I’m reading DD Guttenplan’s meticulously-researched biography of journalist IF Stone out of interest in Jewish identity. Stone came out of Jewish culture; his worldview was that of the outsider critic, fearful of power, aligned with other Jewish intellectuals. Yet he also drew on an American populist tradition, and worked to bring a universalist ideal to Jewish life. His criticisms of Israel were remarkable for their time. He said that the Jews in Israel were turning into their gentile oppressors, and the Palestinians into Jews.
My favorite episode in the book is a clash of Jewish titans Guttenplan has unearthed from 1975 that fully anticipates the unspoken tensions over neoconservatism and dual loyalty that would emerge in the wake of the Iraq war.
In 1975, at the time of the Arab oil embargo, Henry Kissinger spoke of a war for oil, and Commentary published a piece called “Oil: The Issue of American Intervention” by Robert Tucker that called for the invasion of the Persian Gulf to seize the oil fields and lower prices.
Stone was horrified, both by the hawkish argument itself and by the source. Commentary was (then) a publication of the American Jewish Committee. He felt that connection could expose American Jews to charges of dual loyalty. He attacked the piece in the New York Review of Books and made it clear that Israel’s interest was different from the U.S.’s. “[T]his is exactly the kind of rescue operation of which some Israeli hardliners may have been dreaming.”
The archived correspondence about Stone’s piece that Guttenplan has exhumed is fascinating. First the British Zionist essayist Isaiah Berlin wrote a four page letter to NYRB editor Robert Silvers, soon conveyed to Stone, and said that while he too opposed the Commentary argument, Stone was wrong to suggest that Jews couldn’t make such arguments. Jews are allowed to advocate for foreign policies that help Jews without being accused of having dual loyalty, Berlin wrote. Look at the Holocaust. Jews had been quiet during the Holocaust to disastrous effect.
Robert Silvers responded to Berlin in a politic eight-page letter (that Guttenplan found at the Bodlleian library in Oxford). Silvers obviously thought dual loyalty a real issue. What if “politicians and populists” held Jews “responsible for encouraging and launching into public discussion strategies that might end up, to imagine a lurid example, with boys from Iowa and Harlem futilely dying in Kuwait.” Are we as journalists to remain silent? Though Guttenplan doesn’t print the entire letter, the suggestion is that a journalist must speak out about such an issue.
IF Stone wrote twice to Berlin. His first letter brought the witty retort from the essayist, that he was tying to “make me smart.” In the second letter, Stone openly broached the issue of dual loyalty—and the hijacking of American Jewish identity by Israel. “It is time we American Jews balked [at] the tail-wag-the-dog tactics of drift and hard-line Israeli politics.” And this is 2 years before Menachem Begin finally defeated Labor in Israeli politics!
Guttenplan soon moves on in this book; he’s got a lot of intellectual ground to cover. But he correctly identifies the clash as a rehearsal of (silent) battles over neoconservatism 30 years on.
What lessons are to be drawn from this episode? Lessons about the conflicts between Jewish Zionist identity and American leadership.
First, it’s evident that even as daring a journalist as IF Stone felt a Jewish inhibition in talking about such stuff, in ways that are slightly embarrassing today. Don’t call attention to ourselves, or we’ll bring down the antisemites on us—that was the attitude of this short bespectacled Jew who changed his name from Feinstein to Stone out of fear of discrimination. Commentary and the neocons surely saw Stone as an assimilationist who had made the mistake of trusting the US during the Holocaust. And by contrast, Commentary was bolshy about the Israel interest in American aggression. Never forget that in the same decade as that Persian Gulf article appeared, neocon godfathers Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol broke publicly with the Democrats over defense spending, arguing that a strong defense budget was essential to Israel’s interest.
OK. 30 years pass. And then exactly what Robert Silvers said might happen happened: Jews were “responsible for encouraging and launching into public discussion strategies that might end up, to imagine a lurid example, with boys from Iowa and Harlem futilely dying in”… Iraq. Notice that Silvers is not saying the Jews started a war; he is talking about the great Jewish contribution, ideas. And let’s be clear, the Iraq strategy was pushed in the late 90s and early 00s by the neocons, who came out of the Jewish community.
And what of the old combatants? The honesty we see in Guttenplan’s pages disappeared from the debate. The neocons denied that they had influence and said that their accusers were anti-Semitic conspiracists. When non-Jewish scholars Walt and Mearnsheimer said there was a Jewish pro-Israel interest in pushing the war, they were denounced up and down Broadway by good liberal writers saying that the pair were anti-Semitic. The New York Review of Books–whose editor had suggested that journalists had a responsibility to talk about this stuff–never assumed that responsibility in the event. Silvers has never run a review of Walt and Mearsheimer’s earthshaking book. (he reportedly killed one he assigned).
IF Stone died in 1989. What would IF Stone do now ?
I’m sure the Iraq debate would have chilled IF Stone to his stones. But the Jewish universalist and democrat would have won out over the parochialist in him: he wold have felt great resposiblity to those boys and girls from Harlem and Iowa. In stark contrast to every liberal journalist of our age, he would have loudly called out the neocons’ Israel-first interest.
