Last Sunday Zev Chafets wrote a too-affectionate and familiar piece about Rush Limbaugh for the New York Times Magazine. Chafets is now a regular contributor to the Times. He had a pro-Israel Op-Ed in the spring.
This is important to note because Chafets is a rightwinger on the Middle East. He grew up in Michigan and always had strong Zionist inclinations. He was part of a synagogue youth organization. He dodged the draft here and went to serve in the Israeli army. He worked for Menachem Begin. As a journalist, Chafets is ho-hum. His book A Match Made in Heaven was distinguished by the casual, familiar style and its love for evangelical rightwingers who are going to save the Israel lobby. This book led to his main achievement as a journalist: his Huckabee profile in the Times last fall, a real coup, exposing Huckabee’s religious ideas. Still, Chafets is a crude rightwinger. A few years ago, when Edward Said died, Chafets slagged the great Said in the Daily News, in the usual sloppy Zionist manner, including contumely about “72 virgins,” etc. At that time my friend Hugh Cosman wrote to the author:
I took issue with a hatchet job he’d just done on Edward W. Said in
the pages of the New York Daily News. When I explained my objections
couldn’t be brushed aside by typical anti-semitic ranting as my
father’s immediate family just escaped Nazi Germany and members of
his extended family did not, Chafets replied “I’m sure your ancestors
are very proud of you…”
I go through this history because it speaks to an important factor in our public life: Zionist journalists getting a platform. Jeffrey Goldberg felt disapproving of Diaspora existence and went over to serve in the IDF, then came back here to write everywhere about Israel. Michael Oren, who left the U.S. for Jerusalem, comes and goes as a journalist here; as I’ve cracked once before, his scholarly writing is to scholarship what military music is to music. Right-leaning Israeli Benny Morris is the New Republic’s main voice on issues of Israeli history, with predictable consequences. Dore Gold, who emigrated from New York to Israel, is the American Enterprise Institute’s “scholar” at $96,000 a year in Jerusalem, and pumps out books no one pays much attention to. Gershom Gorenberg is first-rate, and I tend to agree with him; but he did make aliyah for religious reasons; and it is interesting that the American Prospect hires him from Israel to say that Walt and Mearsheimer are wrong about the power of the lobby in D.C., something I think Gorenberg doesn’t know much about (his own scholarship on the issue stopped in the late 70s; he doesn’t consider the recent history of presidential policy nullification by the lobby with any authority). Smart/entertaining/rightwing Shmuel Rosner writes for Slate–this headline asks, Why We Sell Arms to the Saudis. Wait, isn’t Rosner an Israeli? Who’s we?
I’m not a nativist. I’m all for 100 flowers blooming. I saw English writers invade our journalism in the ’80s, and American journalism profited (and Tina Brown hiked writers’ rates all by herself, god bless her). But I do think we’re dealing with a factor fingered by my Arabist friend the other day: within the diverse American establishment, Zionists are the only ones with an esprit de corps. Which helps explain the elevation of a second-rater like Chafets. I said 100 flowers blooming–not 50. Where are the post-Zionists and anti-Zionists? It bears repeating that the Times Op-Ed page, which prints Chafets, used to print John Mearsheimer all the time, but seems to have blacklisted him since he opposed the Iraq war. All this is about to change. Just you watch.
