C-Span just aired a panel at the Nixon Center about Jacob Heilbrunn’s book on the neocons: They Knew They Were Right. For me it was significant for the raw argument about Jewish identity that arose between Heilbrunn and respondent Dov Zakheim, the son of a Holocaust survivor.
The author spoke first. He said that the Holocaust is a "driving" force in the thinking of both neocons and liberal hawks on foreign policy. And he had a big "question mark" about that; he accused them of "sentimentalizing," i.e., reacting emotionally to events. He noted that Douglas Feith had told him that he had learned all about Israel and the Middle East from his father’s experience as a Holocaust survivor. A bit of hysterical thinking that I don’t think Heilbrunn mentioned in his book.
Alas, Heilbrunn doesn’t take this analysis to the next stage, which is that the neocons projected their Holocaust fears on to the Arabs/Palestinians, and so have magnified sectarian struggles in the Middle East into a hoped-for World War IV in which the U.S. must defeat evil. Heilbrunn doesn’t take it there because he has already broken taboos in his book, and there is a general air about his presence of–"Well, I have said enough, I will leave it at that" (as I wrote in the American Conservative). You understand his fear. He’s walking the line, as a Jew in Establishment circles. This week Arun Gandhi was forced to leave the presidency of the Peace Institute for writing on a Washington Post blog that Jews have overdone Holocaust consciousness, and that the result was that Jews and Israel are major players in a culture of violence. Now Gandhi has to go to some kind of reeducation session. You’re not allowed to discuss this sort of stuff, unless you’re Jewish.
Back to the Nixon Center. Heilbrunn was taken on by Dov Zakheim, a former Bush Administration official, who sought to argue that the neocons aren’t really Jewish, and the Holocaust has very little to do with their thinking. Zakheim, the son of a survivor, made a number of water-muddying comments. He said that Paul Wolfowitz deeply cares about the Palestinians, which makes him not a neoconservative. He said that to be affected by the Holocaust truly, you have to have had close kin killed. He said that Democrat Tom Lantos was the only survivor on Capitol Hill, and he’s damn sure not a neocon. He said last he had checked Zalmay Khalilzad was a Muslim not a Jew. And so forth.
These are spurious statements, designed to mislead. Lantos supported the Iraq war because Saddam reminded him of Hitler. It doesn’t matter whether he’s a neocon or not; he is emblematic of a strong element in Jewish public life that would go to war with the Arabs in part because they support suicide bombers in Israel. Not my country, thank you. Also, to be truly affected by the Holocaust you don’t have to be a survivor. As Brandeis historian Jacob Cohen said at a Dershowitz event last year, the Holocaust is a sacred Jewish experience. Too sacralized, in my view. But it is sacred; Jews of my generation were steeped in Holocaust consciousness. Zakheim is an Orthodox Jew and a strong supporter of Israel; he knows that Jewish concern for Israel is a real factor in pushing for a militarist American defense policy, particularly from big neocons.
The remarkable thing about the event, though, is that Jews were having it out publicly about the Jewishness of the neocons. Zakheim seems to hope the conversation goes away, but Heilbrunn has done an immense service by starting it. As I’ve said often on this blog, American Jewry won’t be healed, nor will American leadership, until we come to terms with the special Jewish role in the Iraq tragedy. Some day the Forward will do forums on the subject, so will the New York Times. To have Jews arguing about Jewishness and the Holocaust and militarism, at the Nixon Center and then on national TV, hey, that is progress.
