The Lobby and the Great Protestant Crusader: The NYT Confronts Mearsheimer and Walt [Not Quite] Head On
Lenni Brenner - Counterpunch
I've been a political activist for 54 years. During that time I've had plenty of chances to do stupid things and I've taken full advantage of the opportunities. But I've developed only one perversion: I not only read New York Times editorials, I collect them.
One thing is for certain. John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt's "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" has made the big time. It's been discussed in the Times, read by the city's intellectuals and many others worldwide via its website, which 1.9 million individuals hit daily.
'Out of town' born residents may have wondered why "Essay Stirs Debate About Influence of a Jewish Lobby" was placed in the paper's 4/12 Metro section, reserved for stories about corruption trials of Brooklyn Democrats. But, while Jews are only ca. 2% of Americans, there is nothing more local than an attack on Zionism in a city where 8% of the total population, and 30% of all whites, are Jews.
Alan Finder told us that other "opinion journals" attacked the professors, "part of a group of foreign policy analysts, known as realists, who believe that international politics is fundamentally about the pursuit of power," as anti-Semitic. But he took no position on the contents of their critique.
The Times hasn't taken a stand on the merits of their arguments for two reasons: Its record on Jewish issues before the creation of Israel in 1948 was shameful and got worse afterwards. A former executive editor spoke for it in the 11/14/01 issue. It's willful blindness to the holocaust was "surely the century's bitterest journalistic failure."
Forbes Magazine laughingly calls itself a "capitalist tool," but today's Times is convinced that it is capitalism's official organ. Indeed if control still rests tightly in the hands of the Ochs and Sulzberger families, publishers since 1896, now worth well over half a billion dollars, a former Federal Communications Commission Chair is on its board of directors and Bear Stern Securities, Brown Brothers Harriman, Charles Schwalb, Citibank, Goldman, Sachs & Co., JP Morgan Chase Bank and Merill Lynch are major stockholders.
Originally from Germany, the Ochs and Sulzbergers started as members of the "Reform" Jewish sect, which preached Tory American patriotism. When the Times defended Atlanta Jew Leo Frank, lynched in 1916 after false rape and murder charges, death threats put Adolph Ochs under "neurological" treatment. He recovered, but thereafter it deliberately fled from fights against anti-Semitism and spiraled right. In 1922 it hailed Mussolini's Fascism as "the most interesting governmental experiment of the day .... We should all be glad that he is going at it vigorously."
Of course, when Hitler came to power in 1933, even it admitted to "qualms which the news from Berlin must cause to all friends of Germany." But
"It is announced that the national finances will be kept in strong and conservative hands .... There is thus no warrant for immediate alarm. It may be that we shall see the 'tamed Hitler' of whom some Germans are hopefully speaking. Always we may look for some such transformation when a radical or demagogue fights his way into responsible office."
Tame Hitler quickly vanished from editorials. But wherever possible the paper evaded dealing with Nazi anti-Semitism. By 1942 it buried Washington's 1st announcement of the Holocaust on page 10.
Of course the present publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, Jr., bears no responsibility for his kin's Hitler era infamies. But he knows that if the Times prints an editorial word in favor of any Mearsheimer/Walt thesis, Zionists would fight back, exposing its morbid role in the Hitler era. That can't do it any good. But there is a more important reason why it can't accept their line.
The Ochs and Sulzbergers privately dismissed pre-state Zionism as utopian and sectarian, raising questions as to Jews' loyalty to the US. In 1946, Arthur Hays Sulzberger gave a synagogue speech denouncing Zionist attacks on calls for liberalizing America's immigration laws, passed in 1924 to keep down the number of Catholic and Jewish immigrants. These Zionists wanted Jews in Displaced Persons camps in Germany to have no choice but to go to Palestine. They retaliated by getting the city's Jewish department stores to pull ads from the paper.
Zionism was an offstage noise in 1933-39 Jewish New York. The important political players were the reformist socialists who led the International Ladies Garment Workers Union. They quit the Socialist Party to support Roosevelt. Their major rival were the Communist Party's Jews. Both despised Zionism for seeking charity donations from Jewish capitalists who should have given the money to their Jewish and other workers. They condemned the World Zionist Organization for its "Transfer" Agreement with Hitler. To get Jewish money out of Germany, the WZO sold Nazi goods in the Middle East and shipped it oranges to Europe via Nazi boats. But the holocaust stunned them. Both left elements regressed into nationalism.
Most capitalists mobilized by the Zionists had shared the broad community indifference to Zionism. Most knew little to nothing about Zionism's Hitler era record. But the slaughter had the same effect on them as on 90% of the Jews, who suddenly supported the creation of a Jewish state as a refuge for survivors.
Then Joseph Stalin decided to back Israel's creation. The cold war on, he wanted the British out of the Middle East. He reasoned that if the Zionists ran them out of Palestine, London's Arab puppets would finally start kicking them out of the region. Stalin's line allowed the CPUSA's ranks to do what they wanted to do, and the emotional wave generated by this singular cross-class unity inundated the Times. Thousands of Jews joined hundreds of young Communists, Jew and gentile, black and white, in dancing the hora, the Israeli folk dance, around the Times Tower as its electric sign announced the creation of Israel and its recognition by Stalin and the US.
Sulzberger surrendered. The 5/16/48 editorial after Israel's independence declaration even insisted that "The decision by the Government of the United States to recognize Israel calls logically for a corollary decision by the same Government to lift its present arms embargo."
Support for US taxpayers arming Israel to the teeth remains unquestioned dogma, even though Sulzberger is aware of Zionist bigotry. His assimilationist father married a Christian and she raised him. In 1969 he visited Israel. "The Family," a 4/19/99 New Yorker article, told of his
"challenging a senior official of the Israeli government who suggested that, no matter what happened in the world, everyone around the table would always have a homeland in Israel. 'Excuse me, but I'm an Episcopalian! Is this still my country?' Arthur, Jr. said loudly. Thirty years later, he continues to regard the Israeli's comment as racist."
Can we reasonably hypothesize that Sulzberger sees much of what we see, whatever Times editorials say and don't say? Lefts and Zionists argue with Mearsheimer and Walt re the degree of pro-Zionist neo-con responsibility for the Iraq invasion, but no one doubts that the lobby played a major role in building public support for what the paper now knows is a disastrous war, won or lost. However Sulzberger's national Democratic electoral commitment makes it very difficult for his paper to editorially denounce the lobby.
The Democrats are more crucially dependent on Zionist campaign contributions than the Republicans. If the paper put the lobby under a critical editorial microscope, they would still hustle rich Zionists for bucks. And it knows it can't go over to McCain or any 'moderate' national Republican candidate and hold the allegiance of its educated readers, who cynically see the Democrats as lesser evils, domestically, or share its support for them as rational imperialists.
Unfortunately for the Times, sooner or later it will have to take an editorial position on the lobby. It can't evade what is being discussed in its pages. As soon as Finder's reportage appeared, the Council for the National Interest put an ad in its 4/16 issue:
"What happens in Palestine deeply influences what will happen in Iraq and in the war on terror. As a recent study by professors at Harvard and the University of Chicago concludes, 'Saying that Israel and the United States are united by a shared terrorist threat has the causal relationship backwards: rather the United States has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way around.'"
Paul Findley of CNI was driven out of Congress by the lobby when he questioned US ties to Israel. We have met. His anti-Zionism started from conservative premises similar to Mearsheimer/Walt but he is now genuinely devoted to justice for the Palestinians.
The issue got hotter with a 4/19 op-ed by Tony Judt, an ex-editor of the New Republic who broke with Zionism in 2003:
"Is Israel, in Mearsheimer/Walt's words, 'a liability in the war on terror and the broader effort to deal with rogue states?' I think it is, but that too is an issue for legitimate debate."
Judt gave us the classic right-wing argument against concern that anti-Semites cheer on Mearsheimer/Walt.
"The damage that is done by America's fear of anti-Semitism when discussing Israel is .... bad for Israel: by guaranteeing it unconditional support, Americans encourage Israel to act heedless of consequences."
Dialectically, the Times' dilemma also exposes Mearsheimer/Walt's and Judt's contradictions. In the tale, the mice decided that if the cat had a bell around its neck, they would hear it and hide. Unfortunately, they had no answer to an old mouse's "But how do you bell the cat?" Mearsheimer and Walt were cofounders of the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy. Its prime organizers were Cato Institute conservatives with 1980s Democratic presidential wannabe Gary Hart providing 'center' cover. To all observers' amazement, they proclaimed to be "united by our opposition to an American empire."
They claim a 'libertarian' vision of what American capitalism should be like. The US is on top of the world economically. It should relax. Constantly expanding militarily imperialism is too statist for them. They want someone in capitalist Washington to make Israel 'make nice' to the Palestinians so that rich Muslims can make nice to America. But who do they think is going to do this? Bush? Rebellious Republicans? The Democrats?
The Democrats and Republicans have been imperialists since before the Spanish-American war. Opposing Bush and neo-con imperialism but not opposing both parties isn't anti-imperialism. De facto it's a call for a new emperor with smarter advisers, i.e., themselves. Sociologist C. Wright Mills encountered their type in academia during the Vietnam war. 'We have to be realistic' was the pro-war professors' national anthem as they and Washington marched to defeat. His "crackpot realist" description of them perfectly fits Mearsheimer and Walt.
Judt broke with Zionism but he also has realpolitik concerns for "the imperial might and international reputation of the United States." Alas, Washington has "chosen to lose touch with the rest of the international community on this issue."
Bush and the neo-cons are so close-linked that its hard to envision a scenario where he breaks with them and retains credibility with anyone. Some Republicans are beginning to wonder where he is leading them. However its his ties to Islamic fanatics, not his hyper-Zionism or Christian zealotry, that upset most of them. Rank and file Republicans were scandalized by pictures of two happy guys, Bush and Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah, holding hands at the ranch. Then Bush's Iraqi Shia clients responded to Sunni terror with their own. Then came the Afghan Abdur Rahman infamy.
Bush was ahead there. Al-Qaada and the Taliban were on the run. Suddenly his native satraps' prosecution of a Christian convert outraged them. They can't justify Christian military dying to establish 'friendly' Islamic states with laws calling for executing converts to their religion. Their critique of Bush has little in common with the profs' or Judt's.
That leaves conservative anti-Zionists with the Democrats, exactly as with the Times. Except that Hillary Clinton still stands by her vote for funding the invasion. And now she constantly makes the rounds of New York's sex-segregated Orthodox synagogues, seeking support from rabbis and male congregants who begin every day with a prayer to God: "Thank you for making me a man, not a woman."
The 1/11/06 Village Voice described her ties to Brooklyn State Assemblyman Dov Hikind, Zionism's David Duke. The Klansman mainstreamed into the Republicans. Hikind went from Meir Kahane's Jewish Defense League, listed by the US and Israel as terrorists, to the Democrats. He is against giving even an inch of the West Bank back to the Palestinians. He opposed her 2000 campaign until she went to him. Now he's in and out of her office. "'Are you going to endorse Hillary Clinton?'.... Hikind said yes, stressing how great a friend she is."