Tonight I was driving home from a friend’s in Dutchess County, near Bruce Kovner’s vast country estate, when a black cat ran across Route 82 right in front of me. I hit the brakes, missed the cat. Still, I wondered about my luck.
I was thinking about Dan Levy’s acknowledgement on Huffpo today that some mainstream Jewish organizations granted asylum to the neoconservatives over the years, notwithstanding their Israel-centered ideas about spreading democracy at the point of a gun, and now Jews have got to come to terms with this. Levy says it’s just a few crazy neocons. But I don’t think it’s that simple. I think the line between neoconservative thought and mainstream Jewish life has been really blurred over the last few years. A few examples:
–Lordly Kovner is no wingnut. He’s chairman of Juilliard and also chairman of the American Enterprise Institute, yet he has provided a haven for Likudnik crazies like Dore Gold, Richard Perle, and David Wurmser.
–The New Republic is considered liberal, mainstream, a fount of young journalistic talent. Yet its editor, Marty Peretz, is described as a neocon in Jacob Heilbrunn’s book, They Knew They Were Right. And the magazine is lousy with neoconservative thinking. Lawrence Kaplan of TNR hooked up with neocon Bill Kristol, now ensconced at the NYTimes, to write a book pushing for the Iraq War. Peter Beinart of TNR, author of another book pushing wars he wasn’t going to be fighting, shopped himself to AIPAC all spring to give private talks on Israel’s interests. And TNR’s John Judis has said that Jewish organizations have made dual loyalty, to Israel, an “inescapable part” of American Jewish life. He should know.
–Thomas Friedman of the New York Times supported the American invasion of Iraq in part because Saddam had paid for suicide bombers in Israel. Paul Berman, late of the Village Voice and Dissent, offered a similar rationale in his book Terror and Liberalism. Liberals? Neocons? Hey–Doug Feith comes from a Democratic family too.
–Jeffrey Goldberg lately mused that it was a good idea to wage the Iraq war to set off a “benign domino theory” that would spread democracy to all Israel’s enemies. When he was writing for the New Yorker, he published a piece in the runup to the Iraq war full of shadowy intelligence suggesting that Saddam had ties to Al Qaeda. Judy Miller ran similar malarkey in the pages of the New York Times. Were these great liberal publications captured by neoconservative fever-dreams? What is Bill Kristol doing at the Times now?
–Joe Lieberman.
I’m just saying, it’s not a clear line. Neoconservatism, or that large chapter of neoconservative thought that said you bring war and suffering to Arab societies in order to produce peace in Jerusalem, gained adherents throughout the Israel-loving American Jewish community, enraged by suicide bombers. Levy, who worked for an Israeli prime minister, seems to think the dissociation will be cut and dried. No: it involves an examination of what Zionism has done to Jewish political culture here, and the degree to which Israeli/Palestinian brutality has brutalized a once-dovish American community.
