Hurray for The New York Times. Today it covered Walt and Mearsheimer’s forthcoming book fairly (a piece penned by the wonderful Patricia Cohen, who broke the AJC anti-Zionism fatwa story last winter). The story is demoralizing. We learn that many venues have now turned their backs on the eminent profs, refusing to even have them come and talk about work that everyone is talking about behind closed doors.
Most significantly, the City University of New York will not do an event because J.J. Goldberg of the Forward refused to moderate a panel with W&M. He says he doesn’t want to appear to be endorsing the book, and "I don’t think the book is very good." He says that the authors didn’t interview anyone in the lobby or anyone who was lobbied.
Goldberg’s comments are sad for a few reasons. First, he is the most important editor of a Jewish publication in the U.S. Consider, even the City University took its cue from him. Second, Goldberg moderated a panel I was on two months back, sponsored by progressive Zionists, having no objection apparently to shaking my hand, though I share many of W&M’s views. I’m a nobody; Walt and Mearsheimer’s book is extremely important. It requires an airing. It requires combative New York Jews and non-Jews discussing it at the City University. Third, Goldberg’s trashing of the book is unfair. The authors are not journalists; their job was not to interview people (though surely they have talked to many of the lobbyists and lobbied, in their fancy universities). They are scholars; and I can tell you that their book (which I have seen) is thunderously impressive on scholarly grounds. Its range and depth of reference are tremendous. Compare them for a moment to another eminent scholar, Bernard Lewis. Bernard Lewis anatomizes the Arab psyche. He says the 9/11 killers bombed the World Trade Center because they came from failed societies and missed the glory of the Caliphate. He offers these psychological stretchers on the basis of extensive research. I don’t think he has ever interviewed an Arab. Certainly not for What Went Wrong, which I was reading today. And Bernard Lewis is invited to the White House; he wrote for the New Yorker; he has a birthday party introduced by Dick Cheney. Notwithstanding his erudition, Lewis has wretched judgment about current events (he says in What Went Wrong that the world will not exhaust oil supplies but will "supersede" them with other resources; meshuganah). Walt and Mearsheimer have superb judgment about current events; they would have stopped us going to Iraq. Lewis was all for it.
I feel that J.J.’s response is reactive. The author of a great book on Jewish Power, J.J. has worked honorably to advance the conversation in Jewish circles. That’s why he will do a panel with me, a wayward Jew, in a synagogue, organized by progressive Zionists. That’s a Jewish discussion. But he is, I think, afraid of what will happen if the mainstream press starts to argue whether there was not a neoconservative/Israel interest in invading Iraq; afraid that this argument will take hold, and that our people will be hurt. A year back, J.J.’s newspaper trashed Walt and Mearsheimer’s article in an editorial called "In Dark Times, Blame the Jews."
Enlightened Jews must ask: are we willing to give up our intellectual freedom out of a fuzzy fear of pogroms in the United States– when our country is in crisis over an unmitigated foreign-policy disaster and the Arab world is in flames? Are we too afraid to have a discussion? I wonder whether J.J. does not agree with Ari Ben Canaan, the hero of Exodus, by Leon Uris. Says Ari:
Don’t be fooled by [sympathetic gentiles] all over the world. They weep crocodile tears and they pay lip service to our millions of slaughtered, but when the final battle comes we will stand alone. Mandria will sell us out like all the others. We will be betrayed and double-crossed as it has always been. We have no friends except our own people, remember that.
It’s time to trust the United States. Give Walt and Mearsheimer a hearing.
