Jeffrey Goldberg’s piece yesterday in the Times is very important. Goldberg is someone many Jews look to for guidance, and his piece is the green flag to the American Jewish community to have open war over Israel and the lobby. At last. On one side, the Adelsons and Perles who want Israel in all of historic Palestine. On the other, the Jews against occupation, the Aaron David Millers who want to divide the land and share Jerusalem. Time for a robust debate, the piece declared (giving an imprimatur to a demand Walt and Mearsheimer and MJ Rosenberg have been making for months). And it was obviously an expenditure of Goldberg’s political and personal capital: what will happen to his many friendships with the likes of Bill Kristol?
The big question I have about the piece is Whether Goldberg discussed it with Obama.
I start with the idea that Goldberg is a power journalist. He is very powerful, and you don’t get
power without seeking it. In his journalistic value system, questions
of power–Is it good for the Jews?–seem to trump questions of truth. The best evidence of this is the 180 he has now done from his
vicious New Republic review of Walt and Mearsheimer last fall. The most revealing point in that piece was Goldberg’s statement that W&M’s book represents a
historic moment in the disenfranchisement of the Jewish people in
America. Goldberg was looking at the book in strict power terms: Is this good for the Jews? And he was
right, that the book served to disenfranchise American Jews, or
rightwing American Jews, the body of Jewish leadership, and may have been a highwater mark in the role of Jews in the American establishment. But whether or not it is good for the Jews is not an intellectual argument. The idea that Dreyfus was falsely
accused caused a huge loss of power to the Catholics in the French power structure, yes; but it didn’t make the idea any less true. W&M are
political scholars, they are not power guys. They were trying to tell
the truth about the lobby’s influence, and yes Jewish
influence, and recognized that they would be sacrificing their own access to power by doing so. Goldberg responded as a guy who has always cared most about the fate of the Jewish people. The book scared him. He went after it like a pitbull.
And a few months pass and now he comes out with a piece attacking that same Jewish leadership.
To explain it, I go back to Goldberg’s "conversation" with Obama of a week before. Not an interview, but a conversation, i.e., between equals. And indeed in this published portion, they are equals; Obama actually kisses Goldberg’s tuchis
(Yiddish for you-know-what) several times, complimenting him on a
recent piece he wrote, etc. And offers mild
statements against the settlements, as a "sore" point across the Arab
world.
But note that Goldberg is only
offering "excerpts" of the conversation. So what happened in the rest of the conversation? Obama is a power guy, and he is wicked
smart. And when the door closed and he had Goldberg’s assurance that it was completely off the record, he channeled the ghosts of Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Dwight Eisenhower and laid it on the line to his new friend:
The settlements are wrong. You know they are
wrong, most Jews are against them. And not only are they wrong, they are nullifying our
policy across the Middle East. We won’t get anywhere with the Arab and
Muslim world until we deal with that issue, and Israel too. As Olmert has said, this is Israel’s last chance to stay a Jewish state. But Jeffrey, I can’t do diddly on this. I can’t open my mouth, I can’t talk to Rob Malley, I can’t talk to Zbig Brzezinski, no one in the realist or progressive camp, without getting hammered; because I have no cover on this issue. No cover. Because
your own community doesn’t dare to criticize Israel openly, and when
brilliant honorable men like Jimmy Carter and Mearsheimer and Walt open their mouths, they
are cut down. Cut down. I need cover. Someone from your community has got to run interference. J Street can’t do it for me, it’s
a good sign but nobody knows these guys. I love Mondoweiss, but he’s
way off the reservation. I need someone everyone knows, a guy like Marty or Alan Dershowitz, look he says he’s a liberal Democrat, or Stephen Spielberg, Jeff Katzenberg, to step up and take the spears and say what you know to be true,
which is that the lobby is killing us on this stuff, and hurting America. There has got to
be a debate within the Jewish community over this or Jeffrey it’s just
like what I said in Philly about race, Nothing will change. Nothing
will change. Only this time it’s world stability that’s at stake. And it’s got to be someone from the Jewish community because look, I could talk about race because
I’m black, I have standing. Here I have no standing. No standing at all. A big Jew has
to say it. And maybe, maybe Jeffrey– that person is you.
And Goldberg looked across the table at the next commander in chief of
the country–a guy he believes in his heart won’t sell the Jews out, a
guy who has the unique ability to triangulate Arab, Jew, and American,
and maybe too, just to be cynical for a second, a guy who will give him
a job– and said, Aye-aye, sir.
