John Mearsheimer is having a great moment. Adam Kirsch at Tablet has followed up on Robert Kaplan's glowing profile of Mearsheimer in the Atlantic as a trailblazing thinker with a piece on The Israel Lobby as "an intellectual landmark." It includes the statement that to judge from its reviews the book convinced no one of its argument. As if the reviews did not originate largely from the lobby itself, or its penumbra, from people like Leslie Gelb who supported the Iraq war, he confessed, so as not to damage his career. Or from Jeffrey Goldberg who of course served in the Israeli army and then promoted the Iraq war because of evidence he had seen that Saddam was acquiring weapons of mass destruction.
An intellectual landmark-- and the New York Review of Books has never reviewed it. Some ideas are too unsettling even to be poked at. I think Kirsch rightly describes the book as broaching the subject of Jewish influence. This is a great subject, as Jewish influence has produced magnificent things in the west... for instance the emigration of my grandfathers and so many others of their generation from eastern Europe under the pressure of bankers at the turn of the century... for instance the New York Review of Books' opposition to the Vietnam War. And yet it is a subject too unsettling to Jews of NYRB editor Robert Silvers's generation, who see it only through the prism of anti-Semitism, the vocalization of an American society they don't fully trust.
As Kafka wrote to his friend, the Zionist Max Brod in 1922:
"The dubious aspect of [a recently-published piece of Brod's] seems to me to be a distinctly Jewish complex of problems, springing from the confusion that the natives are too alien to one, thus distorting reality, and the Jews too close, distorting reality, and therefore one cannot treat the latter or the former with the proper balance."
At a time of incredible Jewish presence in the establishment, and widespread Jewish intermarriage, it is time to resolve this complex. When Robert Kaplan writes in his piece that the Walt and Mearsheimer piece on the Israel lobby was rejected by the Atlantic in 2005 because editors fiercely questioned its "objectivity," that is an expression of the complex.
I’ve read the Kirsch piece, and the Kaplan piece. Re the Kirsch, especially. Adam Kirsch is a smart guy, an opinion I’ve come to from reading many of his essays. But when he says that no one was persuaded by TIL, because it got bad reviews– does he actually believe that, or is it just an hasbara line? Because he is smart enough to see that most of the reviewers were Zionist, and to understand that most of the publications which reviewed it were not about to diverge from the Israel line. And to know that the reviews were much better abroad– including Israel, but also England–where the lobby has considerably less power to punish and censure. Kirsch knows that, doesn’t he? And he’s just putting out a sort of party line, which he knows is BS, but still kind of works. Or is he actually deceiving himself? I feel like I know this milieu very well, but this core question still puzzles me.
BTW, Kirsch also criticized the TIL cover, claiming classic anti-semetic tropes, blah blah. Those cliched images are hard to avoid, the cover art for this article link to theamericanconservative.com does a pretty good job.
i think i went easy on Kirsch. apparently he does some nazi analogizing in his piece….
No shit :p
He went ballistic, as did Marc Tracy, who is increasingly revealing himself as a bitter necon by the day. I think his conversion is soon completed. Don’t be surprised if he becomes another David Mamet(although a much smarter, more eloquent version)
Truth to be told, I didn’t read Kirsch’s screed up until now. I took your word for it(although I did read the Atlantic piece).
My comment below still stands, but this sort of signifies the entrenching conflict within the Jewish community.
See this bitter commentary from a Zionist progress(yes, they still exist!) in Britain:
link to guardian.co.uk
She’s well-known and a strong feminist at that. Sort of tells you how much ethnicity can cloud someone’s behaviour. It also reminds me of your brilliant post on Doris Lessing a few weeks back, recounting the Jewish marxists(who were also Zionist) and saw no contradiction in both these affiliations.
We ought not demonize these Jews, and let me explain.
In many ways, I think this struggle will be far harder than what transpired in South Africa. There was no Afrikaaner lobby in the U.S. And they were defensive about this from the beginning.
And you cannot discount the historical connection that Jews have to Israel, even if you think it’s wrong to come back after 2000 years all of a sudden and reclaim the land via outright theft and ethnic cleansing(and I see your point).
My argument is that because of numbers(Jews are plenty more and can see a logical path to continuing this policy, unlike the Afrikaaners who shrank by the year in numbers from a minority to a pittance of the entire population), religion(something the SA conflict also lacked) as well as history, add to this the siege mentality of Jews in Israel and certain (upper) echelons of the diaspora as well as just plain ol’ fashioned Jewish overachievement; then it’s easy seeing this dragging on for decades.
Remember, what’s at stake here isn’t just land but crucially, it’s self-concept. We view ourselves as more moral than other people, not just smarter. Therefore Israel is the knife to a central part of our identity. This would entail we’re not worse than other people, but not better, as well as a myriad of other identity issues(“A light unto the nations” is a play right out of this book).
Zionism is increasingly vowen into the general Jewish psyche and even into Judaism, which I think is a disaster, and this means that opposition to Israel isn’t just political argument. Many Zionist Jews see it as a frontal attack not just on their personal existance but on Judiasm itself, and what it stands for. After all, if Israel is what it is(and it is), then that means many people believe utter fantasy and have done so for most of their lives.
People don’t like that, and I can understand them. Neither do I.
Krauss, striking link to that Guardian piece. We’re in the midst of a bad feedback loop here, anti-semitism->Zionism->antisemitism-> worse Zionism, etc. I’m not sure really how to crack it. My surmise is that the mostly foreign (and third world?) students at the LSE Party with the Nazi drinking game feel justified in some sense by Israel’s flouting of UN resolutions, bombing the defenseless, etc. But anyone can see what effect that would have on liberal/progressive Jews, they batten down the hatches. It’s not leading towards a solution, but a bloodbath, or several of them.
Any way out?
I think you’re quite right, Krauss, about the sheer difficulty of all this. It’s a far deeper problem than SA was. Thanks for the link to the Guardian – useful for an Independent reader.
The screeds by Kirsch and by Gold seemed to take exactly the same tone, one of profound and bitter anger, one against Mearsheimer, one against various British targets. Kirsch is saying that Mearsheimer is no better than the mysterious authors of the Protocols, since they too made a kind of anti-Semitic discourse acceptable within an important non-Jewish group.
Kirsch does, as Phil says, credit Mearsheimer with changing the intellectual climate and he alludes to Freedman’s ‘bought Congress’ sally as a stormcloud which this climate produces. I would only ask Kirsch to ask himself whether the section of the American public of which he is thinking would have been so much influenced if there had been nothing worth considering in the argument put before it. Are these people, his own fellow-citizens, really so shallow or so casually malevolent as not just to believe something groundless but to let it change everything? Would there not be a case for at least looking critically at the undignified behaviour of Congress about which Freedman is so scornful?
I don’t think Mearsheimer in any way regrets the full participation of Jewish people in American political life, which a ‘standard’ anti-Semite would.
“And you cannot discount the historical connection that Jews have to Israel.”
Everything is worth questioning.
Free, full-text .pdf download of The Thirteenth Tribe by Arthur Koestler, a Hungarian Jew.
Additional material published on the Khazars and the origins of European Jews.
In a nutshell – Wikipedia
The Thirteenth Tribe (1976) is a book by Arthur Koestler, which advances the thesis that Ashkenazi Jews are not descended from the historical Israelites of antiquity, but from Khazars, a Turkic people. Koestler’s hypothesis is that the Khazars converted to Judaism in the 8th century, and migrated westwards into Eastern Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries when the Khazar Empire was collapsing.
You need to see the Atlantic article in print. Instead of the parenthetical “about some things” there’s a giant asterisk instead. A giant “wink wink nudge nudge know what I mean” if you will.
link to youtube.com
A landmark indeed.
Sadly, the topic of Jewish power is in a warped state of mind for all too many Jews(and non-Jews).
I lament this because I’m in one of those phases where I’m really going ethnic in my booklist. I’m reading up on all the great Jewish Wall St bankers at the turn of last century, people like Jacob Schiff.
There are biographies on him, but even if they are by Jews made for (mostly) Jewish audiences, the things I’ve pieced together by reading his private correspondance(the little that the family has made public) and other books by contemporaries, often Gentiles, is that so much of these books is censored, probably for fear of stoking anti-Semitism.
I understand this, I understand the history and I do not underestimate it. But Schiff’s efforts for the Jews are extraordinary and other prominent Jewish bankers like Warburg, who both would feel completely alien today.
Warburg, in particular, was a great industrialist who believed in thrift and social harmony, progressive taxes and work for all.
He took the long view and saw the needs of the greater society as something above short term profits.
This is Jew I would hope more people would learn about! But even if there was one new book about him by Niall Ferguson, coming from a Gentile conservative perspective, there is still this fear of approaching this topic and to the loss of the current economy in my humble, and slightly ethnocentric, opinion.
From an American/European perspective, you can gain a lot by reading the few books on these Jewish capitalists, but these men had very vibrant Jewish identities and strong lives, in an era where intermarriage was an anomaly and Jews, for better or for good, were extremely close and tightknit.
Therefore, for that Jewish angle you don’t get a lot for your time.
Thinking about their lives and the times they lived in and where the Jewish community was in America at the time, it’s nostalgic and emotional, of course, but it makes you sigh for those times.
Yes, we’ve risen to astronomical heights, but the price for that has been communal rupture, both intermarriage/assimilation as well as isolation and common scorn, secular vs religious, liberal vs neocon and Zionist vs non-Zionist so forth.
The Other has become the other Jew.
Another victim of this rise to power is paranoia about our own success. And paranoia does not make good history books, as I’ve discovered in recent weeks. Sure, part of me want to gloat for my own childish reasons. But part of me wants to get down to the truth, and I dislike airbrushed books.
Perhaps I will have to wait until I am in my sixties, a few decades, until I can read splendid history on this epoch.
It’s sad that so much of contemporary Jewish life is driven by fear, guilt and anxiety.
I understand and empathise with those who follow this path, the education they got instilled this into them, but still, it’s worth to lament.
Landmark…yeah, right.
Just like Love Canal.
Or the tire fire at the junkyard they can never extinguish.
Krauss-
“In many ways, I think this struggle will be far harder than what transpired in South Africa. There was no Afrikaaner lobby in the U.S. And they were defensive about this from the beginning.”
Your comments are insightful and informative – thanks. The deep rooted complexity of Zionism in American life, especially American Jewish life, makes challenging the ideology and its tragic flaws much more daunting than the anti apartheid movement in SA. I would add that, unlike SA, the tragedy of Zionism has a “race against time” cloud that looms over I/P, the US, Europe and the greater ME because of the accelorating genocide against Palestinians and the potential for another Cast Lead or US/Israel war on Iran to grow into a wider regional war/WWIII.
given the “race of time” perhaps it’s unwise to concentrate our efforts on winning over jewish americans; rather, we should try to win over the 98% of americans who belong to other faiths or are atheists. do this by stressing what general david petreaus, among other military top brass, said about israel’s intransigence vis-a-vis a mideast peace accord endangers u.s. troops in afghanistan, as well as our denouncing israel-firsters for the traitors that they are. citing the generals/admirals who’ve had some negative things to say about the zionist entity makes sense because, deserve it or not, along with nurses, doctors & clergy, the military always ranks high in popularity polls. this approach will tap into the growing recognition of and resentment at our government’s subservience to israel. we hammer away on these themes and pretty soon the public will be feeling very uncomfortable about our government’s unconditional support for israel, and pissed off as hell at israel-firsters.
once this happens, there goes the special relationship & good riddance too.
Donald’s essay the other day addresses the difficulty of this approach.
Many Christians in the US are reflexively pro-Israel and harbor the same protective instinct of Jews and deep aversion to what they perceive as antisemitism as Donald mentioned.
I use the words “reflexively,” “instinct” and “perceive” deliberately. They suggest, or at least I tried to suggest, that many Christians have an emotion-laden and emotion-driven concept of Jews and of Israel, but not a sound, fact-based, reason-based, historically informed understanding of realities of Jewish being-in-the-world and particularist ways of thinking. (I wanted to use the word “peculiar” rather than “particularist;” Ralph Reed’s doctoral dissertation, “Fortresses of Faith,” studies the “peculiar” ways of thinking of Southern Evangelical Christians. )
This is to say, many US Christians are emotionally involved with Jewish/Israeli events, and as someone whose name I don’t recall has observed, It is impossible to change an emotionally held belief with rational arguments (owtte).
tme
but is the u.s. christian’s emotional attachment to jewish/israeli interests as strong as his/her attachment to america? that’s where the emposure of the dangers to our country of israel-firstness comes in. israel-firsters, that is, of whatever religious/political persuasion.
impossible or very difficult?
Krauss-
Comments from Guardian article included this:
DavidPavett
17 January 2012 9:16AM
“Some would say this is no big deal. Who wouldn’t prefer a Nazi-themed party game to a Nazi-themed genocide? Some people (some Jews) are just no fun at all.”
Who would say that? No doubt there is a tiny minority of idiots who would, but that is no basis for the claims made in this article.
“… Jews are becoming afraid. We sniff the air and feel a change because antisemitic discourse is more acceptable now than at any time since the 1930s.”
When you find yourself talking about what Jews think, what blacks think, or any such talk on behalf of a whole group based on no more evidence than being one of them, then it is time to stop. This does not open genuine discussion, it closes it. If you disagree then that is because you are not one of the group and therefore don’t understand or, in this case, if you are one of the group then you are obviously a ‘self-hating Jew’. Sniffing the air doesn’t hack it.
“… but paranoia and Judaism walk together; our history demands it, and no people is as conscious of its history as the Jews.”
There are language traps to avoid. Judaism is a religion and that many Jews are not religious. The “history” alluded to in this article is a traditional story and like many such stories it is open to question.
“This tribe, exiled from what is now called Israel/Palestine by the Romans in 70AD …”.
Shlomo Sand has argued that there is no evidence of such an exile. Archeologists Israel Finkelstein and Neil Silberman have argued that there is no evidence for that other great “historical” event the Exodus. Beware traditional history.
“… has been chased from country to country in the millennia since …”
One does not have to be tempted to deny the persecution of the Jews over long historical periods to point out that this way of putting things is not very historical either. Jews have also flourished over long periods in various and times and places such as Muslim Spain, Ottoman Turkey (where they received the Spanish Jews expelled by the Christians) for some of its existence, and of course Germany from the 18th century. It does not detract from Jewish suffering to recognise that their history is not one of uniform persecution. Vast research is not needed to realise that Jews form successful minorities in many countries including the UK. Let us remember too the enormous contribution that Jews have made to national/world cultures and the consciousness of every educated person.
“… longing for what we call the return to Zion, saying every Passover “next year in Jerusalem”
This is more make-believe history. At the birth of Zionism many Jews, maybe most, were opposed to it.
“The harassment and murder of Jews is a constant in European history”
This is not even make-believe history, just nonsense.
“It is a sickness that emerges from generation to generation, always with a new resentment to prosecute – the murder of the Christ … and now a Jewish state that defends itself …”
This an easy way to dismiss criticism of the Israel: anyone who does so is just continuing the old traditions of Jew-hatred. It is easy but it is very poor politics.
“Antisemitic discourse is now mainstream …”
Where is the evidence for this absurd claim? I asked a Jewish friend about it and he agreed that the claim is absurd.
“Leftwing antisemites despise Israel, but are less vocal on the crimes of other oppressive states (China, Russia, Saudi Arabia).”
I am left-wing. I do not despise Israel, but I am critical of its policies, as I am of its Arab neighbours, and China, Russia and Saudi Arabia, and the UK which I certainly criticise more than any of those listed.
“The incidents mount up – the heckling of an Israeli orchestra, the graffiti on university walls, the demand that Jews denounce Israel if they wish to be accepted in polite society, the plays and TV films written without context …”
None of this is sufficient for the case claimed. The heckling was objectionable but the action of a few. I know nothing about infantile graffiti. What demand that Jews denounce Israel to be accepted? And so on with the rest.
“A cynic would say that we know what Europe thinks of the Jews, and if you believe that, a party game does not surprise.”
Maybe, but cynicism is not a useful guide to political judgement. Just think about the absurdity of expressions like “What Europe thinks of the Jews”.
Caroline Glick is on the reactionary zionist bandwagon, saying Mearheimer has mainstreamed anti-semitism, and The Israel Lobby is akin to The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion: link to townhall.com