The Israeli journalist Uri Avnery shares my view that Walt and Mearsheimer’s book is historic. He compares it to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Avnery joins a group of progressive Jews, including Michael Lerner, who welcome this book as a way out of the Israeli occupation that has so corrupted that society, and our politics too.
For me, Avnery offers the hope that Jews will join this conversation about the lobby and say what they know. So far the Jewish response to Walt/Mearsheimer has been mostly denial or attack. Jews have tended, like Jeffrey Goldberg in the New Republic, to approach the book in power terms–This is an assault on Jewish power–rather than on intellectual terms. What is revealed here? (As I said some months back) Walt and Mearsheimer are scholars of Jewish history, and yet I will be the first to say there is something a little wan about the performance. They come to this as realist political scientists and gentiles, and they don’t presume to talk about Jewish culture.
Jews know about the lobby intimately. It is our thing (as Italians would say). Alan Dershowitz crowed about its power in Chutzpah (as I reported here). The two most prominent Jewish writers of the last 50 years, Saul Bellow and Philip Roth, both speak of the lobby in fond terms. In The Counterlife, one of Roth’s warm fiendish alter egos brags about the lobby’s strength, having emigrated to Israel himself. In To Jerusalem and Back (1976), Saul Bellow speaks often of the lobby as a great and necessary institution. "The defense of Israel is ‘the paramount task of the [American] Jewish community,’" says one of his trusted informants.
Some day the lobby will be taught in Jewish history classes. I think it arose in a new way in the 1970s. The ’67 and ’73 wars had awakened American Jewry. "[I]t would take the trauma of the June, 1967 war to shake both sides into a greater realization of… how deeply committed the Diaspora and Israel were to each other," writes the Zionist historian Melvin Urofsky. Of course the other factor here was the awakening to the Holocaust. Saul Bellow said that Sadat was enamored of Hitler; and in 1971, neocon godfather Milton Himmelfarb (Bill Kristol’s uncle) offered a credo for American Jews in the wake of the extermination of European Jewry:
"’Never again!’ we said, the ‘again’ recalling what Hitler had done, had been allowed to do, to the Jews. Never again, we meant, would we let others fool us or would we fool ourselves about the intention of those who intended to destroy the Jews. Never again would we lean on that broken reed, enlightened opinion. Never again would we do less than all we could do… Never again would we incur the guilt, or the guilt-feeling, of 1933-1945."
So the guilty sense that comfortable American Jews were passive during the Holocaust and that Arabs are the new Nazis fed the unilateral activism of the lobby–and the nullification of the U.N. and other "enlightened opinion." These are big and important ideas in our world today. I believe the only intellectual who has touched on them is Michael Desch, in his paper on the use and misuse of the Holocaust analogy. It’s time for Jewish writers to enter this conversation in a spirit of openness.
P.S. Bellow was a conservative; he felt that Jews had a right to a tiny splinter of land in the Arab world. And yet his hawkish 1976 book acknowledges the seeds of corruption. He says, often but apologetically, that the settlements are a bad idea, that they are perverting the idea of Israel. The lobby has signed off on those settlements for 30 years.
