Another example of the ways that Israel-first talk is politely bleeped out of the American conversation. Joe Klein has a tearjerking column about his late friend David Ifshin, “McCain’s Radical Pal,” who as an anti-Vietnam radical gave a speech in Hanoi attacking American pilots like John McCain as war criminals.
McCain returned the favor in ’84. By then Ifshin was an important Dem, a Walter Mondale campaign lawyer; and working the hustings for President Reagan, John McCain broke his personal policy of not getting back at anyone over Vietnam rhetoric and attacked Ifshin in a speech of his own.
Fast forward. Ifshin and McCain meet at an AIPAC conference, and McCain forgives Ifshin, and Ifshin forgives McCain. Ifshin:
apologize to you for years. I feel so terrible about that speech I gave
in Hanoi.”
But read McCain’s 2006 praise for Ifshin, as reported by the late lamented New York Sun (boy they did chicken right, or something right). McCain:
“His [Hanoi] speech was broadcast into our cells. I thought it a grievous wrong
and I still do.”
“A few years later, he had moved temporarily to a kibbutz in Israel.
He was there during the Yom Kippur War, when he witnessed the support
America provided our beleaguered ally. He saw the huge cargo planes
bearing the insignia of the United States Air Force rushing emergency
supplies into that country. And he had an epiphany. He had believed
America had made a tragic mistake and done a terrible injustice by
going to Vietnam, and he still did. But he realized he had let his
criticism temporarily blind him to his country’s generosity and the
goodness that most Americans possess, and he regretted his failing
deeply,” Mr. McCain said. [emphasis mine]
So Ifshin’s epiphany re Vietnam/McCain came purely out of Israel feeling. It is identical to the epiphany that in the 70s caused Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz to become neocons and Republicans, and latterly for their sons (and Podhoretz’s son-in-law) to push the Iraq War. This has been the migration path of countless Jewish political hawks, one followed now by Lieberman, Mel Levine, Waxman, Berman: anti-Vietnam War, but when it comes to the Middle East, and making Israel safe, that’s another story.
Joe Klein did great work earlier this year when he dimed out the “Jewish neocons” as men of “divided loyalties” who had sold the war privately to him in ’02 as a way of changing Israel’s neighborhood. Crazy people. Klein should have been equally forthright about his late friend’s motivation
