The Joe Klein dual-loyalty assertion is being debated everywhere, including here by Shmuel Rosner, who goes thru some formalities about being an Israeli so he can’t comment then promptly tosses that aside to speak as a member of the Jewish community, and to imply that Klein is using religion against those with whom he has policy differences. Klein has refused to back down–
“You want evidence of divided loyalties? How about
the ‘benign domino theory’ that so many Jewish neoconservatives talked
to me about – off the record, of course – in the runup to the Iraq war,
the idea that Israel’s security could be won by taking out Saddam,
which would set off a cascade of disaster for Israel’s enemies in the
region?”
Klein was equally bracing when it came to the violence of the Clinton machine, in Primary Colors.
The amazing thing about this argument is that time and again, thru the Walt and Mearsheimer skirmishes, Jews wrung their hands (wringed?) over the dual-loyalty canard. But this duck keeps popping up again (from Eric Alterman and John Judis, among others) because it truly describes the hearts of the neoconservatives. As Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz told us long ago when they shifted parties, they were for a strong military because the U.S. had to protect Israel. Then their son and son-in-law became actual policy makers, and brought their parochial beliefs to the White House, and shut up about their Israel agendas. Klein is a blunt man, god bless him. This conversation is coming into the open.
