|
Bloggers vs. the Lobby
Israel’s
propaganda fortress faces a surprising new challenge.
The American Conservative
March 12, 2007
by Scott McConnell
Despite the failure in Iraq, the
repudiation of the president’s foreign policy in opinion polls
and the 2006 elections,
and the collapse of respect for the U.S. in most other
countries, support for the Bush Doctrine of preventive war
remains surprisingly intact among one important slice of
Americans: the presidential candidates of both major parties.
New York Times columnist David Brooks recently lamented
that Democratic contenders were sounding soft, crafting their
foreign-policy positions to generate “applause lines in Iowa.”
He needn’t have worried. The parade of White House aspirants to
appear before a hawkish Israeli audience in Herzliya, and an
equally hawkish AIPAC crowd in New York, is a truer gauge of
where leading candidates stand.
On New Year’s
Day, Israeli superhawk Benjamin Netanyahu called for an “intense
international public relations front” to persuade Americans of
the need for military confrontation with Iran. The sight of John
Edwards addressing a conference in Israel by satellite feed,
along with John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Newt Gingrich, and Mitt
Romney—the latter two actually flew in to speak in
person—indicated that the front already exists. All the
candidates spoke as if preemptive war in the Middle East was a
tried and true success. As a correspondent from Jewish Week
summed it up, the U.S. presidential hopefuls were “competing to
see who can be most strident in defense of the Jewish state.”
The consensus choice for the competition’s winner was Romney,
but the putatively liberal Edwards, who described preventing
Iran from securing nuclear weapons as “the greatest challenge of
our generation,” made a surprisingly strong showing. No leading
presidential contender suggested that attacking Iran might be a
bad idea.
This
hawkishness is actually an outlier sentiment, popular only among
those running for office. In Washington, it’s difficult to find
a foreign-policy expert who thinks that any good would come of a
strike on Iran. Even the neocons have their doubts. The Iraq
War, miserable concept that it was, had far more respected
backers.
American
military options are poor. Surgical air strikes wouldn’t do
anything decisive to Iran’s nuclear program, but they would
create huge problems for Americans in Iraq and perhaps lead to a
two or threefold rise in the price of oil. The U.S. lacks the
troops to enforce regime change through a land invasion and has
already demonstrated its inability to successfully occupy a
Muslim country one-third Iran’s size. Furthermore, Iran,
according to U.S. intelligence estimates, is ten years away from
a nuclear weapon. Its seemingly nutty current president is
losing support in the country. Those most theologically opposed
to the Shia Islam that Tehran espouses are the very al-Qaeda
Sunnis who set this dreadful train of events in motion in the
first place.
So why do
leading politicians line up for “The Bush Doctrine: Take Two”?
On the Republican side, it might be explained by a desire to
cater to elements of the Christian Right that believe a final
showdown with Islam is called for on religious grounds, or to
talk-radio listeners who want to nuke the “Islamofascists”
because that’s what weapons are made for. Such groups form part
of the GOP base. But what of Edwards, what of Hillary
Clinton—both eager to be on the record for keeping all options
on the table? It’s a question that cannot be truthfully answered
without reference to the neuralgic subject of the Israel lobby.
It is a tough
issue to address, as Gen. Wesley Clark, a middle-of-the-pack
Democratic presidential contender in 2004, recently discovered.
Upon reading an Arnaud de Borchgrave column that discussed a
then incipient Israeli campaign to pressure Hillary Clinton and
other Democrats to “publicly support immediate action by Bush
against Iran,” he lost his cool, saying to Arianna Huffington,
“How can you talk about bombing a country when you won’t even
talk to them? It’s outrageous. We’re the United States of
America; we don’t do that.” Pressed by Huffington to explain why
he was sure Bush would attack Iran, he answered, “You just have
to read what’s in the Israeli press. The Jewish community is
divided but there is so much pressure being channeled from the
New York money people to the office seekers.”
This was an
awkward way to put it; the euphemism surely sounded more
contentious than anything Clark might have said
straightforwardly. And of course some people chose to ignore
Clark’s correct assertion that the Jewish community was very
divided on the Iran issue. Within days, the general was in
caught in a familiar crossfire, smeared as an instigator of
anti-Semitism by some Republican Jewish organizations, his
remarks headlined as “Protocols of the New York Money People” by
a Wall Street Journal columnist. Soon he was engaged in
a humiliating apology and repentance ritual with Abe Foxman of
the ADL.
At this point
the story could have taken the same path it has virtually every
time something similar has happened since 1970—the originator of
the “anti-Semitic” gaffe apologizes, some taint remains attached
to his name, and everyone is reminded once again of the perils
of crossing swords with “the lobby.”
But things
took a different course, for significant reasons. It hasn’t yet
been established that the blogosphere has changed the nature of
American politics in any fundamental way. Obviously it can
quickly focus a great deal of attention on something—Trent
Lott’s seemingly appreciative remarks on Strom Thurmond’s racial
views of 60 years ago, for example—that might have gone
completely unnoticed, thus turning Washington into even more of
a fishbowl. And some minor lesson can probably be learned from
John Edwards’s awkward effort to hire “edgy” left-wing bloggers,
with all the unedited vulgarities they bring with them. But
blogs may foment serious debate about difficult subjects and
change the climate of opinion in meaningful ways. In the
aftermath of Herzliya and the Clark episode, it seemed as if
this was actually happening.
For within a
day or two, one could read in the blogs some surprising
assertions that amounted to a truth defense of Wes Clark. It
seemed to come primarily from young, or comparatively young,
Jewish bloggers. Observations that had been bandied about for
years in private seemed to burst forth where many people could
see them. This was welcome and suggests a broadening and
deepening of the peace movement that so notably failed to stop
the Iraq War. Suddenly there were Jewish voices talking about
the Israel lobby as an established fact and, to be frank, as a
bit of a problem. Significantly, these were not voices from an
older and more alienated Chomskyian Left but from an
American Prospect-like liberal mainstream.
In early
February, Glenn Greenwald, a New York attorney who recently
published a book on the Patriot Act, wrote a blog entry that
focused on the New York AIPAC gathering attended by both John
Edwards and Hillary Clinton. Greenwald quoted an article from
the New York Sun—there is no more unimpeachably
right-wing Zionist source—that featured Democratic political
consultant Hank Sheinkopf’s claim that “New York is the ATM for
American politicians. Large amounts of money come from the
Jewish community. If … you want dollars from that group, you
need to show that you’re interested in the issue that matters
most to them.” The issue that matters most, the article went on
to say, is Israel, and what this group most wants to hear with
regard to Israel is commitment to bellicosity toward Iran.
Edwards and Mrs. Clinton did their best to comply, though
according to a report in the equally Likud-friendly New York
Post, Clinton apparently disappointed some in attendance by
suggesting that diplomacy might be attempted before war. “This
is the wrong crowd to do that with,” commented one attendee.
Greenwald went
on to point out that these articles made exactly the same point
that Clark made, adding, “It is simply true that there are large
and extremely influential Jewish donor groups which are
agitating for a U.S. war against Iran, and that is the case
because those groups are devoted to promoting Israel’s interests
and they perceive it to be in Israel’s interests for the U.S. to
militarily confront Iran.”
Greenwald’s
post was not the only one. Matthew Yglesias, a young writer with
a blog and similar political orientation, also addressed the
Clark issue, noting that while Jewish opinion was divided on
Iran, “Everything Clark said, in short, is true. What’s more,
everyone knows it’s true.” Yglesias pointed out that it
is seemingly permissible to refer to the financial clout Jews
wield in the Democratic Party if one is being supportive of
America’s self-proclaimed “pro-Israel” forces, but if you’re
critical of this influence, you’re denounced as an anti-Semite.
Ezra Klein,
another young blogger, also referred to the Clark episode, and
his post addressed the question that underlies the entire issue:
the vulnerability of Israel to Iranian nuclear weapons. Did not
the concentration of Jews in a small state surrounded by hostile
neighbors raise questions about the usefulness of the Zionist
enterprise in general, since the whole point was to make Jews
more rather than less secure?
Of course any
sensible person recognizes that an Iranian nuclear weapon would
raise serious strategic concerns for Israel, likely forcing it
into the deterrent posture of mutual assured destruction that
the United States had to endure during much of the Cold War.
Addressing these dilemmas, one (regrettably anonymous) commenter
on Klein’s blog wrote:
I’d
suggest a second conclusion: Make friends with the
neighbors. We’ve got a long history of doing it. Only this
time it would be from a position of strength, which is
ultimately the purpose of the State of Israel. Yes, there
are deep rooted, generational hostilities at play. But we
Jews excel at all sorts of things that make life better for
people: the practice of medicine and law, scientific
research, and yes, commerce. If there were a real
commitment, not just to peace, but to regional prosperity,
it would happen.
However
“unrealistic” this vision might seem in the near term, it
deserves to be quoted at length. Its noble vision stands alone
against the tremendously well-funded propaganda edifice of the
Israel lobby, from AIPAC and the Anti-Defamation League to the
American Jewish Committee and multiple other groups, whose dank
worldview reaches deep into the conservative think tanks and the
upper echelons of the Bush administration. The AIPAC sensibility
is expressed in cruder form by right-wing talk-radio hosts who
every day try to soften up their listeners to the idea of
American nuclear strikes against Muslim cities.
But this
hopeless view of the world, however much it is amplified by
today’s Jewish establishment, is not the only perspective of
American Jews. Indeed it is not even the majority view. A poll
by the American Jewish Committee revealed that support among
Jews for a military strike against Iran had dropped from 49
percent last year to 38 percent at present.
One could
argue that the dovish sentiment expressed by the commenter on
the Klein blog is not only more grounded in history, human
nature, and the particular Jewish experience than the one we
hear from the American Jewish establishment before which
Clinton, Edwards, Romney, and Giuliani kowtow. Is it really
practical to think that Israel’s long-term security needs can be
satisfied by having the United States smash the country’s
potential enemies as they arise, again and again?
The
blogosphere is playing a role in bringing to the fore these
kinds of dissenting views—though they may be majority
views—letting them circulate and evolve under the test of
critical argument. But even without the blogs, there have been
signs that the lobby’s edifice is cracking. How else can one
interpret the amazing document published by the American Jewish
Committee last month, which accused several prominent American
Jews of “anti-Semitism” because of their criticisms of current
Israeli policies? It is one thing to claim that Christians who
criticize Israel or the American relationship to Israel are
motivated by anti-Semitism; this has long been a standard
rhetorical tactic. But to wield that word against Jews—several
of them very prominent in journalism, culture and
academia—seemed so silly as to be a symptom of something like
panic, as if the traditional big powers feel the debate about
Israel and American foreign policy is veering out of their
control.
Perhaps the
AJC’s targets really weren’t only Professor Tony Judt or
playwright Tony Kushner, or even the Washington Post’s
Richard Cohen, the latter hardly a strident critic of Israel. As
Yglesias bluntly explained it, “the idea, basically, is to scare
the goyim who figure that while liberal Jews can take the heat,
they probably can’t, and had best just avoid talking about the
whole thing.”
Yglesias is on
to something important here, though the situation is more
complicated than he described. Both Jews and gentiles have been
raising the volume of discussion about the American-Israeli
relationship and Israeli policies. On the Jewish side, there is
a profusion of important peace-oriented websites. The explosion
of interest in the Walt-Mearsheimer essay and Jimmy Carter’s
book evince a Christian awakening of the Mideast’s critical
importance. The perilous present geopolitical context explains
this: a great many people wouldn’t risk the opprobrium of the
lobby for the sake of the Palestinians, who often wage their
struggle far less impressively than one might wish. But letting
the lobby influence American foreign policy toward Iraq raises
the stakes mightily. Allowing Bibi Netanyahu and his American
allies to call the tune of U.S. policy toward Iran is far too
much to bear.
But it’s true
that many Christians won’t enter this battle without Jewish
allies or at least will join it with less enthusiasm. It’s not
simply that they can’t take the heat. It’s that those who have
spent much time in journalism or academia or trying to influence
public policy have generally done so alongside Jews and are
accustomed to having Jews play significant roles in their
personal and professional lives. To fight a battle without
Jewish colleagues, or even against Jewish colleagues, is likely
to feel rather lonely. This is no doubt less true for hardcore
Christian Zionists—curiously the most aggressively Likudnik of
all segments of Christian opinion—than it is for other gentiles.
But it is this sentiment that makes the new effervescence of
Jewish dissent so important for the country at the present
moment. It opens a door for Christians to voice opinions they
might otherwise keep to themselves—not for fear of what Abe
Foxman might say about them, but out of discomfort of being
isolated from the urban, “cosmopolitan,” Jewish-influenced
milieu of which they have long been part.
It may be
beyond the American people’s power to stop George W. Bush from
launching another preventive war. But even though the president
and his top advisers can isolate themselves from currents of
public opinion, that is less the case for top military officers.
And it is far more likely that they will find ways to raise
meaningful speedbumps and roadblocks on the route to an expanded
war if there is a large enough public outcry against it. Right
now there is not. Indeed, key Democrats and Republicans are
maneuvering for applause lines in Herzliya as much as in Iowa.
There remains a policy-expert consensus that attacking Iran
would be very foolish, but it is hardly loud and far from
powerful. It has no political force behind it.
That’s why the
truth defense floated on behalf of Wes Clark was important, and
that’s why the mockery that has greeted the AJC’s claim that
Jews who criticize Israel are “anti-Semites”
are such hopeful signs: they offer the possibility of a movement
rising that could save the United States from compounding the
errors it has already made.
March 12, 2007 Issue
Copyright © 2007 The American
Conservative
Source
|
