Last fall at the behest of black-shirted Marty Peretz, who promised a “frightening” evening, Yivo, the Yiddish Institute in New York, held a panel on the book The Israel Lobby, called Walt and Mearsheimer: A Critical Response. For nearly two hours three panelists ripped Walt and Mearsheimer as antisemites. The two chief bases of the alleged antisemitism were that Walt and Mearsheimer vastly exaggerated the power of the lobby and viciously blamed Jewish neoconservatives for the Iraq war, a charge of dual loyalty.
Then in May, the most vociferous of the panelists, Jeffrey Goldberg, basically recanted the first position in this important Times piece. He said the lobby had profoundly damaged the American interest vis-a-vis a lamentable policy Israel has practiced now without abatement for 40 years, building settlements in the West Bank, and called for a “blunt” discussion of the lobby’s activities in the Jewish community. Comes July and Joe Klein writes on his Time blog that Jewish neoconservatives pushed the Iraq war out of dual loyalty to Israel; and Jeffrey Goldberg hosts Klein on his blog to discuss the matter and while disagreeing with Klein never once accused him of antisemitism, let alone hurled Father Coughlin and Charles Lindbergh and the Nazis at him, as he had done at the authors.
The lesson here is pretty simple: non-Jews will be smeared for sticking their noses into U.S. policy re Israel. (Goldberg also attacked Jimmy Carter for his gall.) And consider the intellectual institution that has been damaged. Doesn’t Yivo owe Walt and Mearsheimer an apology? Or at the very least, doesn’t it owe them the stage to answer those hideous charges of last fall?
