Back when I was a kid, we used to denounce people who used code words for Jews. Rootless cosmopolitans was the classic. The modern variants were “pushy,” “aggressive,” and “New Yorkish.” It was antisemitism cloaked in euphemism.
Lately I’ve noticed where Jewish writers can’t talk openly about the Israel lobby, but resort to a similar sort of code. Yesterday in the New York Times, David Brooks…
spoke of an emerging political realignment that will transform the categories of right and left. On one side are populist nationalists, he said, whose foreign policy goals are “realist.” On the other are “elitists”: “progressive globalists” whose foreign policy is “multilateral interventionist.”
This is code. Brooks’s political radar is as usual keen, but he obviously has in mind Walt and Mearsheimer, the two realists who have made an explosive critique of the Israel lobby. When the realists analyze our foreign policy, from Fukuyama to Brzezinski to Walt, they talk about Israel/Palestine, and the separation of American interest from Israel’s. Brooks should deal with this argument openly, and engage the question. What he’s done here seems intellectually dishonest.
Brooks’s predecessor, William Safire, was open about Israel’s interests, and his devotion to them. Indeed, such frankness used to be the norm among neoconservatives. Bush aide Elliott Abrams wrote nine years ago that “To many American Jews, [support for Israel] became the essence of their understanding of their own Jewishness.” Now that support for Israel has become acutely politicized—and implicated in the Iraq disaster—you never see that sort of frankness among the neocons. The more power they have, the more nuanced and opaque they have become. Brooks is a journalist. He should be clearing away such mystification, not adding to it.
This goes under the heading of My Jewish Problem, because it is a reflection of my own discomfort as a progressive small-d democrat amid the mainstream Jewish presence in public life—specifically, my tribe’s ascension into the establishment alongside its inability to engage the political questions that arise from that power. I know where the discomfort comes from: persecution, antisemitism, and the Holocaust. But failing to address that presence and power directly, when questions are raised directly, is unbefitting of a democracy. There is a way to discuss this stuff without abandoning Israel or having pogroms in Iowa.
The Israel Lobby is effective, legal and the way American politics works. This is the crux of the Walt-Mearsheimer article.
The Israel Lobby has helped American businesses and consumers by developing the Israeli economy of dynamic technologists that have delivered the design and production of the most widely used Pentium processor, the unmanned aircraft (UAV), R&D centers for Microsoft, Google, IBM and Intel, the MRI (body scanner), countless pharmaceutical and medical discoveries and ISCAR Tools (Warren Buffet's four billion dollar acquisition).
Americans benefit from the fruits of this lobby. Call it a subsidy to Intel, Google, IBM, Boeing and Berkshire Hathaway. For better or worse, the interests of America are the interests of the Fortune 500 and the Israel lobby serves these interests.
"Back when I was a kid, we used to denounce people who used code words for Jews. Rootless cosmopolitans was the classic. The modern variants were "pushy," "aggressive," and "New Yorkish." It was antisemitism cloaked in euphemism. "
And the latest euphemism is, of course, "neocons". A lot easier on the anti-semitic tongue than the clumsy old "rootless cosmopolitans".
Sorry. my neighbors passionately hate the pushy Jews they meet, or they see in the news. That is legit.
The instinct to expand this hatred on a whole ethnicity is illegit.
But those Jews should throw the first stone who have never sinned.
Since when was buying the product insufficient thanks to the tech developer? Since when did we have to support the ultra nationalist, jewish supremacist, racist cabal that claims to have force fed the development behind the product – and sold it as necessary to a hi tech world war that this cabal alone is actively seeking?
ASP's notion that "neo-con" is an anti-semitic slur for Jews is dead wrong. Most American Jews opposed the Iraq war so it makes no sense to call them neocons. A more accurate definition of neocon is this: "A Jewish American Likudnik who cares more about Israel than he does the United States."
Oh, please. Brooks has been writing about the clash between realists and progressive internationalists for years. (See, for instance, his Aug. 2004 NYT magazine piece on reinventing the GOP)
But wait–Brooks is Jewish! And he uttered the word "realists"! And since Walt-Mearsheimer fancy themselves to be realists…then surely this column MUST be a coded missive on the Israel Lobby.
Brilliant deductive reasoning. I doff my hat to you, sir.
Europeans had a passionate hatred for their Jewish "neighbors" sixty years ago, too.
Maybe its a necessary thing for the Jews to have the Israeli Military- one of the most powerful militaries in the world- protecting them.
Maybe it's necessary for 'the Jews' (since this does implicate all of them) to start understanding why they are hated.
Here's a clue : humans generally hate non human species which are parasitic on them, like certain insects, but not ones which co exist without being parasitic.
Phil Weiss, are you satisfied with the results of your race-baiting articles and blogs yet?
Hopefully, the editorial board of The Observer is contemplating if this is what they want their paper to be about.
Its not easy being a hyphenated-american.
I can't say I am sorry at having succeeded in getting on "Joey Cavod"'s tits (as we say in english)
Incidentally, I am struck once again by "Joey Cavod"'s cavalier approach to truth and language. Jews are not a 'race'.
This is just a good way to make sure that anti-semitism doesn't raise its ugly virulent head again.
Don't you realize how many jews died in the Holocaust? Anything that protects the jewish community from harm or criticism or expands it is good. This is simply a fact of life we all have to accept. Everything else has always been trivial. Israel is a shining beacon to the world. Nothing else is a substitute for that sublime justice.
All of you anti-semites and racists and self-hating jews should be whittling your time away in prison.