I continue to applaud the New Yorker’s knocking off Sheldon Adelson last week, but with one hand. It has the feeling of special pleading to me. In fact, it even created
an undercurrent of sympathy in me for its villain, who I suspect is incredibly roguish and charming if you got to meet him, and god knows came from nothing without using the SATs to get here.
By special pleading, I mean that author Connie Bruck curiously leaves out important areas of Adelson’s role in public life. For instance, Haim Saban gets off easy
in the article, but he’s doing much of what Adelson’s doing on the
Democratic side–another megarich, ardent Zionist with an amazing personal story (I’m trying to get assigned to write about Saban; don’t hold your breath), funding thinktanks that say America and Israel have identical interests. Bruck also downplays the Freedom’s Watch angle, the pro-Iraq-War element of Adelson’s political monkey business that seems to me the most important aspect of his work.
Does it matter here that Bruck is married into the L.A. Democratic, pro-Israel, pro-Iraq-war
elite? To her credit, I only know this because in her piece, Bruck disclosed her marriage to former Congressman Mel Levine, now a big L.A. lawyer, and said he’s a Middle East policy adviser to Obama.
But that scants his political agenda. The LA Jewish Journal says that Levine has been actively campaigning to raise money from Hollywood royalty for Obama by testifying that he’s kosher on Israel. I bet one of the people he’s trying to land is Saban. Levine supported the Iraq war. According to the FEC, Levine gave money to Joe Lieberman in ’06 before and after
he was defeated by Ned Lamont and was running as an Independent. That makes Levine another Dem hawk in the neolib style. The FEC also says that Levine gave $2300 last year to Shelley Berkley, the annoyingly/ardently pro-Israel Nevada
congresswoman whom Adelson despises–he’s supported her opponents, Bruck says. Bruck quotes Berkley at length in her story, but says nothing about her husband’s involvement in that dogfight.
Israel is central to Adelson, and to Levine too. Here he is writing about Obama in the Jewish Journal, and sounding just like AIPAC:
I could not support a candidate for president if I were not confident
of that candidate’s strong support for Israel. Obama is a stalwart
supporter of Israel and the U.S.-Israel relationship.
In her piece Bruck is sympathetic to AIPAC because (as I reported here) AIPAC is now tilting toward the two-state solution. Her husband utterly approves AIPAC:
Fortunately, the most credible of Israel’s supporters, such as the
American Israel Public Affairs Committee, have clearly stated that
Obama’s record of support for Israel is superb. And the Anti-Defamation
League has praised Obama’s stands against anti-Semitism.
One thing Levine doesn’t like is author and prof Rashid Khalidi. He makes it clear that Khalidi has nothing to do with Obama:
Rashid Khalidi: Recently, e-mails parroting a right-wing Web site have
attempted to link Obama with the views of Khalidi, a prominent
Palestinian American academic. But the public record makes completely
clear that their views on the Middle East are very different.
Oh my! Khalidi is a really smart, goodnatured, and temperate guy (with a fabulous wife).
What’s wrong with him? A: He’s Palestinian. Right now, as the head-scarf incident demonstrated, Obama can’t go near
Arab-Americans. And Mel Levine is making sure of that. That is what’s wrong with the Jewish place in the
American establishment: rich old guys are redlining Any
Arab’s view of the Middle East from the discourse. How much does Bruck share her husband’s agenda? I have no idea, but I wonder. I notice that she does not report something that I mentioned a month back on this blog: Adelson wants all Arabs to disappear.
I’m still glad she wrote the piece, it’s good news. And evidence of the same important trend that J Street is emblematic of: public divisions over Zionism within the Jewish establishment (which recall the bitter divisions over Communism), between the hardliners and those who want a two-state solution. It shows that the realistic Jews want to have it out with the neocons. Oh happy day.
(Thanks to Brad Greenberg, whose Godblog has a good piece on Hollywood Jewish conspiracy theory.)
