The arguments by Keller, Goldberg, Avishai, etc. in defense of retaining Ethan Bronner at his post in spite of the conspicuous conflict of interest, show how hard it is for us to judge Israel by the standard we apply to other countries.The sympathy/kinship/affinity runs too deep. Imagine a Times reporter on the Zapatista rebellion of the 1990s whose son enlisted in the Mexican army that fought to crush the rebellion. Would Keller write a personal defense of the decision to keep that reporter as his leading source of information on Mexico?
Closer to home. Say the Times reporter in Helmand province is married to an Afghan woman (from one of the families of the Northern Alliance). Their son enlists in a special-ops unit operating in Helmand and the Times asks itself: "How compromising is this? The marriage was already awkward, but it also gave our reporter access to sources denied to other Americans. Yet the son will now be going on controversial missions which the father is assigned to cover." Is there really much question what conclusion would be reached?
The defense of Ethan Bronner’s personal probity and freedom from bias finally proves too much. If these arguments suffice to overturn the usual standard of conflict-of-interest, it should be possible for Bronner himself to enlist in the IDF and continue as the leading Times correspondent on Israel’s politics and its treatment of Palestine.
Steve Walt has a great post following the news from Tony Blair that when he was planning the Iraq war disaster with George Bush they consulted the Israelis, and that Israeli security was a consideration. Walt feels vindicated on the most controversial claim of his book, that the Israel lobby pushed the Iraq war. Here’s an excerpt from Walt, then I will provide my two cents.
Consider the following passage from an editorial in the Jewish newspaper Forward, published in 2004:
As President Bush attempted to sell the war .. in Iraq, America’s most important Jewish organizations rallied as one to his defense. In statement after statement community leaders stressed the need to rid the world of Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction. Some groups went even further, arguing that that the removal of the Iraqi leaders would represent a significant step toward bringing peace to the Middle East and winning America’s war on terrorism"
The editorial also noted that "concern for Israel’s safety rightfully factored into the deliberations of the main Jewish groups."
The Forward, it is worth noting, is well-connected and has a well-deserved reputation for probity in its reporting on the American Jewish community. It is hard to see how its editors could be mistaken about such an important issue or why they would lie about it. And they never issued a retraction. We can therefore assume that the writers of this editorial knew what they were talking about: key groups in the lobby supported the war. Reasonable people can disagree about how important their influence was, of course, but at a minimum these groups reinforced the Bush administration’s resolve and made it less likely that other politicians or commentators would conduct a serious debate about the wisdom of the invasion.
Finally, it bears reiterating that I am talking about key groups and individuals in the Israel lobby, and not about the American Jewish community in toto. Indeed, my co-author and I have repeatedly pointed to surveys showing that American Jews were less supportive of the decision to invade Iraq than the American population as a whole, and we have emphasized that it would be a cardinal error (as well as dangerous) to try to "blame the Jews" for the war. Rather, blame should be reserved for Bush and Cheney (who made the ultimate decision for war), for the neoconservatives who dreamed up this foolish idea, and for the various groups and individuals — including those in the lobby — who helped sell it.
What’s always intrigued me about the argument that American Zionists/the lobby/American Jewish leadership had no responsibility for the war is that I grew up being told that Jews were the smartest people in the world and our ideas had changed history– Einstein, Freud, and Marx were the triumvirate my parents cited– and then the Iraq war happens, and basically it’s our ideas, or Zionist neocon ideas, and when the thing is a disaster everyone says that Bush and Cheney came up with it. And the Forward, fearing pogroms, says, "In Dark Times, Blame the Jews." It just doesn’t track. Ideas are important; that’s a modern conception, and a Jewish conception; and god knows that ideas that arose in the Jewish community were very important indeed here. The evidence is endless. There are all the books by Wurmser, Berman, Kaplan, Kristol, Perle and Frum on my bookshelves arguing for the Iraq war in part because of suicide bombers in Israel. There’s Tom Friedman making that argument; and later telling Ari Shavit that if you had abducted 25 intellectuals within a mile of his office in D.C., most of them Jewish, the war would never have happened. There’s the collapse of the liberal Jewish establishment, from the Union for Reform Judaism to the New Yorker magazine to 9 of 11 Jewish congressmen from NY and California (praise Bob Filner and Jerrold Nadler for their Tonkin Gulf-awareness). Yes and why did they collapse? There’s Philip Zelikow, the head of the 9/11 Commission saying that Israeli security was the motive for the war that dare not speak its name; there’s Colin Powell saying that the idea for the war came out of the Zionist thinktank the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs; there’s Condi Rice saying the war was to "help Israel," per her biographer. And now there’s Blair.
Vietnam helped bring down the WASP Establishment, and Iraq is going to do a number on the Jewish presence in this Establishment. That’s why there’s such anger at Mearsheimer and Walt; there’s a lot of social status in play, let alone national security issues. And Jewish life won’t be healed until we recognize the degree to which macho Israeli militarist ideas inside our Diaspora thinktank-journo-privileged-pencil-neck community have wagged the dog. We’re empowered people. Yes we have been victimized in history, as other people have been too. But that has given rise to a myth of Jewish non-agency in world affairs.
