by Zev Chafets
Article 22 of the Hamas Charter accuses Jews of “controlling news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others. With their money they stirred revolutions in various parts of the world with the purpose of achieving their interests and reaping the fruit therein. They were behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution, and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about, here and there. With their money they formed secret societies, such as Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, the Lions, and others in different parts of the world for the purpose of sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist interests. With their money they were able to control imperialistic countries and instigate them to colonize many countries in order to enable them to exploit their resources and spread corruption there.”
After Hamas’s electoral victory in the West Bank and Gaza, in January 2006, its political leader, Khalid Mashal (who lives in exile in Damascus, under the protection of the Ba’athist Syrian government), visited Tehran. There, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme spiritual leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran, promised Hamas money and support to defeat the “occupier regime” in Palestine and, presumably, Israel’s foreign Jewish enablers.
Al Qaeda, experts correctly point out, is not Persian, Shiite, or Palestinian. It very likely has no direct links to Iran, Hezbollah, or Hamas (although one of its senior leaders, Ayman al-Zawahiri, started out in Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, the progenitor of Hamas). Al Qaeda is a Sunni Islamist movement whose head, Osama Bin Laden, is a Saudi. But Bin Laden’s mentor, a Palestinian cleric named Abdullah Azzam, was also among the creators of Hamas. In 1998, when Bin Laden and four colleagues issued a declaration of war against the West, they called it a “Jihad Against Jews and Crusaders.” And, when Al Qaeda attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, they were cheered throughout the Arab world by Sunnis and Shiites alike.
In 2003, Daniel Pearl, a correspondent of the Wall Street Journal, was taken captive in Pakistan by an Islamist group. They were not Persians, Saudis, Lebanese, Palestinian, or Egyptian. They were Pakistanis. Their leader, Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, was an émigré, born and raised in Britain. These Islamic radicals cut off Daniel Pearl’s head, taped the act, and sent out a videotape titled The Slaughter of the Spy-Journalist, the Jew Daniel Pearl.
After 9/11 and the Pearl murder, American Jews began taking security measures. National organizations stepped up contacts with the FBI and local police departments. Individuals canceled business trips and vacations in the Middle East. Synagogues hired armed guards.
Still, people who were thrummingly alive to every theoretical danger from evangelical Christianity tried their best to ignore reality. A majority of the people at the YMHA who came to cheer David Saperstein and boo Yechiel Eckstein were unwilling to be convinced that they were in any real danger. “There’s a war going on, in case you haven’t noticed,” James Rudin wrote in Baptizing America. But the “war” he had in mind—the war Rudin and his fellow Jewish liberals wanted—was against Christian fundamentalism and the Republican Party.
THE JEWISH IMPULSE to deny danger, misread political reality, and choose the wrong enemies isn’t unique to this generation. The ancient Hebrews were out of Egyptian bondage about ten minutes before they began clamoring to go back. Jews wandered around the world homeless for two thousand years while every other nation got itself a state (even the Belgians figured out nationalism faster). In Eastern Europe, Jews defended themselves by praying to a God who didn’t listen or building grandiose political theories about the brotherhood of man that pissed everyone off. When the Zionists came along with a practical plan to create a Jewish state, the vast majority of European Jews preferred life in America—or the ghetto.
The American Jewish establishment was especially obtuse about Hitler. Walter Lippmann, the favorite son of the German-Jewish elite, a man hailed by Time as “America’s most statesmanly pundit,” insisted that Nazi anti-Semitism was trivial, and he simply ignored the Holocaust.
The New York Times took a similar see-no-evil approach. Stories about the mass murder of Europe’s Jews appeared on its front page only six times in six years. Max Frankel, a refugee who, decades later, became the Times editor in chief, has referred to this as “the century’s bitterest journalistic failure.”
It was also a specifically Jewish failure.
The Sulzberger family, which owned the Times, laid down what Frankel calls a guiding principle: “Do not feature the plight of the Jews and take care, when reporting it, to link their suffering to that of many other Europeans.” This policy was enforced by the Times publisher, Arthur Hays Sulzberger, who was a trustee of Temple Emanu-El, New York’s cathedral of high Reform Judaism. According to Frankel, Sulzberger thought that “Jews should be separate only in the way they worshipped…they needed no state or political or social institutions of their own.”
The Times’ act of journalistic denial was especially odd because so many of its readers had blood relatives who were among Hitler’s victims. The paper took a pass on what was essentially a hometown story while customers, many removed from the killing fields of Europe by only a decade or two, said nothing.
Jewish organizations were hardly better. Some were intimidated by isolationists like Charles Lindbergh who accused them of trying to drag the United States into war for their own interests. Others were simply unable to grasp what was happening. And some were less innocent. When Germany signed a nonaggression pact with the USSR, some Jewish communists in the United States were prepared to live with the Nazis—a willingness that ended only after Hitler broke the pact and invaded the USSR.
For the liberal majority, Jewish solidarity simply came in a distant second to political loyalty to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. There were no mass protests in 1939 when FDR refused to let an ocean liner, the St. Louis, carrying nine hundred Jewish refugees from Germany, dock in the United States. After Pearl Harbor, mainstream Jewish leaders failed to press the U.S. government to take special measures to save the Jews of Europe. When Rabbi Stephen Wise dared broach the subject, FDR brushed him off with the grand observation that “the mills of history grind slowly.”
Ironically, a lot of evangelicals were more clear-sighted. Some saw Hitler as the agent of God’s prophesied punishment of the Jews for their sins (there were Orthodox rabbis who preached their own version of this divine-wrath theory), but others tried to mobilize public opinion. In 1939, the Moody Monthly, one of the most influential evangelical publications in the United States, ran an article titled “An Appeal for Persecuted Israel,” which presciently reported that the lives of 6 million European Jews were in jeopardy. Many evangelical leaders were able to understand that Hitler’s anti-Semitism was not some personal quirk but an essential element of his program.
Yechiel Eckstein spoke at the 92nd Street Y as an advocate for the grandsons of these Christian Zionists. He believed, as they did, that Jews were once more threatened by armed, mobilized enemies around the world, and that these threats should be taken personally by the Jews of America. Saperstein, Rudin, Foxman, and the others might be worried about gay marriage or prayer in school—certainly these were valid concerns—but they were not, in a time of jihad, the Jewish existential and moral priority. There was indeed a war going on—and the evangelical Christians, like them or not, were on our side.
The old guys with the earrings sitting next to me at the Y that night mumbled “Bullshit”; it was a message they weren’t able to hear. But others—at the YMHA and around the country—were listening, and at least some were thinking a new thought: maybe Eckstein was right; maybe the war against the evangelicals was the wrong war.
TEN
IRAQ: “IT’S NOT MY PROBLEM”
A majority of Jews, like a majority of all Americans, initially supported the decision to invade Iraq. They believed, as almost everyone did, that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. They also know, as many Americans did not, that Saddam had fired Scuds at Israel in the first Gulf War. But even Jews who had no special conce
rn for Israel were alarmed by the mushroom clouds the Bush administration invoked.
Most also shared the wider belief that Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden were connected. And, of course, there was a connection. The 9/11 Commission found no operational link; Saddam wasn’t involved in the plot to attack the World Trade Towers. But the commission noted contact between them. Bin Laden had “explored possible cooperation” with Iraq when Al Qaeda was still based in the Sudan, in the mid-1990s. And terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had indeed been in Iraq before the American invasion, getting treatment in a Baghdad hospital. No foreigners—certainly no battle-hardened foreign fighters with Al Qaeda connections, like al-Zarqawi—were allowed to come to the Iraqi capital without government permission. No hospital would have dared to admit anyone like al-Zarqawi without an okay from Saddam.
In any event, the strategic relationship between 9/11 and Iraq did not depend on a specific operational connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam (or Hezbollah, about which the commission also speculated). For Middle Eastern groups and governments hostile to the United States (as Saddam certainly was), seeing the Twin Towers fall and the Pentagon on fire excited new thoughts about American vulnerability.
The invasion of Iraq was an assault on that excitement, an attempt to reestablish American deterrence. Iraq was chosen not because it was in league with Bin Laden, but because it is at the heart of the Arab world, and because Saddam, the man who stood up the United States in 1991 and lived to tell the story, was an idol of anti-American Arab radicals. By toppling him, the United States was sending a message: if we even think you’d do something like 9/11, you’re gone.
This was immediately grasped by the dictators of the Arab world. Muammar Qaddafi turned Libya’s nuclear program over to the Americans. Mubarak of Egypt and King Abdullah of Jordan tightened already close relations with Washington. The Gulf States allowed themselves to become virtual American military installations. North African regimes even conducted joint naval operations with the American fleet.
What Bush did in Iraq was not the product of crusader zeal or a naïve Wilsonian desire to democratize the region. It was a calculated punch to the Arab solar plexus. On 9/11, Arabs had attacked the United States, and everyone in the Middle East was waiting to see what the Americans would do about it. If Bush had contented himself with an action in Afghanistan, which is far from the Arab world, it would have been interpreted as an evasion and a sign of weakness, like Reagan idly bombing the Syrian countryside from the sea after pulling U.S. Marines out of Beirut in 1983, or Clinton lobbing cruise missiles at the empty tents of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan.
The problem was, Bush couldn’t go to the country with this sort of Middle Eastern realpolitik. Americans want to be John Wayne, not Don Corleone. And so the president based his case on a simple and frightening scenario—Iraq had weapons of mass destruction it might pass off to terrorists—that the public could easily grasp.
This was not entirely cynical on Bush’s part. The CIA and the Defense Department told him that Saddam had such weapons. It would have been a foolhardy president who brushed off such assessments by his own intelligence ser vices on such a potentially life-threatening issue. But Bush was very probably set on going to Iraq very soon after 9/11 because he wanted to deliver a message, weapons of mass destruction or not.
When it became clear that there were no nuclear or biological weapons in Iraq, and only a few outdated chemical missiles, alternative explanations for the war sprang up. Some said that Bush had been trying to impress his father. Others claimed that he went to war for Halliburton, or big oil, or to win elections. A few, like Senator Fritz Hollings of South Carolina and Representative James Moran of Virginia, charged that Bush had launched the war on behalf of Israel. This idea, widely believed by European elites and taken as a matter of course in the Arab world, permeated parts of the American academic left, nativist right, and “realist” foreign policy circles in Washington.
In the spring of 2006, the thesis that the Jews were behind the war in Iraq found its first full American expression in a paper published by Stephen Walt, the academic dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School, and Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago.
The professors described a Jewish cabal that extended beyond the Bush administration. They pointed out that during the Clinton years three senior State Department officers, Dennis Ross, Martin Indyk, and Aaron Miller (all Jews), had colluded to shape U.S. government policy on Israel’s behalf. “Palestinian negotiators complained that they were ‘negotiating with two Israeli teams—one displaying an Israeli flag, and one an American flag,’” Walt and Mearsheimer noted.
The professors found the alleged cabal “even more pronounced in the Bush administration, whose ranks have included such fervent advocates of the Israeli cause as Elliot Abrams, John Bolton, Douglas Feith, I. Lewis (“Scooter”) Libby, Richard Perle, Paul Wolfowitz, and David Wurmser. As we shall see, these officials have consistently pushed for policies favored by Israel and backed by organizations in the [Zionist] Lobby.” All the Bush officials named by Walt and Mearsheimer are Jews except for John Bolton; perhaps they confused him with Josh Bolten, another senior Bush aide who is Jewish.
Walt and Mearsheimer widened the conspiracy to include not only aforementioned officials but Professor Bernard Lewis, journalists William Kristol, Robert Kagen, and Charles Krauthammer. At one point, they even included the New York Times in their Jewish lobby. They contended that the nefarious conspiracy has also subverted the nation’s think tanks, attempted to silence dissent through blacklists and boycotts, intimidated both political parties and Congress, and generally forced the United States to act against its own interests.
The paper caused a stir. The Kennedy School published what amounted to a disclaimer (proving, in Walt-Mearsheimer World, that Zionist neocons are far along in their plan to take over Harvard and the rest of academia). When pro-Israeli groups complained about the conspiracy theory, Walt and Mearsheimer countered that Zionists always answer their critics by calling them anti-Semites. The accusation that the Jews were behind the war grew so pervasive that at one point, President Bush was moved to publicly deny it.
A delicious response to all this came from David Duke, the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. “I have read one summary [of the Walt-Mearsheimer paper] already and I am surprised how excellent it is,” he was quoted as saying by the New York Sun. “It is quite satisfying to see a body in the premier American university essentially come out and validate every major point I have been making even before the war started…. The task before us is to wrest control of America’s foreign policy and critical junctures of media from the Jewish extremist neo-cons.” Duke’s endorsement was echoed by the head of the Guidance Council of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, Abd al-Mun’im Abu al-Futuh, who observed that “the people who wrote the report were working in the interest of the American people.”
Even before the Walt-Mearsheimer paper, I had discussed the accusation of neocon perfidy with one of the supposed members of the cabal, Jay Lefkowitz. He is a thin, redheaded man with a slight lisp who doesn’t look old enough to vote, let alone serve in high-ranking White House positions. But he was a senior aide in the first Bush II administration and, because he is Orthodox, something of an adviser on Jewish matters. Once, before a state dinner, Laura Bush called him to ask about the rules for mixing meat and dairy. He told her that it was forbidden.
“If we have fish instead of meat, will everyone be able to eat?” she asked.
“Well, no,” he admitted. He suggested giving the Orthodox guests separate dishes and silverware, but Mrs. Bush wasn’t willing to do that. She ordered kosher dishes and silverware for everyone. “It was the first time in American history they didn’t use the official china at a state dinner,” said Lefkowitz.
Lefkowitz didn’t deal with the Middle East during his years at the White House. But he is outraged by the suggestion that Jews who did had hoodwinked the United States into going to war.
“There weren’t any Jews in Bush’s war cabinet,” he told me. “Who were the Jews? Dick Cheney? Condi Rice? Colin Powell? George Tenant? Donald Rumsfeld? Those were the people who made the decisions, not their deputies and assistants.”
I WAS ESPECIALLY pleased by the fact that Walt and Mearsheimer named me as one of the co-conspirators. In fact, I have never met Bill Kristol, Elliot Abrams, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Scooter Libby, or any of the other Elders of Zion. I did, however, write a number of columns in the New York Daily News advocating American action to depose Saddam and his regime. I wrote as an Israeli (albeit one with American citizenship) and out of personal experience. Saddam Hussein had tried to kill my son and me.
In 1990, in the approach to the first Gulf War, as American and coalition forces assembled in Saudi Arabia, Saddam announced that he would retaliate for any attack by “burning half of Israel.” I was working for the Jerusalem Report at the time, and we tried desperately to find out what Iraqi assets lay behind that threat. Some Mossad analysts thought Saddam had at least one dirty bomb that could be used to contaminate Tel Aviv. Others believed he had chemical weapons. A few thought he might even have a nuke bought on the black market. Nobody was certain.
The government decided to pass out gas masks to the entire population and required people to prepare a “safe room” at home. There was a run on bottled water, masking tape, sheets of transparent plastic (to seal windows), transistor radios, and anything else people believed might come in handy during a nuclear, chemical, or biological attack.