I saw "Charlie Wilson’s War" last night. B+. It was too one-note for me. But any Hollywood film that tries to deal with foreign policy gets kudos here.
Also, I was pleased to see that the film touches on my favorite subject, the Israel Lobby. Charlie Wilson, a Democratic congressman from East Texas (played by Tom Hanks), tells a rightwing socialite (Julia Roberts) who is pushing him to back the mujahedin resistance to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan that he can’t give arms to Muslims because of "the Jews." How many Jews are in your district? she asks. Seven. But those Jews don’t matter. It’s the Jews in New York and L.A. who support his campaign because he’s a friend of Israel, he says. Of course, Wilson is determined to arm the resistance, so he gets both the Israelis and Egyptians on board, and visits Jerusalem and Cairo. The film then addresses a second cliche about Israel/Palestine. When the Egyptian and Israeli start quarreling about history, Charlie Wilson wearily says, "Oh not that again," and asks them to put aside their ancient differences for the sake of the Afghan resistance.
I found it bracing that the film so openly acknowledged the importance of Jewish money in Congress. You could say that this openness was created by Walt and Mearsheimer, with their brave book. The alternative theory is that director Mike Nichols is Jewish, and so apparently is screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (sure is good to see Hollywood making room for my people!) and it’s O.K. for Jews to talk about the lobby, especially if it’s shtik. Alan Dershowitz wrote all about the power of the lobby in Chutzpah, then when Walt and Mearsheimer dared to take up the subject he called them antisemites. Philip Roth talked about the lobby in The Counterlife, Saul Bellow in his Jerusalem book. That was OK, till two gentile scholars decided to look into it. The author Jeffrey Goldberg has displayed something of the same attitude. The famous quote Goldberg extracted from an AIPAC lobbyist, saying he could get the signatures of 70 senators, or congressmen, on a napkin by the next morning, was an important contribution to our understanding of the lobby. But at a Yivo event last month, the reporter condemned Walt and Mearsheimer as antisemites (according to a friend’s transcription).
To me it’s one of the most
specious parts of this book is their constant denials…. [T]hey don’t define anti-semitism. But then they deny that they themselves
are anti-semitic. It doesn’t matter one whit what you say…. It’s
not up to a white person to tell a black person what is racist and what is not.
And is not up to a non-Jew to tell a Jew what is anti-semitic. I think that
cultural, political autonomy means that we get to define what we think is
anti-semitic. And these protests in the book about how much they’re not
anti-semites are completely unconvincing to me.
The fascination here is the comparison of Jews to blacks in the south. We are victims, so we get to name our oppressors. As an autonomous ethnic group, we are accountable only to ourselves. It’s completely out of step with millennial America, where Jews are part of the establishment and have true power, the ability to influence others’ lives. It would be nice to see more responsibility. Maybe Charlie Wilson signals a change.
P.S. One other thought. Charlie Wilson’s big epiphany in the movie comes when he views the suffering of Afghan refugees at a vast camp in Pakistan. He is moved to action. As the activist Hilda Silverman likes to point out, movies have made a lot of the D.P. camps to which Jewish refugees were confined in the years after WWII. When will someone do a movie showing the camps to which Palestinians fled during the ethnic cleansing of ’48? When will Americans be moved by that human story?
