The Obama effect is roiling the Jewish waters. Yesterday I wrote that the Jewish left cannot reemerge until progressive Jews identify the neoconservatives' Iraq war agenda as a Jewish agenda. Joe Klein has done so already this year, in a bold, if 5-years-self-embargoed statement about Jewish neocons with divided loyalties, and he does so again today, in a Khalidi-inspired response to Jeffrey Goldberg at the Atlantic. This is precisely the conversation that I have been calling for, and here it comes. Amazing that exactly a year ago at Yivo, Goldberg took part in a panel smearing Walt and Mearsheimer as antisemites because they blamed the Iraq war on the Israel lobby. Well a year goes by and that conversation is now happening inside the castle gates. This is the masque of the red death, Poe's great story about the plague outside that is actually within.
Here's Klein's latest, a response to a Goldberg post that is filled with the usual familial self-justification:
efforts to call out a small group of Jewish neoconservatives for their
disgraceful, bullying behavior and their dangerous influence on John McCain's
and the Bush Administration's foreign policy:
"I know [Goldberg now] that Joe derives great pleasure from criticizing Jewish
supporters of the Iraq War — the Wolfowitzes, Perles and Feiths –in
specifically Jewish terms, while never seeming to use the Christianity of
other supporters of the war, including Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Powell,
and other such marginal figures, against them. I don't like the
double-standard, but it's part of the rough and tumble."
No, Jeff, I don't derive great pleasure from it. I'm pretty
anguished about it. As a Jew, I'm embarrassed by these extremists and outraged
by their assumption that they represent mainstream Jewish opinion in this
country. Furthermore, I don't use the Christianity of Bush et al against them
because their Christianity had nothing to do with their support for the war. For
people like Doug Feith et al, their Jewish identity–their ethnic nationalism,
not the religious part of it–had an awful lot to do with their plumping for war
with Iraq and, more recently, Iran. Feith et al advised Binyamin
Netanyahu, in a paper called "A Clean Break," to go to war with Iraq when he was
Prime Minister in order to protect Israel. I find the conflation, by some Jewish
neoconservatives, of Israel's interests and America's–and their truly dangerous
misreading of both–to be appalling. But much worse is their rush to pin the tag
of antisemitism on anyone who disagrees with them, including me.
Beautiful. Quoting the Clean Break paper just like Grant Smith and the paleo's. Klein's anguish is exactly like the anguish of the Italian-American who dimes out his cosa nostra cousin to the feds. Because this was a family affair, and we were supposed to give cover to the neocons. This conversation won't be finished till the neoliberal hawks like Goldberg himself are made to account openly for their own thinking/reporting preceding the Iraq war, and how much of it came out of an Israeli agenda. All that talk of Palestinian suicide bombers. And make no mistake, the conversation's going there. Just remember the free for all after Vietnam. A necessary one, in which the Liebermans and Bermans and Schumers of the world rose up, in antiwar righteousness–and status.
Two more things: The issue again arises of why Klein, who obviously understands these issues in the way that I do, as central to both American and Jewish history, has not done more than the occasional blog entry to talk about them. He has never defended Walt and Mearsheimer, as say Avrahum Burg has. He has not done a major story in the magazines to which he has access. Why, because there are Jewish seals on this discussion, as heavy as those seals on the Hasmonian tunnels that Netanyahu broke…
Something else: Goldberg says he can't respond to Klein till after the Sabbath, an indication that he is observant. I wonder if Klein is observant, and I wonder too whether there is not a connection between religiosity and support for Israel, which Goldberg obviously has in greater measure than Klein, having emigrated there once out of a belief that the diaspora was bad for Jews. No doubt, ethnocentrism is clearly associated with pro-Israel belief. And assimilationism with anti-Zionist belief. And thus the conundrum: has this messianic movement called Zionism not had the effect in the end of knocking down Jewish numbers by helping to make Judaism something that I and other assimilationists wanted to distance myself from?
No question about, Jews that like being Jewish, that give a shit, are supportive of Israel. Self hating Jews like Phil Weiss, aren't. It's no mystery. I do love the theory that if not for Israel Phil would be what, observant. Very rarely do you read such bullshit.
Any Jews in their right mind would distance themselves from the likes of Feith, Perle, Abrams and AIPAC. The smart ones would dennounce them loud and clear. And the really smart ones would dismantle the Jewish Israel Lobby before it dismantles them.
No question about it, American Gentiles that like being objective according to Enlightenment principles, that give a shit, are supportive of USA constitutional principles, and USA First; Jews like SOG aka Bill P, aren't. It's no mystery. I do love the reality that if not for USA taxpayer dollars and Goy grunts, Israel and SOG would actually have to eat their own racist, tribal bullshit.
Weiss: "This conversation won't be finished till the neoliberal hawks like Goldberg himself are made to account openly for their own thinking/reporting preceding the Iraq war, and how much of it came out of an Israeli agenda."
That's why Klein is incomplete when he limits his critique to "a small group of Jewish neoconservatives." He needs to expand it to the entire gamut of US Jewish Zionists and their organizations like AIPAC and ADL, etc, which form the basis and milieu from whence Jewish Neoconservative and Jewish Neoliberal warmongers came.
Klein, you can't just go halfway down the road and then abruptly stop simply because you don't want to implicate a big Democrat Party constituency and money and intellectual base. That's cowardly, too. Jewish Zionism=Jewish Neoconservatism=Jewish Neoliberalism. There’s no getting around that. Klein, don’t hold yourself up as some intellectual hero while at the same time you intellectually suppress knowledge of the corrupt and bigoted movement that is the root of the problem. Lying by omission is still lying.
Sounds like we are moving in the correct direction. There may yet be a happy ending to this sordid drama.
"As a Jew, I'm embarrassed by these extremists and outraged by their assumption that they represent mainstream Jewish opinion in this country."
Don't they? Phil's reason for starting this blog was based on something he overheard a family member say:
"The reason this blog exists (I often say) is because of something one of my siblings said to me in 2003: 'I demonstrated against the Vietnam war, but my Jewish newspaper says this war could be good for Israel.'
My sibling's comment suggested that there was a Jewish interest that overrode even the antiwar spirit in my family culture, and it led me to look into my religious background and the role of Zionism in American Jewish life. I'd avoided looking at Israel/Palestine till then. Now I had to study the way that neoconservatism and its Zionist underpinnings had affected the Jewish liberal presence in American life.
The heart of this blog is the belief that the Iraq war was a disastrous turn for my country in the world, in which it imitated Israel's policy toward the Arab world, of militancy, occupation, arrogance. And from that comes my challenge to American Jewish identity: to come to terms with the Zionist push for this war, and the inherent dual loyalty issue in the Diaspora role in Jewish nationalism, and understand how it has corrupted Jewish tradition, let alone American policymaking."
I hope that Joe Klein will follow Phil's lead even more. As Ed has correctly stated, he's only taking half-measures at this point, and that's not enough. I understand that it's a very hard thing to do, but it's necessary.
Man, is it necessary.
I don't like this from Klein:
"And while the term, antisemitism, will always retain its traditional meaning–anti-Jewishness–it does conflate certain categories…"
"Anti-semitism" should be relegated to the dustbin. "Anti-Jewish" should be used to describe anti-Jewish sentiment, just as "anti-Arab" is used to correctly describe said feelings.
If a semite is defined as: a member of any of a number of peoples of ancient southwestern Asia including the Akkadians, Phoenicians, Hebrews, and Arabs, or a descendant of these peoples, or a member of a modern people speaking a Semitic language – then how did we come to use the term "anti-semitism" to describe only anti-Jewish behavior? It's another attempt by the Zionists to eliminate any and all true history of the Middle East, and replace it with their own narrative.
More troubling sentiments from Klein:
"Indeed, Goldberg defends Khalidi:
But about Khalidi — he's a fierce partisan of the Palestinian cause, of course, and in my conversations with him, and in his writing, I see that his sympathies frequently cause him to distort Middle East history. But an anti-Semite? I don't think so. In fact, Rashid Khalidi is one of the rare Palestinian advocates who argues, as he has with me, that Arabs must study Jewish history, including and especially the history of Jew-hatred, in order to better understand Israel, and to reach a compromise with it."
Gee, that's some way to defend him, Joe. He's not an anti-semite, but he also doesn't know the correct narrative on Middle East history. This is typical Zionist sympathy. "Oh, he's not an anti-semite, but you also shouldn't listen to him if you want to get any sense of the Middle East, it's history, and it's ongoing dilemma. For that, you'll have to continue to listen to our narrative, which is the correct one, because we say so…"
Joe Klein would do well to point things like this out. Just because Goldberg doesn't think Khalidi is an anti-semite doesn't mean his passage is in any way defending him. It's defending him against charges of anti-semitism. So what? That becomes the center of attention, and all other useful information is thrown out, so the narrative becomes one of Zionists arguing back and forth with others (many of them Zionists too) over whether or not a given person is an "anti-semite" based on their own criteria.
Of course, Khalidi has much to say about the Middle East, Palestine, etc. But we'll never hear that. Anyway, Goldberg says he "distorts" it, so it's not important. The important thing is that Goldberg doesn't think he's an "anti-semite." Now go about your business. There is nothing else to see here.
What's the point? Since jews,e.g., not from Poland and Germany are semites, and Palestinians are semites, the very notion of "anti-semitic" is very misleading?
"the very notion of "anti-semitic" is very misleading?"
Yes, that's the point. "Misleading" is too kind. It's flat out wrong in its current popular usage, in which it's invoked ONLY for anti-Jewish sentiment. I make it a point to say "anti-Jewish" when I encounter such sentiments. "Anti-semitic" used to describe what is strictly anti-Jewish sentiment is an insult to all semitic peoples.