ALL ABOUT GUTs

How to Talk About Israel (IAN BURUMA, 8/31/03, NY Times Magazine)

The steady alignment of American interests with Israel made it possible for American Jews to be good Jews, good Democrats and good American patriots too. This same period gave birth to neoconservatism, in which Israel played a major role. The career of Norman Podhoretz might serve as an illustration. He was once a man of the left who wondered, when ''thinking about the Jews,'' whether ''their survival as a distinct group was worth one hair on the head of a single infant.'' But, as he explained in a speech on the occasion of his retirement as editor of Commentary in 1995, he began to change his mind in the 60's, when he became ''much more aggressive in defense of Jewish interests in general and of Israel in particular.'' One reason was a sense of shock when defeat in Vietnam threatened to turn the United States into a demoralized, enervated, even isolationist power, which would no longer stand up for good against evil in the world.

The other came roughly at the same time. Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories made radical leftists in the United States as receptive as Europeans to Arab and Soviet depictions of the Zionists as neo-Nazis. Disgust with this kind of ''liberalism,'' as well as with a perception of American weakness, pushed former leftists, like Podhoretz and Irving Kristol, managing editor of Commentary, to the right. Convinced of ''the inextricable connection between the survival of Israel and American military strength,'' Podhoretz began to see American dovishness in foreign affairs as a direct threat to Israeli survival. This feeling may be shared by some European Jews too, but without the swagger that goes with being a superpower citizen. Ruth Wisse, a professor of Yiddish literature at Harvard, remarked about Podhoretz that ''because of the national confidence that America nurtured in him, he is immune to the self-doubt and apologetics that eat up so many of his co-religionists from inside.''

This confidence is what Podhoretz and other neoconservatives sought to save from the wreckage of Vietnam. One of their most powerful political allies in this enterprise was Senator Henry (Scoop) Jackson, mentor of Richard Perle, among others. Jackson, a gentile, a Democrat and a staunch cold warrior, was the perfect bridge on which former leftists could cross over to the right, without actually joining the Republican Party. Henry Jackson was a founder of the America-Israel Friendship League. Israel, to him, was not a sentimental issue but an essential part of his vision of the United States as a nation destined to free the world from tyranny. Arab nationalism and Soviet Communism were seen as equally dangerous in this rather Manichaean view of a worldwide battle between good and evil.

It goes with Manichaeism (which is, of course, what appeals to Christian fundamentalists too) that battles are not only strategic but also existential. And this, in the eyes of many neocons, is what puts Israel and the United States in the same boat. Podhoretz again: ''Just as the fervent wish of the Arab world to wipe the Jewish state off the map derives not from anything Israel has done or failed to do, but rather from its existence alone, so we'' -- the United States -- ''are hated not because of our policies but because of who and what we are.''

The roots of neoconservative disillusion with liberalism and the almost obsessive promotion of American power go deeper than Vietnam, however. In Podhoretz's case it goes back to his childhood experiences on a school playground in Brooklyn, where he was bullied by his black schoolmates. Blacks, he had always been told, in good liberal fashion, were poor and persecuted, while Jews were rich and powerful. Neither rich, nor powerful, young Norman grew to hate the boys that beat him up with such ease. As he explained in a famous essay, ''My Negro Problem -- and Ours,'' he hated them, but also admired them, for ''they were tough; beautifully, enviably tough, not giving a damn for anyone or anything. To hell with the teacher, the truant officer, the cop; to hell with the whole of the adult world that held us in its grip and that we never had the courage to rebel against.''

This is highly revealing. What Henry Jackson, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Ariel Sharon, Benjamin Netanyahu and George W. Bush have in common is that they enabled bookish men to feel tough, beautifully, enviably tough. Too much can be made of the connection between the Chicago philosopher Leo Strauss and officials in the current Pentagon, but one aspect of Strauss appears to have rubbed off on them. Born in Germany, Strauss was a liberal rationalist in his youth. He had hoped, he said, that anti-Semitism would end with Jewish assimilation in a liberal democracy. The Nazis taught him otherwise. By the 1920's he began to regard liberals as weaklings, powerless to stop the violent mob. If one thing ties neoconservatives, Likudniks, and post-cold-war hawks together, it is the conviction that liberalism is strictly for sissies.

This coincides nicely with our Grand Unified Theory--that all of human existence is explained by the struggle between the yearning for Freedom, on the one hand, vs. the desire for Security, on the other. For the most part Jewish, black, and Latino men vote more like single women than they do like other men. This is unsurprising given the justifiable insecurity of a historically put upon people, who then look to the State for protection. Equally unsurprising is the idea that more self-confident and assertive Jewish men would turn away from the Democratic Party, the party of security, and toward the Republican Party, the party of freedom. Posted by Orrin Judd at September 1, 2003 12:04 AM