In a month, Jacob Heilbrunn’s book on the neoconservatives, They Knew They Were Right, will be published by Doubleday. I’m reviewing it for the American Conservative, and Doubleday gave me permission to quote the following.
One of Heilbrunn’s scores is a letter he found in the New York Times in 1969, attacking the Nixon Administration for putting pressure on Israel to withdraw from the occupied territories. The letter was a highly-informed but extremist rant against the State Department going back to John Foster Dulles, and blaming the State Department’s tilt toward the Arabs in the Suez crisis in ’56 for creating the conditions of the ’67 War.
It is appalling the State Department can be so blind to historical precedent as to call for a withdrawal from the captured area. [i.e., not "occupied"] There is no evidence to indicate that Nasser’s "pledge on peace" will prove any more sincere in 1969 than in 1956…. [Secy of State Wm.] Rogers’s proposal is paving the way for another disastrous war between the Arab states and Israel in the near future…
The writer was 15-year-old Douglas Feith, now a neocon and architect of the Iraq disaster. In an interview with Heilbrunn, the neocon mastermind dismissed the letter as "juvenilia." But Heilbrunn sees it as sincere, and says that Feith’s "views were already set in stone as a youth."
Move on from Feith to Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who is a year or so older. In high school, Friedman writes in From Beirut to Jerusalem, he became a devotee of the Jewish Agency in Israel– and spent all three summers in high school on a kibbutz in Israel.
For my independent study project in my senior year… in 1971, I did a slide show on how Israel won the Six-Day War. For my high school psychology class, my friend Ken Greer and I did a slide show on kibbutz life, which ended with a stirring rendition of "Jerusalem of Gold" and a rapid-fire montage of strong-eyed, idealistic-looking Israelis of all ages. In fact, high school for me, I am now embarrassed to say, was one big celebration of Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War….
It would be hard to think of two men who played a more significant role in pushing the Iraq war than Feith and Friedman. Both at heart romantics about Israel, they both invoked Israel’s security in justifying the disastrous invasion. Isn’t it high time that American Jews who weren’t singing Hatikvah in high school got involved in Middle East policy?
