Of course you pay a price for criticizing Israel in this country

by on January 23, 2009 12
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Ezra Klein says it's not dangerous to one's career to criticize Israel, and cites the case of Stephen Walt, who got a big book contract and now a blog at Foreign Policy. Klein is simply wrong. First of all, Walt, who is exceptional in any case, was told by Lawrence Summers, indirectly, that he had kissed away high university or government position by taking the stance he did. Talk to Summers. A shrewd guy. This prohibition has stopped countless people from opening their mouths. As Klein points out, Walt was smeared widely and on the front pages of respectable publications as an antisemite. This is also a prohibition that stops people, and for good reason. Jimmy Carter was called the same word and shunned at the Democratic convention because of his position. Imagine what happens to lesser folk. Lately the San Francisco Chronicle quoted a "Jewish professional" as saying she dared not criticize Israel in Gaza because it might hurt her career. For my own part, I know that I have lost a lot of work because of my position on Israel. My work on this subject is almost never published in the mainstream. I make very little money off this subject. Finally, I dare Klein to point me to any American publication that prints the ideas of an anti-Zionist. I'm damned if I can name one. Anti-Zionism holds the same cultural/social position, virtually, as Communism in the '50s. Maybe we're just as wrong as the Communists, but I wouldn't bet on it; and anyway that's not the point. The point is that you pay a big price.                                                     --Phil Weiss

About Philip Weiss

Philip Weiss is Founder and Co-Editor of Mondoweiss.net.
Posted in American Jewish Community, Beyondoweiss, Israel/Palestine, US Politics

{ 12 comments... read them below or add one }

  1. Anonymous says:
    January 23, 2009 at 10:27 pm

    OT

    —————————————-
    FROM ABOVE: "Guys, may someone tell me where I could find the letter of this US-Israel "memorandum of understanding" on Gaza, please?"

    ME: The full text of US-Israel Memorandum of Understanding is available at -

    http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1232100166741&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

    Posted by: John Lewis-Dickerson | January 23, 2009 at 07:30 PM
    —————————————-

    Thank you very much, John.

  2. LD says:
    January 23, 2009 at 10:53 pm

    Phil you rock. I don't know how much you make off the blog but your writing is very important. I'm thankful for this blog.

  3. cherylb says:
    January 23, 2009 at 11:07 pm

    Of course people have paid a price for stepping out on this issue. Whether journalist, academic, activist, or legislator those Americans who criticize
    Israel, who might generate a broader American conversation are marginalized. As has oft been stated, this conversation can and is carried on in Israel.
    Amy Goodman has just run a piece in the San Francisco Chronicle relating a story that Obama told a questioner regarding what he would do on the I/P question. He told of the Pullman train car porters and the man who organized them talking with Roosevelt about the injustices. Roosevelt agreed and said "Make me do it" Obama told this story, said he was only one person and said, "Make me do it." (regarding I/P)
    This early organization happened in the civil rights movement and forged the way for Rosa Parks and MLK. What you, Walt and Mearsheimer, Carter, Finklestein. Rachel,and many many other Americans have become are the Freedom Riders of this new American/Palestinian civil rights movement. If I am right, you have or are preparing the rest of us for the great march when the right leader appears on the stage.

  4. BluePearl says:
    January 23, 2009 at 11:27 pm

    Phil, thanks for your service to the truth. Norm Finkelstein said that if there was no price to pay everyone would speak the truth.

  5. Rowan Berkeley says:
    January 24, 2009 at 1:43 am

    Well, we wouldn't want to damage any genocidal imperialist bastard's career prospects, would we?

  6. Richard Witty says:
    January 24, 2009 at 4:20 am

    Walt was "smeared" for disappointing polemic in the original LRB article.

    They assumed that he would apply his rigorous and disciplined intelligence on that issue, in the same manner that he had in previous publications.

    My impression was that their angers showed through, MORE than their analysis.

    They attempted to correct their presentation in the book largely successfully, but also betraying an odd equation of "Israel lobby is monolith, but yet isn't" that remained.

    Most commentators described their work as "functionally anti-semitic", to the point of professional negligence. I expect some described them as personally anti-semitic.

  7. otto says:
    January 24, 2009 at 4:40 am

    Here's Ezra's earlier comment on this topic and my then response.

    http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/ezraklein_archive?month=07&year=2008&base_name=cry_antisemite_and_let_slip_th

    First, in pluralist America, many people are always testing the boundaries of taste and external constraints, so if AIPAC and so managed to restrain public debate it's much more likely to be because they were in fact able to do so, rather than because they had a only reputation with little or nothing behind it.

    Second, to say that Walt and Mearsheimer got away with it, so the constraint must not have existed, is rather bizarre: these were two of the best insulated individuals in the country on this issue, absolutely top scholars, in the most prestigious universities, doing a double-team act to provide a bit of mutual support. They still got personally nuked in the press again and again, even though their book was larded with half-accommodations of their opponents positions, surely at least some of them tactical in nature. Walt and Mearsheimer took a bullet for the team and opened up the discourse a very little bit.

    Third, the opening of the discourse has also been much assisted by the interweb, which has partially de-gatekeepered opinion journalism. If the web didn't exist, Spencer, Matt and you [Ezra] would all still be working for TNR and a real constraint on allowable views of Israel/Middle East policies surely exists there (among many other outlets – see Alterman on this).

  8. cogit8 says:
    January 24, 2009 at 4:42 am

    "Anti-Zionism holds the same cultural/social position, virtually, as Communism in the '50s"

    More like the good guys in "1984" or the rebels in "Star Wars", the revolutionaries in 1774, or the partisans fighting against the Nazi occupations of europe.

    But to have to temper one's public statements, and watch what you say to whome: this is straight out of 1930's communist Russia. The Zionists are playing hard-ball, ruthless, amoral, obnoxious characters, full of self-righteousness and hatred of Arabs.

  9. Rowan Berkeley says:
    January 24, 2009 at 5:34 am

    Most commentators described their work as "functionally anti-semitic", to the point of professional negligence. I expect some described them as personally anti-semitic.

    You know something, Witty? Your personality and thought processes are more disgusting than those of Heinrich Himmler, just to pick an obvious example of obscene, genocidal, imperialist lying at large.

  10. Sarah says:
    January 24, 2009 at 9:23 am

    Witty's profile is simple:

    Take a chicken hawk for Israel,
    Mix with goy dollars and literal blood for Israel,
    Add a bottle of anti-assimilation
    For Jewish continuity,
    Bottle in abstract platitudes
    Flavored with selective latitudes–
    A circumsized Label
    Snipped the full Brotherhood
    Of Man,
    Cork it
    Dork it
    –Chicken soup for the soul
    the higher soul
    the priority of loyalties
    Rests on his top shelf.

  11. John Lewis-Dickerson says:
    January 24, 2009 at 2:59 pm

    ********************************************
    San Francisco Chronicle Fires Reporter For Attending Peace Protest
    by Amy Goodman and Henry Norr – Published on April 24, 2003 by Democracy Now!

    …..Amy Goodman: Were you also active on Israel/Palestine issues and what has been the response of the paper? Do you think that has weighed in at all?

    Henry Norr: Well, that’s an interesting issue in the background of all this, never mentioned explicitly as far as I can see and as far as insiders at the paper will tell you, very much a part of the picture here. I went on vacation last year with my wife. We went to Palestine to be part of the International Solidarity Movement, the people who support and assist the non-violent resistance of the Palestinians to the Israeli occupation. We did that for just a couple of weeks. We didn’t do anything particularly heroic, but we did it and when I came back I talked about it with my colleagues. I put together a little lunchtime presentation and slideshow, a little discussion of what I had seen and observed and heard. And apparently management didn’t like that very much. Apparently there was somebody who attended that presentation – I’m told, I don’t know this first-hand – but somebody supposedly reported to management that I made anti-Semitic remarks and so on, which is really a big joke. I mean, I’m Jewish by background and I don’t think I’m the least bit anti-Semitic. However, I’m deeply opposed to the policy of the Israeli government.

    And then there was another thing last summer I wrote in my technology column. I wrote a column about a $2 billion dollar, state of the art, high-tech factory that Intel owns in Israel. I wrote about the history of the land that that factory is on and about the Palestinian villagers that were there before…..

    ……Needless to say – actually I got a tremendous amount of support. I was amazed. Most of the email I got about the column was supportive and appreciative. But the local pro-Israeli Zionist lobby was outraged and the Israeli Consulate in San Francisco, which is kind of the cheerleader coordinator for those forces apparently, was outraged and, I found out later because nobody at the Chronicle told me, but apparently they came and demanded an immediate meeting to object to my column…….

    …….And that of course infuriated the Likkud lobby and so on. And eventually I was told this was an inappropriate topic and I wasn’t supposed to write such things anymore……"

    ENTIRE TRANSCRIPT OF 'DEMOCRACY NOW' INTERVIEW – link to commondreams.org
    />

  12. Ed*ard Teller says:
    January 24, 2009 at 8:23 pm

    When I wrote "The Skies Are weeping," about Rachel Corrie in 2003-04, I was also writing my Piano Concerto. The Anchorage Symphony premiered the concerto three weeks before I held a joint public meeting in Anchorage with a rabbi who was hostile to the Corrie work, to discuss its premise. The meeting, attended by about 100 very unruly people, led to my canceling the work about Corrie, fearing for the safety of my student performers.

    Before the work about Corrie became public knowledge (I kept a pretty tight lid on the work and its progress through 2003, as some of my other music was then either being performed or considered for performance), a half dozen US orchestras were interested in performing the piano concerto. Soon after the negative publicity and my public denunciation for anti-Semitic art, all interest in the piano concerto quickly evaporated.

    I wouldn't trade what I learned from that experience, and from the struggle to get TSAW finally performed for 100 performances of the piano concerto, though. However, the pianist who spent hundreds of hours learning the concerto felt quitedisappointed.

    She was from NYC, attended Juilliard from 8th grade through PhD, and was my first close friend to tell me that I might never get an American symphony orchestra to play one of my works again during my lifetime, because of TSAW.

    Had I been younger when this happened, I might have decided against writing pro-Palestinian music.

    I should note that the University at which I work has solidly continued to support me since the negative publicity about the work surfaced.

    Philip Munger

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