If you wanted to sense the power of Walt and
Mearsheimer’s ideas, there was no better place than the conservative synagogue Beth Hillel outside Philadelphia last night, a panel discussion sponsored by the rightwing Jewish Policy Center on radical Islam and the new anti-Semitism on campus, featuring four neoconservatives, including Giuliani adviser Daniel Pipes.
From the outset of
the evening, the talk was of Walt and Mearsheimer. Richard Fox, the real estate
mogul who supports the new pro-war group
Freedom’s Watch, opened the discussion by referring to the book. "They have been getting a lot of press. A real problem: we Jews who represent a fraction of the population are in control. These two professors are not the first to teach antisemitism and they won’t be the last."
The moderator was mustachioed Michael
Medved, and he also spoke of Walt and Mearsheimer. He said that they had gotten
$750,000 for their book from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. (I also have heard that they
got a lot of money, I don’t know how much). Then David Horowitz, the reformed
radical from California,
also bashed the authors, in almost losing his composure as he described
the pitiable condition of the tiny Jewish state. "The lies are so monstrous these days… The Walt Mearsheimer book [says] the media is controlled by the Jews who are using it to attack Muslims… Name me the Hollywood film that is defending the state of Israel!"
It did not seem to me that
these references were calculated. There was a wretched, fearful quality to the
evening–as what looked to be 800-1000 people had filled a hall during the High
Holidays, their cars parked on the synagogue lawn. I sensed that the fear of Walt/Mearsheimer was genuine: reflecting a Holocaust-engendered belief on the part of
the panel and audience that we Jews are extremely vulnerable in western society, and that
anti-Semitism is as bad now as it was in the 1930s. "I believe that we are in a much worse state in the world today, that is we as Jews, than the Jews were in the 1930s," Horowitz claimed stupendously
(and crazily—I say this as a guy who likes Horowitz, he’s a kind man one-on-one).
Part of the political complex that Walt and Mearsheimer are taking on today is the myth of Jewish powerlessness. It is felt in many parts of the
Jewish community, and god knows it has good and ancient pedigree. Overcoming feelings of emasculated powerlessness is the theme of Leon Uris’s Exodus (which as W&M point out is Israeli history in the U.S.). It’s one of my themes that this idea of powerlessness is today a false one: that we are principals in
American society.
I will cite one fact that bears this out. These men who spoke
so eloquently last night of the need of defeating terrorism, not appeasing it, or making
deals with it, but of triumphing over Islamofascism, as Daniel Pipes put it so militantly—they did not once call on Jewish kids to join the Army. As I have reported, there are more Buddhists in the U.S.
armed forces than Jewish kids. At 1.3 percent of the adult population, statistically we should be
about 16,000. We are less than 4,000–25 percent of expected representation, compared to 40 percent for that other elite, Episcopalians. We are underrepresented for a simple reason; because our children have choices, they are by and large affluent. The rightwing Jews at this event did not speak of such matters because they are so identified with an understanding of Jewish vulnerability, in Europe and in Israel.
At
the end of the evening, an older woman rose and spoke in agony about the situation
in Israel today and referred to the dramatic picture of frightened Palestinian schoolgirls
that appeared at the top of the front page of the Times. "I have spent my life fighting for Israel as I’m sure many people in
this room have, in every venue that I can think of. Today there is a picture
that makes us wring our hands…" She got the largest applause of anyone. When a student rose to say the U.S. should be reaching out to Egypt and other Muslim countries, he was booed.
So the Israel lobby asserts itself. The last ten minutes of
this two-hour event on anti-Semitism were all about
Palestinian suffering, which should move the Jewish heart. No: Medved, in his
last remarks, spoke desperately of how we must promote
politics. A speech straight out of Walt and Mearsheimer! Medved said that, shockingly, 82
percent of American Jews have not been to the country that his own brother
emigrated to. If you can do anything, he said, visit Israel. Take your friends. Take
your family. (And will they visit the
Hebron I have seen? No).
As to presidential politics, he said that Ron Paul and Dennis
Kucinich were all but antisemites, "both of whom have trafficked with haters of Israel and are basically pledged to the destruction of Israel as we know it." While Hillary was good for the
Jewish community, and Obama was surprisingly good as well. He had, within
hours, taken down an ad on his site for Walt and Mearsheimer’s book! As for
Christopher Dodd, he was excellent on Israel. Why, his father had served as a
prosecutor at Nuremburg.
Let’s linger on this point.
Later that evening I opened my New York Times and saw the ad for a book by
Christopher Dodd called Letters From Nuremberg, My Father’s Narrative of a
Quest for Justice, replete with
endorsement by Elie Wiesel. Why is this book coming out now? Because
of Jewish presence in the American political process. Because Jews make up more than half of the Democratic contributors. There is only one word for
the abilty to compel a leading senator to write a book about his father’s Nuremberg credentials of 60 years
ago as he runs for President: power. Until American Jews come to terms with
that power, until we understand that powerless Israel lost 50 people in the Lebanon
war last year while killing 900 Lebanese and strewing the country with American-made
cluster bombs, we are lost in the Middle East.
