Muhammad Idrees Ahmad

Jeffrey Goldberg is one of the Israel Lobby’s most prominent propagandists. Besides his anti-Palestinian reportage, this former Israeli prison guard also played a key role in selling the Iraq war touting the fabled Iraq-911 link. (see Alexander Cockburn, Jebediah Reed, and Spencer Ackerman‘s reports on his war-pimping) Far from costing him his job, being wrong has elevated him since to the position of a sought after columnist for major US publications. And he has been unabashed in using this perch in the service of his ideology. He used the Washington Post as a platform for an attack on Jimmy Carter, as he used the extreme-Zionist The New Republic for an attack on Mearsheimer and Walt. More recently he has been vetting Barack Obama for his commitment to Israel, but interestingly enough, he has since written an article critical of the Right-wing of the Israel lobby. Even though some of his arguments echo Mearsheimer and Walt, he goes ahead and disparages them once again. Both responded in the letters page the next day. But a more thorough debunking of Goldberg’s arguments and his method comes today on Philip Weiss’s indispensable blog by scholar Jerome Slater.

Jeffrey Goldberg is perhaps today’s most prominent American journalist specializing in Israel and the U.S.-Israeli relationship. His work regularly appears in all the best places: the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, Atlantic, the New Republic. That fact alone reveals the wretched state of American discourse on Israeli matters.

Here are just a few of Goldberg’s recent contributions to public discourse:

In a 2006 Washington Post review of Jimmy Carter’s book, Palestine: Not Apartheid, Goldberg wrote: “Carter, not unlike God, has long been disproportionately interested in the sins of the Chosen People. He is famously a partisan of the Palestinians…And God, unlike Carter, does not manufacture sins to hang around the necks of Jews when no sins have actually been committed.”

In the same article, he repeated an absurd contention he has made elsewhere: “The Arabs who surround Israel have launched numerous wars against it, all meant to snuff it out of existence.” Really? Which ones? His best case no doubt is the 1948 war, but it is still a poor one, for the serious historical scholarship has long challenged the argument that the invading Arab armies intended, let alone had the capability, of snuffing Israel out of existence. The next Arab-Israeli war was the 1956 Suez War—but that was initiated by Israel, not “the Arabs,” and it was part of a coordinated British-French-Israeli attack designed to humiliate Egypt’s Nasser and for Israel to seize the Sinai Peninsula.

The third war was that of June 1967, but that was also initiated by Israel, not by the Arabs. To be sure, initially the Israeli attack was widely seen as a justified Israeli preemptive attack against an Egyptian arms buildup in the Sinai that was intended to destroy Israel; however, for many years that view has been challenged by serious Israeli and other historians, who argue that Nasser blundered into a war he did not intend. Indeed, it is not just historians who now reject the notion that Israel’s existence was at stake; none other than Menachem Begin, not known as a leftist New Historian, publicly called the 1967 war “a war of choice.”

What about the next war, the 1973 Suez conflict? Initiated by Egypt, yes—but just about no one thinks that Sadat’s intention was to snuff out Israel. Rather, his purpose was to seize part of the Sinai in order to force Israel to negotiate a settlement that would return the rest of Sinai—seized by Israel in 1967—to Egypt. And the strategy worked—much to the true interests not only of Egypt, but Israel.

What’s left—the various Israeli attacks on Lebanon, as in 1982 and 2006? Wars of “no choice,” Israel’s very existence on the line?

Now we come to Goldberg on Mearsheimer and Walt. In his notorious 2007 New Republic review of the Israel Lobby, Goldberg returned to his Carter review tactic of smearing serious critics of Israel with the barely-concealed charge of anti-Semitism: “the book remains true to the malignant and dishonest spirit of the [earlier M/W London Review] article. It represents the most sustained attack, the most mainstream attack, against the political enfranchisement of American Jews since the era of Father Coughlin.” Gosh, that bad? I had thought Mearsheimer and Walt were criticizing the power of the Israel lobby in the formulation of American policy towards Israel; I must have missed the part where they called for denying the Jews their political rights.

In the same review and elsewhere, Goldberg challenges the M/W contention, shared by nearly all serious observers and indeed by bin Laden himself, who ought to know, that an important part of the motivation for al-Qaeda’s 9/11 attack was rage at U.S. support for the Israeli occupation of the Palestinians. Here’s how Goldberg characterizes the M/W assessment: “This is not QUITE the view, commonly heard in the Arab world, that Israel had a direct hand in the destruction of the World Trade Center…but it is still heinous.” (emphasis added).

Remarkably enough, it turns out the Goldberg actually agrees with what is clearly Mearsheimer and Walt’s central contention, that the power of the Israel lobby is the main reason for U.S. support of Israeli policies that harm the national interests of both countries. Even in his New Republic attack, Goldberg wrote that he thought that Israel should “slowly wean itself from American aid, BUT AIPAC HAS TO AGREE WITH THIS” (emphasis added), evidently failing to notice that he was providing powerful support for the M/W argument.

Most recently, in a May 18 New York Times oped that is already becoming famous—or notorious—Goldberg again attacks M/W (in passing), but concludes that the U.S. government won’t be able to “talk, in blunt terms, about the full range of dangers faced by Israel, including the danger that Israel has brought on itself…until Aipac and the leadership of the American Jewish community allow it to happen.” What? As Max Boot in Commentary in effect protests: Isn’t that precisely what Mearsheimer and Walt are arguing? Goldberg angrily denies it, but of course Boot is right—indeed, if anything Goldberg’s wording is less qualified than that of Mearsheimer/Walt. Speaking personally, I wouldn’t go quite as far as M/W, let alone Goldberg. My own view is that Mearsheimer and Walt sometimes exaggerate the power of the Israel lobby, and those exaggerations have unfortunately caused their much more important and compelling arguments, concerning the irrational policies of both the United States and Israel, to be largely ignored.

I suppose Goldberg is entitled to deny, however lamely, that he has again accepted the message, even as he attacks the messengers. But he is certainly not entitled to do so by calling his adversaries (in an interview with Shmuel Rosner in the May 22 Haaretz), “the vile Walt and the vile Mearsheimer.” John Mearsheimer and Steve Walt are two of the most internationally eminent and renowned scholars and public intellectuals in the field of international politics, chaired professors at two of America’s greatest universities, and their book is without a doubt a most serious work that is bound to have a major impact on both scholarship and general public discourse. To sneer at them as anti-Semites and refer to them–personally and for emphasis, individually–as “vile” is simply, well, vile, and far beyond the pale of any intellectually or morally respectable discourse.

Will Goldberg’s latest travesty discredit him as a serious pundit in all those famous U.S. newspapers and magazines? If you believe that, then I am the Queen of Sweden.