Mondoweiss: Q. Ten years ago in March you emailed me the Israel lobby article from the London Review of Books, by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. What do you think of that paper and that book? And how does it influence us today?
Well I think The Israel Lobby is the most important political book to be published in this century [2007]. For a long time there have been these sort of hints of establishment malaise with the nature of our relationship with Israel. People think we’re too deferential to Israel or they say that the Palestinians are being unjustly denied a state or self-determination, and were unjustly cleansed from their land, and that we’ve put Israel on this huge moral pedestal, which is a mistake of judgement. This has been expressed before, perhaps most prominently by George Ball, who was maybe the smartest cabinet member of the Kennedy Johnson administration. But it tended to be expressed by people at the end of a long career. So it wouldn’t necessarily be followed through.
So here suddenly you have two first rate academics and writers with all the skills of knowledge and synthesis and self-expression who publish this really detailed book when they’re still very much in their professional primes, and every point was argued as well as it could be done. There was no exaggeration, but there was no pulling back either. And I sensed that the first time I read the first three paragraphs of the LRB piece, I just felt that there was something special about the language, it had an exemplary combination of forcefulness and restraint. And it was done by – you know it’s not easy to be an international relations professor, it’s not easy to be a professor at the University of Chicago and Harvard, and it’s not easy to be at the top of that profession; and never before had this argument been done really so well, even if had had been bouncing around for a long time.
Look, I have been doing research on 1956 and Dulles and Eisenhower, and you can see a lot of State Department people who show up in the archives, saying, Israel is going off the deep end here and why are Americans letting it happen, and can’t there be some counterpressure to all the pressure we’re getting from the Israel lobby? And that was in 1956, when all these problems were in embryo compared to now.
So it’s extraordinary. I think books stay around, and people will be reading that book for a long time. I don’t know whether a book can change the world, but probably half of the activists in the Democratic Party essentially know its arguments and agree with it and it comes out in the Sanders movement and the struggle over the platform. Maybe 15 percent of Republicans do…
Because there’s a reflexive hawkish response in the American Washington establishment or deep state almost whatever happens in the world with things that have no visible connection to Israel. For example, we help foment a coup in Ukraine and Russia responds with a countercoup and suddenly the beltway establishment is up in arms. This has nothing to do with Israel, but it has to do with a reflexive hawkishness, and the idea that it’s America’s duty or role, or destiny to be the indispensable nation muddling about in issues all over the world. So the Israel lobby has nothing to do with that. Or the Israel lobby kind of surfs on that sentiment, taking that sentiment and trying to use it to Israel’s advantage. And saying America’s this big global power and it has to do thus and such, and Israel like America is a democracy, and so it can do no wrong, in Gaza or Lebanon of anywhere else…
Q. You write about the 96 “Clean Break” paper. Various neocons believed that plan; and one can craft a conspiratorial understanding of how mayhem among the so called states of the Middle East that followed serves Israel. Annie Robbins has long talked about this.
I think that’s a fair conclusion. So the next question, which I don’t have an answer to, is to what extent has Israel helped foment, say, the civil war in Syria, which obviously has tremendous tragic consequences. I don’t know.
Q. Remind us, the Clean Break, what was that about?
In the 90’s several pro-Israel neoconservative intellectuals wrote a kind of platform or an action plan for [Israeli PM Benjamin] Netanyahu who had just been elected for the first time, suggesting that Israel should a, not be involved in any American sponsored peace process, but also that the disruption of various states in the Middle East including Iraq, Lebanon and I think Syria, would be very much in Israel’s interests. Some people have linked this to various rightwing Israelis who were writing earlier.
But basically yes– there’s a certain kind of rightwing Israeli analyst who thinks, We benefit from chaos for obvious reasons; strong states that have a scientific infrastructure and a middle class are a threat to Israel, but warring tribes are not. I think that was part of the impetus for the Iraq war, an unspoken one of course; people said that we have to bring democracy to Iraq, but I have to think that for neoconservatives, chaos in Iraq and the division into an ethnic sectarian war, was a quite possible outcome of our invasion, and they were fine with that…
Q. Tell me the Joseph Sobran story.
It’s a very interesting story. I don’t know Joe Sobran. I think I met him once briefly but I know some people who knew him well, like Pat Buchanan. He joined The National Review as a young graduate student, he had a wonderful prose style that leapt off the page, and for William F. Buckley, he was a conservative Catholic, he was someone who was outraged by abortion and Roe v Wade and a lot of the cultural changes taking place in the ‘60 and ‘70s, but he had wide interests. When he was still a grad student in Michigan, Buckley would fly him to New York every two weeks so he could write editorials for a few days, and fly him back. This is, pre email, obviously, and that gives you a sense of how esteemed he was. And he and Buckley were personally close.
Joe also had fairly conventionally dissident views about Israel and the Israel lobby, and he would occasionally write somewhat snarky things about how quick we are when Israel says jump, to say how high. But it didn’t attract a great deal of notice until the first Iraq war. And I don’t really know what Sobran thought. I know conservative Catholics often have less of a braking mechanism about Jewish sensibilities than people who grew up with Jews. Whereas elite Protestants tended to have gone to school with a lot of Jews. So there’s a difference there, and I think Sobran didn’t have any brakes. But then the first Iraq war came, and he wrote several columns saying that Israel was lobbying for the war, and I know around this time, Midge Decter compiled a dossier of offensive Sobran columns and was circulating it around, and Buckley at first withdrew from Sobran and demoted him and said he wanted to read everything Sobran wrote before it went in the magazine. He wanted to have every column faxed to him, but Buckley didn’t have a fax machine, so he read it over the phone. And eventually Sobran who had been a key figure at National Review and was a self confident, self respecting intellectual, refused to do that, and wrote what he wanted, and Buckley severed him from National Review.
I don’t know Sobran, so this is a subject for a novel, but Sobran eventually wrote the kinds of things that only an anti-Semite would write. He was cut off from his regular source of income so he began to accept invitations from really fringey rightwing groups, and he didn’t have any money, and I remember Eric Breindel [late former editor NY Post editorial page] told me in great detail about his tax situation, his tax delinquency, and I kind of wondered how Breindel knew that, but it was must have been something that someone in the neoconservative world was paying attention to– with satisfaction.
My last and most memorable contact with Sobran was, we were starting a magazine in summer 2002, and Taki and Pat Buchanan and I wanted to rehabilitate Sobran as a columnist. Then I read in the Forward that he was going to give a speech to some Holocaust denial outfit. I said no. First Pat called him and then I called him and we said, Don’t go. And he basically blew us off. I’m not going to let them tell me what to say or where I can speak and this and that. Basically, you can’t have a writer who addresses a Holocaust denial organization be a writer for your magazine, it just isn’t going to work!
But it was funny. We were calling him at the airport. He was about to get on a plane…
…[Gore Vidal] wrote a piece for the Nation and he laid into the Podhoretzes combining their support for Israel and their general warmongering and he used a lot of phrases that were at least borderline anti-Semitic; it was sort of like, Go back to your own country. I don’t want to go back to the piece so I won’t characterize it one way or another, but the Podhoretzes tried to organize a big campaign against him to get the Nation and their editors and the Nation’s contributors to repudiate Vidal’s antisemitism. Probably 75 percent of the people they asked said they didn’t find anything egregious about what Vidal had said, and it was an attack on the Podhoretzes, and not on the Jews, which was true. Norman wrote this big essay, called the hate that dare not speak its name. Something like that. I remember reading the essay and thinking, going up the elevator, who’s Norman attacking now? Gore Vidal!
It wasn’t my issue at all. I knew that Israel had a problem with the Palestinians, there was injustice on that side, but it was number 9 among the things I cared about. And I thought eventually Israel would be forced to grant Palestinians a state.
Norman and Midge actually made a contrast between the left’s refusal to condemn, shun and push Vidal away from being a respected writer and Buckley’s readiness to accommodate them by getting rid of Sobran. It was kind of his main point. I guess their point was that Republicans and conservatives were not anti-semitic, but the left tolerates anti-semitsim. That was part of the polemical charge. It wasn’t a big issue to me.
Anyway, I guess maybe 5 years after that I was working as an editor and columnist for the New York Post and I had to write a column every week, after work. I had noticed an item in the paper during the 1992 Democratic primary that Gore Vidal was some kind of adviser to Jerry Brown, in talking about infrastructure and high speed rapid transit and things like that. I was sort of pro Clinton, but I didn’t have a strong preference, and I thought I could write a column, and the column could write itself. I would get Commentary to fax over the old copy of their essay, which they of course did quickly. So I wrote like an 800 word newspaper column based largely on the points that Midge and Norman had leveled years ago and I said, What is Jerry Brown going to do about this, why is he going to take advice from Vidal?
I was so lazy, I thought, I can write this column and be home for dinner at 9:30. I started after the paper had gone to bed at 530 or 6. And everybody praised it. I first got a whiff that if you’re named McConnell and you accuse someone of antisemitism, people say, Yay! Yeah, go for it.
And Jerry Brown severed Vidal from his campaign.
Q. He did?
He did. And some pretty significant New York radio station dragged poor Victor Navasky who had gone thru the woods on this issue 8 years before to debate me. I feel sorry for Victor. We went on the radio. Because there’s an infinite media market for accusations of anti-semitism, which I began to sense then.
Alright. So if you fast forward after that, I began to be more seriously thinking about Israel and Palestine, I came to realize that– Vidal wrote in such a way that I wouldn’t write it, but a lot of his key points were right. Midge and Norman and their magazine had consistently been pushing for more militaristic US policies and war, particularly in the Mideast. Vidal was right about that. And they do have a kind of divided loyalty. I don’t know the formal question of, do you have joint citizenship. But I know Norman, I used to know Norman pretty well, and he sees everything through the lens of what’s good for Israel, and all the neocons do. So Vidal was picking away at the scab, and he was doing it in an overly polemical and noncareful way, but there was a lot of truth in what he was saying, and I wasn’t immersed enough in the story in the 80s to think about that.
When he died I wrote a piece saying I wish I’d had a chance to apologize and explain what I thought then and now.
