It was sneaky of The New York Times to trot out Leon Wieseltier to trash Norman Podhoretz’ latest book, Why Are Jews Liberal? (Doubleday 2009). Wieseltier was raised in an observant home and in his 1998 book Kaddish showed that he knows something about Judaism. But Wieseltier’s snarky dismissal of Podhoretz’ work (“this is a dreary book”) is belied by a crucial admission by the New Republic’s long-haired literary editor: “Podhoretz is not mistaken when he declares that the enthusiasm for Israel among conservatives is real and new and deep. He is also correct that what sympathy there is for the Palestinians in American politics is to be found largely among Democrats.” In fact, the New Republic is watching the evolution of Obama’s Middle East policy with unfeigned alarm. They never forgive you for being right, and the personal attacks on Podhoretz have intensified in direct proportion with his prescience.
The conservative side of American politics enthusiastically supports Israel, while the Democrats harbor embittered opponents of Israel. Why do Jews overwhelmingly vote for the Democratic party? Wieseltier’s account is plausible but specious:
The problem is that [Podhoretz] cannot suppose that sympathy for the Palestinians may coexist with sympathy, and even love, for Israel. If you think that the survival of Israel requires the establishment of Palestine, because the absorption of millions of Palestinians into Israel, in an annexation or an occupation, will destroy the Jewish character or the democratic character of the state, then Podhoretz’s scorn for the peace process will not suffice as an account of Israel’s situation. If you think that the establishment of Palestine threatens the survival of Israel, because the Palestinians desire only the abolition of the Jewish state and will never be satisfied with a territorial compromise, then Podhoretz’s suspicion of any American president who does not merely comply with the demands of the Israeli government will strike you as the apotheosis of fidelity.
With this portmanteau misstatement, Wieseltier purports to refute Podhoretz. But his cleverness founders on the facts. Most American Jews Why do only 4% of Israelis (according to a Smith Poll for the Jerusalem Post believe that President Obama is pro-Israel? It simply doesn’t wash that only one in twenty-five Israelis would support the Democratic position if a reasonable person weighing Israel’s best interests would consider it the best alternative. To set the record straight:
Neither Norman Podhoretz nor anyone in the neoconservative camp opposes the creation of a Palestinian state as a matter of principle. A Palestinian state run by unreconstructed terrorists financed and armed by Iran who proclaim the goal of destroying the State of Israel is a different matter.
Annexing the West Bank and Gaza and absorbing the Palestinian population is not an alternative ever proposed by Podhoretz or anyone on in the conservative camp (although a some ultra-Orthodox Jews might advance it).
There is nothing about an occupation of disputed territories that threatens Israel’s democratic character. It is an unpleasant job, but it can continue indefinitely, or until the Palestinians have repudiated irredentist elements.
Nearly every politician on the Israeli side and on the American right, as well as the Bush administration, has envisioned a territorial compromise as part of eventual settlement – but most favor one in which Israel would keep the small part of West Bank territory on which nearly half a million Jews have built homes as well as Jerusalem.
The issue between Israel and the Obama administration is not whether the US should “merely comply with the demands of the Israeli government,” but the fact that Obama repudiated an explicit understanding between the Bush administration and the Israeli government ensuring flexibility in West Bank settlement construction in return for the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza.
What Israel is offered, and Podhoretz (along with vast majority of Israelis) abhors, is handing the West Bank over to a Palestinian failed state headed by a corrupt gang kept in place on the West Bank by the Israel Defense Forces, after its Gazan counterpart was swept away by Hamas without resistance. Giving up the West Bank settlements, as such Obama supporters as Alan Dershowitz have argued, is inconceivable until Iran is de-de-fanged. But that (as Dershowitz complained) Obama’s position amounts to a plea to satisfy Muslim sensibilities. If the Israelis can be forced to make a humiliating and potentially dangerous concession, and the US can betray previous commitments to Israel then maybe – just maybe – the Muslim world will trust the US to be evenhanded and abandon its longstanding and implacable opposition to the existence of a Jewish State in the Middle East.
Wieseltier’s editor at the New Republic, Martin Peretz, was one of the pro-Israel liberals who put his credibility on the chopping-block for Obama the candidate during the summer of 2008, when Commentary magazine and other conservative venues brought to light a pattern of Obama’s anti-Israel associations, including his chief Senatorial aide for foreign policy Anne Power. A poster-child for the concept of buyer’s remorse, Peretz has been hammering on the same points on his blog, The Spine. One recent entry insists that the “moderate” wing of Palestinian politics remains committed to terrorism and the destruction of the State of Israel. Peretz is even disgusted with Obama:
Frankly, I am sick and tired of President Obama’s eldering—more accurately, hectoring—Israel’s leaders. It is, after all, they whose country is the target of an armed and ideological cyclone that Obama has done precious little to ease. He brought nothing back from Riyadh and Cairo, absolutely nothing except the conviction of the Arab leaders that they need do nothing but sit and wait until the president squeezes one concession after another out of Jerusalem.
It was on precisely such grounds that Norman Podhoretz opposed Obama in the last election; one might say that it was in stark staring denial of the available facts that Peretz supported Obama.
Now that a liberal warhorse like Marty Peretz is making arguments that sound just like vintage Podhoretz, it seems petty of Peretz’ literary editor to make light of Podhoretz’ exasperation. Narcissistic intellectuals are free to treat Israel’s problems with the Palestinians as a laboratory experiment in social engineering, but the prospective casualties in the experiment are not lab animals but Jews. Wieseltier’s response – waspish, literary, self-consciously clever – goes a long to answering Podhoretz’ question as to why Jews are liberals. Wieseltier shows by horrible example how Jews have become enamored of their own cleverness and, with their great success in the New World, confuse their own body odor with perfume. In the old days, the Prophets qualified self-worship as idolatry. Today we call it “liberalism.”
The question is not whether Podhoretz has ignored the royal road to peace with the Palestinians – Marty Peretz is just as skeptical as he is – but why Jewish liberals like Peretz have not repudiated Obama altogether. The answer is obvious. For Democratic liberals to break with Obama would be the political equivalent of a suicide bombing. They might damage Obama, but at the expense of placing themselves on the sidelines indefinitely. If they give Jewish Americans a strong reason to cross to the Republican side, what will they be good for?
Pro-Israel Jewish liberals console themselves, as did Alan Dershowitz in a recent blog post, “that because American Jews voted Democrat by and large and because the Democrats won, we have far more influence with this administration than we would if the majority of American Jews voted Republican.” Dershowitz seems unaware of how odd this sounds, for the problem might not have been there to begin with if the majority of American Jews had voted Republican. But he has a point. Jewish Democrats always have the option to break with Obama, but like suicide, there’s always a case for postponing it. While they ponder their political mortality, Jewish liberals should be generous enough to allow Norman Podhoretz an “I told you so.”
