A friend just got the latest YIVO bulletin, which is not available at the Yiddish institute’s website, and reports the following:
It includes a full page diatribe against Walt-Mearsheimer that concludes that W and M "presented a one-sided version of Israel and Midde east history by manufacturing fictional argumemts for the sole purpose of supporting and furthering anti-semitism throughout the United States and the world."
Unbelievable. YIVO is a scholarly institution whose goal is to preserve the language and culture of Eastern European Jews. In joining this debate in this way they are enlisting the 6,000,000 Jewish martyrs in the AIPAC cause, as if millions of the 6,000,000 weren’t socialists, communists, and anti-zionists along with Orthodox Jews, Zionists, assimilationists, etc.
YIVO has nothing to do with Israel. And they are willing to forego donations from all those who do not believe that endless war is in the best interests of Israel.
It is dismaying to me because Yivo is the place where these things ought to be discussed openly. But Martin Peretz is a leading figure on Yivo’s board, and he has helped to sacrifice the institution’s scholarly purpose to one of essentially dual loyalty.
A year or so back in the Yivo bookshop, I bought a little volume called "Solidarity and Kinship: Essays on American Zionism," published by the American Jewish Historical Society in 1980. In the book is an essay by Abba Eban about the foundation of the Jewish state that emphasizes the "decisive" role of American Jewy, which even armed the fledgling country in defiance of American laws against sending arms to Israel. I bring this up because Eban makes no bones about the Israel lobby.
Truman would not have supported partition were it not for the "pressure and influence … brought to bear on presidential decisions." Eban says that following the outbreak of violence in late ‘47 in the wake of the U.N. vote to divide Palestine, the U.S. government sought to retreat from its support for partition, but that the levers of "influence" were brought to bear. Eban describes a crucial $25,000 gift made by Jews to Truman’s vice presidential aspirations in ‘44 and says that in ‘48 again American Jews helped Truman to finance his campaign at a "desperate" time.
"No historian would question the judgment that without the support of American Jewry, Israel’s emergence out of vulnerability and weakness into sovereignty and successful resistance could not have been conceived," Eban writes. "[This] extraordinary solidarity and kinship…enlarged Israel’s power beyond the limited dimensions of its space and size."
This isn’t really history, it’s current affairs: obviously, this sort of "pressure and influence," to quote Eban, continues to this day; but when non-Jews dare to speak of it they are smeared as antisemites. Or libeled, as they are in this case, as fiction writers. Some day Yivo will have scholarly conferences on the Israel lobby and dual loyalty. Alas that will have to wait till the issues become truly historical.
Meantime, the left will have to conduct the discussion. Lately the estimable blogger Tony Karon wrote that Walt and Mearsheimer got it wrong about the Israel lobby because they failed to recognize the "deeply-entrenched [pro-Israel] tropes in U.S. political and civil society — tropes which now function quite independently of the lobby’s interventions." I don’t think he’s right about those "tropes." As Eban says, the State Department wanted to cut and run on partition after it proved that it would produce endless strife in Palestine. Even Truman was going wobbly. Yes there are militarists and Christian Zionists who play a role in the policy-making. But the realest trope is the lobby itself, which has been around now for over 60 years…
Related posts:
- YIVO Stages Event on Walt/Mearsheimer; Can Jewish Institutions See Israel As Others See Israel?
- Finkelstein, a Victim of the Israel Lobby, Denies That It Has Power
- Was Truman Courageous in Recognizing Israel in ‘48?
- Jimmy Carter Can’t Say What Jewish Critics of Israel Are Free to Say
- It’s time for Yivo to host a debate with Walt and Mearsheimer
{ 13 comments }
'In joining this debate in this way they are enlisting the 6,000,000 Jewish martyrs in the AIPAC cause, as if millions of the 6,000,000 weren't socialists, communists, and anti-zionists along with Orthodox Jews, Zionists, assimilationists, etc.'
Co-opting "the Jews" in any given ideological cause by presuming to speak for all of them on any given issue is a boilerplate Jewish-ideologue tactic. Jewish ideologues complain about supposed anti-Semites generalizing about all Jews, but themselves speak of Jews as a monolithic group. This is why it is important to distinguish between groups, for example, by specifying pro Israel Jews as "Jewish Zionists" the same way fanatical pro Israel Christians are identified as "Christian Zionists."
Also, why don't more Jews complain when other Jews refer to "the Jews" in monolithic terms (ie framing Walt and Mearsheimer's scholarship as an attack upon "the Jews"? If such generalizations are acceptable under some circumstances, why not others?
Ed, that's a good point regarding speaking about a group in monolithic terms. Hitler did the same thing. Germans couldn't do anything about it; nor can Americans or Israelis. Money talks, and all else walks. There's no choice in the 21st Century except Plutocracy or Fanatic Religion (not that they are always exclusive).
"[The YIVO bulletin] includes a full page diatribe against Walt-Mearsheimer … Unbelievable. YIVO is a scholarly institution whose goal is to preserve the language and culture of Eastern European Jews. In joining this debate in this way they are enlisting the 6,000,000 Jewish martyrs in the AIPAC cause, as if millions of the 6,000,000 weren't socialists, communists, and anti-zionists."
Very well said, Phil. Why should a scholarly organization whose mission is to preserve the Yiddish language and document east European Jewish culture be taking such a pointed position on a contemporary book which has little to do with either objective?
As you so incisively point out, anti-zionism was very mainstream among pre-World War II Jewry, probably constituting the majority consensus.
It's scary and saddening to see the extent to which the zionist meme has infected even organizations such as YIVO, which surely could serve its mandate better by keeping a prudent distance from the Walt/Mearsheimer fray.
Wow … is Judaism ever headed for a self-devised crisis. It didn't have to be this way. But even moderate, constructive critics were slandered and ignored as antisemites. I have a sense of gathering tragedy …
Of course Hitler didn't need warrentless electronic searches and a fake fourth estate press. The clock stopped in 1938? Not hardly; it had just begun, and with the minute hand pointing to the latest righteous victims, the second hand adding up the real victims.
By the way, the illegitimacy of generalizing about "the Jews" should be extrapolated to generalizations about "the American people." Was the terrorism of 9/11 really an attack on "the American people," or was it an attack upon the foreign policies of the new Pharisees running Washington? Examination of the evidence points most certainly to the latter.
The purple-coded test in http://eaazi.blogspot.com/2007/10/ahmadinejad-columbia-faculty-politics.html relates to Martin Peretz' role as a director at YIVO.
Most Israelis, like most Americans, have no say in the regime that governs them–neither political voting system (for party versus candidate, but within a 2-party system) gives a shit about the everyman vote as both can easily ignore it.
Damn! No wonder Jesus freaked out in the Temple.
Yeah, and their desecration of the Temple pales in comparison to what the corrupt Establishment has done to Washington.
Phil — in my comment about the deeply entrenched tropes, I guess I wasn't being completely clear. I'm not discounting the lobby, far from it; what I'm noting is their success in establishing as conventional wisdom all sorts of nasty right-wing positions which run contra to U.S. (and arguably even Israeli) interests. The point I was trying to make is that a lot of the general AIPAC lines have been internalized in the U.S. political mainstream. And in the process, AIPAC has established itself as synonymous not just with Israel, but with philo-Semitism. What you see at that annual AIPAC conference where Democrats and Republicans line up to kiss ass is a graphic demonstration of the fact that AIPAC no longer even needs to go after the politicians, they come to AIPAC cap in hand.
It's not even a behavior or a principle about which mainstream politicians bother to think any more, it's par for the course. I guess that's what I was trying to get at…
Mainstream politicians' goal is to get or stay in power and soak up fringe benefits. Of course, as in jogging to stay healthy, this does not conflict with Tony Karon's comment (above).
In http://delong.typepad.com/egregious_moderation/2007/09/tony-karon-mear.html Tony Karon points out, "After all, nobody asked Remnick to write these pieces."
That claim is not exactly true from my limited observation of the journalistic industry and my greater observation of the finance industry.
One can build up a lot of credit with the powers that be with such efforts.
Jonathan Wells's attacks on the Islamic Society of Boston at the behest of the David Project, which is an Israel Advocacy organization, got him his transfer to Fox News even though in theory Fox News and the Boston Herald are supposed to be independently owned.
[It boggles the mind, but the FCC relaxed the rules on media cross ownership shortly after I began to make my concerns about the Fox Herald relationship public among my contacts in the Boston news industry. See http://eaazi.blogspot.com/2007/08/sale-of-boston-herald.html , which I published several months after looking into the relationship between Fox, the Herald, Wells, and the David Project and after discussing the issue with several local attorneys specializing in this sort of regulatory law.]
In the finance industry there are networks of Jewish professionals that protect one another and pass around insider info. Someone that advances the wrong opinion on Israel can get cut off. Someone the expresses the right opinions advances.
I am seeing payoffs for pro-Israel support and not deep tropes.
Another source of common pro-Israel opinion is the movie industry. Melani Macalister discusses the relationship between pop culture and perceived national interest. See http://members.aol.com/ThorsProvoni/history/naaplecture.htm#_ednref26 .
Yet, every marketing study that I have read on the subject indicates that what pro-Israel film has created, anti-Israel film can uncreate.
No one should be particularly surprised that the Hollywood Crowd (powerful Jews in the film industry) make it realy difficult to produce and distribute Palestinian-sympathetic film. (Look at the grief that Spielberg got for Munich, and my models indicate that the gross ticket revenue was only 1/3 what it should have been — purposeful mismarketing at the lower ranks?)
So, how about The Believer?
Or do you like B. Streisand's x-hubby playing out his disgusting part in American X, soping up goy guilt, no matter how (intellectually, factually, aestheticaaly )disgustingly? Ug.
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