This past weekend I spent some time with my brother-in-law, a music lover who lives in Philadelphia. He told me of the pleasure he gets from concerts at the new Kimmel Center and, for chamber music, the Perelman Theater. I couldn’t help reflecting that the Kimmel Center is funded by Sidney Kimmel, a huge supporter of Jewish charities and the Jewish day school movement, and the Perelman Theater was funded by Ruth and Raymond Perelman, parents of Ron Perelman, all three of whom are big on Jewish and Israeli charities. The Perelmans started a Jewish day school in Philadelphia, so Jews can learn apart from gentiles and not get socially comfortable with gentiles.
Tony Karon has criticized Walt and Mearsheimer, saying that support for Israel is a deep "trope" in American public life regardless of the lobby’s influence. Michael Oren stakes a similar claim in his recent book, Power Faith and Fantasy, America and the Middle East (or something like that, the book’s in the other room now): Americans have always had a religious connection to the Holy Land and now Israel. LBJ cared about Israel for religious reasons, Oren says–not as I suggested so cynically the other day, because he aspired to the presidency. Richard Witty has written, "the relationship is permanent, not because of any shift
of strategic alliances, but because of permanent economic, religious and
personal ties." Israel lobbyists are always saying, Americans naturally love Israel. Marty Peretz says so in tomorrow’s Haaretz:
People like Walt and Mearsheimer are
"facing a stone wall, which is the fact that the American people like
Israel and identify with it," he says. That support has little to do with
the Israel lobby. "We have petitions upon petitions from centuries ago by
Americans who wanted a Jewish homeland in Palestine," he says. "That’s
from before there were any Jews in the U.S.
This is romantic hogwash. Most Americans feel little emotional connection to Israel, but they are keenly aware of how much entrepreneurial Jews are contributing to the American economy and culture; and they accept that the price of this is a political concession that is actually inimical to U.S. interests overseas (Israel’s treatment of Arabs), and they say, Let them have it. The Kimmel/Perelman example I offer above is merely the latest evidence I’ve found of the thorough integration of Jews into the American establishment, an integration that is occurring because Jewish gifts are prized in the global information age. In a sense, it comes down to money. And entrepreneurial Jews are the engine of the service/information economy, from Google to Clintonism to the New England Patriots.
The best analogy for the Israel lobby is the Ibsen play An Enemy of the People, in which a town in Norway ostracizes a doctor who says that the town baths are polluted and are killing people. Because the baths are the source of the town’s income. So the doctor must be silenced. Sort of like Walt and Mearsheimer, being marginalized for challenging the righteousness of Israeli apartheid. In my analogy, the town baths are the Jewish genius for this economic moment, Jewish success in the late 20th century. What Yuri Slezkine called The Jewish Century, of "priests and merchants," not "princes and peasants…" Yes I know this moment may be coming to an end. Still it is a Jewish moment, and we are keeping America on top, and keeping the Democratic presidential candidates afloat, and keeping Freedom’s Watch going on the right.
I know there are non-Jewish elements in America that do love Israel. Some of them are powerful. It is just hard to tell how powerful when someone else has their thumb so firmly on the scale, as the Israel lobby does, and is chanting, Don’t you love Israel! I don’t think Americans really care about Israel. Yes they care about the Holocaust, they care about justice for the Jews. But most of all they care about being on top. And so at some level the success of the Israel lobby is transactional.
Keep us on top, we will continue to let Israel colonize the West Bank, carve up the international holy city of Jerusalem with concrete walls, and subjugate the Palestinians. That contract may be ending, now that
the economy is slipping and the history of Palestine is being revised
publicly in the States at last, and young American Jews are wondering why they have to work for an oppressive state here and the Associated Press uses the word
"Nakba." Still that’s the contract. Because remember, The business of America is business.
[Wrote this late last night. One revision: I dont wish to suggest that the Jewish entrepreneurial genius is a bad thing, no it’s a great thing. I like what it does for the country, with some reservations. It’s the fact that this gift is connected to the older Jewish generation’s unreconstructed Zionist dream that is the problem…]
