May/June 2009

The “Pro-Israel” Smear Campaign
Eric Alterman

In a better world, it might be possible to contemplate the possibility that Charles “Chas” Freeman saw his nomination to be chair of the National Intelligence Council (NIC) scuttled owing to his insensitivity to the issue of human rights in China.

But in our world, this argument has a few problems. First off, Freeman’s job had nothing to do with human rights. Questions about the trade-offs between the rights of the Chinese to free speech, free assembly, dissent and the like are handled above his pay grade. In fact, they are handled well outside his building. Second, it’s difficult, nay impossible, to think of another nominee to an intelligence post who was rejected and publicly humiliated for his or her views on human rights issues. Intelligence agencies do not normally vet their picks with the ACLU. Third, Freeman’s views on the issue are identical to those of honored ex-statesmen (and secretaries of state), Henry Kissinger, James Baker and Lawrence Eagleburger. But nobody’s calling them names.

No, it is simply dishonest to pretend that China had anything whatever to do with his ritual defenestrating in the media and Congress. This was the work, from first to last, of the folks who like to call themselves “pro-Israel” but whom opponents term “Israel’s Amen Corner,” “Likudniks” and simply “the Jews.” But as Jonathan Freedland wrote in The Guardian regarding Freeman’s forced withdrawal, even when one “discard[s] the mythology of ‘the Israel Lobby,’ the reality is bad enough.”

In the United States, discussing the power of both Jews and pro-Israel hawks—an overlapping but not identical group of people—is an extremely complicated matter. When the respected political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt wrote The Israel Lobby, they made a number of strategic errors that allowed their opponents to write off their entire argument. Their first error was to pose the issue as that of a single “lobby” when, in fact, the people who make it difficult to discuss U.S. policy toward the Middle East and the role that powerful and wealthy Jews play in influencing it constitute many such “lobbies.” Second, they sought to blame the U.S. attack on Iraq on “the Lobby” when it is easy to imagine such an attack taking place without any involvement whatever from these forces. And third, being good realist political scientists, they assumed that U.S. foreign policy ought to be conducted according to some platonic set of agreed-upon “interests” rather than a set of politically determined, emotionally driven calculations, which is clearly not the case. (See under, for instance, “Cuba.”)

Walt and Mearsheimer now see themselves frequently compared to Nazis and Islamic terrorists and are barred from speaking at the kinds of places where they were once routinely invited to speak. Much the same happened to Jimmy Carter when he authored an (admittedly terrible) book that applied the word “apartheid” to Israel. The New Republic’s Martin Peretz actually professes to believe that owing to Carter’s deviant views on the topic, the ex-president and lifelong human rights champion “will go down in history as a Jew hater.”

Freeman’s Arabist-style lack of sympathy for Israel led to his being called more names than I can recount here, up to and including being an alleged favorite of the “pedophile lobby.” The official “pro-Israel” lobby AIPAC says it had nothing to do with it. And perhaps it didn’t, though given the way it typically operates, that is hardly the end of the story.

In any case, in public, the campaign was led by ex-AIPAC staffer Steve Rosen and a group of writers and bloggers who are shared by the magazines The New Republic, Commentary and The Weekly Standard. All are associated with a neocon-driven foreign policy, with unstinting and unquestioning support of whatever the state of Israel does, almost regardless of the
consequences. Each one vociferously supported Israel’s 2006 invasion of Lebanon, now universally recognized as disastrous, and each one supported Israel’s 2008 invasion of Gaza, now (just about) universally recognized as disastrous.

Each, in other words, is a proponent of the same position as that of AIPAC—which is not merely to support absolutely everything Israel does, but to smear anyone who opposes it as either anti-Semitic or “self-hating,” depending on his or her ethnic origins. When the organization J Street was founded, The New Republic assigned the job of undermining its reputation to a young former personal assistant to Peretz named James Kirchick, who was later forced to apologize in the magazine’s pages for simply inventing from whole cloth the positions he attributed to the organization’s supporters, including yours truly.

That these people felt a need to destroy Freeman implies at least one of two complementary possibilities: Either a) they genuinely care deeply who is analyzing U.S. intelligence data because they are worried it might stand in the way of an American or Israeli attack on Iran, just as the 2006 National Intelligence Estimate did, or b) they simply wish to advertise to any aspiring public servant the danger to his or her career of taking positions inconsistent with their view of what’s good for Israel regardless of whether the aspirant will play any role whatever in the making of said policy. In other words, these folks wanted Freeman’s head on a pole for all to see.

I think both are true. I also think American Jews need to ask themselves if they really want to allow such people to speak—and act—in their name.

Eric Alterman is a professor of English and journalism at Brooklyn College and City University of New York’s graduate school. His latest book is Why We’re Liberals: A Political Handbook for Post-Bush America.