The Middle East of the Second Intifada was a wild, often lawless place, especially in the occupied territories. Palestinians launched suicide bombings in which those who sacrificed themselves in order to murder Israelis were promised not only the rewards of Heaven but also generous payments to their surviving family members by supportive Arab regimes. The so-called al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades conducted over 150 attacks between 2000 and 2005. Meanwhile, Israel finished construction on an elaborate—and largely effective—system of electronic fences, patrol roads, and observation towers that it called a “separation barrier.” Most of the rest of the world termed it a “wall,” and the International Court of Justice ruled it illegal. The 440-mile-long route the system eventually took had the effect of unilaterally annexing approximately 10 percent of the West Bank and 38 percent of what had previously been Palestinian land in East Jerusalem. Many Jewish settlers, however, responded to the violence with violence of their own. While most of the incidents involved relatively small-scale threats and intimidation, a cadre of Jewish terrorists bent on vengeance captured random Palestinians for the purposes of torture and murder, often receiving the blessings of their religious authorities in advance. One entire Palestinian village was forced to evacuate all of its 150 citizens because, its members claimed, the “gunfire, stone-throwing, physical assaults and vandalism had become unbearable”—raising uncomfortable echoes of the pogroms visited upon Jews in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Eastern Europe.1
The violence reached a climax on March 28, 2002, when suicide bombers attacked a public Passover seder at the Park Hotel in Netanya, killing twenty-nine Israelis and wounding dozens more. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon responded by canceling Israel’s promise, made as part of the Oslo Accords, to keep Israeli troops out of Palestinian-controlled population centers. Starting with the northern West Bank cities of Nablus and Jenin, he ordered the IDF to stamp out the rebellion. With the unflinching support of the US president, the conservative Republican George W. Bush, what followed was a series of sustained Israeli bombing campaigns, random beatings, and, most controversially, a series of targeted assassinations.2
The Israeli assassination program had been around long enough to become a matter of legend. The Mossad routinely sent killers to whatever nation its targets happened to be residing in, and their audacious murders and daring escapes made them heroes at home and to American Jews and gentiles alike. Mossad maintained the public pretense that it never had any involvement in these murders and didn’t even know what the questioner was talking about. (“If you want to shoot, shoot, don’t talk,” a retired IDF general and former defense ministry official, Amos Gilad, once explained, quoting Clint Eastwood’s “Dirty Harry” character. “[T]he Mossad’s reputation is to do fantastic operations, allegedly, clandestine, without publicity,” he said.)3
Excitement grew when the unlucky target happened to be an ex-Nazi or a famous Arab terrorist. But the program was expanding to include religious figures, especially those associated with the Gaza-based Hamas organization, people who inspired terrorists but had not personally engaged in terrorist acts. It would soon also expand to scientists of many nationalities who were understood to be helping Iran with its (allegedly peaceful) nuclear program. Sometimes the targets were former inciters who had changed their ways and called for peace, but somehow no one at Mossad had gotten the news. Though the Israelis sought to go to great lengths to avoid it, family members, neighbors, and sometimes children would often turn out to be “collateral damage” in these assassinations. Even today, as the assassination program continues, its history remains shrouded in mystery: Israel’s High Court of Justice ruled in April 2021 that declassification could “endanger national security,” regardless of how old the cases might be.4
Aside from stating the usual prohibitions that most countries have against murder, the Oslo agreements forbade Israeli troops from entering Palestinian-controlled territory for any reason. The Israelis didn’t care and did nothing to hide the fact that their undercover agents were operating there routinely. “There is complete justification for the implementation of the principle ‘He who tries to kill you, kill him first,’” Yisrael Meir Lau, the country’s Ashkenazi chief rabbi, told one journalist. Israel was fighting a “mandatory war,” demanding “acts of self-defense, initiative and daring.” Few human rights organizations embraced the rabbi’s interpretation, however. They noted that the assassinations violated the 1907 Hague Convention, which clearly states that occupying forces are forbidden from infringing on the rights of the host nation’s citizens. Israel also refused to provide any evidence that the people it was killing were, in fact, who it said they were or had done what they were alleged to have done. Amnesty International found that Israeli forces had “committed violations of international law during the course of military operations in the West Bank towns of Jenin and Nablus, including war crimes.” Amnesty was not reporting in a one-sided way: an earlier report had termed Palestinian terrorist attacks against Israeli citizens to be “crimes against humanity.” But Israel and its supporters rejected these reports, attacked the human rights organizations as biased, and sought to prevent them from doing their jobs.5
Israeli governments had long been at odds with the human rights organizations operating both inside Israel and within the occupied territories. Israel’s defenders consistently argued that it was the “only democracy in the Middle East” and that it alone among the countries in the region lived up to Western standards of human rights protections. But this was true only for Jews. Israeli Palestinians may have had more recognized rights than most of the citizens of the Arab dictatorships surrounding it—a point Israel’s defenders never tired of making—but when it came to actually enforcing those rights, they often proved a mirage. Israeli Palestinians could not remotely depend on the web of legal protections, personal relationships, and military, judicial, and police sympathies that their fellow Jewish citizens simply took for granted. Israel’s official investigation into the lives of its Arab inhabitants in 2003, known as the Or Commission Report, found that they could not depend on its police force to “demonstrate systematic and egalitarian enforcement of the law.” This was another way of describing the persistent institutional discrimination Arabs had faced since the state’s founding. Human rights groups won an important victory when, in 1999, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the “routine” torture of prisoners was illegal. In any case, the violence-minded settlers were more than happy to take matters into their own hands. Palestinians on the West Bank lived a life of near lawlessness between local authorities, roving gangs of self-appointed enforcers, Islamic decrees, and both Israeli troops and Jewish vigilantes.6
Israel’s battles with the likes of Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and its own B’Tselem became a regular feature of US news coverage in this period, but they did not much affect US public opinion. Most Americans apparently accepted the argument that human rights violations were a necessity in a nation beset by terrorism. These feelings only intensified after September 11, 2001. Before the 9/11 attacks, one poll showed a 41–13 percent preference for the Israeli position over that of the Palestinians among Americans questioned; afterward, in the same poll, it was 55–7 percent.7
Even before the planes crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, neoconservatives had begun a campaign to justify another US-backed war against the Palestinians. During a three-day period in August 2001, three pundits, for example, argued in the Washington Post that Israel should launch yet another war. Michael Kelly, former editor-in-chief of The New Republic, began his piece by terming Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount a “pretext” for Palestinian violence, and mocked “the aggressively delusional” people who still failed to understand that “the Palestinians are the aggressor”: “They started the conflict, and they purposely drive it forward with fresh killing on almost a daily basis.” The Palestinians saw the Second Intifada “not as a sporadically violent protest movement but as a war,” and Israel should respond accordingly. Kelly said Secretary of State Colin Powell’s call for both sides to reduce tension was “beyond stupid”: “It is immoral, hypocritical, obscene. It is indefensible.” Powell and others had simply failed to recognize that “Israel is at war with an enemy that declines, in its shrewdness and its cowardice, to fight Israel’s soldiers but is instead murdering its civilians, its women and children.”8
Kelly’s column was followed by that of another former New Republic editor, Charles Krauthammer, who had since decamped to Rupert Murdoch’s Weekly Standard. Krauthammer described the conflict as if filing his story from inside Israel’s propaganda ministry. “No country,” he claimed, “can sustain what Israel is sustaining.” Now that Arafat had “reject[ed] Israel’s offer of a Palestinian state with its capital in a shared Jerusalem,” he had unleashed a “terror campaign [with which] he intends to bring a bleeding, demoralized Israel to its knees, ready to surrender.” Krauthammer, a recipient of the 2002 “Guardian of Zion” award from Israel’s Bar-Ilan University, recommended war: “a lightning and massive Israeli attack on every element of Arafat’s police state infrastructure” with a simultaneous attack on Arafat’s rivals, Gaza’s Hamas and Islamic Jihad—though he referred to them as Arafat’s “allies”—as “the only way” to solve the crisis.9
On the third day came a column by George F. Will, the paper’s most famous columnist ever since he had been hired to write an op-ed column for the paper in 1974. A secular conservative Christian, Will called for Israel to launch “a short war—a few days; over before European and American diplomats’ appeasement reflexes kick in.” Its purpose should be “to kill or capture those terrorists (and those who direct them) whom Arafat has permitted to remain at large,” and “to destroy the Palestinian Authority’s military infrastructure.” Will insisted that Israel claim “all of Jerusalem,” and thereby “signal the end of all talk about the indivisibility of Jerusalem.” He, too, attacked US policy, blaming the State Department under the presumably dovish Secretary Powell as a “brackish and bottomless lagoon of obtuseness” when it came “to whatever Israel does in self-defense.”10
Once again, talk of a “second Holocaust” filled the US media. One leader of a national Jewish organization announced that he was “convinced that we are facing a threat as great, if not greater, to the safety and security of the Jewish people than we faced in the ’30s.” Ron Rosenbaum, a respected Jewish biographer of Hitler, warned that “there’s likely to be a second Holocaust. Not because the Israelis are acting without restraint, but because they are, so far, acting with restraint despite the massacres making their country uninhabitable.” George Will would cite Rosenbaum’s column in one of his own titled “‘Final Solution,’ Phase 2.” A New York Jewish paper ran the headline “the new kristallnacht” above a story about a terrorist attack in Netanya; Charles Krauthammer repeated the phrase in the Washington Post, writing “This is Kristallnacht transposed to Israel.” The Anti-Defamation League’s Abe Foxman began his provocatively titled 2003 book Never Again? The Threat of the New Anti-Semitism by insisting that he was “convinced that we currently face as great a threat to the safety and security of the Jewish people as the one we faced in the 1930s—if not a greater one.” This irrational panic occurred, it should be noted, more than five years after Israel’s minister of communication, science, and the arts, Shulamit Aloni, advised her fellow Jews, at the 1996 Independence Day celebration, that “the world has changed; our place among the nations of the world is secure and stable. The struggle for physical survival is over. Only people with anachronistic mind-sets are still scaring us with fears of the past… seizing the sensations of victimization and persecution, preaching for isolation.”11
This apparent never-ending psychosis—together with 9/11—would prove a boon for Israel’s cause in the United States. A report summarizing thirteen polls taken in the aftermath of the attacks found large majorities agreeing with the view that most Palestinians sided with America’s attackers. Support for the establishment of a Palestinian state fell to less than a third of those questioned. Many Americans shared the view that the attacks were at least partially inspired by America’s association with, and support for, Israel. Only a tiny minority, however, told pollsters that the United States should therefore distance itself from the Jewish state. Rather, fully 93 percent believed that Israel and the United States should be working together to meet the threat of Islamic terrorism worldwide, and 84 percent believed that Israel should do whatever was necessary to find and destroy terrorists, who threatened to do serious harm to its citizens or nation. “You’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists,” was George W. Bush’s simplistic formula. Israel was “with us.”12
This was all music to the ears of neoconservatives, who now dominated debate as never before. The Second Intifada had driven a stake through the heart of the Israeli peace movement and similarly devastated the political parties that supported it. The Israeli peace movement’s decline robbed dovish American Jews of the legitimizing blessing that well-known Israeli writers, intellectuals, and (best of all) ex-generals could bestow upon them with their speaking tours of the United States and newspaper op-eds. Some brave (or reckless) writers or organizational figures may have tentatively floated the notion that it might be preferable were Israel to act with restraint, but there was virtually no one doing this in the mainstream US political debate. In the political climate of the Second Intifada, almost no one was willing to assign any responsibility to Israel for the ongoing violence between Israel and the Palestinians. What pro-Palestinian voices there were in these debates were largely in “Letters to the Editor” sections, and then published only in response to articles that spoke with the authority of the publication itself. For instance, Hussein Ibish, then employed as communications director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, wrote to the Washington Post to complain that “instead of urging Israel to comply with international law and end the occupation, [Michael] Kelly urges Israel to ‘go right ahead and escalate the violence’ and ‘destroy, kill, capture and expel the armed Palestinian forces.’” But when Palestinians said such things about their Israeli enemies, he noted, “the United States demands their arrest, and Israel sends its death squads to execute them.” His letter was one of four printed, and it appeared at the very bottom of the Post’s page.13
Democrats had emerged from 9/11 slightly less hawkish than Republicans, meaning that their leaders approved of the United States attacking only those nations and organizations that might credibly be tied to the attacks, rather than ones we just didn’t happen to like. This reticence inspired yet another effort by conservatives, neo and otherwise, to try to convince American Jews to abandon the party they had stuck with since the beginning of the New Deal. (This was doubly ironic, as George W. Bush, in October 2001, became the first US president to make support for an independent Palestinian state official US policy.) William Safire picked up the cudgel that so many conservatives had been wielding since Lyndon Johnson began complaining about Jewish opposition to the Vietnam War thirty-five years earlier. The argument boiled down to the contention that if Jews really cared about Israel, they would desert the Democrats, who simply made an exception to their overall dovishness for Israel, and embrace the Republican Party, where hawkish support for military adventurism was consistent with its overall philosophy and therefore more reliable. In a column headlined “Democrats vs. Israel,” published in the New York Times during the annual meeting of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) in the spring of 2002, Safire insisted that Democrats were now in the process of “transmogrifying the Arab aggressor into the victim,” though the reporting of his own newspaper belied the specifics of what he claimed as evidence. Here, yet again, Safire sought to carry on an argument that had now, for decades, been hosted by Commentary. It had featured American Jewish Committee staffer and sociologist Milton Himmelfarb (1967, 1981); his brother-in-law, the “godfather” of neoconservatism Irving Kristol (1973, 1984, 1999); AJC historian and Holocaust scholar Lucy Dawidowicz (1984); Harvard’s Martin Peretz; professor of Yiddish Literature Ruth Wisse (1993); and many others. Kristol may have started it, but each of the others echoed his complaints about what he termed, in 1999, “the political stupidity of American Jews,” albeit to little effect. Most Jews remained Democrats then and still remain so today.14
In the deeply contested 2000 presidential election in which the US Supreme Court eventually awarded him the presidency, George W. Bush earned just 19 percent of the Jewish vote. His opponent, Bill Clinton’s vice president and a former senator, Al Gore, already enjoyed strong ties with Jewish leaders. He did not exactly hurt himself with this constituency by choosing Joe Lieberman, a politically hawkish senator, as his running mate. Lieberman was often described as the Senate’s first Orthodox Jew. (Though Lieberman did attend an Orthodox Washington synagogue, he described himself only as an “observant Jew,” rather than an Orthodox one.) With the Soviet Union consigned to the dustbin of history, Bush initially chose to side with the wing of the Republican Party that sought to return to its pre–World War II isolationist roots in foreign policy. “If we’re an arrogant nation, they’ll resent us,” he said while running for president; but “if we’re a humble nation, but strong, they’ll welcome us.” But 9/11 turned Bush around by 180 degrees. Guided by his vice president and now mentor in all matters, former defense secretary Dick Cheney, together with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Bush expanded the definition of US national security beyond that of any previous administration. Henceforth, under Bush, the United States would “rid the world of evil-doers.” A US military response against Al-Qaeda and the Taliban government in Afghanistan was widely supported across virtually the entire political spectrum. But the next question the members of the Bush administration asked themselves almost immediately was whether to attack Iraq as well.15
Anyone in search of a “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”–style conspiracy theory to explain the Bush administration’s foreign and defense policies would have found particularly rich material in the myriad connections, coauthorships, editorships, and interlocking board memberships of the various organizations that connected the neoconservatives inside and outside the Bush administration agitating for a US attack on Iraq. Michael Lind, a foreign policy writer with ambidextrous politics, noted the apparent paradox at the time: “Most Jewish Americans are politically hostile to George W. Bush, whose alliance with the Christian right disturbs them. Yet the younger Bush has, in practice, been influenced more by the Israel lobby than by the oil lobby.” This reliance was due, he suggested, to the post-9/11 loss of influence of the State Department, which continued to support Palestinian statehood and the peace process, together with the rise of “a cadre of pro-Israel hawks” allied with Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz.16
The son of Polish Jewish immigrants, and fluent in six languages, Wolfowitz had been the model for the Straussian political apparatchik character in Saul Bellow’s final novel, 2001’s Ravelstein. A former Senate staffer for Henry “Scoop” Jackson who received his PhD while studying under the nuclear war theorist Albert Wohlstetter, Wolfowitz was deeply enmeshed in the world of Jewish neoconservatism. In 2002, the Jewish Institute for National Security of America (JINSA) gave Wolfowitz its Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson Distinguished Service Award for promoting a strong partnership between Israel and the United States, and the Jerusalem Post, describing him as “devoutly pro-Israel,” named him its “Man of the Year.” A frequent guest at AIPAC conferences even while in office, Wolfowitz helped the organization raise funds by speaking to invitation-only gatherings for big donors.17
Wolfowitz’s deep connections to AIPAC, the neocons, and Israel were particularly important in the debates of how the United States was misled into its disastrous war in Iraq. After 9/11 Wolfowitz had argued for the United States to attack Iraq rather than Afghanistan. And it was Wolfowitz who found the political justification for such a war. “For bureaucratic reasons,” he admitted to Vanity Fair, “we settled on one issue, weapons of mass destruction, because it was the one reason everyone could agree on.” The fact that the case for war would turn out to be based on false information—and that it was promoted by Wolfowitz, given his reputation and associations—would, to no small degree, color the perception that the disastrous war was launched at least partially to benefit Israel rather than the United States.18
In addition to Wolfowitz, a former JINSA board member, Douglas Feith, who was now Bush’s deputy undersecretary of defense, together with the chair of Bush’s Defense Policy Board, Richard Perle, another former Scoop Jackson staffer, had coauthored a 1996 paper with David Wurmser, now a special assistant to the (extremely hawkish) undersecretary of state for arms control, John Bolton. (Israel’s ambassador to the United States labeled Bolton “a secret member of Israel’s own team” during his tenure as Bush’s UN representative.) The paper, titled “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm,” was written at the behest of Benjamin Netanyahu, who was then not yet prime minister but an extremely ambitious Likud politician. The report called for “removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq” as “an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right,” together with a war on the Palestinian Authority.19
Another paper, this one authored exclusively by Feith in 1997, suggested that Israel reoccupy “the areas under Palestinian Authority control.” A year later, in 1998, under the rubric of a neoconservative foreign policy think tank, the Project for the New American Century, ten members of the future Bush administration—including Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Perle, and Feith—signed a letter arguing for a unilateral US invasion of Iraq. This missive was followed up in early 2001 by Wurmser, then ensconced at another conservative think tank, the American Enterprise Institute, who wrote up war plans for Israel and the United States “to strike fatally, not merely disarm… the regimes of Damascus, Baghdad, Tripoli, Tehran, and Gaza.” These arguments were heavily promoted inside the White House by Elliott Abrams, a former Scoop Jackson staffer and Norman Podhoretz’s and Midge Decter’s son-in-law. Following his criminal conviction for lying to Congress about the Iran/Contra scandal during the Reagan administration, Abrams received a presidential pardon from the first president Bush, and the job of national security staffer in charge of Middle East policy from the second.20
As the administration was debating how to respond to the Al Qaeda attacks, and much of the rest of the country remained in a state of shock and fear, neoconservatives leapt into what they accurately viewed as a political void. Charles Krauthammer and others had taken the position—in the years immediately following the end of the Cold War—that as the world’s only “unipower” (that is, its only remaining superpower), the United States could pretty much do whatever it wished with its military. At the same time, Harvard scholar Samuel Huntington’s argument for a “clash of civilizations” between Islam and the West led many to the conclusion that a civilizational war was not only unavoidable but desirable. The fact that this meshed with Israel’s interests implied that for those advocating these actions, it was understood as a given that the United States should attack some as yet undetermined combination of Israel’s Arab adversaries. For neoconservatives and many others, the interests of the United States and Israel were now identical, and a global war against radical Islam was therefore justified wherever what Bush called these “evildoers” reared their heads. Israel could now play the role that Benjamin Netanyahu, as prime minister, later described as a “defensive shield of Western civilization in the heart of the Middle East.” New York’s Jewish Week put the case rather starkly in a headline reading, “America: The New Israel.”21
The neoconservatives presented Americans with a lengthy list of nations they believed should be invaded or, at the very least, attacked. Nine days after the 9/11 attack, forty neoconservatives (and others) sent an open letter to George W. Bush insisting that he target not only Saddam Hussein, but also Syria and Iran, if the latter did not stop supporting Hezbollah, as well as Hezbollah itself. “Even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack,” it read, “any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq.” Its authors reminded Bush that “Israel has been and remains America’s staunchest ally against international terrorism.” Writing in the Wall Street Journal, Seth Lipsky, a neoconservative and the former editor of the [Jewish] Forward, called for US attacks “from Afghanistan to Iran to Iraq to Syria to the Palestinian Authority.” The New Republic’s editors demanded that the Bush administration “move ruthlessly to prevent Iran from acquiring the deadliest arsenal of all.” Weekly Standard editor William Kristol preferred an immediate “military strike against Iranian nuclear facilities.” Charles Krauthammer argued in the Washington Post that after the United States was done with Afghanistan, Syria should be next, followed by Iran and Iraq. Norman Podhoretz, writing in Commentary, termed George W. Bush’s mission to be to fight what he called “World War IV—the war against militant Islam.” Among his favored targets: Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Lebanon, and Libya as well as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the Palestinian Authority.22
The panic, paranoia, and uncertainty that followed 9/11 led to accusations of disloyalty against anyone who failed to get with the program or who even dared to question what it might be. Andrew Sullivan was not a neoconservative, but he had been the editor of The New Republic and a protégé of Martin Peretz. Five days after the attack, Sullivan pontificated that “the middle part of the country—the great red zone that voted for Bush—is clearly ready for war. The decadent Left in its enclaves on the coasts is not dead—and may well mount what amounts to a fifth column.” (Those “decadent” untrustworthy Gore voters, Sullivan failed to note, exceeded those voting for Bush by slightly more than half a million.)23
As was now the new “normal,” neoconservative arguments in the wake of 9/11 hewed much closer to the views held by evangelical Christians than they did to those of American Jews. A Gallup poll found “that among the major religious groups in the United States, Jewish Americans are the most strongly opposed to the Iraq war.” Ambivalence abounded. As the pundit Michael Kinsley put it in October 2002, “Among Jewish Americans, including me, there are people who hold every conceivable opinion about war with Iraq with every variation of intensity, including passionate opposition and complete indifference.” Meanwhile, the age-old worries about gentiles blaming the Jews for the wars they fought also arose again. David Harris, at the helm of the American Jewish Committee, feared that a failed war in Iraq would lead Americans to turn to the “scapegoat for bigots for centuries”—its Jews. All of these competing arguments within the Jewish community led to a far more complicated picture than that usually painted in the media, where “Jewish interests” continued to be defined as “supporting Israel,” as the neocons had so far successfully defined them.24
Jews also worried about being blamed for the 9/11 attack itself. Their concerns had nothing to do with the band of so-called 9/11 “Truthers,” who counted the (fictitious) number of Jews who allegedly stayed home from work in the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers that day, or who saw the hand of the Mossad in the attack itself—these deranged individuals could be safely ignored. Rather, their concerns were grounded in the commonsense belief that when Islamic terrorists attacked the United States, they were likely to have been inspired by the United States’ long support for Israel. But neoconservative pundits and Jewish leaders insisted that the attack and US foreign policy were unrelated. They did so in part because they wished to argue that US support for Israel brought with it no significant costs, and also because if it were true, then the obvious fix would be to change the policy and reduce US support for Israel.
Ironically, the first prominent person to lay out the case against the neoconservative war party turned out to be the paleocon pundit and sometime Republican presidential candidate Patrick J. Buchanan. A fascinating and quite charming personality in the American punditocracy, Buchanan had danced along the far-right fringe of respectable discourse for decades. His easy amiability and perennial good humor helped to make his semi-fascistic political views palatable to television producers and radio programmers and their audiences. Buchanan had grown up in a culturally isolated Catholic community where Spain’s longtime dictator Francisco Franco and Joseph McCarthy were counted as heroes. He championed the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet and the racist government of apartheid-era South Africa, flirted with supporting the former KKK grand wizard David Duke, and even evinced a soft spot for accused Nazi war criminals. Regarding the Middle East, he manifested a traditional far-right distaste for Israel, exacerbated by a fury born of the neoconservative displacement of himself and his fellow paleoconservatives from the center of conservative thought and power. During the first Gulf War, under the first President Bush, he had notoriously claimed, from his perch on television’s McLaughlin Group, that “there are only two groups that are beating the drums… for war in the Middle East—the Israeli Defense Ministry and its amen corner in the United States.”25
Buchanan’s 5,200-word cover story appeared in March 2003, just as Washington’s war fever was reaching its highest pitch. Buchanan leaned heavily on guilt-by–Jewish association. It was published in The American Conservative, which, despite its name, displayed heterodox ideological proclivities, with both left- and right-wing voices united in support of an old-fashioned isolationist foreign policy, together with a profound hostility to Israel that sometimes slipped into naked antisemitism. Alongside conspiracy-friendly Buchanan, the magazine also featured the sometimes pro-Nazi Taki Theodoracopulos (who would become its editor) and Philip Weiss, a former journalist whose bizarre, conspiracy-driven musings on Jews and Israel on his eponymous website, Mondoweiss, put a period on the end of what had once been a successful journalistic career.26
Noting the host of nations that various neoconservatives had nominated for attack, Buchanan asked, “Cui Bono? For whose benefit these endless wars in a region that holds nothing vital to America save oil, which the Arabs must sell us to survive? Who would benefit from a war of civilizations between the West and Islam?” His answer: “One nation, one leader, one party. Israel, Sharon, Likud.” He then guided the reader through a potted history of what he understood to be Israel’s all-but-criminal manipulation of US politics up to the present day. He charged the neoconservatives with seeking to “ensnare our country in a series of wars that are not in America’s interests,” and with “colluding with Israel to ignite those wars and destroy the Oslo Accords.” He insisted that they were “deliberately damaging U.S. relations with every state in the Arab world that defies Israel or supports the Palestinian people’s right to a homeland of their own,” and “alienat[ing] friends and allies all over the Islamic and Western world through their arrogance, hubris, and bellicosity.” The upshot, he continued, was that “President Bush is being lured into a trap baited for him by these neocons that could cost him his office and cause America to forfeit years of peace won for us by the sacrifices of two generations in the Cold War.” (Luckily for Bush, Buchanan was unaware that the president’s own mother, former First Lady Barbara Bush, had greeted him on the phone with the question, “How’s the first Jewish president doing?”)27
What Buchanan did not understand, or at least did not say, was that for many American Jewish neoconservatives, there was no distinction to be made between the defense of Israel and the defense of the United States. With countless American Jews, these identities had thoroughly merged. To be a patriotic American meant to support your government in war, and so, too, to be a patriotic Jew meant to support Israel. To be an American Jew meant supporting both and questioning neither—at least when Israel was involved. It was less a conspiracy than an identity. The idea that the interests of these two nations—these two parts of the beating heart of American Jewish identity, could diverge became, for many, literally unthinkable. The fact that one of these countries was a tiny beleaguered Middle Eastern nation and the other a global superpower nearly seven thousand miles away meant little when it came to Israel’s and America’s supposed “shared values” and shared enemies. Martin Peretz put this clearly during the 2006 Israeli war with Hezbollah: “Let’s face it: Aside from fighting for themselves, the Israelis are also fighting for us.” Norman Podhoretz, readers may recall, had accused anyone who did not approve of Israel’s invasion of Lebanon twenty-four years earlier “not merely of anti-Semitism but of the broader sin of faithlessness to the interests of the United States and indeed to the values of Western civilization as a whole.”28
Their arguments, while hardly convincing in a normative sense, tracked almost perfectly with those of leftists who viewed Israel merely as an organ of American imperialism. In any case, Buchanan’s arguments could be summarily dismissed in the mainstream debate because of who it was that was making them: a far-right crank with a particular bee in his bonnet about Israel, resulting from his brand of Joe McCarthy–style right-wing Catholicism, pre–World War II isolationism, soft antisemitism, and occasional sympathy for accused Nazi war criminals. With friends like Pat Buchanan, the Palestinians hardly needed enemies. The next set of Israel’s critics would not be so easy to dismiss.