The other day David Frum apologized for his vicious post saying that the New York Times’ Sergey Ponomarev faked a photograph of Palestinian victims of slaughter in Gaza. Frum’s colleague at the Atlantic James Fallows has now published a long piece assailing Frum for his cynicism about an elemental trust in journalism: the idea that journalists bear witness, that their work attests, “I saw this.”
Fallows is a hero in my book because he has forcefully denounced the slaughter in Gaza, by likening it to Americans napalming civilians in Vietnam in the belief that was a strategy. I think he knows– Israel is delegitimizing itself.
But I want to pick up here on Fallows’s journalistic credo, and challenge him on it. I agree with him, that journalists are most effective when they affirm to a reader, I saw this. In fact, this whole website was founded on that principle: In the early 2000’s I knew that I as an American Jew bathed in the meritocracy had a special understanding of the role of Zionism in the US political culture and, given the disaster in Iraq, I had a responsibility to share my understanding with other Americans. When my brother said in 2003 that he had demonstrated against the Vietnam war, but his Jewish newspaper said, This war might be good for Israel, I knew I had to speak out and explain every part of my privileged liberal Jewish Zionist inheritance to readers.
Explaining that meant talking about the Jewish rise into the establishment in my generation. It is not possible to explain the influence of neoconservatism or neoliberalism without speaking about the Jewish rise. We came into the establishment in the 1970s and 80s and rechristened those old strains, liberalism and conservatism. Neocons David Frum and David Brooks have been somewhat straightforward about this process. Frum said that Bill Clinton had the most philosemitic presidency in history. Both his Supreme Court picks were Jewish, so was much of his staff, even his girlfriend was Jewish. Now his son-in-law is too.
I saw this. At Harvard and later when I moved to New York to pursue my brilliant career, my cohort was Jewish men whose fathers bore resentment over anti-semitism, whose career-arcs had been dented by prejudice. Now my friends were climbing into the turrets of the new establishment. We remade Wall Street and journalism and the broader culture.
James Fallows knows this as well as I do. He has always been something of an outsider himself, as a westerner with a journalist’s wide-eyed sense of wonder. He was at Harvard just before I was and saw the wave. In Fallows’s last year at Harvard, Alan Dershowitz threatened to leave the law school unless they finally named a Jewish dean. Well Dersh didn’t leave; and there have been several Jewish deans since. One of them, a Zionist, is now on the Supreme Court, thanks to Barack Obama, who has said that his “cabal” are three Chicago J Street Jews, liberal Zionists who funded his first campaigns.
This establishment has obviously had a huge effect on our Middle East policy. George H.W. Bush is widely perceived to have lost the presidency in part because he opposed settlements (even Tom Friedman agrees with me). When AIPAC blessed Clinton in 1992, its director said Clinton loved Jews and George Bush didn’t:
I have full confidence that we’re going to have a much better situation. He’s got Jewish friends. A girl who worked for me at AIPAC stood up for them at their wedding. Hillary lived with her. I mean we have those relationships. We have never had that with Bush.
No we didn’t. The occupation flourished under Clinton, and Bill Kristol purged the Arabists from the Republican Party and George W. Bush had a neocon braintrust that saw the Israeli occupation as emulable; and Barack Obama vetoed the Security Council resolution against settlements in 2010. The Israel lobby permeates our political culture. When former Israeli ambassador Dore Gold– born in Connecticut, living in Israel, drawing $96,000 a year from the American Enterprise Institute as a “scholar”– said last night on CNN that Israel would have to be a glutton for punishment to go near the U.N., Wolf Blitzer, who once worked for AIPAC, laughed and said, “Yeah I know.”
Chuckling through a massacre.
I saw this; and when I began writing as an anti-Zionist about the establishment I’d been reared to join, that ended my career in the mainstream media like turning off a light. Jim Fallows is as sociological as I am. He became famous for a brilliant piece he wrote in 1975 that was about political action. Called, “What did you do in the class war, Daddy?” the piece anatomized the corruption of Fallows’s own white and privileged class during the Vietnam war. The elites had escaped the draft but failed to resist it, Fallows said. Why did people with “any presumptions to character… let it go on?”
Today Fallows knows better than I do (because my experience is now so stale) the extent of Zionism inside the American elite. He served Jimmy Carter; he saw the rise of the Israel lobby against Carter; he was at the Atlantic in 2005 when they funked journalistic duty and killed “The Israel Lobby” by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, and so the two published it in England, and Walt, an optimistic Californian like Fallows, gave up any dream of serving in the State Department.
There’s just been a second massacre, worse than the last massacre in Gaza, or the one before that– the one that the U.S. turned a blind eye to and cashiered the U.N.’s effort to hold Israel accountable for the slaughter. I challenge Jim Fallows to resist, to tell us what he knows about Zionism in the US establishment.
As ever, great writing and insight.
A great challenge to Jim Fallows– I hope that he will rise to it.
It would be nice if we could lose this ‘third rail’ in the media, politics, etc. forever.
Nice. We need gentile writers with onions and smarts. The question is, does Jim Fallows value his career in the MSM?
Obviously Zionism dominates how people in the US think about the I/P conflict. The Israel Lobby totally dominates Congress. Obama listens to Netanyahu chewing him out on ceasefires–imagine an American President taking that from any other country. (I can’t). Racist rabbis give speeches outside the UN and nobody except you and Chris Hayes to my knowledge have commented on this.
But I don’t want people to get the idea that this is about Jew-counting in the establishment. It’s about counting people in the establishment who have a bias on Israel and use their influence to push us to support a government that practices apartheid and commits war crimes and supplies weapons to them while they do it. That means pointing to specific people and specific groups. So someone like Adelson, to take a particularly repulsive example, is Jewish. That matters because he uses that influence to have Republican presidential candidates grovel before him on the subject of Israel, to the point where Chris Christie had to apologize for using the term “occupied territories”. On that issue, his Jewishness matters. On other issues where he is repulsive–he’s probably repulsive on all issues–it doesn’t. (Of course his position on Iran is part of his position on Israel.)
Romney is also someone who has contempt for Palestinians. In his case I think he has contempt for anyone who isn’t powerful.
Then there are some of the major Jewish organizations. Name and shame if they have a despicable record on this. But again, be specific.
Rabbis–probably a target rich environment. But name the specific rabbis and/or organizations.
And then there are the Christian Zionists–they are an easy target for the cultural liberals because they are evangelical, but the support for Israel often goes unmentioned except in some stupid context. Such as the following– I’ve seen people mention it as an example where they feel sorry for Israelis for having such uncouth people as allies. Which is nonsense–that unwavering support is exactly what many Israelis want. They can laugh at the theology of their allies, but they’ll take the support.
Fallows burnishes his “objective credentials” by telling his conclusions on al-Dura affair.
“I saw and heard, was that some things were knowable: in particular, that the boy could not have been shot by the IDF soldiers known to be in the area. The physics of trajectories, sight lines, and bullet damage did not match up. What did happen to the boy—still living? accidentally shot? shot intentionally by soldiers in some other location, or by someone else?—was unprovable at the time (I asserted) and might never be known.”
Fallows delivers this story as his credential. I suspect that I know more physics than he does, in spite of rather futile effort to teach me quantum mechanics; normal mechanics I could grasp. It was indeed tested that if IDF soldiers were shooting without moving much from their positions, and al-Durahs were motionless behind a concrete barrel (simulated by manekins in a test) then none of them could be shot. However, both soldiers and the killed boys could move, for example, the boy could be startled by a nearby explosion and move few inches exposing himself to fire. The context is that there was undeniable carnage, and some photos taken even though the midst of carnage does not offer best conditions for taking snapshots. After figuring that one of the photos could be challenged, Zionist change the discourse from random violence by IDF of which there were plenty examples to “Paliwood”, taking advantage of murky circumstances of the photo (the circumstances of a barrage of fire are hardly ever totally clear, after all).
I recall another affair, “Two plumes over Beirut”, when a photo showed two plumes of smoke raising from Dahiya, and Zionist experts were claiming the photo to be doctored, as there was only one plume. To derail the discourse on the morality and legality of flattening a large urban area far from a battlefield on a supposition that some adversaries may hide there. However nonsensical, it gives talking points invaluable it talk shows etc. More recently, a boy shot by IDF was falling down “unnaturally” as expert who spend years gunning down humans were assuring us. This whole genre deserves a bit more than “we sometimes agree, and sometimes disagree”.
I accept this as plain truth.
But am more interested in how to end it.
So I think some other plain truths have to come out.
Zionism brought this to US shores and US Jews joined up with them.
I dont think at this point the ‘some or all’ how many Jews is even important.
Leave out the culture, religion, victimhood or whatever inspired the Jews in their attitudes. That is not going be cured any time soon.
Zionism has to be framed as a threat to nations and the world, as communism, Bolshevism and other phenomenons that gripped the world and its leaders were.
And the movement against zionism and zionist must be ethnic-less without Jews as the targets.
So that when the protest of anti semitism arise in this and take up 90% of the arguements they can met with one reaction and one answer–”Ridiculous”–and thats all.
We cant keep letting the anti semitism accusation have any merit in going against them so what zionism is has to be broadened beyond the Jews and Israel.
I dont see how the zionist threat and the jews problem is going to be solved any other way then a ‘movement’ that demonizes zionism and lets the zionist, jews or not , out their own selves and be put in some political and social leper-like colony removed from any influence.
I dont know how to do this but it needs to be done on this level.