My friend Dan Fleshler, who opposed the Iraq war, exonerates Jewish neocons of the charge of dual loyalty (to the U.S. and Israel) in a post on Huffpo. Interesting, but I think his argument is weak.
First off, Fleshler says that to suggest dual loyalty is a charge "tantamount to treason," and that therefore one must have incontrovertible evidence before making the charge. I don’t think it is tantamount to treason. Treason is a crime that can mean the death penalty. Dual loyalty is an affair of the heart that can actually be legal under the Constitution–indeed, the Supreme Court said some time back that it was O.K. for a person to fight and vote in another country and still be a citizen of the U.S.
There’s a difference between the right to be a citizen, or to own property, or not to be imprisoned and the right to serve as an adviser to the president. There is no such right. If there was, I could show up at the White House to be the Middle East adviser tomorrow. Political appointments are subject to tons of discretion. And all I’ve said is that when there’s a suspicion of dual loyalty, I don’t think those people should be setting policy in that area. When Elliott Abrams writes that Jews must stand apart from their society in any country but Israel, I suspect dual loyalty; and I don’t want him making policy in that powderkeg region.
The other thing I find unconvincing about Fleshler’s post is his pat exoneration of the neocons. He relates a conversation he once had with Doug Feith in which Feith said he’s a conservative who cares about a lot of countries, including Israel. This is the same Feith who pointed to a portrait of Herzl in his library, in a New Yorker article, and said that all Jews should be for Bush, presumably because Bush was so good for Israel.
That’s evidence of dual loyalty, it’s certainly not proof. I don’t think it’s easy to either establish dual loyalty or clear someone of it. I wonder how much these neocons think of Israel in their heart of hearts. But unless you put someone on truth serum, it would be hard to prove.
But this gets to the larger point. It seems to me completely legitimate to suspect dual loyalty in a lot of the Jewish thinking on the war, thinking that seamlessly conflated U.S. and Israeli interests. When Tom Friedman said he was for the war because of suicide bombers going into Tel Aviv pizza parlors…. when Ken Pollack wrote a whole book pushing for the war and said the Arab street would be on our side and he never once mentioned the Israeli occupation…. when the Jewish Policy Center told Jewish audiences that the war was good for Israel and meanwhile told general audiences that the war was good for stability in the Mideast… when my own brother said in 2002 that he was against the Vietnam war but he didn’t know how he felt about this one because "my Jewish newspaper says it could be good for Israel"…. in all these cases, I wonder whether Jews weren’t thinking about Israeli interests ahead of American ones.
That’s why I’m a non-Zionist, or a post-Zionist. Zionism creates the conditions under which these suspicions will arise, because Jews will feel torn between two places. Through the law of return, Zionism states that all Jews belong to the Jewish nation; and though in the 1950s the head of the American Jewish Committee, Joseph Blaustein, strongly rejected the calls that Israel made on American Jews, today American Jewish identity is defined to a large degree by support for Israel, and religious nationalism is routinely offered to Jewish audiences the way anti-abortion doctrine is part of the evangelical church. Some Jews have taken that idea further than others. Indeed, as I have reported, the two godfathers of neoconservatism, Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz, both called for a strong U.S. military in the 70s, so as to defend Israel. Recently, John Judis and Eric Alterman, liberal journalists, have openly raised questions about dual loyalty in (some) American Jews when it comes to Israel. As I report in the American Conservative, one of the big backers of the pro-Iraq-war group Freedom’s Watch has given $60 million to the birthright program, which sends young Jews on a free trip to Israel, so they’ll fall in love with the country and with other Jews. Don’t you wonder just why he’s supporting the Iraq war? I do.
Fleshler’s pat answers won’t make this issue go away. Jewish prominence in American society, coupled with definitions of Jewish identity that tie us to Jerusalem, mean that these suspicions are going to arise whenever the U.S. makes policy choices, like the disastrous Iraq war decision, that appear to be in Israel’s interest more than our own. After Catholics came into the power structure, John Kennedy, as a step toward gaining the highest office in the land, had to go to the ministers in Houston in 1960 and explain why he felt no allegiance to the Vatican. I think Jews are facing a similar sort of crisis; indeed a Jewish candidate for president would be getting the Israel-in-your-heart question on the campaign trail right now.
As I’ve said again and again, the horror of the Iraq war ought to set off a soulsearching among Jews of conscience about the extent to which the now-routine business of rationalizing Israel’s brutal policies toward the Palestinians has come to affect American choices in the Middle East. I’m not trying to deprive any of the Jewish neocons of life, liberty or the pursuit of a sinecure at a Washington thinktank. I just want their fingers off the trigger.
