I’ve been having my semi-annual argument with a Jewish friend over, Whether the neocons were Jewish or not. I generally find these arguments pointless because there is an element of fear in them: my friends are nervous that Jews will get blamed for the Iraq debacle. I always say that Some Jews should be blamed for it, and the sooner the liberal Jewish community does its part–by dissecting those rightwing Jewish strands of thought (Greater Israel, for instance; the occupation and colonization of Arab land is a good thing!) that we as Jews are in a better position than anyone to recognize–the sooner our community will be healed, and the U.S. public will understand how this disastrous war came about. One of the big reasons anyway.
I’ve taken now to quoting English scholar Paul Maltby on the subject, who wrote recently:
[Neocon Jonathan] Tobin is concerned – and rightly so – to remind us that not all
neocons are Jewish. Yet surely, if he believes so much in the virtues
of neoconservatism, would he not want proudly to proclaim the leading
role of Jews in the movement?… Perhaps one way to address the issue of the disproportionately
large Jewish presence among the neoconservative leadership is to sweep
it under the carpet, but that kind of cover-up only abets antisemites
with their theories about Jewish plotting in high places…. Instead, a more effective way to confront the problem
would be for Jewish community leaders to come forward and publicly
denounce neoconservative thinking as a betrayal of Jewish values.
Maltby’s point about Jewish pride led me yesterday to a breathrough, when I said to this friend, Look at the Manhattan Project. Yes, Truman dropped the bomb. But a lot of Jews made the bomb. On this popular history site, The Manhattan Project is described as the work of mostly Jewish scientists. I grew up with that understanding.
You can say of the Manhattan Project exactly what you say of the neocons: Not all the brains were Jewish. But in that case, we openly identify the Jews qua Jews because 1, Americans generally think the bomb a good thing (I’m not offering an opinion), and 2, Jews proudly regard scientific brilliance, or more precisely, frontier scientific discovery in that era, before the wide dispersal of education, as an outsider Jewish attribute. (And yes, my dad’s a Jewish scientist, as outsider as they come…)
Neoconservatism-Iraq-war planning is even more Jewish in character, especially when you consider that Tom Friedman, Lawrence Kaplan, Bill Kristol and Paul Berman (four hoursemen of this apocalypse, from NYT, TNR, AEI, and Dissent) offered as a causus belli that Saddam was paying for suicide bombers in Israel. Why didn’t we invade Sri Lanka too? A lot of suicide bombers there.
