Scott McConnell at The American Conservative, on Commentary Magazine’s flirtation with non-Zionism. I love the Sam Francis quote about neocons’ hidden agenda to embroil the U.S. in perpetual war. Of course the neocons would say there’s no difference in national interests, a useful self-delusion:
Commentary had not always been dogmatically Zionist: in its early days, it had run such leading dovish intellectuals from Palestine as Uri Avnery. In 1946, Hannah Arendt assessed Theodor Herzl’s legacy 50 years after the publication of The Jewish State. She found the Zionist idea flawed: there was no country to be had without displacing the original inhabitants, and such a state would not end anti-Semitism in the world. Four years later, Clement Greenberg wrote that if Jews could survive only by becoming aggressive nationalists, they would have lost justification for persisting as a group.
Anti-Zionism receded after Israel’s founding, in the magazine and beyond. Commentary devoted little space to Israel before 1967. By the 1980s, however, Podhoretz could be counted on to slam critics of Israel as anti-Semitic. By the 1990s, advocacy for Israel and alarmist pieces about Iraq’s supposed weapons of mass destruction were Commentary staples.
To his credit, [author Benjamin] Balint treats the debates swirling about the magazine in the age of 9/11 with considerable dispassion. He claims it is a “canard” that neocons cared more for Israel than the U.S., but quotes without sneering many of those who make the charge. In his epilogue, he adds this assessment from the late paleoconservative essayist Sam Francis: “What neoconservatives have done is to design an ideology … that offers ostensible and plausible rationalizations for the perpetual war in which Israel and its agents of influence in the U.S. government and media seek to embroil the United States (and which all too many American conservatives, out of a foolishly misplaced patriotism, are eager to support) without explicitly invoking the needs and interests of Israel itself.”
