Archive for the ‘Israel’ Category

Posted by steveneidman on March 11, 2010

The Jewish Review of Books

Bob Dylan: Messiah or Escape Artist?

by Ron Rosenbaum

Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic, Poet
by Seth Rogovoy
Scribner Books, 336 pp., $26

In 1978, a young graduate student traveling in India named Daniel Matt wrote to Gershom Scholem, the 80-year-old Professor of Jewish Mysticism at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The letter discussed his experiences, his ambitious plans to translate the central text of Jewish mysticism, the Zohar, and, most of all, about Bob Dylan, who he hoped Scholem might appreciate.

      I’m also sending you Bob Dylan Approximately, whose author believes that Dylan draws
      on Kabbalistic sources consciously or unconsciously (whatever that means). The thesis
      does not hold water … Be that as it may, the book is still interesting as a collage, and
      will give you a hippie’s perspective on Robert Zimmerman (Dylan’s real name).

Scholem replied:

      Your detailed account of your travels in the East and your experiences there with several
      friends and gurus I read with great interest … Who was or is Robert Zimmerman, called
      Bob Dylan? … Please let me know if he is a Jew. The Zimmermans divide 50% into Jews
      and goyim … My receptivity to music is, alas, nothing, therefore I forego the pleasure of
      listening to “Blonde on Blonde” or even the more seducing “Desire.” The title “Highway 61”
      arouses no desire in me. Maybe I am too old for it.

“Who was or is Robert Zimmerman, called Bob Dylan?” Is he a Jew? Good questions! Almost from the beginning of his career Bob Dylan né Zimmerman has had an odd, intense, divisive, often mysterious, relationship with Jews and Judaism. For some Jews (and Christians too) he has become a virtually messianic figure. In his new book, Bob Dylan: Prophet, Mystic, Poet, Seth Rogovoy portrays him as a kind of biblical prophet on the order of Isaiah or Jeremiah.

I’m not exaggerating the cult-like devotion of those whom I’ve come to call “the Bobolators” (after Shakespeare’s “Bardolators”). Although there are many brilliant commentators who are able to separate the wheat from the chaff, there are others for whom there is no chaff, those for whom his every word and line in every lyric, no matter how casual or trivial, seems to be a burning bush of signification that speaks with numinous authority in a blaze of encrypted poetry.

He was the chosen one for the secular Jewish folkies who saw him as able to bring the messianic, if not Marxist, social gospel to the gentiles in his protest songs. While some kvetched about his name change, realistically “Zimmerman” wouldn’t have served the Woody Guthrie persona he crafted. And the Woody Guthrie act worked. It worked so well that this middle-class Jewish boy from Hibbing, Minnesota, passed as a kind of Okie hobo. Of course, talent played a part: Dylan’s “Song to Woody,” really the first sign he was capable of conjuring up transcendent beauty, decisively signaled his difference from all of the other Greenwich Village faux Okies.

That is, until he got tired of that act and caught fire with electric rock and roll, leading to cries of betrayal and “Judas!” That famous cry of “Judas!” was heard as Dylan launched into an electric guitar set in his 1966 Royal Albert Hall concert (now available as Live 1966 and arguably the best of the live Dylan albums). And when you think about it, it was an accusation that he was being Judas to his own Jesus.

He was wickedly good at electric rock and roll and there was a period when he was writing unconsciously great songs, with an alchemy of cynicism, nihilism, psychedelicism, and absurdist black humor: The flash and filigree of “Highway 61 Revisited”; the “thin wild mercury” sound (as Dylan once described it) of Blonde on Blonde. I still believe this was his moment of greatest transcendence culminating in the pure masterpiece, Blood on the Tracks. In those first two albums, especially, one could place Dylan in a secular Jewish cultural/historical context: the largely Jewish “black humor” movement whose genesis lay in the absurd horror of the Holocaust, from Lenny Bruce to Joseph Heller and Norman Mailer to Philip Roth.

But, as Matt wrote to Scholem, some Jews have always wanted to claim him for more traditional Jewish piety, and Rogovoy is the latest. It should be said that those who labor in the vineyards of Dylanology (and I’m now working on my own take on him) owe Rogovoy a great debt for persuasively tracking so many Dylan words, lines, and allusions to Biblical sources we might not have noticed. But should we therefore expect Dylan to behave himself as a specifically Jewish artist?

Rogovoy tries to make the case that the most important thing about Dylan is his Jewishness. Even when Dylan converted to Christianity, Rogovoy assures us, he—and his songs—were still really Jewish. And for a time—after the explicitly Christian period of the late seventies and early eighties passed—when Dylan was seen on Chabad Lubavitcher telethons and then, more privately at Chabad services all over the map, it seemed like Dylan had finally found his home in the messianic Hasidic sect.

But then, somewhat to Rogovoy’s misfortune, just as this book proclaiming Dylan’s essential Jewishness was about to be published, Dylan’s label made an announcement that even those like myself, no longer easily shocked by Dylan’s choices, found shocking. Rogovoy’s Jewish “prophet, mystic, poet” was going to release a “traditional” Christmas album, entitled “Christmas in the Heart.” Yes, we all know (as Garrison Keillor churlishly reminded us recently) that Jews have written many Christmas songs, but mostly of the secular “White Christmas” sort. In this album Dylan sings real devotional songs, including “O Come All Ye Faithful.”

Could there be a connection between Rogovoy’s book and the Christmas album? Rogovoy is so relentless in nailing every Dylan utterance to some Biblical or Talmudic or kabbalistic source that on some level Dylan might have known he was about to be tied to this procrustean bed of piety for good. This is more metaphorical conjecture than biographical theory. But if you watch the video of “Must be Santa” from the Christmas in the Heart album (by far the best thing on it), you see a Dylanesque guy desperately trying to flee from a Christmas party and hurling himself through the glass of the venue to escape it.

That’s Dylan: more escape artist than preacher. It was Dylan who told us he became his own “enemy / in the instant that I preach.” Nonetheless, Rogovoy’s source-hunting is so relentless, one can only bow to his ingenuity as he pins just about every Dylan line you can think of, like a dead butterfly, to its biblical source box. I was particularly impressed by the wealth of allusions to the Davidic stories he finds. On the other hand, Dylan has been aptly described as a “magpie” who snatches images and allusions from any context, as he happens upon them. And what Rogovoy sees as piety may be mag-piety. A less contestable aspect of Rogovoy’s exemplary research is his deepening of the detailed picture now emerging of Dylan’s Jewish upbringing. Rogovoy shows that the Zimmermans were at “the center of Jewish life in Hibbing,” and that young Robert’s bar mitzvah broke attendance records at the local hotel.

Certainly, we know Dylan has remained preoccupied with God. There’s an excerpt in Rogovoy’s book from an interview with Dylan (this was in the late ’70s and the interviewer, as it happens, was me). Dylan was discussing the ills of the modern world and, in his inscrutable deadpan, suddenly mentioned that he had seen a Time magazine cover that asked “Is God dead”?

“Would you think that was a responsible thing to do?” Dylan asked me, with an emphasis on responsible that made it either genuinely indignant or joking—or both. Then he added “What does God think of that? I mean if you were God, how would you like to see that written about yourself?” It was funny, Dylan trying to feel God’s pain, asking the primal Dylan question of God: how does it feel?

Perhaps the biggest stretch of the book is Rogovoy’s rationalization of Dylan’s Jesus period. Talk about taking the Christ out of Christmas. Consider when he comes to what he calls “Dylan’s most direct statement of Christian belief,” on the album Slow Train Coming. “The official published lyric of ‘When You Gonna Wake Up’ has him singing, ‘There’s a Man upon a cross and He’s been crucified / Do You have any idea why or for who He died?’”

“But,” Rogovoy tells us, as if he has discovered a loophole, “on the recording Dylan actually sings, ‘There’s a man on the cross and he’s been crucified for you / Believe in his power that’s all you gotta do.” Either way it’s a pretty straightforward declaration that the crucifixion is the path to salvation. But wait! Rogovoy seeks to obfuscate Dylan’s rare if unappealing didacticism: “The line seems tacked on to the end of the song; nothing that comes before prepares a listener for this statement of faith; there is no case being made that leads up to this as the logical (or illogical) conclusion; it’s practically a non sequitur as it appears in the song.”

You can almost see him sweat. But it’s simply not true that nothing prepares the listener or that it’s a non sequitur. It’s more like a culmination that Rogovoy can’t abide. He denies Dylan the right, misguided or not, to be the person he was then, because it challenges the ironclad rigidity of Rogovoy’s thesis. This transparent sophistry (“tacked on” could be another person’s “triumphant conclusion”) allows Rogovoy to avoid confonting Dylan’s soul-searching.

Still, there’s something there. As Daniel Matt, now the distinguished translator of the Zohar, put it to me in an e-mail:

For many years I worshiped Dylan. I occasionally referred to him as Baba Di-lan, Aramaic for “our gateway,” to truth and wisdom. For some reason, I always wanted him to be very deeply Jewish, whether or not he was. I felt that he saw things in their stark reality, that his prophetic vision penetrated to the core of everything and his poetic genius enabled him to share that with others.

Posted in Israel, Jew, Jewish Interest, Music, art, arts, celebrity, culture, history, literature, rock 'n roll | Tagged: Bob Dylan, Daniel Matt, Jewish mysticism, Jewish Revi, Seth Rogovoy, Zohar | Leave a Comment »

A Better Way to Build a Pro-Israel PAC

Posted by steveneidman on March 11, 2010

The Jewish Standard

Steven Eidman • Letters

Published: March 4th, 2010

Thank you for your profile of the Joint Action Committee for Political Affairs (JACPAC), and its newly elected president, Clifton resident Gail Yamner.

(see http://www.jstandard.com/content/item/pac_head_urges_greater_political_involvement/ )

There are many one-issue pro-Israel PACs that do excellent work in helping to elect candidates who are strong supporters of a close U.S.-Israel relationship.

However, many of these candidates hold views on domestic issues, such as civil and reproductive rights, gun control, and church-state issues, that are at odds with the views of the overwhelming majority of Jewish voters. JACPAC supports a bipartisan slate of candidates who are both strongly pro-Israel and whose stance on domestic issues is more moderate and tolerant.

While a contribution to a single-issue PAC might have previously ended up helping to elect a Jesse Helms or a Tom Delay, and today may go to a Jim Demint, and tomorrow may wind up in the war chest of Sarah Palin, a contribution to JACPAC will go to candidates whose election will be good for Jewish interests in Israel and here at home.

Steven Eidman

Englewood

Posted in Democrats, Israel, Jewish Interest, National Security, Politics | Tagged: Conservative, Democrat, Eidman, Gail Yamner, Israel, JACPAC, Jesse Helms, political action committee, Politics, Republican, Sarah Palin, Steven Eidman | Leave a Comment »

Posted by steveneidman on February 24, 2010

How Is Yiddish Doing?

By Ruth R. Wisse

On 2 December 2009 the curtain of Harvard’s famed Agassiz Theater rose on a production of Avrom Goldfaden’s Shulamis, one of the most famous plays in the Yiddish repertoire. An operetta set in the Land of Israel in late biblical times, it was last performed in Warsaw in 1939, and forcibly shut down by the German invasion of September 1. To stage the current production its co-directors, Debra Caplan, a Harvard graduate student of Yiddish and Cecilia Raker, an undergraduate concentrator in drama, assembled a cast willing to learn their parts in a language most of them had never heard. The directors kept all the musical numbers in the original Yiddish and used a new English translation for the dialogue, adding dancers to the production to compensate for the verbal delights an English audience would miss.

Of the dozen plays I had studied with these students in a course on Yiddish drama, Shulamis was by no means the most obviously appealing to contemporary taste. Its theme is trustworthiness: a young man Absolom neglects the vow of marriage he made to the rustic Shulamis, who endures bitter years of waiting until he repents the alliance he made instead and returns to her. Beneath the intricacies of the love story throbs the Jewish national motif of keeping faith with covenant. What most intrigued the student-directors was the moral and psychological fallout of such faithfulness: How do we account for the suffering of the woman Absolom marries, and for the death of their two infant children in apparent retribution for his sin? When Absolom leaves his wife and fulfils his promise, can an audience forgive him as fully as Shulamis does, and is the reconciliation at the final curtain really meant to erase the effects of those intervening years? The excitement generated by such questions among cast, musicians, technical crew, and among scholars and graduate students invited to participate in an intercollegiate symposium on the play seemed to bear out the website’s claim for “a resurgence of interest in Yiddish among young people.”

Much of that interest is currently stimulated by institutions of higher learning, like Columbia, NYU, the Jewish Theological Seminary, Stanford, Emory, Brandeis, and universities of Indiana, Michigan, Albany, and Texas, all of which offer programs in Yiddish. Harvard’s current cohort of eight PhD candidates in Yiddish is its largest and liveliest since the inception of the program in 1993. Yet the field of Yiddish is hardly stable. The University of Maryland has just announced that it may drop its Yiddish position as a cost-saving device, sacrificing an apparently marginal subject—one unlikely to figure prominently in the college ratings of US News and World Report. The news from Baltimore generated anxiety in what had until recently been the expanding sphere of Yiddish studies. Comings and goings of faculty sometimes determine the status of the language, since many university positions in Jewish Studies are open ended, and shift their priorities according to the specialty of the person hired.

With the Humanities curriculum itself under siege, how important will Yiddish be to the overall mission of colleges? And if university programs are competing for shrinking resources, how important ought it to be?

——————————————————————————————————————————–

How much poorer English would be without the schlemiel and his bagel, without the chutzpah to kvell, kibitz and kvetch.

——————————————————————————————————————————–

A mere century ago the majority of Jews, who then numbered over seventeen million (to today’s fewer than thirteen million), spoke Yiddish, read Yiddish, and raised their children in Yiddish. But this was rapidly changing. Wherever they were offered citizenship, most Jews encouraged their children to advance in the local language. The pace of acculturation varied with local levels of toleration. Yiddish dissolved quickly in America, more slowly in Poland, and fitfully in Russia, where the Soviet government tried to use the language as an instrument of indoctrination. Some Jewish leaders regretted the low esteem in which Yiddish was held by even its speakers. The public intellectual Chaim Zhitlowsky (1865-1943) ruefully compared the fortunes of Yiddish to those of the Jewish people. “Both are required to prove that they are genuine: the Jews that they are really a nation and Yiddish that it is really a language…. They always have to carry a passport that sets out all their identifying marks, and if God forbid, one attribute is missing—they are considered fake.” In eerie confirmation of this appraisal, the suspect world of Yiddish was extinguished with its speakers during the Second World War. Nowadays, everyday life in Yiddish is confined to tight communities of Jews who want to remain separate from secular society.

When I first determined to introduce courses on Yiddish language and literature at McGill University in Montreal in the late 1960s, there were as yet no other courses in Jewish Studies anywhere in the curriculum. But as higher education was then in an expansion mode, responsive to the claims of foreign cultures, I argued that the academy was failing its duty to western civilization, let alone to the world beyond it, by excluding its constituent cultures, emphatically including Jewish culture. Since I was then in the English Department, I had to persuade its faculty of what Yiddish could bring to the English curriculum and to its newest offshoot, American literature. My strongest claim was the body of literature that had been created in North America by Yiddish poets, dramatists, and novelists, and by Jewish writers in the English language who were also fluent in Yiddish. I was helped by the fact that two local greats—the native Montrealer Saul Bellow and A.M. Klein, one of Canada’s leading poets—translated and drew heavily from their native Yiddish.

Interface between Yiddish and English was my second line of argument. The influx of Yiddish into London and New York at the end of the nineteenth and start of the twentieth centuries, initially so alarming to protectionists like Henry James and Henry Adams, was soon welcomed by stylists like H.L. Mencken. How much poorer English would be without the schlemiel and his bagel, without the chutzpah to kvell, kibitz and kvetch. By that time, the enlivening effects of Yiddish had inspired the 1960s motto, “Dress British, think Yiddish.” Professional comedy was then about 75% Jewish, driving Yiddish ironies into the mainstream, and at culture’s other extreme, the Holocaust was penetrating historical consciousness, with Yiddish as its major language of witness. The relatively large number of Yiddish speakers in Montreal, including Holocaust survivors and their children, was a major point in favor of its local relevance.

Only my presence in a department of English literature dictated those particular reasons for the inclusion of Yiddish in its curriculum. When a colleague asked about the logic of Yiddish/Jewish studies starting up in the English Department, I was needlessly defensive: “Where else should I go?” I asked, “To the German Department?” The Second World War was still fresh enough in everyone’s mind to support my sarcasm, yet the semantic affinity between Yiddish and German made that a not unreasonable alternative. I ought to have said that I could have made the case for Yiddish equally well in most areas of the Humanities and Social Sciences.

- Linguistics provided the first academic home for Yiddish in America, finding rich comparative material in the history and spread of the language. The extension of Yiddish across much of Europe between the 13th and 20th centuries and its fusion of Jewish and non-Jewish languages made it exceptionally useful to the study of “languages in contact”—the title of an influential book in the field.

- Anthropologists were intrigued by the discovery that Yiddish-speaking Jews in communities from westernmost Hungary to easternmost Russia had more in common with one another than with their Christian neighbors. Folklorists took an interest in Yiddish songs, tales, jokes, recipes, and customs, some of which continue in contemporary forms.

- Historians at every turn came up against the Jews, who stood in the path of empires from the Seleucids and Romans through the Christians and Muslims to the Fascists and Communists. Yiddish-speaking communities took the brunt of attack from the thirteenth to the twentieth centuries. Hitler’s Final Solution was aimed primarily at the Yiddish population of Europe. What was it about this pacific civilization that elicited such hostility? Then again, Yiddish culture exemplified the resourcefulness of a people that prospers and thrives wherever it is allowed to do so. The study of history could benefit from more such examples.

- Religious Studies and Divinity Schools had allowed Biblical Hebrew into their curriculum when all other aspects of Jewishness were expunged. But once Judaism was granted legitimacy as part of the study of religions, Yiddish earned its inclusion alongside Hebrew as a language of modern religious experience. Hasidism, one of the youngest religious movements within Judaism, functioned largely in Yiddish, and continues to do so today in far-flung Hasidic communities. Jewish folk religion flourished in Yiddish. Modern women’s prayer emerged in Yiddish, which also generated a post-war liturgy in Yiddish.

- Philosophy and Political Theory may be curiously handicapped by their neglect of a tradition of thought that resists grand explanations and holds apparent contradictions in delicate balance. I sometimes wonder what would happen if students of Hegel and Marx were simultaneously required to study the humbling cadences of Sholem Aleichem, or if the Jews who once flocked into German universities had taken their Yiddish in with them rather than deferring to the Ubersprache. The assumed inferiority of Yiddish to German not only fueled contemptuous disregard for another culture, but ignored what by other standards are ethically and intellectually stronger ideas than those emerging from German Enlightenment. The penetration of Yiddish into these disciplines has yet to be achieved.

- Yiddish literature—the field currently best integrated into universities–richly repays the student who acquires the language in order to read it. The evidence lies in lists of Yiddish novels, plays, poems, and essays, and short stories that constitute reading exams for doctoral candidates in the field. Courses on Yiddish literature may be organized chronologically to demonstrate the development within little over a century of modern Yiddish fiction from modest satires to the Nobel Prize winning work of Isaac Bashevis Singer, or they may feature competing literary approaches (realism, symbolism, impressionism, etc.), literary themes (faith and reason, diaspora and homeland, literature of destruction, etc.), or considerations of gender (vide Janet Hadda’s study of “passionate women, passive men”). Yiddish is a rich field for the study of translation: some of the best Yiddish writers translated from other languages and its works are increasingly known through translation. Comparative courses (The Yiddish Novel under Tsars and Stripes; The Comic Tradition in Jewish Culture) study the fortunes of Yiddish in various socio-political contexts, or in tandem with coterritorial literatures.

- The kind of arguments I once made for the relevance of Yiddish to an English Department have since swayed other language and literature departments. The study of Old Yiddish (c. 1250-1500) and Middle Yiddish (1500-1700) is most advanced in German Universities, whose scholars compare, for example, early Bible translations and versions of epic poems that survive in both Yiddish and German. The end of the Soviet Union, which opened the Russian archives and allowed freer travel to Eastern Europe, stimulated research into historical questions ranging from comparative rates of divorce and conversion to the Jewish presence in Soviet theater and film. The Iran-sponsored 1994 bombing of the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires destroyed much of its Yiddish archive, but a simultaneous rise of interest in Spanish-Jewish studies has resulted in the inclusion of Yiddish culture in Central and South America Studies. There is also emerging parallel interest in Ladino—the language of Jews from the Iberian Peninsula and their descendants—that triggers comparative studies of Ladino and Yiddish.

- Israel Studies, until lately neglected in North America, are traditionally contrasted with Yiddish studies. This is because ideological rivalries of the early twentieth century pitted Zionist proponents of Hebrew against Yiddish promoters of Diaspora, creating the simplistic association of Hebrew with statehood and of Yiddish with life outside Israel. This split continues to serve some ideologically-driven scholarship today, particularly among Leftists who seek in Yiddish an alternative to a putatively “militaristic” Jewish state. However, Yiddish actually played a prominent role in both pre-modern and modern varieties of Zionism, and some Yiddish writers and poets celebrated the creation of Israel more enthusiastically than some of their Hebrew counterparts. If there is a “resurgent interest in Yiddish” among young people in North America, this is no less true for young people in Israel, who thanks to their native Hebrew already know its alphabet, and thanks to living in a Jewish state are already familiar with Jewish aspects of its culture.

This thumbnail sketch of academic “uses” of Yiddish scarcely does justice to the civilization that flourished for seven centuries in Europe, nor to the curiosity it still awakens. When the late Isaac Bashevis Singer was asked how it felt to write in a “dying language,” he joked that legions of graduate students would some day be writing dissertations on his books. This year two visiting professors from China were at Harvard doing just that, but once they began studying the literature more broadly, they moved on to other Yiddish writers as well. These visitors complained that I and my department were not doing enough to promote Yiddish—and Jewish Studies–in China. I should have sent them to the administration of the University of Maryland to make the case for its retention there!

The unanticipated appeal of Shulamis over the social dramas that until recently attracted the lion’s share of attention reminds us that education and culture do not always follow the most plausible path. The famous Yiddish “Tale of the Seven Beggars” by Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav makes a related point. Nahman inverts all our expectations to show that the blind man is the most insightful, the deaf man most alert, the eldest, most youthful, the handicapped, most complete, and so forth. He invites us to recognize through the power of a story–in its telling as much as in its moral–the reality of the spiritual life over the material one in which we place our trust. I am tempted to apply the point to Yiddish. Often mistaken for a “minor” language, it contains the experience of a people that burned and burned and was not consumed. Its value may have grown as its speakers declined.

Posted in Film, Israel, Jew, Jewish Interest, art, arts, culture, history, literature, school | Tagged: Jewish Studies, McGill, Shulamis, Wisse, Yiddish | Leave a Comment »

No, Mr. Walt, The Iraq War is Bush’s Fault, Not Israel’s

Posted by steveneidman on February 15, 2010

Rinse, Wash, Repeat

John B. Judis

For the last time, Stephen Walt, Israel did not send the U.S. and Britain into Iraq.

I don’t think anyone would mistake me for a big fan of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the main (as they put it) “pro-Israel” lobby in Washington. The only organization of that kind that I’ve ever given money to is Americans for Peace Now. And I have defended critics of AIPAC, including Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, the authors of The Israel Lobby, from charges of anti-Semitism. But I think Walt and Mearsheimer have been dead wrong in trying to blame the Israel lobby or the Israeli government for America’s invasion of Iraq. And now Walt is repeating the same nonsense.

Walt, who blogs for Foreign Policy’s website, recently revived the argument, claiming in a self-congratulatory column titled “I don’t mean to say I told you so, but…” that Tony Blair’s testimony last month before Britain’s Iraq War Commission confirmed that “the Israel lobby … played a key role in the decision to invade Iraq in 2003.” I have read Blair’s testimony. I don’t find it to be proof of anything of the kind; and I don’t think Walt’s accompanying restatement of the argument is any more persuasive than the version he and Mearsheimer put forward in his book.

Walt says that Blair’s statement to the commission “reveals that concerns about Israel were part of the equation [that is, the decision to go to war] and that Israel officials were involved in those discussions.” Here is what Walt, citing a column in the New Statesman, quotes Blair as saying about his early April 2002 meeting in Crawford, Texas, with George W. Bush:

As I recall that discussion, it was less to do with specifics about what we were going to do on Iraq or, indeed, the Middle East, because the Israel issue was a big, big issue at the time. I think, in fact, I remember, actually, there may have been conversations that we had even with Israelis, the two of us, whilst we were there. So that was a major part of all this.

Now there are at least three problems with the inferences that Walt draws from this statement. First, even if we were to grant that Blair is saying that he and Bush were talking about Israel’s role in or importance to the Iraq invasion, this certainly does not show that the Israel lobby had anything to do with the decision to go to war. Nor, secondly, does it show that the Israeli government pressured the U.S. to go to war. The “conversations” could have easily consisted of the Bush administration informing Israelis of their plans.

But these are minor objections. The real problem is that Walt does not seem to have taken the trouble to have read the transcript of Blair’s testimony. If he had, he would have realized that Blair was not talking about how invading Iraq might benefit Israel, but about the conflict then occurring between Israel and the Palestinians. The second intifada had reached a new height with the Passover and Haifa suicide bombings and the beginning of the siege at the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, and Blair was concerned that the Bush administration was not actively pursuing the peace process. Blair wanted the administration to put the Arab-Israeli issue on a par with the threat of Iraq. The former prime minister makes this clear in other parts of his testimony. Here is an exchange between Blair and Sir Roderic Lyne:

Lyne: … Just one more point arising from Crawford, but not just from Crawford. You said–you reminded us that the Arab-Israel problem was in a very hot state at Crawford. You said you may even have had some conversations with Israelis from there, and obviously it was something that was a large part of your conversations with President Bush. I think it is right to say–indeed, Jack Straw said it–that you were relentless in trying to persuade the Americans to make more and faster progress on the Middle East peace process. Ultimately, Jack Straw said it was a matter of huge–in his evidence the other day–it was a matter of huge frustration that we weren’t able to achieve something which you had been seeking so strongly …

Blair: … I believe that resolving the Middle East–this is what I work on now–is immensely important, and I think it was difficult, and this is something I have said before on several occasions, it was difficult to persuade President Bush, and, indeed, America actually, that this was such a fundamental question …

Lyne: But surely you must have said to him, “Look, this thing is only really going to have a chance of working well if we can make this progress down the Arab-Israel track before we get there”?

Blair: Well, I was certainly saying to him, “I think this is vital,” and I mean, this was–you could describe me as a broken record through that period …

The talks at Crawford and subsequent discussions led eventually to getting Bush to launch the “road map” for peace. In other words, he and Bush were not saying that they had to invade Iraq to assist or appease the Israelis. Nothing that Blair said in his testimony should have provided the slightest evidence that this was occurring. And it seems clear enough that the discussions Blair and Bush had with the Israelis were not about Iraq but about the peace process.

I am sorry to say that this kind of sloppy research and reasoning is typical of the way that Walt and Mearsheimer deal with the question of whether the Israel lobby influenced the decision to go to war. In their book, they claim that the U.S. would “almost certainly” not have gone to war without the influence of the Israel lobby. That’s a very strong claim, but they do not back it up either in the book or in Walt’s current blogging. Let me briefly deal with their logic here.

There are three ways in which the Israel lobby could have made itself indispensable to the decision to go to war: first, in White House-Pentagon deliberations; second, in significantly influencing the critical Congressional vote in October 2002; and third, in dramatically shaping public opinion. Their argument falls short on all these counts.

White House: To contend that the “Israel lobby” influenced the White House decision to invade—which had more or less been made by the spring of 2002 when Blair visited Crawford—Walt and Mearsheimer expand the “lobby” to include “neoconservative intellectuals” such as Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense. They then imply that Wolfowitz and other neo-conservatives favored regime change in Iraq primarily because it would benefit Israel. No evidence has surfaced to show that Wolfowitz was acting in this manner. There were other neo-conservatives in the administration – such as David Wurmser and Douglas Feith – who had in the past explicitly linked regime change in Iraq to Israel’s welfare, but they were not in a decision-making capacity. Indeed, the two people outside of the President who appear most responsible for the decision to invade — Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney — could not be categorized, even by Walt and Mearsheimer’s absurdly broad standards, as part of an Israel lobby. So while it would be foolish to rule out that Israel’s welfare was not discussed or mentioned in discussions about whether to invade Iraq, there is no basis for saying that the White House decision to invade Iraq was driven by neo-conservative preoccupations with Israel’s security.

Congress: Walt cites my quoting of AIPAC head Howard Kohr’s boast that AIPAC had been “quietly lobbying” Congress to pass the war resolution in October 2002. I don’t doubt that AIPAC officials favored going to war, as did the leaders of some other pro-Israel organizations. But AIPAC did not aggressively lobby for the war resolution the way it lobbied in 1981 against the AWACs surveillance plane sale to Saudi Arabia or recently for refined petroleum sanctions on Iran. I have interviewed AIPAC people and members of other Jewish lobbying organizations on this question, and they say the same thing. It was not a make-or-break legislative priority. And there is very good circumstantial evidence to back this up. Some of AIPAC’s most dependable supporters on the Hill—such as Senators Daniel Inouye and Carl Levin and Representative Jerrold Nadler—opposed the resolution. So, yes, AIPAC probably did “quietly” make its preference known; but it can’t be credited or blamed for the outcome of the vote. And no other pro-Israel or Jewish lobby possesses comparable clout on the Hill.

Public Opinion: Did the Israel lobby have a sine qua non influence on public opinion in favor of the war? If so, one would expect that its influence would at least show up among Jewish Americans, who would be most likely to listen to their arguments. In a 2003 survey, the American Jewish Committee found that 54 percent of Jewish Americans disapproved of going to war with Iraq and only 43 percent approved. At the time, a majority of Americans approved of going to war. So, far from being a leader in pro-war sentiment, American Jews were lagging behind. Walt and Mearsheimer concede this point, but it’s important nonetheless to include it because it is the only other way in which the Israel lobby might have had a decisive effect on the decision to invade, but did not.

There is, in other words, no basis at all for accepting Walt and Mearsheimer’s contention that, without the Israel lobby, the U.S. would likely not have invaded Iraq. It’s not anti-Semitic to make these charges–they have quotes and anecdotes in their book–but they don’t add up to the proof of any overriding influence. Nor does Walt’s use of Blair’s testimony to the Iraq War Commission. I think it’s time for Walt and Mearsheimer to put this part of their argument to rest.

Posted in Antisemitism, Democrats, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jew, Jewish Interest, Law, National Security, Obama, Politics, Steven Eidman, UN, history, terrorism | Tagged: AIPAC, anti-semitism, Blair, Bush, Cheney, Democrat, Eidman, Hamas, Iran, Iraq, Iraq war, Israel, Jewish, lobby, Mearsheimer, Middle East, Netanyahu, Obama, Palestinians, Politics, pro-Israel, Republican, Rumsfeld, Senate, settlements, Steven Eidman, Walt, West Bank | Leave a Comment »

Posted by steveneidman on February 8, 2010

America: A fearsome foursome

By Edward Luce

The team seen most often in the Oval Office
David Axelrod, senior adviser A former journalist on the Chicago Tribune who quit to set up a political advertising firm, Mr Axelrod, 54, is Barack Obama’s longest-standing mentor, from his days in Chicago politics. Always at the candidate’s side during the election campaign, he is the chief defender of the Obama brand. Still a journalist at heart, he describes himself as having been “posted to Washington”.

Robert Gibbs, communications chief

The most visible face of the White House for his sardonic daily briefings. Mr Gibbs, 38, is perhaps the least likely member of the circle – he is a career Democratic press officer from Alabama who quit John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign and shortly afterwards went to work for Senator Obama. A constant presence during the campaign, he is also seen as a keeper of the flame.

Rahm Emanuel, chief of staff

The best story about Mr Emanuel, 50, concerns the dead fish he delivered to a pollster who displeased him. The least honey-tongued politician in Washington, he is also one of the most effective. Friends say he is relentlessly energetic, critics that he has attention deficit disorder. He has enemies but even detractors concede he may well achieve his aim of becoming the first Jewish speaker of the House of Representatives.

Valerie Jarrett, senior adviser

An old friend of the Obamas, having hired Michelle to work in Chicago politics in the early 1990s, Ms Jarrett, 53, is probably the first family’s most intimate White House confidante. A former businessperson and aide to Richard Daley, mayor of Chicago, she was briefly considered as a candidate to fill Mr Obama’s Senate seat. She was part of the circle he consulted before running for president.

At a crucial stage in the Democratic primaries in late 2007, Barack Obama rejuvenated his campaign with a barnstorming speech, in which he ended on a promise of what his victory would produce: “A nation healed. A world repaired. An America that believes again.”

Just over a year into his tenure, America’s 44th president governs a bitterly divided nation, a world increasingly hard to manage and an America that seems more disillusioned than ever with Washington’s ways. What went wrong?

Pundits, Democratic lawmakers and opinion pollsters offer a smorgasbord of reasons – from Mr Obama’s decision to devote his first year in office to healthcare reform, to the president’s inability to convince voters he can “feel their [economic] pain”, to the apparent ungovernability of today’s Washington. All may indeed have contributed to the quandary in which Mr Obama finds himself. But those around him have a more specific diagnosis – and one that is striking in its uniformity. The Obama White House is geared for campaigning rather than governing, they say.

In dozens of interviews with his closest allies and friends in Washington – most of them given unattributably in order to protect their access to the Oval Office – each observes that the president draws on the advice of a very tight circle. The inner core consists of just four people – Rahm Emanuel, the pugnacious chief of staff; David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett, his senior advisers; and Robert Gibbs, his communications chief.

Two, Mr Emanuel and Mr Axelrod, have box-like offices within spitting distance of the Oval Office. The president, who is the first to keep a BlackBerry, rarely holds a meeting, including on national security, without some or all of them present.

With the exception of Mr Emanuel, who was a senior Democrat in the House of Representatives, all were an integral part of Mr Obama’s brilliantly managed campaign. Apart from Mr Gibbs, who is from Alabama, all are Chicagoans – like the president. And barring Richard Nixon’s White House, few can think of an administration that has been so dominated by such a small inner circle.

“It is a very tightly knit group,” says a prominent Obama backer who has visited the White House more than 40 times in the past year. “This is a kind of ‘we few’ group … that achieved the improbable in the most unlikely election victory anyone can remember and, unsurprisingly, their bond is very deep.”

John Podesta, a former chief of staff to Bill Clinton and founder of the Center for American Progress, the most influential think-tank in Mr Obama’s Washington, says that while he believes Mr Obama does hear a range of views, including dissenting advice, problems can arise from the narrow composition of the group itself.

Among the broader circle that Mr Obama also consults are the self-effacing Peter Rouse, who was chief of staff to Tom Daschle in his time as Senate majority leader; Jim Messina, deputy chief of staff; the economics team led by Lawrence Summers and including Peter Orszag, budget director; Joe Biden, the vice-president; and Denis McDonough, deputy national security adviser. But none is part of the inner circle.

“Clearly this kind of core management approach worked for the election campaign and President Obama has extended it to the White House,” says Mr Podesta, who managed Mr Obama’s widely praised post-election transition. “It is a very tight inner circle and that has its advantages. But I would like to see the president make more use of other people in his administration, particularly his cabinet.”

This White House-centric structure has generated one overriding – and unexpected – failure. Contrary to conventional wisdom, Mr Emanuel managed the legislative aspect of the healthcare bill quite skilfully, say observers. The weak link was the failure to carry public opinion – not Capitol Hill. But for the setback in Massachusetts, which deprived the Democrats of their 60-seat supermajority in the Senate, Mr Obama would by now almost certainly have signed healthcare into law – and with it would have become a historic president.

But the normally liberal voters of Massachusetts wished otherwise. The Democrats lost the seat to a candidate, Scott Brown, who promised voters he would be the “41st [Republican] vote” in the Senate – the one that would tip the balance against healthcare. Subsequent polling bears out the view that a decisive number of Democrats switched their votes with precisely that motivation in mind.

“Historians will puzzle over the fact that Barack Obama, the best communicator of his generation, totally lost control of the narrative in his first year in office and allowed people to view something they had voted for as something they suddenly didn’t want,” says Jim Morone, America’s leading political scientist on healthcare reform. “Communication was the one thing everyone thought Obama would be able to master.”

Whatever issue arises, whether it is a failed terrorist plot in Detroit, the healthcare bill, economic doldrums or the 30,000-troop surge to Afghanistan, the White House instinctively fields Mr Axelrod or Mr Gibbs on television to explain the administration’s position. “Every event is treated like a twist in an election campaign and no one except the inner circle can be trusted to defend the president,” says an exasperated outside adviser.

Perhaps the biggest losers are the cabinet members. Kathleen Sebelius, Mr Obama’s health secretary and formerly governor of Kansas, almost never appears on television and has been largely excluded both from devising and selling the healthcare bill. Others such as Ken Salazar, the interior secretary who is a former senator for Colorado, and Janet Napolitano, head of the Department for Homeland Security and former governor of Arizona, have virtually disappeared from view.

Administration insiders say the famously irascible Mr Emanuel treats cabinet principals like minions. “I am not sure the president realises how much he is humiliating some of the big figures he spent so much trouble recruiting into his cabinet,” says the head of a presidential advisory board who visits the Oval Office frequently. “If you want people to trust you, you must first place trust in them.”

In addition to hurling frequent profanities at people within the administration, Mr Emanuel has alienated many of Mr Obama’s closest outside supporters. At a meeting of Democratic groups last August, Mr Emanuel described liberals as “f***ing retards” after one suggested they mobilise resources on healthcare reform.

“We are treated as though we are children,” says the head of a large organisation that raised millions of dollars for Mr Obama’s campaign. “Our advice is never sought. We are only told: ‘This is the message, please get it out.’ I am not sure whether the president fully realises that when the chief of staff speaks, people assume he is speaking for the president.”

The same can be observed in foreign policy. On Mr Obama’s November trip to China, members of the cabinet such as the Nobel prizewinning Stephen Chu, energy secretary, were left cooling their heels while Mr Gibbs, Mr Axelrod and Ms Jarrett were constantly at the president’s side.

The White House complained bitterly about what it saw as unfairly negative media coverage of a trip dubbed Mr Obama’s “G2” visit to China. But, as journalists were keenly aware, none of Mr Obama’s inner circle had any background in China. “We were about 40 vans down in the motorcade and got barely any time with the president,” says a senior official with extensive knowledge of the region. “It was like the Obama campaign was visiting China.”

Then there are the president’s big strategic decisions. Of these, devoting the first year to healthcare is well known and remains a source of heated contention. Less understood is the collateral damage it caused to unrelated initiatives. “The whole Rahm Emanuel approach is that victory begets victory – the success of healthcare would create the momentum for cap-and-trade [on carbon emissions] and then financial sector reform,” says one close ally of Mr Obama. “But what happens if the first in the sequence is defeat?”

Insiders attribute Mr Obama’s waning enthusiasm for the Arab-Israeli peace initiative to a desire to avoid antagonising sceptical lawmakers whose support was needed on healthcare. The steam went out of his Arab-Israeli push in mid-summer, just when the healthcare bill was running into serious difficulties.

The same applies to reforming the legal apparatus in the “war on terror” – not least his pledge to close the Guantánamo Bay detention centre within a year of taking office. That promise has been abandoned.

“Rahm said: ‘We’ve got these two Boeing 747s circling that we are trying to bring down to the tarmac [healthcare and the decision on the Afghanistan troop surge] and we can’t risk a flock of f***ing Canadian geese causing them to crash,’ ” says an official who attended an Oval Office strategy meeting. The geese stood for the closure of Guantánamo.

An outside adviser adds: “I don’t understand how the president could launch healthcare reform and an Arab-Israeli peace process – two goals that have eluded US presidents for generations – without having done better scenario planning. Either would be historic. But to launch them at the same time?”

Again, close allies of the president attribute the problem to the campaign-like nucleus around Mr Obama in which all things are possible. “There is this sense after you have won such an amazing victory, when you have proved conventional wisdom wrong again and again, that you can simply do the same thing in government,” says one. “Of course, they are different skills. To be successful, presidents need to separate the stream of advice they get on policy from the stream of advice they get on politics. That still isn’t happening.”

The White House declined to answer questions on whether Mr Obama needed to broaden his circle of advisers. But some supporters say he should find a new chief of staff. Mr Emanuel has hinted that he might not stay in the job very long and is thought to have an eye on running for mayor of Chicago. Others say Mr Obama should bring in fresh blood. They point to Mr Clinton’s decision to recruit David Gergen, a veteran of previous White Houses, when the last Democratic president ran into trouble in 1993. That is credited with helping to steady the Clinton ship, after he too began with an inner circle largely carried over from his campaign.

But Mr Gergen himself disagrees. Now teaching at Harvard and commenting for CNN, Mr Gergen says members of the inner circle meet two key tests. First, they are all talented. Second, Mr Obama trusts them. “These are important attributes,” Mr Gergen says. His biggest doubt is whether Mr Obama sees any problem with the existing set-up.

“There is an old joke,” says Mr Gergen. “How many psychiatrists does it take to change a lightbulb? Only one. But the lightbulb must want to change. I don’t think President Obama wants to make any changes.”

Posted in Antisemitism, Democrats, Healthcare, Iran, Israel, Law, Medicaid, National Security, Obama, Politics, Polls, Social Network, Steven Eidman, Supreme Court, Wall Street, business, celebrity, culture, economics, economy, history, terrorism | Tagged: Bush, Chicago politics, Conservative, David Axelrod, Democrat, Edward Luce, Eidman, Gibbs, hate, Healthcare, Insurance, Obama, Politics, Racism, Rahm Emanuel, reform, Republican, Senate, Senator, single payer, Supreme Court, Valerie Jarrett, Wall Street | Leave a Comment »

Is Anti-Bankism the New Anti-Semitism?

Posted by steveneidman on February 1, 2010

How to Think About: Jewish Bankers

By Michael Kinsley

Goldman Sachs, the huge and hugely profitable investment bank, has become a symbol of the financial excesses that helped to bring on the current recession. Because Goldman is thought of as a “Jewish” firm, and because it dominates the financial industry, criticism of Goldman, or of bankers generally, is often accused of being anti-Semitic. Commentators including Rush Limbaugh and Maureen Dowd have been so accused. When, if ever, are such accusations fair?

If you believe that Goldman has done nothing wrong, then any criticisms of Goldman or use of the firm as a symbol of the crisis are obviously unfair to Goldman. Furthermore, they would raise the legitimate question of “Why pick on Goldman?” and the possibility that anti-Semitism is part of the explanation. Similarly, if you believe that anything Goldman did wrong was done wrong by lots of others, the question of “Why pick on Goldman” arises, as does the same obvious answer.

Unfortunately for Goldman, it is not obviously blameless in the crisis. It was never so reckless that it risked going under. It borrowed only [sic] ten billion dollars from the Federal government, even that under duress, and paid it back as soon as possible, with interest. But the firm engaged in complex transactions that amounted to betting against its clients. Throughout the crisis, it enjoyed an implicit government guarantee on the grounds of being “too big to fail.” The government bailed out one of Goldman’s biggest borrowers–the insurance company AIG–saving Goldman billions in losses. And its profits and executive bonuses revealed, at the least, a lack of sensitivity at a time when millions are losing their jobs.

Even if Goldman did nothing in particular wrong, its status as one of only two remaining huge investment banks on Wall Street (the other is Morgan Stanley) might make it a legitimate focus, especially given its reputation, even before the crisis, for ruthlessness.

Is it legitimate to think of Goldman as a Jewish firm? Messrs. Goldman and Sachs, who founded the firm in the nineteenth century, were Jewish, as have been most of its partners since then, almost all of its leaders, and its current CEO (Lloyd Blankfein). It was founded because Jews were excluded from other firms. At this point Goldman is a publicly traded stock that anybody may own, and probably most of its employees are not Jewish. (Just as Jews are more than welcome at “gentile” firms like Morgan Stanley).

Is it legitimate to talk about Goldman as a Jewish firm? That’s a different question. Many American Jews think “Jewish” when they hear the words “Goldman” and “Sachs,” but still cringe whenever they hear the connection made in public, especially by non-Jews. Certainly any explicit suggestion that Goldman’s alleged misbehavior and its Jewishness are related in any way is anti-Semitic.

But what about comments about Goldman Sachs that draw on the classic stereotype about Jews and money, without making any explicit connection to it being a Jewish firm? That depends on which stereotype you mean. There is the stereotype that Jews thrive and tend to predominate on Wall Street and in the financial professions generally. This is true, but so what? There is no mystery or conspiracy involved. Jews in Europe were excluded from many occupations for centuries. They couldn’t own land and be farmers. Here in the United States they couldn’t climb the executive ladder at big corporations. They were not welcome at investment banks run by Protestants. So they founded their own.

The stereotype that Jews gravitate toward, and often do well in, finance is so innocent that, ironically, bringing it up is suspicious. What does it have to do with anything?

Rush Limbaugh brought it up the other day. He said on his radio show that President Obama may be appealing to anti-Semitism with his recent populist criticism of banks and bankers. “There are a lot of people,” Limbaugh said, “when you say banker, people think Jewish.” He didn’t mention Goldman Sachs. Abe Foxman, longtime head of the B’nai Brith Anti-Defamation League, declared that Limbaugh’s remark was “offensive and inappropriate” and “borderline anti-Semitic.” Limbaugh and his defenders protest that Limbaugh clearly was referring to other people, “people who have–what’s the best way to say–a little prejudice about them,” and not endorsing such views himself. And the transcript bears him out.

By Foxman’s standard, even to mention that many bankers are Jewish is anti-Semitic (even though it’s true), and attributing this view to others (while professing to be worried about it) is no excuse This may be over-the top. We live in a culture of umbrage, in which everybody seems to be taking offense at something somebody else says. Foxman is one of the nation’s foremost umbragists.

However, Limbaugh’s supporters make too much of the fact that, read literally, his remarks took the form of defending Jews against unfair maligning. There can be something creepy about “philo-semitism,” or a professed special fondness for Jews. Even when it is sincere (as it may well be in Limbaugh’s case), it rests on an acute feeling of “otherness” about Jews that makes many Jewish Americans rightly uncomfortable.

Sometimes the stereotype about Jews and money takes a harsher form: Jews are greedy, they lie, cheat and steal for money, they have undue influence with the government, which they cultivate and exploit ruthlessly, and so on. In recent weeks, many have said this sort of thing about Goldman Sachs, but with no reference to Jews. Are they all anti-Semites? No. It ought to be possible to criticize Goldman in the harshest possible terms–if you think that’s warranted–without being tarred as an anti-Semite. (Many of Goldman’s harshest critics, unsurprisingly, are Jewish. Jews can be anti-Semites, too.)

Then there is this oft-quoted passage at the beginning of a lengthy rant against Goldman Sachs by Matt Taibbi last July in Rolling Stone: “The world’s most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” This sentence, many have charged, goes beyond stereotypes about Jews and money, touches other classic anti-Semitic themes about Jews as foreign or inhuman elements poisoning humanity and society, and–to some critics– even seems to reference the notorious “blood libel” that Jews use the blood of Christian babies to make matzoh.

Taibbi claims to have been utterly blindsided by accusations that his article was anti-Semitic. He says he finds the idea “ludicrous.” He denies any relation between his words and classic anti-Semitic stereotypes. His critics find this impossible to believe. Could such a sophisticated writer (the article skewers Goldman with great skill and style) actually not know about the stereotypes and ancient lies that this passage echoes, and could he actually be surprised that there would be people calling his article, fairly or otherwise, anti-semitic? It may be possible to call Goldman Sachs a bloodsucker without being an anti-Semite. But is it possible to call Goldman Sachs a bloodsucker and then be surprised when you’re called an anti-Semite?

Posted in Antisemitism, CEO, Democrats, Israel, Jew, Jewish Interest, Law, Obama, Politics, Steven Eidman, Wall Street, banks, business, culture, economics, economy, history, psychology | Tagged: ADL, AIG, ati-semitism, Blankfein, Bush, Conservative, Democrat, Eidman, Foxman, Goldman Sachs, hate, Holocaust, Israel, Jewish, Limbaugh, Morgan Stanley, Obama, Orthodox, Politics, Racism, reform, Republican, Senate, Senator, Steven Eidman, Taibbi, Wall Street | 1 Comment »

Michael Oren, Israel’s Ambassador, vs. Andrew Sullivan

Posted by steveneidman on October 8, 2009

Deep Denial

Why the Holocaust Still Matters

Michael B. Oren

Toughened by their frontier ethos, steeled by serial wars, Israelis are not prone to flattery. Most, in fact, eschew using the closest equivalent to the Hebrew word for flattery–chanupa–in favor of the derisive Yiddish-derivative, firgun. An Israeli joke holds that the word, slashed by a red diagonal line, graces the exit from Ben-Gurion Airport, together with the warning, “You are now entering a Firgun Free Zone.”

Not surprisingly, then, several Israeli commentators reacted unflatteringly to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s recent speech to the U.N. General Assembly. Though many international leaders and even the audience in the U.N. hall applauded Netanyahu, his words were lambasted in Haaretz by Tom Segev as “unnecessary and embarrassing” and by Gideon Levy as “demagogic” and “insulting to the intelligence.” Aluf Benn, one of Israel’s most respected journalists, faulted the prime minister for failing to address a global, rather than an Israeli, audience.

The bulk of the speech highlighted the threat of Iranian nuclearization, the travesty of the Goldstone Report, and Israel’s hopes for a peace with the Palestinians based on security and mutual recognition. Yet criticism of the prime minister virtually ignored these topics and focused instead on his opening remarks, about the Holocaust. “One third of all Jews perished in the great conflagration of the Holocaust,” Netanyahu reminded the delegates. “Nearly every Jewish family was affected, including my own.” He went on to assail President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the world’s premier Holocaust denier, who had addressed the same assembly the previous day, as well as those ambassadors who did not walk out on him. “Have you no shame?” Netanyahu upbraided them. “Have you no decency?”

Detractors of Netanyahu alleged that, by asserting the reality of the Holocaust, he stooped to Ahmadinejad’s level–worse, that he granted credibility to the Iranian thug by debating him over a universally accepted truth. “If 64 years after World War II concluded with Hitler’s fall … the debate on the reality of the Holocaust has reached the UN General Assembly,” Benn wrote, “then Ahmadinejad has succeeded in instilling doubt.”

Perhaps because they were raised in a society suffused with Holocaust consciousness, some Israelis might be unaware of the extent of ignorance of the Final Solution throughout the world, even in the United States, and especially among youth. Confronted with the enormity of the horror, many young people today–much like American Jewish leaders in 1942–react with incredulousness, rendering them susceptible to denial. Millions of Muslims, moreover, subscribe to the syllogism: If Israel was created by Europeans out of Holocaust guilt, and the Holocaust never occurred, then Israel’s existence is unjust. Where better than the General Assembly, a body established in response to World War II and affording a global audience, to reaffirm the veracity of an event now so widely questioned if not refuted?

But in concentrating on the prime minister’s preamble, critics overlook the deeper connections between the Holocaust and his subsequent themes. Recognizing the murder of six million Jews more than six decades ago is, in fact, vital for understanding the supreme dangers posed to six million Jews in Israel today by a nuclear Iran and by the Goldstone Report. Reasserting the factuality of the Holocaust is a prerequisite for peace.

Many factors contributed to the Holocaust–European anti-Semitism, mass murder technologies, and Allied indifference–but none more elemental than the Jews’ inability to defend themselves. Israel and its citizen Defense Forces represent the most palpable means for redressing that incapacity.

Accordingly, denying the Holocaust not only deprives Israel of its raison d’être, but, more nefariously still, it invalidates the Jews’ need to defend themselves. So, the Iranian leader proceeds to arm Hamas and Hezbollah and produce nuclear weapons while claiming that the Jews of Israel–like those of 1940s Europe–have nothing to fear. But Ahmadinejad does not stop short at merely deeming the Holocaust a “fairy tale;” rather, he portrays Israel as a Nazi state–guilty of perpetrating the very offenses against the Palestinians that the Nazis never did to the Jews.

Where Ahmadinejad leaves off, the Goldstone Report, or, as it is officially called, the “United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict,” persists. The U.N. mission purports to have investigated Israel’s military action in Gaza last winter, an operation launched in response to the firing of more than 7,000 Hamas missiles at Israeli towns since Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from the Strip. But instead of probing Hamas’s deliberate effort to maximize Israeli civilian casualties and its doctrine of hiding behind Palestinian human shields, the judges interviewed handpicked Hamas witnesses, several of them senior commanders disguised as civilians, and uncritically accepted their testimony. Inexorably, the report, which presumed Israel’s guilt, condemned the Jewish state for crimes against humanity and for mounting a premeditated campaign against Gaza civilians.

The Goldstone Report goes further than Ahmadinejad and the Holocaust deniers by stripping the Jews not only of the ability and the need but of the right to defend themselves. If a country can be pummeled by thousands of rockets and still not be justified in protecting its inhabitants, then at issue is not the methods by which that country survives but whether it can survive at all. But more insidiously, the report does not only hamstring Israel; it portrays the Jews as the deliberate murderers of innocents–as Nazis. And a Nazi state not only lacks the need and right to defend itself; it must rather be destroyed.

Ahmadinejad’s genocidal rhetoric and the iniquity of the Goldstone Report notwithstanding, Israel will, of course, continue to defend its citizens. No amount of vitriol will compel Israel onto a course of self-destruction. But what will be destroyed is any chance for peace. Having twice withdrawn unilaterally to recognized borders and received only onslaughts in return, and having suffered censure for protecting themselves from that aggression, Israelis will understandably recoil from additional retreats that will leave them vulnerable. Israelis, moreover, will not withdraw from any territory liable to become staging grounds for terrorist groups empowered by international agencies and convinced of their ability to murder Israelis with impunity.

Israel will pursue policies with or without firgun. But by making the connection between the Holocaust and its denial, the Iranian nuclear program, and the Goldstone Report, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has exposed the venal narrative that concludes with Israel’s paralysis. By reaffirming Israel’s right to safeguard its citizens, he has demarcated the only path to peace.

Michael B. Oren is Israel’s ambassador to the United States.

The Undiplomatic Michael Oren

Andrew Sullivan

I thought ambassadors were supposed to smoothe over rifts, not inflame them. And I thought they were supposed to speak to the broadest number of citizens in the countries to which they have been appointed, not provide inflammatory rants to the already-persuaded. But this Michael Oren piece in TNR abandons any pretense of diplomatic balance.

The premise of Oren’s piece is that Israel faces a new Nazism represented by Ahmadinejad and Holocaust deniers but, to an even greater extent, by the South African liberal, Richard Goldstone, and the United Nations. Oren seems to be arguing that Gaza was a war of survival for the Jewish state and that Israel had no choice but to launch a war that killed, by one conservative Israeli count, 320 children, destroyed 4,000 homes, and up to 80 government buildings. Even if one is sympathetic to the horrific barrage of Hamas rockets that Israeli citizens endured (and what decent human being wouldn’t be?) – every single rocket being a war crime – it helps no one to use language this extreme or to distort history in this manner.

One might ask what the response of Michael Oren would be if Palestinian terrorists pulled off a major coup by killing 320 Jewish children, and destroying 4,000 homes in Tel Aviv, because Israel had lobbed primitive missiles at its territory, missing human targets an overwhelming proportion of the time. This is not to defend Hamas’ wickedness and war crimes. It is not to say that Israel deliberately targeted children. It is to insist that the laws of war be applied equally to both parties in a conflict. It is to ask Israel to live up to its own ancient moral values – values that were pioneered when my own ancestors were running around painted in wode.

It is also to ask beleaguered Israel to get some perspective and to see, for a moment, how things might look from the outside. I can see why they may feel encircled and alone. But they’re not. Even those of us who have been made angry by their recent actions and seeming unconcern for the needs of their most powerful friend, want to help. God knows I love Israel and its people; and I understand that some of the extremism among neocons is really an excess of passion and love rather than mere belligerence and orneriness. But, seriously guys, get a grip. Help the US help you. And try to see the wider picture.

Here’s a graph that tells the story of the comparative human toll in the year before the conflict broke out:

Over eight years, 28 Israelis were killed by Hamas rockets in what were clearly war crimes, as Goldstone emphatically reports. Four times that many Palestinians were killed by Israelis in one month in 2008. In the subsequent conflict, the ratio of Palestinian deaths to Israeli deaths was close to 100 – 1. With this tally, Oren writes:

If a country can be pummeled by thousands of rockets and still not be justified in protecting its inhabitants, then at issue is not the methods by which that country survives but whether it can survive at all.

Seriously? No; the issue is whether Israel committed war crimes in its self-defense in Gaza and whether that self-defense was disproportionate to the threat it faced. At the time Bret Stephens offered the just war theory behind the Gaza war thus:

For every single rocket that falls randomly on Israeli soil, an Israeli missile will hit a carefully selected target in Gaza. Focusing the minds of Hamas on this type of “proportionality” is just the endgame that Israel needs.

Does that sound like the desperate act of a country on the brink of extinction? Glenn Reynolds explained the actual rationale:

Israel’s just playing by Chicago rules: “They pull a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. That’s the Chicago way!”

Whatever else that is, it is not a just war. The disproportion was the point: it was designed to teach the Gazans and Hamas a lesson they would never forget. Michael Goldfarb, McCain’s former spokesman, echoed Reynolds’ statement but embraced the murder of children as well:

The fight against Islamic radicals always seems to come around to whether or not they can, in fact, be deterred, because it’s not clear that they are rational, at least not like us. But to wipe out a man’s entire family, it’s hard to imagine that doesn’t give his colleagues at least a moment’s pause. Perhaps it will make the leadership of Hamas rethink the wisdom of sparking an open confrontation with Israel under the current conditions. Or maybe not, and the only way to stop Hamas is to eliminate its capacity for violence entirely.

Now it is a completely fair point that many other nations are in no position to criticize, including the US. Israel has to survive on a tiny strip of land which is surrounded by enemies. The Jews have achieved there such a miraculous, inventive, dynamic state it puts most other countries to shame. And its moral standards and its internal airing of debate have no peer in its own region. In some respects, the US has recently had lower standards.

The US, by invading Iraq and failing to provide any security for the civilians trapped in the chaos the US tolerated, (“stuff happens”), by torturing hundreds of prisoners, innocent and guilty, and by unleashing entities like Blackwater on civilian populations is in no position to judge. 3,000 Americans died on 9/11. Hundreds of thousands of civilians died in the Iraq occupation in sectarian violence that an invading army has a fundamental moral responsibility to restrain. To have invaded a country with no thought for the security of its civilians is one reason I came to see the execution of the Iraq war as morally intolerable. Israel, moreover, has seen its Supreme Court outlaw the torture methods championed by the US under Bush and Cheney. The US, in stark contrast, refuses to investigate its seven-year policy of torture and abuse of individuals, some of whom it knew to be innocent.

But that doesn’t make either war just. As Matt points out, even if you believe the Israeli attack on Gaza was justified, that doesn’t exclude the possibility of war crimes in its execution. Is this so hard to understand? Jews of all people – the victims of war crimes of unimaginable evil – should know this. And exchange anger and paranoia for the integrity they once had.

Posted in Antisemitism, Iran, Israel, Jew, Jewish Interest, Law, National Security, Obama, Politics, UN, culture, history, terrorism | Tagged: Andrew Sullivan, Conservative, Democrat, Gaza, Goldstone, Holocaust, Iran, Israel, Jewish, Michael Oren, Middle East, Netanyahu, Obama, Oren, Palestinians, Politics, settlements, Steven Eidman, West Bank | Leave a Comment »

Did Bin Laden Ever Visit THe U.S.?

Posted by steveneidman on July 1, 2009

Osama in America: The Final Answer

by Steve Coll

The question of whether Osama bin Laden has ever visited the United States, a subject on which I have expended an unhealthy amount of energy in the course of various journalistic and biographical research, has now seemingly been settled. Osama was here for two weeks in 1979, it seems, and he visited Indiana and Los Angeles, among other places. He had a favorable encounter with an American medical doctor; he also reportedly met in Los Angeles with his spiritual mentor of the time, the Palestinian radical Abdullah Azzam. All this is according to a forthcoming book by Osama’s first wife, Najwa Bin Laden, and his son Omar Bin Laden, to be published in the autumn by St. Martin’s Press.

First, some context for the book’s disclosures:

In the autumn of 2005, while conducting research in Saudi Arabia for the book that became “The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century,” I met a Saudi journalist named Khaled Batarfi, who had been a neighbor and friend of Osama Bin Laden in their teenage years. During one of our interviews, Batarfi offered an account of Osama’s early travels—to London, to Africa on Safari, and to the United States—that was suggestive of a young man who had more direct experience of the West than was generally understood. Batarfi’s account of Osama’s American trip was particularly striking. In December of that year, I wrote a story for this magazine about the private high school Osama had attended in Jedda, and how he was first introduced to the tenets of radical Islamic politics. In that story, I also reported Batarfi’s on-the-record but unconfirmed account of Osama’s visit to America; Batarfi believed the travel had occurred not long before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, in 1979. U.S. customs and immigration records from the relevant period had been routinely destroyed—and so the question of whether Osama had personal experience of America, and what that experience might have been, remained elusive. (Bin Laden has never referred to any trip to this country in his writings or statements.) While I found Batarfi to be credible, a single-source account, based on hearsay, could hardly be regarded as satisfactory.

Over the next several years, I came across several other fragments suggesting that Batarfi was essentially correct—these bits of evidence included a published account by one of Osama’s workplace supervisors in Saudi Arabia reporting that Osama had once traveled to the United States, and more recently, an interview with Yassin Kadi in the Times in which Kadi recalled meeting Osama during the nineteen seventies in Chicago.

After the original 2005 interviews with Batarfi, I reported that

only one aspect of the journey made a particularly strong impression on bin Laden: On the way home, Osama and his wife were sitting in an airport lounge, waiting for their connecting flight. In keeping with their strict religious observance, his wife was dressed in a black abaya, a draping gown, as well as the full head covering often referred to as hijab. Other passengers in the airport “were staring at them,” Batarfi said, “and taking pictures.” When bin Laden returned to Jedda, he told people that the experience was like “being in a show.” By Batarfi’s account, bin Laden was not particularly bitter about all the stares and the photographs; rather, “he was joking about it.”

Batarfi had it right, it now seems. Here is Najwa’s forthcoming account of their journey, according to a bound galley of “Growing Up Bin Laden” provided by St. Martin’s Press.

One evening he [Osama] arrived home with a surprise announcement: ’Najwa, We are going to travel to the United States. Our boys are going with us.’

I was shocked, to tell you the truth…Pregnant, and busy with two babies, I remember few details of our travel, other than we passed through London before flying to a place I had never heard of, a state in America called Indiana. Osama told me that he was meeting with a man by the name of Abdullah Azzam. Since my husband’s business was not my business, I did not ask questions.

I was worried about Abdul Rahman because he had become quite ill on the trip and was even suffering with a high fever. Osama arranged for us to see a doctor in Indianapolis. I relaxed after that kindly physician assured us that Abdul Rahman would soon be fine.

…I am sometimes questioned about my personal opinion of the country and its people. This is surprisingly difficult to answer. We were there for only two weeks, and for one of those weeks, Osama was away in Los Angeles to meet with some men in that city. The boys and I were left behind in Indiana with a girlfriend whom I would rather not name…

My girlfriend was gracious and guided me on short trips…We even went into a big shopping mall in Indianapolis…

I came to believe that Americans were gentle and nice, people easy to deal with. As far as the country itself goes, my husband and I did not hate America, yet we did not love it.

There was one incident that reminded me that some Americans are unaware of other cultures. When the time came for us to leave America, Osama and I, along with our two boys, waited for our departure at the airport in Indiana. I was sitting quietly in my chair, relaxing, grateful that our boys were quiet….

I saw an American man gawking at me. I knew without asking that his unwelcome attention had been snagged by my black Saudi costume…

I took a side glance at Osama and saw that he was intently studying the curious man. I knew that my husband would never allow the man to approach me…

When my husband and I discussed the incident, we were both more amused than offended. That man gave us a good laugh, as it was clear he had no knowledge of veiled women…

We returned to Saudi Arabia none the worse for our experiences.

Not a particularly consequential experience, perhaps, but surely one that has a life in Osama’s memory and imagination—and another indication, among many available in his life, that he should be understood not only as a self-isolating radical imbued with millenarian religious narratives, but also as a modern and globalized figure whose experiences and outlook belong very much to our age.

Posted in Iran, Israel, Jewish Interest, National Security, Politics, culture, history, terrorism | Tagged: Abdullah Azzam, Bin Laden, doctors, hate, Middle East, Osama bin Laden, Osama in America, Politics, Steve Coll, Yassin Kadi | Leave a Comment »

Rejecting Shmuley Boteach’s “War on the White House”

Posted by steveneidman on June 29, 2009

SHELTER FROM THE STORM

by Steven Eidman

I was puzzled by Shmuley Boteach’s sounding of the battle cry against the Obama administration and its call for Israel to stop all building activity in the settlements: http://www.jstandard.com/index.php/content/item/the_coming_storm_obama_and_u.s._jewry/.

While I have no problem championing Israel’s interests and jeopardizing any dinner invitation which the President might be thinking of extending, I would first need more evidence that Israel was indeed threatened by U.S. demands. Successive Israeli governments, both left and right-leaning, have agreed to dismantle the majority of the settlements and to surrender more than 90% of the land in the West Bank to the Palestinian Authority, in the context of a negotiated peace treaty. Furthermore, Israel agreed to a settlement freeze in 2002, included in Phase I of the “roadmap for peace”. While the nuances of the word “freeze” may well need to be settled on, this can’t be the casus belli that Rabbi Boteach makes it out to be, as quiet diplomacy between our countries is already bringing us to an agreed upon definition. I suspect the clear majority of the 78 percent of U.S. Jews who voted for Obama have no problem in supporting the President’s call for the freeze, especially as it was accompanied by a clear and forceful demand for an end to all terrorism and violence by the Palestinians. The presumption by Rabbi Boteach that only a “sunshine Jewish patriot” could support President Obama’s forceful attempt to make both sides adhere to their commitments in moving the peace process forward is unjustified, and doesn’t take into account the dramatic shifts that have already taken place- in Lebanon, in Iran, on the Syria-Iraq border- since the election of Obama. Israel’s new ambassador to the United States, appointed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with the blessing of Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, is on record as supporting a unilateral withdrawl by Israel from the West Bank. Other than in the Orthodox community, I expect most U.S. Jews to react to our President’s initiatives with cautious optimism. A rapproacment between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, and the release of Gilad Shalit – both distinct possibilities- can change the entire landscape of the peace process. Let us press the White House to bring about these stepping stones to peace, rather than gird for war with it.

Steven Eidman

Posted in Iran, Israel, Jewish Interest, National Security, Obama, Politics, history | Tagged: Avigdor Lieberman, Eidman, Hamas, Iran, Israel, Jewish, Middle East, Netanyahu, Obama, Palestinians, Politics, settlements, Steven Eidman, West Bank | Leave a Comment »

Shalit’s Release May Reveal Who Israel’s REAL Friends Are

Posted by steveneidman on June 26, 2009

Neocon enemies, using diplomacy, reach deal for Shalit’s release

by Glenn Greenwald

Last night, I noted the sudden and obviously hypocritical concern about detainee abuse emerging from The Weekly Standard’s Michael Goldfarb now that the transfer of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit by the Palestinians to Egypt appears imminent and it’s time to exploit his detention. In service of that same mission, Goldfarbalso tries to attribute this deal for Shalit’s release to the heroism of Benjamin Netanyahu, excitedly claiming that, if it happens, it will cause the Israeli Prime Minister’s “approval numbers [to] skyrocket, further undermining Obama’s leverage over him” (i.e., Israel will be able to continue to expand settlements on land that isn’t theirs).

But as Omooex points out in comments, the Haaretz article which Goldfarb himself cited makes clear that it was not Netanyahu, but numerous other parties — Jimmy Carter, Egypt, Syria and the Obama administration — who engineered the agreement to transfer Shalit from Gaza to Egypt (followed eventually by his release to Israel, pending the release by Israel of Palestinian prisoners):

The move is part of a new United States initiative that includes Egyptian and Syrian pressure on Hamas . . . The idea to transfer Shalit to Egypt in exchange for the release of Palestinian women, teens, cabinet ministers and parliamentarians being held in Israeli prisons was raised about a year ago during a visit by former U.S. president Jimmy Carter to Damascus, Jerusalem and Gaza. . . . Carter raised it again on his visit earlier this month, during which he met Noam Shalit, Gilad’s father. . . . The European source said Shalit’s transfer to Egypt was the first stage of the Egyptian-brokered agreement hammered out between Fatah, Hamas and other Palestinian factions, in coordination with the U.S. and with Syria’s support.

In other words, the deal for Shalit’s release was secured by some of the neocon’s most despised enemies (Jimmy Carter and Syria), with the help of a President they insist hates Israel (Barack Obama), relying on tactics they have long scorned (diplomacy, negotiating with Terrorists, including Hamas). Of course, Jimmy Carter — who neocons endlessly smear as being Israel-hating and even anti-Semitic — did more to advance the interests of Israeli security than every neoconservative keyboard-tough-guy combined (indeed, more than virtually any single individual on the planet) when he engineered the 1979 Camp David peace accord between Israel and Egypt, which — even 30 years later — continues to pay dividends for Israel in the form of this apparent agreement for Shalit’s release. Identically, the Shalit deal is possible only because, as Haaretz notes, Hamas knows that there is now an American administration willing to negotiate with hostile parties, rather than trying to feel “tough” by ignoring and/or threatening them:

Hamas, which controls Gaza, has increasingly tried to reach out to the Obama administration in recent weeks.

This is but one of the numerous inanities of neoconservatives: as destructive for the U.S. as their obsession with Israel and mindless belligerence are, those fixations also do nothing for Isarel but jeopardize it further. Years of neocon rule and moronic chest-beating in Washington did nothing to help Shalit. But a deal is struck for his release — long a top priority of Israelis — only months into a new administration committed to engagement with Syria and other ostensible Enemies, as well as an emphatic rejection of neoconservative ideology at least when it comes to dealing with some Muslim states. But even those clear and obvious facts — whereby this apparent success is possible only with them out of power, their ideology repudiated and their Enemies engaged — won’t stop them from claiming that this somehow vindicates their tawdry mindset.

[Along those same lines, Omooex also highlights what will be an overlooked part of the story: namely, that Israel is imprisoning "Palestinian women, teens, cabinet ministers and parliamentarians" (including, until his release this week, "Palestinian Legislative Council Speaker Sheikh Aziz Dweik after three years in prison" who is "a leader of Hamas in the West Bank [and] espouses a moderate line in the organization”). If this Shalit deal ends up being consummated (and that still remains to be seen), the American media narrative will undoubtedly dramatize the detention of Shalit, an actual Israel solider, even while Israel imprisons scores of “Palestinian women, teens, cabinet ministers and parliamentarians.”]

Notably, Goldfarb seems to think that Obama’s leverage over Israel is dependent upon the domestic approval ratings of Netanyahu. Actually, that leverage is grounded in the tens of billions of American dollars in aid to Israel, the supplying of American weapons for Israel’s various wars, and the multiple forms of diplomatic protection the U.S. extends to Israel. At least preliminarily and from all appearances, the Obama administration has been using that leverage for U.S. interests by demanding that Israeli actions that harm the U.S. cease. Ironically, despite all the right-wing rage about that (in both Israel and the U.S.), the refusal to cater to neoconservatives when it comes to U.S. policy towards Israel just so happens — as demonstrated by this Shalit episode — to be benefiting Israel as well.

UPDATE: From a Haaretz Editorial last year, entitled “Our Debt to Jimmy Carter” (h/t thomas c):

The government of Israel is boycotting Jimmy Carter, the 39th president of the United States, during his visit here this week. Ehud Olmert, who has not managed to achieve any peace agreement during his public life, and who even tried to undermine negotiations in the past, “could not find the time” to meet the American president who is a signatory to the peace agreement with Egypt. . . . Carter, who himself said he set out to achieve peace between Israel and Egypt from the day he assumed office, worked incessantly toward that goal and two years after becoming president succeeded – was declared persona non grata by Israel. . . .

The boycott will not be remembered as a glorious moment in this government’s history. Jimmy Carter has dedicated his life to humanitarian missions, to peace, to promoting democratic elections, and to better understanding between enemies throughout the world. . . .

Whether Carter’s approach to conflict resolution is considered by the Israeli government as appropriate or defeatist, no one can take away from the former U.S. president his international standing, nor the fact that he brought Israel and Egypt to a signed peace that has since held. Carter’s method, which says that it is necessary to talk with every one, has still not proven to be any less successful than the method that calls for boycotts and air strikes. In terms of results, at the end of the day, Carter beats out any of those who ostracize him. For the peace agreement with Egypt, he deserves the respect reserved for royalty for the rest of his life.

That all speaks for itself, and speaks volumes about our current Middle East predicaments and what to do about them.

UPDATE II: Speaking of using leverage, the original road map “quartet” — the U.S., the EU, the U.N. and Russia — have now jointly adopted the Obama administration’s position that Israel must ”freeze all settlement activity, including ‘natural growth’.” Israel is long accustomed to ignoring worldwide consensus because the U.S. sides with them on those matters. Where, as here, the U.S. is publicly and privately in favor of the consensus, Israel’s ability to defy it will depend upon how much leverage Obama is really willing to use.

UPDATE III: Goldfarb replies here, with the full array of textbook neoconservative platitudes. The only point worth noting is that he agrees with the observation I expressed last night that Goldfarb’s views (like those of most neonconservatives) ”ultimately come down to nothing more complicated than: what we do is Good and Right because we are superior and because they are inferior.” Goldfarb admits he thinks torture is tolerable when we do it to Them but not when They do it to us because — as he puts it — “Of Course We Are Superior and They Are Inferior ” (that, of course, is the very definition of “moral relativism,” which Goldfarb and his allies like to pretend they oppose even as they exemplify its core premise). And — other than a view that Muslims generally are inferior — what possible ground is there for claiming moral superiority over the numerous detainees at Guanatnamo and elsewhere who, even by the Bush administration’s reasoning, were guilty of nothing? Independently, it’s bizarre to hear someone proclaim themselves morally superior when, just a few months ago, they were celebrating the benefits of the wholesale slaughter of an entire extended family — including small children — in Gaza.

As I wrote a couple of weeks ago:

The most predominant mentality in right-wing discourse finds expression in this form: “I am part of/was born into Group X, and Group X — my group — is better than all others yet treated so very unfairly” . . . . Here again we find the same adolescent self-absorption: the group into which I was born and was instructed from childhood to believe is the best [] is, objectively, superior. It is so much better than everyone and everything else that even to suggest that we have flaws comparable to others is to engage in “false moral equivalencies.” To do anything other than emphatically proclaim my group’s objective superiority is to treat my group unfairly.

Goldfarb’s reply is a pure expression of that warped and self-glorifying mentality.

Posted in Democrats, Iran, Israel, Jewish Interest, Law, National Security, Obama, Politics, economics, history | Tagged: Carter, Conservative, Egypt, Goldfarb, Greenwald, Haaretz, Hamas, Iran, Israel, Jewish, Middle East, neo-con, neocons, Netanyahu, Obama, Omooex, Palestinians, Politics, Schalit, settlements, Shalit, Syria, Weekly Standard, West Bank | Leave a Comment »

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