Last week I did a post from the J Street conference saying that Morton H. Halperin, who is the organization’s vice chair, said in so many words that American Realist critics of Israel would cast the country to the winds if they had their druthers. I didn’t provide any quotes to back up my interpretation.
I’m returning to the subject because even at 72, Halperin is a legendary figure who personifies the Jewish liberal presence in the Establishment. He was a young dove serving in the councils of the Nixon and Johnson administrations, and was famously wiretapped by his old friend Kissinger after the news got leaked that we were bombing Cambodia. He worked for the ACLU and is associated with George Soros’s Open Society Institute. (And he is the father of Mark Halperin, a journalist with insane access and little detectable ideology.)
It’s important to explore Halperin’s thinking because it helps to show the character of his Jewish generation’s faith in Israel. Below I review two of Halperin’s statements at a panel he moderated on whether supporting Israel is in our national security interest, and then offer my comment.
1. Halperin is for a Jewish state in the Middle East, but against Muslim states.
Martin Bresler, chairman of Americans for Peace Now, rose from the audience to echo a question that Halperin had asked near the beginning of the panel: “Why isn’t a one-state solution an American foreign policy strategic concern?”
Bresler went on, “Isn’t the answer to that question at least in part, If we have a country that is not a majority Jewish but a majority Muslim country, We would lose what we call our best ally in the region, and is that a major concern to the United States?”
Halperin responded:
“As we explain to the Egyptians and others, for example, that a Muslim state is unacceptable, that a modern democratic state cannot have a religious base, people will begin to notice that we have a different view about Israel, and the question I think is going to become increasingly debated, whether we think it’s a sensible question or not, of Why isn’t that territory a democratic state with one vote for every person, and a democratic government, and how is that a threat to the people in Israel? I know the answer to that question, I think all of us do.
“But I think it’s a question that is going to be increasingly asked…So when I talked about a solution of a one party state, I did not mean an Israeli apartheid state, I meant what people would describe as a democratic state. Your assumption was that somehow the American government would feel that that state would be less likely to have a foreign policy that was consistent with American interests than the current state, and I believe many American faux realists will think just the opposite.”
2. Halperin thinks the Israel lobby theory is a dangerous lie.
Halperin spoke of why it had been essential to found J Street: because of a “standoff between three groups” in policymaking circles. The first group was his group, “a very small group that believes and still believes… that a [two-state] settlement is in the security interest of the US and Israel and is attainable.”
The second group was realists, that portion of the national security establishment who don’t care to make a settlement– because it’s not easily attainable, or not necessary, because we “can pursue American interests” without getting a two-state solution.
And the third group is the Israel lobby. Though Halperin didn’t name them as such. He called it the group that would exact “a high political price if you push for a settlement [with] the Israeli government,” bringing on a “domestic crisis in the U.S… with very severe consequences for the fundraising budgets of candidates.. if not presidential elections…”
And Halperin said that the objective of his group was to change the political calculus of the issue so that “the president of the United States is told it’s good politics to push both sides to get a settlement [and] American Jews… will vote and give their money on that basis….”
Halperin followed up with another shot against the realists, by implication John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt:
“Nothing is more dangerous,” Halperin quipped, than teaching the theory of international relations, something he has done himself. “Because what [students] are taught is precisely this absurd notion that the realists know what the national security interests of the United States is and it is in Middle East oil and not in democracy in Israel, and therefore [our] whole policy in the Middle East is to be explained by the Jewish vote and the pernicious nature of the Israeli lobby. That view is in my view very much a lie, and I think a real danger over time to American support for Israel.”
3. My comment.
I think all of Halperin’s comments reflect his belief, notwithstanding all the success he’s had, in the persistence of anti-Semitism.
Why else would he believe in the need for a Jewish state when he doesn’t want Arab states to be Muslim states? And he seems to want the U.S. to take active measures to preserve the Jewish state…
And I think that belief in anti-Semitism explains his shots against the realists. They don’t really care about Israel, they have this false belief in an American interest that transcends the need for a Jewish state. They believe in the Israel lobby theory, a dangerous lie. Though even Halperin concedes that taking on the Israel lobby would create a “crisis” and help demolish a candidate’s fundraising abilities. Huh. And even Halperin calls on the realists to support a Jewish democracy, but not a full democracy.
After the panel I went up to Halperin and said, I know that many in the State Department opposed Truman’s recognition of Israel. But what is your evidence that realists today don’t care for Israel? Halperin said that it was the insistence by realists that Israel return to the 1967 line in order to achieve peace– i.e., that Israel should accept the Arab Peace Initiative to get a two-state solution.
At this point we were interrupted. But I think that this exchange shows the poverty of the liberal Zionist vision for a two-state solution: I don’t see how a re-partition that does not create a viable Palestinian state could ever create a lasting peace. And Halperin’s suggestion that realists are contemptuous of the peacemaking process and think we can pursue American interests without a peace is a flat misrepresentation of the realists I know, who see this conflict as central, who have desperately pushed a two-state solution, who are far more sympathetic to Israel than I am, and who regard the lobby-tilted peace process as a joke.
In Halperin’s caricature of their views, I hear distrust of the goyim, and a core belief on the part of a highly-successful liberal in the persistence of anti-Semitism/the greatness of Israel. (And yes I wonder whether his children are fully on board for that program, or just nod their heads and accept it as their inheritance, as so many in that generation do.)
Finally, I’d remind readers that the chairman of Peace Now said that if Israel and Palestine become a majority-Muslim state, that state would likely cease to be an American ally. Halperin wisely differed.
