the
garden path on a Likudnik-Sharon agenda'' by British Jews
close to Blair. He included among them Foreign Secretary
Jack Straw, a Christian, whose rather distant Jewish family
connections are very unlikely to make him a Likudnik.
The fact that James Moran had to apologize immediately,
while the British M.P. was under no compulsion to do so,
shows a profound difference between the United States and
Europe, or indeed anywhere else in the world. Although
Moran's opinion may be shared by other Americans, it is not
something mainstream politicians can vocalize. Even
legitimate criticism of Israel, or of Zionism, is often
quickly denounced as anti-Semitism by various watchdogs. In
European political discourse, not only is anti-Zionism
quite acceptable, but so are vague allegations of too much
Jewish influence in public life, especially across the
Atlantic. And in the non-Western world, it's not even
necessary to keep such allegations vague.
Rarely can such a tiny country as Israel, and such a
relatively small minority as the diaspora Jews, have been
assumed to exercise so much influence in world affairs. The
special relationship between Israel and the United States,
and the supposed dominance of ''Jewish interests'' in
Washington, is by now encrusted with so many layers of
mythology and bad faith that it has become very difficult
to discuss Israel's role in American politics critically
and dispassionately. Yet not to talk about it invites only
more conspiracy theories.
There are several myths to be considered. The first is the
idea that the American or the British government is
dominated or manipulated by Jews. In fact, none of
President Bush's cabinet members are Jewish, and the last
time individual Jews played a prominent part in any British
government was under John Major. Straw, moreover, has spent
more time and energy courting Iran than Israel. The
well-being of Israel is not Blair's main concern either. In
fact, an equitable deal for the Palestinians is more
important to the British leader, who badly needs to rebuild
his bridges with other European governments. That is why he
wants Washington to push the Israelis harder to make peace
with the Palestinians.
There is no doubt that Israeli lobby groups are well
organized and well financed and have considerable clout in
Washington. But then so do other lobbies. That is how the
game is played. There was a time not so long ago when hefty
books were written about the United States government
falling into the hands of scheming Japanese lobbies. It is
true that some people in the Pentagon, as well as
influential organizations like the American Enterprise
Institute and the Project for the New American Century,
have close relations with the Likud Party, and especially
with Finance Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is much more
in tune with American neoconservatism than Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon is. Douglas Feith and Richard Perle advised
Netanyahu, who was prime minister in 1996, to make ''a
clean break'' from the Oslo accords with the Palestinians.
They also argued that Israeli security would be served best
by regime change in surrounding countries. Despite the
current mess in Iraq, this is still a commonplace in
Washington. In Paul Wolfowitz's words, ''The road to peace
in the Middle East goes through Baghdad.'' It has indeed
become an article of faith (literally in some cases) in
Washington that American and Israeli interests are
identical, but this was not always so, and ''Jewish
interests'' are not the main reason for it now.
Indeed, Israel enjoys a zealous following among some
gentiles, particularly Christian fundamentalists. (In
electoral terms, Christian fundamentalists are more
important to the Republican Party than Jews -- there are
many more of them, the Christian Coalition is highly
efficient and most Jews still vote for the Democrats
anyway.) Even though Israel is often described as the only
democracy in the Middle East, the Christian right's
remarkable devotion to Israel is not necessarily driven by
democratic principles. The ''Christian Zionists'' are
convinced by a literal reading of the Bible that Christ
will reappear only once the Jews have repossessed the Holy
Land. Their other conviction, that Jews will either die in
an apocalypse or be converted to Christianity, is not so
reassuring. Still, the Rev. Jerry Falwell declared on ''60
Minutes'' that evangelical Christians would make sure no
American president would ever do anything to harm Israel.
At a conference of the Christian Coalition held in
Washington last year, there were more Stars of David than
crucifixes.
Then there are the foreign-policy hawks for whom Israel has
been a strategic inspiration. The notions of
''pre-emptive'' war and ''regime change'' were exemplified,
if not exactly pioneered, by Israel. The Six-Day War of
1967 was launched by Israel in self-protection, admittedly
in the face of far greater provocation than Iraq ever gave
the United States. And the invasion of Lebanon in 1982 was
part of an Israeli effort to install a more friendly
government in Beirut. Both actions, deplored by critics of
Israel all over the world, were seen as marks of admirable
resolve by friends of Israel in the United States.
What we see, then, is not a Jewish conspiracy, but a
peculiar alliance of evangelical Christians, foreign-policy
hard-liners, lobbyists for the Israeli government and
neoconservatives, a number of whom happen to be Jewish. But
the Jews among them -- Perle, Wolfowitz, William Kristol,
editor of The Weekly Standard, et al. -- are more likely to
speak about freedom and democracy than about Halakha
(Jewish law). What unites this alliance of convenience is a
shared vision of American destiny and the conviction that
American force and a tough Israeli line on the Arabs are
the best ways to make the United States strong, Israel safe
and the world a better place.
Not all Americans agree with this hard line, to be sure: a
recent campaign by American Jews to press Sharon into
accepting a two-state solution shows this. In fact, he now
accepts it in principle. Whether he will comply with
American pressure to stop building a barrier to keep the
Palestinians more or less imprisoned inside the occupied
territories is doubtful, especially when Palestinian
suicide bombers continue to blow up buses -- and the
Israeli government continues to kill Hamas leaders. And
there is no sign that President Bush will make a serious
effort to make the Israelis dismantle, or at least stop
building, Jewish settlements in the Palestinian areas. The
idea that Israeli and American interests, as defined by
evangelical Christians, neocons and Likudniks, converge, as
if by force of nature, is not seriously challenged in the
United States.
To judge from much of the world's media, especially in
Europe and the Middle East, this was always true. In fact,
it was not. The turning point was the Six-Day War. It was
then that many Europeans took up the Palestinian cause and
Israel could count, for the first time, on the almost
unconditional support of the United States. In 1947,
President Harry S. Truman did join the Soviet Union in
backing the United Nations resolution that gave Jews the
right to found a state in Palestine. But he did so against
the advice of State Department officials, who worried about
antagonizing the oil-rich Arab nations. When Israelis
fought for the survival of their state in 1948, the United
States did nothing to help them. Both the Americans and the
Soviets would later have good reasons for discretion about
their respective attitudes at Israel's difficult birth.
In 1956, during the Suez crisis, the United States actively
opposed Israel's interests. It was an interesting little
war in light of today's fashionable cliches about dovish
anti-Zionist Europeans and hawkish pro-Israeli Americans.
Israel's biggest supporter and arms supplier in the 1950's
was not the United States, but France. That is how Israel
got its nuclear bomb. Britain was more ambivalent and
tended to lean toward the Arabs. But when President Gamal
Abdel Nasser of Egypt, often depicted in the European press
as an Arab Hitler, nationalized the Suez Canal, thus
cutting out the British and French corporate owners, the
British joined the French in an attempt to grab it back.
They enlisted the Israelis in this enterprise by
encouraging them to attack Egyptian ''terrorists'' in the
Sinai, after which Britain and France would order both
sides to withdraw from Suez. The inevitable Egyptian
refusal would then be followed by a short, sharp conflict
and possibly even a ''regime change'' in Cairo. All went
well until the Soviets threatened to intervene on behalf of
the Egyptians and President Dwight D. Eisenhower forced
France and Britain to back off and the Israelis to get out
of the Sinai.
The French remained Israel's staunchest allies until 1967,
when Gen. Charles de Gaulle decided to withdraw his favors.
Having only just divested France of its last colonial
possessions in North Africa, de Gaulle decided to cultivate
the Arabs. He called the Israelis a ''domineering'' people
and warned them against going to war. As he put it to the
Israeli foreign minister, Abba Eban: ''You will be
considered the aggressor by the world, and by me. You will
cause the Soviet Union to penetrate more deeply into the
Middle East, and Israel will suffer the consequences. You
will create a Palestinian nationalism, and you will never
get rid of it.'' De Gaulle was not totally wrong on any of
these counts.
Until 1967, Israel was a great liberal European cause.
Almost everyone on the left supported it. The promised land
of kibbutzim and open-shirted pioneers represented, after
all, a socialist dream. Conservatives supported Israel,
too, especially the type of people who thought that Jews
were all very well as long as they stuck to their own kind.
This attitude was not new. Arthur Balfour, the British
foreign secretary whose famous declaration in 1917 opened
Palestine to Jewish immigration, was against Jewish
immigration to Britain and told Chaim Weizmann, the Zionist
leader, that he shared the ''anti-Semitic postulates'' of
certain well-known Jew-baiters.
Guilt, too, had a great deal to do with European good will
toward Israel in the 50's and early 60's. This was a time
when Jewish characters in German novels took on a saintly
air and anti-Semitic remarks (in public) were treated as a
kind of blasphemy. Anti-Semitism didn't disappear, of
course, but open expressions of it were frowned upon, at
least in Western Europe. If the word ''Jew'' had to be
uttered at all, people lowered their voices, as if
embarrassed by the very sound of it. Britain, never having
been under Nazi occupation, was less vexed. Having grown up
in guilt-ridden Holland, I can remember how shocked I was,
sometime in the mid-60's, to hear a young lawyer in London
make disparaging remarks about Jews.
Philo-Semitism is better than pogroms, to be sure, but
there was something unreal, and even a little unsettling,
about this dutiful sense of collective guilt. It was as if
Jews, including Israeli Jews, once again were not treated
in the same way as other human beings, which can quickly
lead to resentment, not among Jews so much as among
gentiles. Zvi Rex, an Israeli psychoanalyst, once put his
finger right on this sorest of points. ''The Germans,'' he
said, ''will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz.'' This
harsh analysis applies to some extent to non-Jews all over
the European continent. Nobody likes to be made to feel
guilty, especially for the sins of his father.
So it was with a certain sense of relief, in the aftermath
of the 1967 war, that the European left, led by Communist
publications like L'Humanite in France, could point its
finger at Israelis and conclude that Jews, far from being
saintly, were behaving just as badly as everyone else and,
indeed, perhaps worse. Once it became clear that the
Israelis were not going to give back their conquered
territories, the Palestinians became the prime victims to
be protected from persecution, and the Jews became the
Nazis. Here is L'Humanite on July 20, 1967: ''Six million
Jews were not slaughtered by the Nazis so that young sabras
could on occasion behave like young Hitlerites.''
In fact, Europeans, especially on the left, had a double
guilt complex. One complex concerned the widespread
collaboration in the destruction of European Jewry; the
other was about the colonial past. France's war in Algeria
ended only in 1962, after eight years of torture, terrorism
and a near civil war in France. Israel had backed France in
this last stand for European colonial rule. Taking up the
cause of Palestinians, Vietnamese and other postcolonial
peoples fighting for their ''liberation'' was a way to
atone for past European sins. And because Western
imperialism, since the late 60's, was largely associated
with Israel and the United States, anti-Zionism and
anti-Americanism came to mean the same thing. In this
respect, if in little else, the editors of L'Humanite and
General de Gaulle were entirely on the same wavelength.
The United States, meanwhile, began supplying Israel with
fighter jets in 1968 and became an ever more reliable
friend. But Zionist lobbies were not the main reason. It
was the politics of the cold war that paved Washington's
road to Jerusalem. Even though President Lyndon Johnson
liked the macho Israelis, some of his closest advisers,
including Vietnam hawks like Secretary of State Dean Rusk
and Walt Rostow, a national security adviser, argued
against supporting Israel's 1967 war. But Johnson decided
that the United States had to stand by Israel to thwart
Soviet designs on the Middle East.
If American Jews had anything to do with this, it was
because many of them criticized the war in Vietnam, and
Johnson needed something to appease these loyal Democratic
voters. Since Israel, by then, was becoming a primary focus
of Jewish identification -- as religion, Yiddish and other
Old World memories were fading -- American support for
Israel was a popular move among Jews. And besides that,
Israel was not only more democratic than America's client
states in Southeast Asia but a much brighter military
success to boot.
The steady alignment of American interests with Israel made
it possible for American Jews to be good Jews, good
Democrats and good American patriots too. This same period
gave birth to neoconservatism, in which Israel played a
major role. The career of Norman Podhoretz might serve as
an illustration. He was once a man of the left who
wondered, when ''thinking about the Jews,'' whether ''their
survival as a distinct group was worth one hair on the head
of a single infant.'' But, as he explained in a speech on
the occasion of his retirement as editor of Commentary in
1995, he began to change his mind in the 60's, when he
became ''much more aggressive in defense of Jewish
interests in general and of Israel in particular.'' One
reason was a sense of shock when defeat in Vietnam
threatened to turn the United States into a demoralized,
enervated, even isolationist power, which would no longer
stand up for good against evil in the world.
The other came roughly at the same time. Israel's
occupation of Palestinian territories made radical leftists
in the United States as receptive as Europeans to Arab and
Soviet depictions of the Zionists as neo-Nazis. Disgust
with this kind of ''liberalism,'' as well as with a
perception of American weakness, pushed former leftists,
like Podhoretz and Irving Kristol, managing editor of
Commentary, to the right. Convinced of ''the inextricable
connection between the survival of Israel and American
military strength,'' Podhoretz began to see American
dovishness in foreign affairs as a direct threat to Israeli
survival. This feeling may be shared by some European Jews
too, but without the swagger that goes with being a
superpower citizen. Ruth Wisse, a professor of Yiddish
literature at Harvard, remarked about Podhoretz that
''because of the national confidence that America nurtured
in him, he is immune to the self-doubt and apologetics that
eat up so many of his co-religionists from inside.''
This confidence is what Podhoretz and other
neoconservatives sought to save from the wreckage of
Vietnam. One of their most powerful political allies in
this enterprise was Senator Henry (Scoop) Jackson, mentor
of Richard Perle, among others. Jackson, a gentile, a
Democrat and a staunch cold warrior, was the perfect bridge
on which former leftists could cross over to the right,
without actually joining the Republican Party. Henry
Jackson was a founder of the America-Israel Friendship
League. Israel, to him, was not a sentimental issue but an
essential part of his vision of the United States as a
nation destined to free the world from tyranny. Arab
nationalism and Soviet Communism were seen as equally
dangerous in this rather Manichaean view of a worldwide
battle between good and evil.
It goes with Manichaeism (which is, of course, what appeals
to Christian fundamentalists too) that battles are not only
strategic but also existential. And this, in the eyes of
many neocons, is what puts Israel and the United States in
the same boat. Podhoretz again: ''Just as the fervent wish
of the Arab world to wipe the Jewish state off the map
derives not from anything Israel has done or failed to do,
but rather from its existence alone, so we'' -- the United
States -- ''are hated not because of our policies but
because of who and what we are.''
The roots of neoconservative disillusion with liberalism
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