The Israeli journalist Uri Avnery shares my view that Walt and Mearsheimer’s book is historic. He compares it to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Avnery joins a group of progressive Jews, including Michael Lerner, who welcome this book as a way out of the Israeli occupation that has so corrupted that society, and our politics too.
For me, Avnery offers the hope that Jews will join this conversation about the lobby and say what they know. So far the Jewish response to Walt/Mearsheimer has been mostly denial or attack. Jews have tended, like Jeffrey Goldberg in the New Republic, to approach the book in power terms–This is an assault on Jewish power–rather than on intellectual terms. What is revealed here? (As I said some months back) Walt and Mearsheimer are scholars of Jewish history, and yet I will be the first to say there is something a little wan about the performance. They come to this as realist political scientists and gentiles, and they don’t presume to talk about Jewish culture.
Jews know about the lobby intimately. It is our thing (as Italians would say). Alan Dershowitz crowed about its power in Chutzpah (as I reported here). The two most prominent Jewish writers of the last 50 years, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, both speak of the lobby in fond terms. In The Counterlife, one of Roth’s warm fiendish alter egos brags about the lobby’s strength, having emigrated to Israel himself. In To Jerusalem and Back (1976), Saul Bellow speaks often of the lobby as a great and necessary institution. "The defense of Israel is ‘the paramount task of the [American] Jewish community,’" says one of his trusted informants.
Some day the lobby will be taught in Jewish history classes. I think it arose in a new way in the 1970s. The ’67 and ’73 wars had awakened American Jewry. "[I]t would take the trauma of the June, 1967 war to shake both sides into a greater realization of… how deeply committed the Diaspora and Israel were to each other," writes the Zionist historian Melvin Urofsky. Of course the other factor here was the awakening to the Holocaust. Saul Bellow said that Sadat was enamored of Hitler; and in 1971, neocon godfather Milton Himmelfarb (Bill Kristol’s uncle) offered a credo for American Jews in the wake of the extermination of European Jewry:
"’Never again!’ we said, the ‘again’ recalling what Hitler had done, had been allowed to do, to the Jews. Never again, we meant, would we let others fool us or would we fool ourselves about the intention of those who intended to destroy the Jews. Never again would we lean on that broken reed, enlightened opinion. Never again would we do less than all we could do… Never again would we incur the guilt, or the guilt-feeling, of 1933-1945."
So the guilty sense that comfortable American Jews were passive during the Holocaust and that Arabs are the new Nazis fed the unilateral activism of the lobby–and the nullification of the U.N. and other "enlightened opinion." These are big and important ideas in our world today. I believe the only intellectual who has touched on them is Michael Desch, in his paper on the use and misuse of the Holocaust analogy. It’s time for Jewish writers to enter this conversation in a spirit of openness.
P.S. Bellow was a conservative; he felt that Jews had a right to a tiny splinter of land in the Arab world. And yet his hawkish 1976 book acknowledges the seeds of corruption. He says, often but apologetically, that the settlements are a bad idea, that they are perverting the idea of Israel. The lobby has signed off on those settlements for 30 years.
"Walt and Mearsheimer are scholars of Jewish history, and yet I will be the first to say there is something a little wan about the performance. They come to this as realist political scientists and gentiles, and they don't presume to talk about Jewish culture. "
Do you really mean that?
I find great refreshment in the slogan "never again". There is something adult in it.
Specifically, in the discussion of what is ethical.
There are MANY that describe themselves as ethical, and their politics as ethical, but live a life of fear and apology.
It is a recurring theme in Jewish history, and more importantly, in what the rest of the world thought Jews "should" feel. The common thread of all persecution, external and internalized, is that we should live a life of constant existential apology.
There is a positive spiritual root to that, a "thanking" the universe/Creator for providing for us, a never-ending, never-endable debt, with a concurrent obligation to use one's life for the betterment of the created world, and persons.
The internalization of the phrase "never again" as an assertion, however, expresses that thanks in a different qualitative manner.
It is possible to be good, individually and collectively, while retaining the attitude of "never again", even with an emphasis on one's own.
Frankly, it is difficult to truly be good, while living in fear or apology.
One dilemma of the assimilated life is that one always is tempted to live that life of apology.
Either to get along, or worse, to internalize getting along, so that one doesn't even have to engage the conflicting questions of a life of apology.
From confidence, one can extend "Never again (will my people be abused)" to "Never again (will I sit while any are abused)"
I don't believe that that transition is genuinely possible from a state of walking apology.
Clearly, there is widespread sentiment to insist that Jews live a life of walking apology, that our sense of spiritually based obligation to the Creator and to living beings, or our sense of pursuing that through separated community in some regard, is in fact an opportunity to abuse us.
Better that we be comprehensively strong, so that we can live well and ethically, confidently.
Walt and Mearsheimer's thesis appeals to both the better (subjective and objective inquiry) and the worst (invocation of fear).
There is VALID basis to distrust "enlightened opinion". That is because so often it is a self-congratulation, rather than a genuine commitment to universal kindness and dignity.
There are subtle and gross examples. The gross examples include the nazi invocations in enlightened Germany, enlightened Poland, Austria, Hungary, Rumania, Russia, France, Great Britain, US. The subtle examples are experienced as insensitivity, then contempt for experiencing rudeness as insensitivity and describing it publicly.
Better that we live a life of walking apology.
So, if it can happen there (a great surprise to the similarly enlightened Jews in those areas), and it can happen here, who is there to trust?
Where is Phil contesting the anti-semitism that is invoked by his choice of comments and actual comments?
Real clarification.
Where is the courage of the enlightened, necessary to demonstrate that it is possible to trust the "enlightened society".
No matter how well received the M&W book is, sooner or later we're going to have to start discussing the media. That's when the hard work begins.
Here's a fascinating Canadian documentary on land use in the Jewish state. Compared to what can be shown on U.S. media, it could as well be from the moon.
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2500957394773313398&q=Canada+Park+video&total=3927&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=3
Well, Saul Bellow was one of those who fell for Joan Peters' book 'From Time Immemorial' ("millions of people the world over, smothered by false history and propaganda, will be grateful for this clear account of the origins of the Palestinians").
Incidentally this book, long since exposed as a hoax, still gets five star rave reviews at the Amazon site from the Zionist cheering squad.
If Israelis wonder why their country attracts so much negative attention they overlook the fact that it is probably more lied about than any other country. The critique is to a certain extent a 'blowback' phenomenon.
In the same way that Clinton's Monicagate was a 'blowjob' phenomenon?
I don't think that Roth's or Bellow's or Malamud's or others' concerns are so easily dismissed.
These are not idiots, not individuals seeking to self-delude.
They seek to understand clearly and deeply, even areas that are verboten to the socialization of assimilated Jews.
I now distrust some of my earlier convictions as attempts to get along, to even internalize the need to get along.
The question of how to respond is a good and important discussion. The question of how to identify is also one, but any characteristics of existential apology is the wrong one.
Well, Saul Bellow could perhaps be excused for his enthusiasm for the Peters fraud. He was, after all, not a professional historian. More serious was the case of somebody who was, Barbara Tuchman.
Not only that she praised the book to the skies, she also engaged in a furious correspondence with some British critics of the book that appeared to be almost illiterate because of rage. Alex Cockburn published this correspondence with some suitable comments, in The Nation I think.
Why do these people seem to lose all critical distance when Israel is concerned ? Psychic needs ? Is this typical for American Jews ?
The Dutch author who first opened my eyes to the situation in Israel, the late Renate Rubinstein (who had lost her father in Auschwitz) already published in 1967 a book on Israel in which she demolished, inter alia, the then still potent myth that the Palestinians had fled from their homes in 1948 because they had been encouraged to do so by their leaders.
She also pointed out that many Palestinian villages had been razed to the ground and had been obliterated from the map.
But most of all, she criticised in this book, basically a report on her travel through the Middle East directly after the Six Day War, the heady atmosphere that Israel's triumph had brought about, the discussions about what to do with the West Bank as if the inhabitants of that territory simply did not exist.
Rubinstein was not worried about her "psychic needs" in this book. What she was worried about was that she would hurt many of her friends in Israel with it (she had lived there for a few years).
Rubinstein had a weakness for Israel but her love of the truth was greater.
I've only read a couple Roth books, and I don't think any Bellow.
I will shortly. Its an embarrassment for me.
I take their person and intellectual integrity more than to dismiss their opinions as a "serving of Jewish psychic needs".
There are more respectful ways to convey the content of the arguments.
Arie,
I hope that you don't profess to be a part of the community of "enlightened opinion" that we are supposed to be able to trust and depend on.
I expect that other prominent authors held similar views re: Israel.
Phil,
Do you know of Bernard Malamud's views? Or EL Doctorow?
Arie is a Jew.
Richard, have you ever read any gentile authors?
I've read some of your fiction, thats if you're the same "anonymous".