Soccer Dad: Lie down with ...

February 7, 2007

Lie down with ...

Richard Cohen argues in Cheapening the fight against hatred (or here) that his classification as someone who abets the new antisemitism has turned all critics of Israel into antisemites and has thus robbed the term of any meaning.

I started writing a column for The Washington Post in 1976. It was about local affairs and so it took me about a year to write my first column about anti-Semitism. Since then, I have written about 90 more, most of them full-throated condemnations of the hatred that killed fully one-third of all Jews during my own lifetime. So it comes as a surprise that has the force of a mugging to be accused of aiding the very people I so hate -- an abettor of something called "The New Anti-Semitism.''

While I have not read the report from the American Jewish Committee, I have read a number of Mr. Cohen's columns. And the charge isn't inappropriate.

One of the problems that few of Israel's critics acknowledge is that criticism of Israel often doesn't stop with just criticism, but rather it involves an attack on Israel's legitimacy. I believe that it's fair to say that someone who considers Israel an illegitimate country is an antisemite because after 2000 years of diaspora it remains a safe haven for Jews from all over.

In July, Cohen wrote an article Hunkering down with history. In it he wrote

The greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now. Israel fights Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south, but its most formidable enemy is history itself.

Perhaps the language is imprecise but in arguing that Israel is a historical mistake he made the argument of many of Israel's enemies. I pointed out at the time that this was essentially the argument of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

It's remarkable that someone who makes his living with words can be so oblivious to their meanings. Earlier, Cohen had defended Walt and Mearsheimer from being labelled antisemitic.

My own reading of the Mearsheimer-Walt paper found it unremarkable, a bit sloppy and one-sided (nothing here about the Arab oil lobby), but nothing that even a casual newspaper reader does not know. Its basic point -- that Israel's American supporters have immense influence over U.S. foreign policy -- is inarguable. After all, President Bush has just recently given Israel NATO-like status without so much as a murmur from Congress. "I made it clear, I'll make it clear again, that we will use military might to protect our ally Israel," Bush said. This was the second or third time he's made this pledge, crossing a line that previous administrations would not -- in effect, promulgating a treaty seemingly on the spot. No other country gets this sort of treatment.

Israel's special place in U.S. foreign policy is deserved, in my view, and not entirely the product of lobbying. Israel has earned it, and isn't there something bracing about a special relationship that is not based on oil or markets or strategic location but on shared values? (A bit now like Britain.) But I can understand how foreign policy "realists" such as Mearsheimer and Walt might question its utility and not only think that a bit too much power is located in a specific lobby but that it is rarely even discussed. This may be wrong, but it is not (necessarily) anti-Semitic. In fact, after reading the Mearsheimer-Walt paper, the respected Israeli newspaper Haaretz not only failed to discern anti-Semitism but commended the paper to its readers. "The professors' article does not deserve condemnation," Haaretz stated in an editorial.

I'll agree with him that the Walt Mearsheimer paper was sloppy. But the sloppiness always cut against Israel. And its most noxious charge was that even the "Clinton parameters" as discusses in Camp David in July 2000 would create "Bantustans." This, of course, was the evocative language of Arafat and his defenders. The choice of "Bantustans" was hardly accidental. Its purpose was to make the charge that Israel, even at its most concilliatory was still the moral equivalent to Apartheid-era South Africa. In other words, illegitimate.

In his current essay Cohen takes to defending Jimmy Carter.

But having said that, let me wonder about those American Jews who interpret criticism of Israel as anti-Semitism or something that abets it. The charge has been leveled at Jimmy Carter over his recent book, "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid." I, too, didn't like the book. I, too, found the book hostile, oddly unbalanced and chillingly lacking in historical context -- not just a near-total neglect of the Holocaust but also no mention of pre-1948 Arab pogroms, such as the 1929 murder of 67 Jews in Hebron. Still, Carter's overall point about Israeli occupation of the West Bank is apt, and calling him all sorts of names does not change that. The former president has in effect embraced the current, ahistorical context for Israel. For many, it is no longer the orphaned waif of the Holocaust but the bastard child of Western colonialism.

Carter used the term "Apartheid" in his title. He said it was to be provocative. But Apartheid has a meaning. Like Bantustan, it is a code word for an illegitimate form of government.

But like Walt and Mearsheimer, Carter also makes a claim that his view has been too long stifled by the Jewish influence in public discourse. What? Did they fail to read Anthony Lewis in the NY Times? Did he fail to read Georgie Ann Geyer? William Pfaff? Robert I. Friedman? All these (and more) were critics of Israel of varying degrees of viciousness and one-sidedness. No one silenced them. If Walt and Mearsheimer couldn't find an American publisher for their work it was because they didn't try too hard or because their work was sloppy and it didn't meet the standards of the publishers they approached. It wasn't because no one American would allow them to make their case.

Walt and Mearsheimer later agreed to an interview with Robert Fisk that was illustrated with a picture of an American flag where the star field was filled with Jewish Stars using imagery that would be at home in any neo-Nazi publication. The only reason Walt and Mearsheimer disassiated themselves from David Duke is because they recognized his status in America. But associating with Robert Fisk didn't bother them at all.

Cohen ought to consider his own phrase about Israel being "... the bastard child of Western colonialism." How has that view gained currency? It's gained its currency by people excusing the excesses of Israel's critics. Cohen has been at the forefront of those who defend those excesses.

Blogdigger tags: Richard Cohen, Antisemitism.