All the issues are flowing together: Iran, campaign finance, the Israel lobby, the presidential election. As I said yesterday, the Financial Times can discuss it but not our press. Last night Chris Matthews was tonguetied on the subject. When do you ever see Matthews tonguetied? He said that there were “sensitivities” in the U.S. around the Israel issue. Then he said it was not just Jews who care about Israel, a great number of Christians do too. I don’t know if that is true, politically, Chris, you absolute genius of politics, be intellectually honest? Who will go to the mat for Israel? On his panel were Andrea Mitchell and Roger Simon of politico. I venture that both are Jewish. There are your sensitivities. When will a journalist have the co-jones to ask a simple question: How important is Zionism to you? Gather a group of journalists and ask them that. Let us learn that there are also non-Zionists. Anti-Zionists.
I hear Sy Hersh has another great piece in the New Yorker this week. My friend Dan Swanson says Hersh is a tough kid from Chicago. No one got the better of Hersh. (And Jim Lobe says that shrimpy Jews make better neocons than tough Jews. The shrimps got beat up when they were kids, or thought they were getting beat up.) I bet Zionism is not that important to Hersh, and he is from a leftwing background. But Daniel Schorr, his mother lit candles for Palestine–and probably sent money off to help the Haganah cleanse the land of Palestinians, when the U.N. had created a state that was only slightly majority Jewish. When will Jews talk about this in the media? We owe it to this great country. Now especially, when Obama and McCain are struggling to meet Jewish expectations.
Matthews owes it to his audience to have John Mearsheimer and Trita Parsi on, realists. Mearsheimer says that the world can live with an Iran with nukes, so does Fareed Zakaria. What is the Israeli interest and what is the American one? And how much of the Israeli interest is perceived by its leaders in militarized terms, a fortress state that sometimes speaks of the ’67 borders as “Auschwitz borders”? Americans should be talking about this stuff, instead of letting Israel drag us into its cycle of violence.
