I hope everyone read the Times Book Review section yesterday, the front-page blast of Kenneth Pollack's book, Out of the Desert, by Max Rodenbeck. Rodenbeck (a wonderful writer in the NY Review of Books) says just what I say about Pollack, that he ignores the Israel/Palestine issue and when he does refer to it, does so in strangely-neutral terms, as the "troubles" or some such b.s. Here's the choice bit:
Pollack seems oddly unaware of history’s motivating forces. To
assert that “what triggers revolutions, civil wars and other internal
unrest is psychological factors, particularly feelings of extreme
despair,” is plain silly. The Boston Tea Party could not have been
prevented by Prozac.
Similarly, he ascribes feelings to broad categories of Middle
Easterners, devoid of any context or explanation. They are “angry
populations” who suffer “inchoate frustration” and “a pathological
hatred of the status quo.” We repeatedly hear of “Arab rage at Israel”
and “Arab venom for Israel.” Nowhere is there a hint that such
attitudes might bear some relation to the plight of the Palestinians, the agony of military defeat or the humiliation of life under Israeli occupation.
fact, the book’s most salient distortions stem from Pollack’s
protectiveness toward Israel. He makes some absurdly cockeyed
assertions, like, “America’s support for Israel over the years has even
been a critical element in winning and securing Arab allies.” He offers
misleading false alternatives, declaring, for instance, that there is
“absolutely no reason to believe that ending American support for
Israel would somehow eliminate” the risk of Islamist zealots taking
power and cutting oil exports. [Weiss emphasis] How about making aid to Israel, and not
just to Arabs, conditional, or aiming at mitigating, rather than
eliminating, such risks? Pollack makes a peculiarly acrobatic effort to
prove that…
Well you get the point. Rodenbeck also says that Pollack is "blinkered" on Israel. Nice. The Prozac moment is directly reminiscent of Francis Fukuyama telling the neocons not to put young Arabs on the couch when there are plenty of direct grievances the west needs to address. And Rodenbeck's dismissal of Pollack's claim that changing American policy would eliminate anti-Americanism is a good response to David Remnick's wisecrack about Walt and Mearsheimer nearly a year ago: that they think that if just solved the Israeli-Palestinian fight, Osama bin Laden would go back into the family
construction business. Funny; I admit it. But my side has never said It's Everything; we've said It's Crucial.
I'm burying the lead: The Times is coming around. At last Ken Pollack, its golden boy of intervention on the Times Op-Ed pages in 2002-2003– a record that is sadly elided in this review–is suddenly in bad odor. About time. Maybe the Times will run Op-Eds now by Mearsheimer and Walt, who opposed the war that Pollack helped to give us?
The Times also ran this valiant letter last week by Michael Brown of Inter-faith Peace Builders, telling the truth about the two-state solution (Shit or get off the pot):
The choice then will be either apartheid imposed on Palestinians or
equal rights for Palestinians and Jews in the Holy Land. Just as
apartheid in South Africa was overcome and Jim Crow defeated in the
South, so, too, is it possible for Jews and Palestinians to live as
equals.
The choice is Israel’s: two states without delay or the
very real prospect of Palestinians in the near future demanding equal
rights in one state from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River.
The natural question that arises from this stuff is, When will the Times start reporting on Haim Saban's role at Brookings Institution, where Pollack works as the director of research for Middle East Policy at the Saban Center? Saban is an ardent Zionist. I saw him at AIPAC, wearing a platinum tie and surrounded by a host of his Saban fellows, young people of every color whom he is recruiting in the love of Israel. This is a guy who confronts his son's Wesleyan classmates when they have a table on campus criticizing Israel. I venture that Pollack is afraid to say a word about the Palestinians because of his paymaster. Pollack's book The Threatening Storm said not a word about the occupation, didn't even use the word, when purporting to educate Americans about the minds of Arabs in 2002, and now he repeats the error, as Rodenbeck has shown. It's an ugly pattern and a disgrace to Brookings, which as Walt and Mearsheimer pointed out, used to be a haven to William Quandt and the two-state solution way back when it didn't rely on the largesse of guys who sing Hatikvah in the shower. I say Pollack been corrupted; he is unable to say a word about Palestinian humiliations. Of course, it's a much sadder reflection on Brookings. But thank god they are finally being pilloried in the Times for it.
P.S. I went to an event last night in Woods Hole, MA, at which former US Ambassador to Yemen George Lane said that Pollack's vision for Iraq is in line with John McCain, and someone in the audience piped up, "His book got panned in the Times today!" It's this kind of public embarrassment that might cause Brookings to wake from its anti-Arab slumbers. Who wishes to be associated with McCain?
