Joe Klein is getting an army. Here is Daniel Levy of the Century Foundation and J Street, writing in Huffpo, to say it’s time for a soul-searching over the Jewish community’s giving of haven to Feith and the other neocons:
[T]here was a failure within the
mainstream, Jewish and non-Jewish, to identify the existence of a
particular Jewish neoconservative narrative and then to challenge that
narrative as being fundamentally flawed in its reading of both American
and Israeli interests. One of the causes of that vacuum was the abuse
and cheapening of the term anti-Semitism as it was hurled at many who
went after Podhoretz, Perle, Feith, and co. They tried, and sadly
rather successfully, built a wall of untouchability. Klein is taking
his shofar or trumpet to that wall, as many have done before, but Joe
is particularly MSM, and therefore important.
Too many Jewish communal leaders and institutions made the mistake
of not standing up and speaking out more against the right-wing
excesses of a small minority of their co-religionists. Some even
embraced and feted the neocons — a mistake AIPAC particularly excelled
in and something I get the impression that AIPAC is at least partially
trying to walk itself back from.
Two problems in that argument. The Jewish community willingly provided harbor. Ask Feith. And since when did American Jews get the responsibility to identify and argue for Israeli interests? No thanks, dude. Israel is a religious state that discriminates against minorities and maintains apartheid conditions in a 40-year military occupation. Jews in the U.S. are a minority with all the rights we could dream of. When are we going to apply the political values under our Guccis to the Middle East? Thus have Israeli values beclouded the American Jewish mind. (Levy worked for the Israeli P.M. Revolving doorism.)
Levy also says, “Are the Jews or Israel to blame for the Bush Middle East debacle? Get outta here.” Alas, too blanket. The neocons were fed and lodged by the pro-Israel Jewish community for many years, even as they dandled their semiautomatic weapons and brass knuckles. Let the reckoning begin. Hark, the sound of tumbrils in the streets of New York!
