My crowd is buzzing over Connie Bruck's profile of Sheldon Adelson in The New Yorker. I have pressed for just such coverage of the U.S.'s third-richest man, and birthright-nut, for months. I notice that the Israel angle is right up front. And from what Richard Silverstein says, the piece is great.
I will read the piece later and surely have a specific response, but for now I have to say that following on the heels of Jane Kramer's wonderful piece about the campaign against Barnard anthropologist Nadia Abu El-Haj a month or so back, this piece is proof of a splendid development: editor David Remnick is committing the resources of the most important magazine in the country to the exploration of the machinations of the Israel lobby.
Remnick took strong exception to Walt and Mearsheimer last September in a piece that was unfortunately dispositive: it allowed liberals to turn their heads. And his own instincts are moderate (here praising Benny Morris as fairminded--the historian whom Uri Avnery describes as an "extreme" rightwinger). But meantime Remnick has accepted the essential intellectual and professional challenge of Walt and Mearsheimer: This stuff is unexamined, it is too central to our politics to be ignored. So he has responded journalistically, publishing these two important factual pieces (in both of which, it must be said, the villains are far-rightwingers, i.e., easier targets than, say, Howard Berman, AIPAC, or even Joe Lieberman). I couldn't stand the New Yorker during the runup to the Iraq war, it was the negative of its courage during Vietnam. This coverage shows that good journalists have grown from that disastrous experience, and that the culture is changing under our feet.
I hope the New Yorker article investigated Adelson's involvement in the Nadia Abu el-Haj debacle and looked at the influence of Miriam Ochshorn's Jabotinskian worldview on Adelson.
Adelson's rise as an American Jewish Zionist political economic oligarch seems to have benefited from a degree of manipulation by the Israeli government in the American hi-tech industry, and Adelson seems to have repaid the boost several times over in facilitating the homeland security bubble.
More on this creep:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/06/30/080630fa_fact_bruck
Ilan Pappe speaking ..Ilan lecture in Sheffield for the Palestine Solidarity Campaign
http://www.indymedia.org.uk/media/2008/03//393741.mp3
IPS: Do we experience today the worst moment of the Arab-Israeli conflict since its beginning?
IP: I still think the worst moment was 1948 and the ethnic cleansing; but it is very bad indeed. It is the final stages of the Israeli unilateral attempt to divide the West Bank into two parts, one annexed to Israel and the other maintained as a big prison camp, or a Bantustan at best. The situation in the Gaza Strip is worse, there the “prison” is already in place, and because of the resistance by the Palestinians to the imprisonment, Israel launches an escalating policy of massive killings. The world seems indifferent, and the Arab world uninterested.
IPS: During his last visit to the region US President George W. Bush described Israel as an example of progress and democracy in the Middle East. How objective do you find his view?
IP: A society that endorses a 40-year occupation of another people cannot be a liberal one. A society that discriminates against 20 percent of its population because they are not Jews cannot be described as progressive. The problem in Israel is not the role of religion or tradition; it is the role of Zionism, a very clear ideology of exclusion, racism and expulsion. This ideology allows the army to play a significant role in most of the domestic and foreign policies, and it is probably right to say that Israel is not a state with an army, but an army with a state.
It is incompresible to me why the Olmert government prohibits Sheldon Adelson from enriching Israeli society with a mini-Vegas of Sands Casinos. After all the good the Sands has done for this country, the evidence should be overwhelming to even the casual observer that Adelson's Casino plan would launch Israel into the premiere ranks of Western society.
This is a change for the New Yorker. Remnick brought in his pal Jeffrey Goldberg, Zionist former Israeli prison guard (now @ The Atlantic), for regular distorted articles on the Mideast. And the New Yorker wrote a cowardly, weasly review of Mearsheimer & Walt, nitpicking, and unwilling to take them on frontally.
David Remnick is a war-promoting Zionist. This profile of Adelson doesn't hit very hard. Sure, it lays out a few facts about his general views. But it barely touches on "Freedom's Watch." It never mentions dual loyalty. (Or rather, singular loyalty: the loyalty of Adelson, Feith, Wolfowitz, et. al lies with only one country.)