FRAMED
Adam Kirsch
Tablet, January 18, 2012
When John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt’s The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy was published in 2007, it launched a thousand essays and op-eds, upset many Jewish readers, and sold a very respectable number of copies. What it did not do, to judge by the reviews, was convince anyone of its central argument: that an all-powerful “Israel lobby” had hijacked American foreign policy using illegitimate means, and that a small but committed group of American Jews was steering the country into disaster to satisfy their parochial interests. Yet judging from a recent spate of articles in some of the country’s most respectable mainstream publications, including the Atlantic, the New York Times, and Time, it seems that, while Walt and Mearsheimer lost the policy battle, in the long term they are winning the war on the most important battleground of all: that of ideas and language.
To look back on The Israel Lobby’s reception today is to see a remarkable unanimity of rejection, from the New York Times (“mostly wrong…dangerously misleading”) and Foreign Affairs (“written in haste, the book will be repented at leisure”) to The Nation (“serious methodological deficiencies…a mess”). There was also a general recognition that in their insinuations about secret Jewish power, Mearsheimer and Walt—professors at the University of Chicago and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, respectively—had given a respectable imprimatur to old and sinister anti-Semitic tropes.
Michael Gerson, an evangelical Christian adviser to President George W. Bush, wrote in the Washington Post: “Every generation has seen accusations that Jews have dual loyalties, promote war, and secretly control political structures. These academics might not follow their claims all the way to anti-Semitism. But this is how it begins. This is how it always begins.” Alert to the same danger, George Shultz, Ronald Reagan’s secretary of State—who should know about how foreign policy is made—went so far as to write the foreword to The Deadliest Lies, a book by Abraham Foxman refuting the Walt-Mearsheimer thesis. “Jewish groups are influential,” Shultz wrote. “But the notion that these groups have anything like a uniform agenda, and that U.S. policy on Israel and the Middle East is the result of their influence, is simply wrong.” Case closed, it would seem.…
But if The Israel Lobby has not changed American politics, it has had an insidious effect on the way people talk and think about Israel, and about the whole question of Jewish power. The first time I had this suspicion was when reading, of all things, a biography of H.G. Wells. In H.G. Wells: Another Kind of Life, published in the U.K. in 2010, Michael Sherborne describes how Wells’ contempt for Nazism went along with a dislike for Judaism and Zionism, which he voiced in deliberately offensive terms even as Nazi persecution of Jews reached its peak. “To take on simultaneously the Nazis…and the Jewish lobby may have been foolhardy,” Sherborne writes apropos of Wells in 1938.
There’s no way to prove that Sherborne’s “Jewish lobby” is the intellectual descendant of Walt and Mearsheimer’s “Israel lobby,” but the inference seems like a strong one. Wells, the term suggests, was not attacking Jews, a group that in the Europe of the 1930s was conspicuous for its absolute powerlessness in the face of the evolving Nazi genocide. Instead, he was bravely standing up to a powerful “lobby,” an organization designed to punish critics of the Jews, and whose influence was on a par somehow with that of the Nazis.
What is disturbing in the Sherborne example is the way Walt and Mearsheimer’s conception of Jewish power is projected into a historical moment when it could not have been less accurate. In France during the Dreyfus Affair, it was common for anti-Semites and anti-Dreyfusards to speak of a Jewish syndicate that secretly ruled the country. Now, in the 21st century, it has once again become possible to speak of a Jewish “lobby” that it would be foolish to cross.…
Walt and Mearsheimer, of course, fill their book with denials that they are talking about a secret syndicate: “The Israel lobby is not a cabal or conspiracy,” they write in the introduction. But the book itself, with its lists of Jewish organizations and journalists, and its tone of moral outrage, works to give exactly this impression. In fact, you don’t even have to read the book to get the impression: Looking at the cover is enough. In 2002, when the British magazine the New Statesman ran a cover story titled “The Kosher Conspiracy” with an image of a gold Star of David pressing down on a Union Jack, it was roundly criticized for copying imagery that would have been familiar in the Nazi periodical Der Sturmer. Yet The Israel Lobby, published by America’s most prestigious house, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, bore a cover image of the American flag rendered in the blue and white of the Israeli flag—an unmistakable visual shorthand for Jewish domination. All by itself, this image nullified Walt and Mearsheimer’s repeated insistence that they were not describing the Israel lobby as a cabal.
So the floodgates were opened: What we have witnessed in the five years since is a blithe recuperation of dangerous, vicious imagery and ideas, with no apparent compunction about their origins or consequences. In 2010, [journalist] Lee Smith investigated the way certain bloggers—including Walt himself—amassed large anti-Semitic readerships through their conspiratorial denunciations of Israel and the Israel Lobby. Quoting the comments sections of such blogs, Smith found them rife with unbridled anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, such as “It seems to me that it is no exaggeration to say roundly that the USA in its entirety is under Jewish control of one variety or another.”
Compare this with Thomas Friedman’s Dec. 14, 2011 column in the New York Times, where he wrote about Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech before Congress: “I sure hope that Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, understands that the standing ovation he got in Congress this year was not for his politics. That ovation was bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.” Criticized for this remark, he replied to New York’s Jewish Week that “In retrospect I probably should have used a more precise term like ‘engineered’ by the Israel lobby—a term that does not suggest grand conspiracy theories that I don’t subscribe to.” But of course, “engineered” suggests exactly the same thing as “bought and paid for.” Decades ago, the right-wing commentator Pat Buchanan was widely denounced for referring to “Israel’s amen corner.” Today, an establishment pundit like Friedman can suggest even more crudely that Congress is bought and paid for by a foreign government with the sense that he is simply voicing conventional wisdom.
Similarly, Joe Klein of Time recently wrote apropos of a possible American conflict with Iran: “It’s another thing entirely to send American kids off to war, yet again, to fight for Israel’s national security.” After being challenged…to name a single instance when American troops have fought for Israeli security, Klein went on to apologize for his misuse of commas—it was the sending off to war that was “yet again,” not the fighting for Israel. But if this was a misreading, it was a natural one, given Klein’s earlier writing and, especially, given the way it aligns with the words of Walt and Mearsheimer, who wrote that “Israel’s enemies get weakened or overthrown…and the United States does most of the fighting, dying, rebuilding, and paying.” Once a far-left conspiracy theory, the idea that the Iraq War was fought at the behest of Jews for Israel’s interest had drifted so far to the center that it could appear under the aegis of Time.…
It would be easy to dismiss these statements…except that they have proven to be anything but isolated. Take for example Mearsheimer’s recent endorsement of The Wandering Who?, a book by a psychotically anti-Semitic ex-Israeli named Gilad Atzmon.… Mearsheimer lent his academic prestige to Atzmon’s poisonous ravings, praising the book for unveiling, yes, unscrupulous Jewish power: “Panicked Jewish leaders, [Atzmon] argues, have turned to Zionism (blind loyalty to Israel) and scaremongering (the threat of another Holocaust) to keep the tribe united and distinct from the surrounding goyim.…”
In the current Atlantic, a profile of Mearsheimer by Robert D. Kaplan casts the Atzmon episode, and the Israel Lobby debate generally, as unfortunate distractions from the achievements of a great foreign-policy thinker. “The real tragedy of such controversies, as lamentable as they are, is that they threaten to obscure the urgent and enduring message of Mearsheimer’s life’s work, which topples conventional foreign-policy shibboleths and provides an unblinking guide to the course the United States should follow in the coming decades,” Kaplan writes.…
This is not quite adequate to the situation. Indeed, the more one accepts Kaplan’s premise that Mearsheimer is a great sage, the more disturbing it becomes that the foreign-policy expert has lent his name to the legitimization of anti-Semitic discourse. In his article, Kaplan continues to bolster Mearsheimer’s self-image as a brave heretic paying a price for crossing the Jews. “Within media ranks, The Israel Lobby has delegitimized Mearsheimer,” Kaplan writes. Here is the neat rhetorical power of the Israel Lobby idea, which it shares with anti-Semitism in general: If you are taken to task for attacking the Jews, you become a martyr to the very Jewish power you denounced.
“Say what you will about The Israel Lobby,” Kaplan writes, but—in the words of an expert he quotes—“It changed the debate on Israel, even if it did not change the policy.” Indeed, I give the book even more credit: It is possible today to see the publication of The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy as an intellectual landmark, one of those rare books that succeed in altering the intellectual climate. Without it, it is hard to imagine Friedman and Klein and others casually writing as they did.
In this sense, Walt and Mearsheimer offer a case study in the old truth that ideas have consequences. Language is the most intangible of things, yet the language we use determines the boundaries of the thinkable and, ultimately, the shape of the world we live in. Now we live in a world where it is possible to say in leading publications, without fear of censure, that Jews buy and pay for the U.S. Congress and American troops are sent to die in Israel’s wars. For that, Walt and Mearsheimer deserve their fair share of credit.
THE CBC’S PROPAGANDA WAR
Bruce Bawer
FrontPage, January 26, 2012
The only thing worse than having the biases of the mainstream media inflicted upon you on a daily basis is having to subsidize it. For Americans, to be sure, the rip-off isn’t so terrible: the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which funds PBS and NPR, gets $430 million a year from the federal government, which comes to only a couple of bucks per household. In [Canada], by contrast…the CBC receives more than $1.5 billion a year from the Canadian government, which amounts to upwards of $100 per household.
And what, exactly, are Canadian taxpayers paying for? That’s the question asked—and very illuminatingly answered—by a new documentary, This Hour Could Have 10,000 Minutes: The Biases of the CBC, produced by James Cohen and Fred Litwin. (The title is a reference to “This Hour Has 22 Minutes,” a long-running CBC series specializing in political satire.) Focusing on two main topics—anti-Israel bias and anti-conservative bias—the documentary consists almost entirely of CBC clips in which we can see these biases in action. To judge by this compilation, the CBC is perhaps even more slanted than the infamously partial BBC—and, perhaps, even more brazen about it.
Take the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In the documentary we see excerpts from a CBC report on the second Gaza “Freedom Flotilla” that consists entirely of interviews with flotilla participants—all of whom represent it as a virtuous and innocuous aid mission and condemn Israel’s actions against the previous flotilla as absolutely unjustified. At no point does the CBC provide even a brief reminder that there is, in fact, another side to the story. (As the documentary asks: “Is this reporting? Or stenography?”)
In one report, the CBC describes the Jewish Defense League, untruthfully, as a terrorist group that’s banned in Canada. In another report, on Hamas’s struggle with Fatah and takeover of Gaza, the CBC includes file footage of Israeli soldiers firing at terrorists—images that have nothing to do with the story in question. In both cases, the CBC was compelled to issue on-air apologies. (This documentary, in fact, is packed with on-air apologies for this sort of thing.)
We’re shown a clip in which an interviewer lets nutty ex-Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, a 9/11 Truther, rant away about Israel—and doesn’t challenge her when she accuses Israel of committing a “massacre” of “unarmed humanitarian activists.” And we’re shown another clip in which the despicable George Galloway is treated with fawning respect by interviewer George Stroumboulopoulos, who describes him as being banned from Canada (he’s not) and who agrees with Galloway that it’s “ridiculous” to consider him a terrorist. (To clarify this issue, the documentary makers show a clip from Arab TV in which Galloway is seen handing money over to Hamas—and bragging about it.)
Not only is the CBC systematically anti-Israeli and pro-Palestinian. Its journalists introduce Israel and “Palestine” into stories that are utterly unrelated to Israel and Palestine, comparing aggressors with Israel and victims with Palestinians, the more firmly to fix in viewers’ minds the notion that Israelis are, indeed, the incarnation of evil and Palestinians as pure as the driven snow.
In a story about Somalis fleeing from belligerent Islamists in North Africa, for example, a CBC reporter says that “the Somalis are becoming the Palestinians of Africa.” In a story about Egypt’s use of its emergency laws to quell uprisings, another CBC reporter, in an apparent effort to make Egypt’s actions sound less harsh, points out that “Israel has an emergency law too,” which he proceeds to describe at length—even though those laws have nothing whatsoever to do with the events he’s reporting on.
The CBC, as the documentary points out, “can use any story to show how awful Israel is.” In a report on the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the CBC manages to work in an absurd comparison between the Soviets’ wall and Israel’s security fence: “For some people, the Berlin anniversary is a reminder of their own divisions. Today a group of Palestinian activists took down a slab of the security barrier that separates Israel and the West Bank.” (The report also describes the barrier as an “electronic fence,” which it isn’t.…)
The CBC is, of course, also hostile to Canada’s own Conservative Party. The documentary showcases a shameless piece of trickery by the network, in which a clip of Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper is taken out of context to make it look as if he’s putting down Canada’s Muslim community. After showing us the CBC version of Harper’s statement, Cohen and Litwin present us with the uncut version, which makes it clear that Harper was making a respectful comment about both Jews and Muslims. On this occasion, too, the CBC was forced to apologize.…
This Hour Could Have 10,000 Minutes was first shown in Ottawa last November and was followed by a panel discussion among several journalists and media critics. That discussion is included on the DVD.… [A] panelist notes that even though the CBC’s viewership numbers keep going down, its government subsidies continue to climb.…
RAISING ISRAELI PATRIOTS
Michael Freund
Jerusalem Post, February 8, 2012
Last week, [Israeli] Education Minister Gideon Sa’ar announced the launch of a profoundly important Zionist educational initiative, one that will have a transformative effect on Israel’s youth. Speaking in the Knesset, Sa’ar said that a pilot program enabling students to visit Hebron and the Cave of the Patriarchs will soon be expanded to include schools from across the country.
Previously, the outings, known as “heritage tours,” had been limited to students from the Jerusalem area on a trial basis. In the past year, approximately 3,000 Israeli high school teens, two-thirds of whom attend secular schools, took part. This is an invaluable undertaking and Sa’ar deserves praise for pushing it through. It will go a long way toward inculcating Israeli youth with a greater appreciation for our link to this land.…
Indeed, it is widely acknowledged that Israel’s educational system desperately needs a strong injection of Zionist and Jewish values. Israeli students must gain a deeper understanding of our past, and there is no better place for them to do so than in Hebron, the burial place of our Biblical patriarchs.
Anyone who is exposed to the heroic story of the return of the Jewish people to Hebron cannot help but be moved by the faith and perseverance which it embodies. Walking through the ancient streets of the city where King David ruled, and offering a silent prayer while standing beside the tomb of our father Abraham, are powerful and emotive experiences which should be part of every Israeli child’s education.
Not surprisingly, however, the proposed plan elicited howls of protest from the extreme Left, which cannot seem to tolerate the idea that Israeli youth should learn about their heritage. When the pilot program was first launched last year, Meretz Chairman MK Haim Oron blasted it as “brain-washing” while MK Ahmed Tibi said that “requiring students to visit occupied territory is ideological coercion.”
This past Sunday, after the expansion of the program was announced, more than 200 teachers took Sa’ar to task when they signed a joint letter declaring that they would refuse to participate in what they deemed to be a “manipulative” effort. Some of the teachers, in interviews with the press, actually went so far as to criticize him for trying to promote Zionist and nationalist values, as though there was something inherently wrong in doing so.
What they seem to have forgotten is that schools exist not merely to teach the mechanics of math or the structure of a sentence, but the qualities of good citizenship too. And to be a good citizen means to appreciate and understand one’s nation, its history, legacy and traditions.
The Land of Israel is a living curriculum, with a wide array of sites that impart our people’s story and evoke pride in its very special saga. We are blessed with so many evocative symbols, from the Western Wall to the Cave of the Patriarchs to Rachel’s Tomb, which far too many Israelis no longer go to see.…
As the 18th-century political philosopher Baron de Montesquieu once pointed out, the promotion of love for one’s country “ought to be the principal business of education.” That must become our motto as well.
A TEST OF TRUE FRIENDSHIP
Charles Bybelezer
According to Canadian Foreign Minister John Baird, “Canada does not stand behind Israel; Canada stands shoulder to shoulder with Israel.” And he’s right. Under Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s leadership, Canada has unquestionably assumed the mantle, previously held by the U.S., of “Israel’s best friend.”
This stems primarily from the fact that Canada’s current government fundamentally understands, and sympathizes with, Israel’s reality and the threats it faces. This was made clear by Mr. Baird’s latest trip to Israel (his third), during which he:
1. Reaffirmed that Canada “believes passionately in Israel’s right not only to exist, but to exist as a Jewish state and to live in peace and security;” 2. “Recognized the long and unbroken history of antiSemitism,” and correctly described as the new antiSemitism the “constant barrage of rhetorical demonization, double standards and delegitimization [of Israel];” 3. Acknowledged that “Israel, today, is a country whose very existence is under attack, both literally and figuratively;” 4. Labeled as “profoundly wrong” the Palestinians’ unilateral attempt to obtain statehood recognition at the United Nations; 5. Reiterated that “[Canada] has no interest in interacting with Hamas. It is a terrorist organization;” 6. Admitted that “it would be easier to…engage[e] in anti-Israeli rhetoric…but Canada will not ‘go along to get along.’”
From Israel’s perspective, Canada “gets” it.
Mr. Harper, for his part, has an equally impressive record. During his tenure, Canada has repeatedly supported Israeli positions in various forums: by infusing a much-needed counterweight to the overwhelming anti-Israel discourse in the UN by routinely casting the lone vote against anti-Israel resolutions, and by twice being the first country (preceding even Israel) to announce a boycott of the UN’s anti-Israel Durban Conference; by slashing its contribution to UNRWA, the organization founded to perpetuate the Palestinian “refugee” crisis; by steadfastly supporting Israel’s legitimate “blockade” of the Gaza Strip, and, in 2006, by becoming the first country to cut off financial aid to the “democratically” elected Hamas government; and by refusing to criticize Israeli “settlement” construction in the Jewish people’s biblical heartland.
More recently, at a summit last summer in Deauville, France, Mr. Harper defied the overwhelming pressure exerted upon him by seven of the world’s most powerful countries and refused to include in the G8 leaders’ final communiqué any reference to an Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders (not as a stipulation for signing an “historic” peace agreement with the Palestinians, mind you, but rather as a precondition for jump-starting negotiations). In the words of one European diplomat, “The Canadians were really very adamant, even though [US President Barack] Obama expressly referred to 1967 borders.”
Furthermore, Mr. Harper’s government in November became the first country to sign the Ottawa Protocol on Combating AntiSemitism, the guiding principles for which were developed at a summit held in Canada in 2010. At that time, Mr. Harper delivered what is likely the most impassioned speech ever by a foreign head of state on behalf of Israel: “When Israel, the only country in the world whose very existence is under attack, is consistently and conspicuously singled out for condemnation, I believe we are morally obligated to take a stand.… Whether it is at the United Nations, or any other international forum, the easy thing to do is simply to just…go along with this anti-Israeli rhetoric…and to excuse oneself with the label of ‘honest broker.’ There are, after all, a lot more votes, a lot more, in being anti-Israeli.… But, as long as I am Prime Minister…Canada will take that stand, whatever the cost.”
Fitting, then, was Mr. Baird’s assertion on January 30 at the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial museum in Jerusalem that “Israel has no greater friend in the world than Canada.” Less fitting, however, is that in spite of Canada’s remarkable and deeply rooted support for Israel, neither Mr. Baird, nor his country, officially recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.
Given the current strength of the Canada-Israel relationship, the possibility of moving the Canadian embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem should at the very least be reintroduced into the public discourse. Such a gesture would be Mr. Harper’s ultimate legacy to the Jewish people and the Jewish state of Israel.
(Charles Bybelezer is Publications Chairman for the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research.)
