Richard Silverstein has an excellent post about a documentary on the Israel lobby that appeared on Dutch television, with several Americans interviewed, including Tony Judt, who said that Rome tolerated Judea's hijinks till Judea began making too much trouble for the empire, and the same thing is now happening with Israel and the U.S. Also Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell's former chief of staff, says that it is "bullshit" that the U.S. and Israel have conjoint interests, as Richard Perle would argue. Two countries never have the same interest. This is progress, that Wilkerson continues to speak out like this. (2 years back he said that Walt and Mearsheimer were "the blinding flash of the obvious.")
In the Yivo event I blogged about the other day, Nick Lemann said that Walt and Mearsheimer were heirs to a long–and suppressed–tradition of criticism of Israel in the State Department, as distinct from the leftwing critique of Israel. Suppressing an important strain of thought in American life is obviously very damaging. I’m glad it’s busting loose at last. This relates to my complaint of last fall: Do the goyim get to register an opinion re Walt and Mearsheimer? At that time the only people reviewing them were Jews. What Lemann failed to register is that the State Department tradition and the leftwing critics are actually merged now. Realist Steve Walt is a good blue state liberal, I’d bet anything he votes Democrat. I’m an old lefty who now enjoys the company of realists, paleos and Arab-Americans. Judt has surely made common cause with realists. Anatol Lieven has become a realist, Fukuyama has deserted neoconservatism to become a realist. Mearsheimer seems hardboiled, but the book he co-wrote is highly sensitive to Palestinian suffering. And so on. There’s a great merging of the refusees, all those who opposed the war in Iraq and wanted the U.S. to deal with the Israeli occupation and are still marginalized for doing so. It is true that there was cultural suspicion between the sides. Jewish lefties grew up believing those State Department guys were indifferent to Jewish suffering during the Holocaust. There’s a lot of power in joining forces. We’re coming in! Soon this kind of documentary will be on American TV.
