provided watered-down reports to the American establishment surrounding
the true state of affairs in Israel/Palestine, thereby undermining the
opinion-making and policy-making process.
Today Slater sent me an incisive criticism of Jeffrey Goldberg's recent shift. On lead guitar, Jerry Slater:
Jeffrey Goldberg is perhaps today’s
most prominent American journalist specializing in Israel and the U.S.-Israeli
relationship. His work regularly appears in all the best places: the New
York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, Atlantic, the
That fact alone reveals the wretched state of American discourse on Israeli
matters.
Here are just
a few of Goldberg’s recent contributions to public discourse:
In a 2006 Washington Post review of
Jimmy Carter’s book,
Not Apartheid, Goldberg wrote: “Carter, not unlike God, has long been
disproportionately interested in the sins of the Chosen People. He is
famously a partisan of the Palestinians…And God, unlike Carter, does not manufacture
sins to hang around the necks of Jews when no sins have actually been
committed.”
In the same article, he repeated an
absurd contention he has made elsewhere: “The Arabs who surround Israel have
launched numerous wars against it, all meant to snuff it out of
existence.” Really? Which ones? His best case no doubt is the 1948
war, but it is still a poor one, for the serious historical scholarship has
long challenged the argument that the invading Arab armies intended, let alone
had the capability, of snuffing Israel out of existence. The next
Arab-Israeli war was the 1956 Suez War—but that was initiated by
designed to humiliate
Nasser and for
seize the
The third war was that of June 1967,
but that was also initiated by Israel, not by the Arabs. To be sure,
initially the Israeli attack was widely seen as a justified Israeli preemptive
attack against an Egyptian arms buildup in the Sinai that was intended to
destroy Israel; however, for many years that view has been challenged by
serious Israeli and other historians, who argue that Nasser blundered into a
war he did not intend. Indeed, it is not just historians who now reject
the notion that Israel’s existence was at stake; none other than Menachem
Begin, not known as a leftist New Historian, publicly called the 1967 war “a
war of choice.”
What about the next war, the
1973 Suez conflict? Initiated by Egypt, yes—but just about no one
thinks that Sadat’s intention was to snuff out Israel. Rather, his purpose was to seize part of the
Sinai in order to force Israel to negotiate a settlement that would return the
rest of Sinai—seized by Israel in 1967—to Egypt. And the strategy
worked—much to the true interests not only of Egypt, but Israel.
What’s
left—the various Israeli attacks on Lebanon, as in 1982 and 2006? Wars of
“no choice,”
very existence on the line?
Now we
come to Goldberg on Mearsheimer and Walt. In his notorious 2007 New
Republic review of the Israel Lobby, Goldberg returned to his Carter review
tactic of smearing serious critics of Israel with the barely-concealed charge
of anti-Semitism: “the book remains true to the malignant and dishonest spirit
of the [earlier M/W London Review] article. It represents the most sustained
attack, the most mainstream attack, against the political enfranchisement of
American Jews since the era of Father Coughlin.” Gosh, that
bad? I had thought Mearsheimer and Walt
were criticizing the power of the Israel lobby in the formulation of American
policy towards Israel; I must have missed the part where they called for
denying the Jews their political rights.
In the same
review and elsewhere, Goldberg challenges the M/W contention, shared by nearly
all serious observers and indeed by bin Laden himself, who ought to know, that
an important part of the motivation for al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attack was rage at U.S.
support for the Israeli occupation of the Palestinians. Here’s how
Goldberg characterizes the M/W assessment: “This is not QUITE the view,
commonly heard in the Arab world, that
had a direct hand in the destruction of the
heinous.” (emphasis added).
Remarkably enough, it turns
out the Goldberg actually agrees with what is clearly Mearsheimer and Walt’s
central contention, that the power of the Israel lobby is the main reason for
U.S. support of Israeli policies that harm the national interests of both
countries. Even in his
“slowly wean itself from American aid, BUT AIPAC HAS TO AGREE WITH THIS”
(emphasis added), evidently failing to
notice that he was providing powerful support for the M/W argument.
Most
recently, in a May 18 New York Times oped that is already becoming famous—or
notorious—Goldberg again attacks M/W (in passing), but concludes that the U.S.
government won’t be able to “talk, in blunt terms, about the full range of
dangers faced by Israel, including the danger that Israel has brought on
itself…until Aipac and the leadership of the American Jewish community allow it
to happen.” What? As Max Boot in Commentary in effect
protests: Isn’t that precisely what Mearsheimer and Walt are arguing? Goldberg
angrily denies it, but of course Boot is right—indeed, if anything Goldberg’s
wording is less qualified than that of Mearsheimer/Walt. Speaking
personally, I wouldn’t go quite as far as M/W, let alone Goldberg. My own view
is that Mearsheimer and Walt sometimes exaggerate the power of the Israel
lobby, and those exaggerations have unfortunately caused their much more
important and compelling arguments, concerning the irrational policies of both
the United States and Israel, to be largely ignored.
I suppose Goldberg is
entitled to deny, however lamely, that he has again accepted the message, even
as he attacks the messengers. But he is certainly not entitled to do so by
calling his adversaries (in an interview with Shmuel Rosner in the May 22
Haaretz), “the vile Walt and the vile Mearsheimer.” John Mearsheimer and
Steve Walt are two of the most internationally eminent and renowned scholars
and public intellectuals in the field of international politics, chaired
professors at two of America’s greatest universities, and their book is without
a doubt a most serious work that is bound to have a major impact on both
scholarship and general public discourse. To sneer at them as
anti-Semites and refer to them–personally and for emphasis, individually–as
“vile” is simply, well, vile, and far
beyond the pale of any intellectually or morally respectable discourse.
Will Goldberg’s latest travesty
discredit him as a serious pundit in all those famous U.S. newspapers and
magazines? If you believe that, then I am the Queen of Sweden.
Weiss’s comment: I’m especially grateful to Slater for a few points here. One, reviewing the history of Israel’s wars. Fascinating, and Tony Judt agrees. Will our mainstream discourse ever entertain these ideas? First it has to have some Nakba, for breakfast.Another vital point is Slater’s defense of Walt and Mearsheimer as the serious scholars they are. I applaud Slater for affirming this, and it’s the more stirring because he disagrees with them on key points. Let’s not forget thededication of their book, to Samuel Huntington: “Sam has always tackled big and important questions, and he has answered
these questions in ways that the rest of the world could not ignore. Although
each of us has disagreed with him on numerous occasions over the
years–and sometimes vehemently and publicly–he never held those
disagreements against us and was never anything but gracious and
supportive of our work.”[my emphasis] And also I’d note Slater’s defenestration of Goldberg on the smear that it is antisemitic to say that the Israel/Palestine issue played a role in the motivation of the hijackers on 9/11. Craziness.
