On New Year's I kept wondering if I'd made a mistake posting about Meet the Press, the fact that four of six participants are Jewish this Sunday, in a discussion of foreign policy. Was I imposing a quota on foreign-policy discussions? I decided that I don't have regrets, and that if I am imposing a quota, it's entirely justifiable. My father's generation objected to quotas when they would have limited Jewish enrollment at law schools etc to 30 percent or so, as I recall (help me Seth Lipsky, or some other neocon). This is a situation in which 67 percent of the participants are Jews.
Obama's adviser Dan Kurtzer agrees with me. In his recent book Negotiating
Arab-Israeli Peace, he said: "The
Clinton team could have benefited from greater regional and
cross-cultural expertise….the absence of Arab expertise was
handicapping U.S. diplomacy…'There was no expert on our team on Islam
or on Muslim perspectives,' said a former Clinton Administration
official."
It is true that if M.J. Rosenberg of TPM was on the panel, as he should be–and will soon be, mark my word–I wouldn't raise this point. If Adam Horowitz of Huffpo. But Rosenberg and Horowitz have taken highly-independent positions on Israel/Palestine. I don't think you can say that about Richard Engel, David Gregory, Jeffrey (former IDF jobnik) Goldberg, or Andrea Mitchell. American Jewry is deeply invested in Zionism, by and large. Zionism casts a shadow of suspicion over Jewish opinion re the Middle East. Unfortunate but true.
Last night I was at a party with a mixed crowd. I'm an assimilationist, as are most Americans; this is the sort of party I go to. Jews and non-Jews. And I can tell you that the attitude of outrage I heard from non-Jews re Gaza was altogether different from the shaded nuanced view of the matter that a Jewish friend had. Sad but true, and predictable.
