I’m still reelin and rockin from Joe Klein’s statement/confession that Jewish neoconservatives made the Iraq war happen. Of course the key word in it is Jewish. That’s what’s got the Foxmans and Commentary bloggers so upset. Because the essential understanding Klein offers is that the neoconservative ideas for Iraq have a Jewish origin, and are caught up with the Zionist religion that has overtaken the American Jewish mind in the last 60 years (including the neocons’ fellow traveler mainstream Jewish journalists with a little Zionist fire in their bosom). That’s starting to unravel now, imshallah. inshallah.
Walt and Mearsheimer avoided the word Jewish. They are political scientists not sociologists, yet one of the most important moments in their book is when they talk about the changeover of Washington political culture from the days when William Quandt was at Brookings and writing important studies on the need for a two-state solution, way back in 1975, to 2002
when Kenneth Pollack is at Brookings, under the wing of Haim Saban, toymaker and Zionist, and issuing his Iraq war tract, The Threatening Storm, in which he stated that the Arab world doesn’t really care that much about the “troubles” in Israel/Palestine, and said nary a word about the occupation. You simply can’t look at Saban and Pollack’s accession without talking about the Jewish rise, Jewish success, Jewish money.
A few weeks back a reporter at a local Gannett paper interviewed me about the new Jewish establishment. He said he was interviewing Jamie Johnson, who has chronicled this trend somewhat at Vanity Fair, and Nick Lemann, whose book The Big Test described the ruling class before the meritocracy as the “Episcopacy.” ‘Cause they were all Episcopal. I don’t know if the guy’s piece has run, I suspect not or I would have heard about it; but in the interview as soon as I started talking about Zionism, he cut me off. This is about the sociology, he said, not international relations.
So right now we have a little reporting about the sociology, and on the other hand political reporting on the neocons and Iraq. Joe Klein’s comment and the furor over it may help at last to bring these two ideas together.
Look what’s happened to the Episcopacy, it’s vanishing from American life. I married into an Episcopal family. My wife doesn’t go to church, her sisters don’t go to church, and I hear fairly violent statements about religion at the Thanksgiving table. My mother-in-law is still a churchgoer, and for real. She went to Palestine with a church group, and smuggled sheets into a hospital in Bethlehem. But another Episcopalian and Israel/Palestine activist, Nancy Horn, tells me that in her small town in PA, she can go to one of three churches. “One’s got 15 members, one’s got 30, one’s got 40.” Then she adds with delicious irony: “The buildings are beautiful.” Liberal Protestants are leaving American public life.
One reason for the departure is religious fervor. “Liberal
Protestants were crucial to abolitionism and the civil rights movement–they were in the driver’s seat. But now, the
word Christianity has almost become a synonym for evangelical or
fundamentalist or pro-life,” says Brian Dana Akers, the son of a Methodist minister who was a big do-gooder. Akers himself is now a leading publisher of yoga books. “I myself have never been a churchgoer,
taking after my father’s father instead of my father, so perhaps I’m
part of the reason for the mainstream decline.And it occurs to me–not only was liberal religion driving events in
the 60s, many of the main actors were literally clergy members: Martin Luther King Jr. and many of his associates, William Sloan Coffin, Father Drinan, the Berrigan brothers, et al.”
This all speaks to a fact that an Arab friend pointed out to me a couple of weeks ago: “in the diverse American establishment, Zionists are the only ones with an esprit de corps.” By esprit, he meant a religious understanding, a way of giving life meaning. That religious understanding of course includes Israel–in the same way that fundamentalist Christian understanding includes pro-life and stem-cell research ideas. Joe Klein has kick-started a really important conversation. Can we have it?
