Some on the left have recently taken to using the term “Israel Firster” and similar rhetoric to suggest that some conservative American Jewish reporters, pundits, and policymakers are more concerned with the interests of the Jewish state than those of the United States. Last week, for example, Salon’s Glenn Greenwald asked Atlantic writer Jeffrey Goldberg about any loyalty oaths to Israel Goldberg took when he served in the IDF during the early 1990s. (On Tuesday, writer Max Blumenthal used a gross phrase to describe Goldberg: “former Israeli prison guard.”) The obvious implication is that Goldberg’s true loyalty is to Israel, not the United States. For months, M.J. Rosenberg of Media Matters, the progressive media watchdog group, has been throwing around the term “Israel Firster” to describe conservatives he disagrees with. One recent Tweet singled out my friend Eli Lake, a reporter for Newsweek: “Lake supports #Israel line 100% of the time, always Israel first over U.S.” That’s quite mild compared to some of the others.

“Israel Firster” has a nasty anti-Semitic pedigree, one that many Jews will intuitively understand without knowing its specific history. It turns out white supremacist Willis Carto was reportedly the first to use it, and David Duke popularized it through his propaganda network. And yet Rosenberg and others actually claim they’re using it to stimulate “debate,” rather than effectively mirroring the tactics of some of the people they criticize.

Throughout my career, I’ve been associated with the Jewish left—I was to the left of the New Republic staff when I worked there, moved on to Talking Points Memo, hosted my blog at Firedoglake for years, and so on. I’ve criticized the American Jewish right’s myopic, destructive, tribal conception of what it means to love Israel. But it doesn’t deserve to have its Americanness and patriotism questioned. By all means, get into it with people who interpret every disagreement Washington has with Tel Aviv as hostility to the Jewish state. But if you can’t do it without sounding like Pat Buchanan, who has nothing but antipathy and contempt for Jews, then you’ve lost the debate.

This is tiresome to point out. Many of the writers who are fond of the Israel Firster smear are—appropriately—very good at hearing and analyzing dog-whistles when they’re used to dehumanize Arabs and Muslims. I can’t read anyone’s mind or judge anyone’s intention, but by the sound of it these writers are sending out comparable dog-whistles about Jews.

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A bit of background for the uninitiated: Last month, Josh Block, a former AIPAC spokesman, pushed a series of talking points that targeted several liberal writers at the Center for American Progress, a left-wing think tank with ties to the Obama Administration. (Full disclosure: My personal blog was very briefly hosted by CAP in 2008; some of Block’s targets are my friends.) The effect was to suggest that CAP was hostile to Israel because it is to Block’s left. A plain reading of the think tank’s work refutes the accusation.

But buried in Block’s overbroad invective was a kernel of truth. Some at CAP, the liberal watchdog group Media Matters, and beyond deployed the “Israel First” smear, calling the Americanness of their political opponents into question. Predictably, right-wing Jewish writers took their shots at CAP, Media Matters, and the rest—never wanting to miss an opportunity to indict the left. And the Washington Post revived the contretemps last month in an article that effectively asked if CAP was anti-Israel.

The response to this controversy, and related ones, was ugly. Many toyed with the idea that denigrating someone’s American identity wasn’t so bad after all. Left-wing polemicist Philip Weiss wrote that he considered the term “Israel firster [to be] a perfectly legitimate term in a wide-open American discourse.” Time columnist Joe Klein noted that he’s used the term himself before, weighing in on “Americans who are pushing for war with Iran”—as the question of attacking Iran lurks in the background of this entire debate—and who “place Israel’s national defense priorities above our own.”

Even more disappointingly, the term got a nod of approval from the head of a lobbying organization that represents the Jewish left. Jeremy Ben-Ami of J Street, the liberal pro-Israel, pro-peace organization that I’ve written favorably about, told the Washington Post he was cool with the throwing “Israel Firster” around. “If the charge is that you’re putting the interests of another country before the interests of the United States in the way you would advocate that,” he said, “it’s a legitimate question.” So, Ben-Ami’s response to years of getting baselessly attacked for not caring about Israel is to turn around and say his attackers don’t care about America? (Ben-Ami later clarified that, “The conspiracy theory that American Jews have dual loyalty is just that, a conspiracy theory and must be refuted in the strongest possible way.”)

If what Rosenberg and the others on the left want is a debate—by which I understand them to mean a debate about the wisdom of a war with Iran, and about the proper role of the U.S.-Israel relationship—great. The left, I think, will win that debate on the merits, because it recognizes that if Israel is to survive as a Jewish democracy living in peace beside a free Palestine, an assertive United States has to pressure a recalcitrant Israel to come to its senses, especially about the insanity of attacking Iran.

But that debate will be shut down and sidetracked by using a term that Charles Lindbergh or Pat Buchanan would be comfortable using. I can’t co-sign that. The attempt to kosherize “Israel Firster” is an ugly rationalization. It shouldn’t matter that the American Jewish right proliferates the term “anti-Israel.” The easiest way to lose a winnable argument is to get baited into using their tactics. I don’t fetishize false civility; bullies ought to get it twice as bad as they give. People disagree, so they should argue. Shouting is healthier than shutting up.

Call me a squish or a sellout or a concern troll. Whatever. But if you can’t be forceful without recalling some of the ugliest tropes in American Jewish history, you’re doing it wrong.

But there is another way to connect the OWS and Palestinian causes, and here the latter becomes a much bigger deal. You can declare them, essentially, the same. Again, a relevant text is a Mondoweiss post. For Mondoweiss’ Adam Horowitz, the horror show Tuesday night at Occupy Wall Street’s Oakland branch—in which police set upon protesters with tear gas and ostensibly nonlethal projectiles, and several were reported wounded, including an Iraq War vet who as of last night was in critical condition—basically was the Palestinian struggle; to quote his post’s headline, it was “Palestine in Oakland.” He cites Max Blumenthal’s reporting that the weapons used in Oakland are not only the same as some of those used against West Bank protesters, but are indeed manufactured by the same company. Blumenthal concludes, “the issue is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid now that the protesters are confronted with the very same weapons Israel uses to crush unarmed Palestinian resistance.” Horowitz also quotes a poem that appeared on the Occupy Writers Website, in which the left-wing Jewish poet Amirah Mizrahi writes, “i was palestine in Oakland.”

Contra Blumenthal and Mizrahi, I find the issue pretty easily avoided. If Oakland was Palestine, well, that’s only because the police were only maiming protesters; if they had been killing them, then Oakland would have been Syria; as it is, Palestine is far from the only place Oakland could be. I don’t doubt Blumenthal’s reporting, and it is a chilling coincidence, but a coincidence isn’t an indictment. Unless you are a pacifist, you can believe rubber bullets can be used unjustly and that rubber bullets can also be used justly; and if there are two instances in which they are used unjustly, that does not automatically make the two instances equivalent, much less essentially a common struggle.

However, as a spectator and as someone sympathetic to the broad contours of OWS’ economic argument, I find it compelling and depressing that, in the minds of some, the injustice in the Bay Area is the injustice in the West Bank village; I think of our common humanity; and I also think of what Mondoweiss’ proprietor, Philip Weiss, told Tablet Magazine columnist Michelle Goldberg: “I am ethnocentric.”

Palestine in Oakland [Mondoweiss]
Related: Mondo Weiss [Tablet Magazine]

Here’s what Blumenthal doesn’t mention: that the “interview” this morning on an Egyptian television network was the final sadistic nail in the coffin of the five-plus years’ captivity of a teenage Israeli soldier. To be very clear, the interview was not agreed to by Israel—the original plan was for Shalit to be in Egypt for less than 15 minutes, merely an intermediate point between Gaza and Israel—and the Israeli government is shocked and appalled by the propagandistic spectacle (the English-language interviewer asked Shalit leading questions about Egypt’s indispensable role in brokering the deal and whether more Palestinian prisoners should be free). If you watch the video and see this poor kid barely able to keep his eyes open and wanting only to see the family he’s been kept away from for a fifth of his life, you will be shocked and appalled, too. See that picture? The hand on Shalit’s shoulder belongs to a Hamas thug standing behind him. At a moment when Shalit must still not have been sure that the deal for his freedom was going to go through, he was subjected to this. Frankly, it’s fucking enraging.

Anyway, it’s a shame that Blumenthal only elects to display his formidable skills as a press critic (really, this was great!) when it suits his prior agenda. And does Blumenthal really want the stories of the prisoners told? The one who killed a few dozen members of three generations of one family during a Passover Seder? The one who blew up a Sbarro’s pizza joint? If he thinks that standing those stories against Shalit’s story, even with the full, appropriate context of a brutal, unjust four-decade-long occupation explained, will somehow manage to make us care less about Shalit and more about an unequivocal terrorist group, then he can go for it.

I’ll prefer to focus on what Noam Shalit told actual members of the media earlier today outside his house in the north of Israel. “When I first saw Gilad,” he said, “I did not say much, I just hugged him.”

The U.S. Media Reports: Gilad Shalit Swapped for 1000 Non-People [Al Akhbar]
Gilad Shalit: I Thought I’d Stay in Captivity For Years [Ynet]

First, though, quick-links to the responses of the bloggers whom Smith referred to by name:

• Andrew Sullivan: “There are no substantive arguments in the piece, and there are no quotes in the piece from any of the bloggers and writers concerned that could even faintly be called anti-Semitic. There is just cherry-picking of vileness that often shows up on comments sections (which this blog does not even have). I mean: seriously. [Andrew Sullivan]

• Stephen Walt calls it a “screed.” [Foreign Policy]

• Phillip Weiss looks at our funders and related boards—apparently William Kristol is our distant cousin (and not just from the Old Country)—although he also (graciously) acknowledges that we have “some bandwidth,” for example having published “a pretty good piece today.” Actually, Marissa’s piece is great, not pretty good, but close enough. [Mondoweiss]

• Dan Luban (a Tablet Magazine contributor) wonders, at Jim Lobe’s blog (which Smith mentions), why Smith, “a neoconservative political operative,” gets a column to use “exclusively as an echo chamber for talking points from Commentary and the Weekly Standard.” Answer one: Don’t ask me, I’m just the blogger! Answer two: Smith’s profile of Robert Malley would never run in the Standard. [Lobelog]

Additionally, some unmentioned writers got in on the action.

• “Lee Smith, shame on you,” Tweets (!) Slate Group Editor Jacob Weisberg. “You owe Weiss, Sullivan, Walt & Greenwald apologies.” Weisberg used to publish Smith. [Jacob Weisberg’s Twitter]

• Ron Kampeas says the piece was “sloppy” and that Smith “smeared” the writers he mentioned. [Capital J]

• Andrew Silow-Carroll argues, “Anti-Semitism is too serious a charge to level without defining your terms and assembling your evidence precisely.” [NJ Jewish News]

• Max Blumenthal calls the piece “crude invective.” [MaxBlumenthal.com]

• Richard Silverstein wants to know why he wasn’t mentioned. He’s just kidding! I think. [RichardSilverstein.com]

Plenty more where this came from in the comments, of course, plus some defenses. To take one, from Rob H., writing about Glenn Greenwald (who I don’t think responded directly to the piece—sorry if he did and I missed it):

If people want to tell themselves that he doesn’t traffic in anti-semitism, go right ahead. But just because he doesn’t say anything overtly anti-semitic, doesn’t mean he receives a get-out-jail free card. Greenwald routinely employs the most inflammatory of rhetoric to describe Israel’s actions and supporters. He uses the word “slaughter” so often, one would think it’s a conjunction. Other terms include “psychopathic derangement,” “psychopathic indifference,” “blood thirsty fanatic,” “sociopathic indifference,” and so on.

So, what do you think? There’s a comments section below, you know.

Blumenthal—a lightning-rod figure whose Republican enemies still call him by the nickname Sid Vicious—was never bound to be an easy sell to the drama-averse Obama crowd, but these days he comes with a new potential liability: his son, Max, a 31-year-old journalist who has carved out a role for himself as a kind of YouTube Michael Moore, infiltrating conservative conventions to capture confrontations with the likes of Ann Coulter and Michelle Malkin. But recently, he turned his attention to a new target.

“The whole time I was writing about the right, I was following the Israeli-Palestinian conflict closely,” Max Blumenthal said in an interview with Tablet this week. “But I wanted to establish a modicum of credibility before I pulled the trigger.”

In early June, the day before Obama’s landmark address to the Muslim world from a Cairo stage, Blumenthal went into central Jerusalem armed with a shotgun mike and a cameraman to interview college-aged—and very likely drunk—Americans, who, with remarkably little prompting, spewed racist vitriol about the president while asserting a strikingly meatheaded brand of Jewish pride. The video went viral, garnering more than 400,000 views before YouTube pulled it down, citing unspecified terms-of-use violations.

Blumenthal comes across as an insider’s outsider; he veers from earnest, serious condemnations of the Israeli left or Sacha Baron Cohen’s portrayal of Kazakhs to cracks about Shabak interrogations, and frets about being passed over in “hot or not” discussions among interns at The Nation. He describes himself as a “non-Zionist” liberal, though he describes the identification of anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism as a “cynical ploy by the Israel lobby.”

He said he was less surprised by what the subjects said than by the reaction after the video posted, on June 5. Commentators from across the political spectrum went nuts; those on the left objected to letting hate speech against the president go unchecked, but the most vocal criticism, which Blumenthal claims included death threats, came from those who felt it was wrong to portray Jews in such a negative light, either for fear of fomenting anti-Semitism or because of the implicit moral equivalence with everyone from garden-variety America-haters to actual anti-Israel terrorists.

Blumenthal said he didn’t think that concern was sufficient to merit quashing the video, which he said he’d hoped would prompt “soul-searching” in the American Jewish community and become a teaching tool for people engaging with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“It may not reflect the reality, but they reflect a reality,” Blumenthal said, dismissing the concern that the video might be “bad for the Jews.” “So why not show it?”

This impulse, he said, came from his father’s advice on being a journalist. “He urges me to be cautious in my methodology and how I express myself, and to be clinical in my writing—to not be strident, to let the facts speak for themselves,” Blumenthal said. But when asked whether the brouhaha over the video had anything to do with the White House blocking his father’s appointment, the younger Blumenthal rose in filial defense, rejecting the idea that his work had anything to do with his father’s career. (He declined to say what his father thinks of his work; Sidney Blumenthal did not respond to email requests for comment.)

Growing up, Blumenthal said, Zionism was never discussed; engaging with Jewishness meant cheering when Kevin Youkilis, a Jewish player, made it to the Boston Red Sox. He made his first trip to Israel in 2001, before the Sept. 11 attacks but after the launch of the Second Intifada, and said seeing the circumstances of the Palestinians living in Israel and the occupied territories prompted him to question Israel’s role in the conflict. After President Bush launched the War on Terror, Blumenthal said, he was upset to hear rabbis at High Holiday services drawing parallels between Israel’s fight against Palestinian militants and America’s war on al-Qaida terrorists.

“I wanted to describe myself as a liberal Zionist, but there was no way—the liberal values I’d been raised on were not compatible with Zionism,” he said.

He returned to Israel for the first time this spring after turning in the manuscript for his book, Republican Gomorrah, which will be published in September. Once there, he began collecting his own footage, which led to the recent videos.

Editors at the Huffington Post refused to post the original video on the grounds that it was insufficiently newsworthy, and the site earlier this week posted and then quickly removed its sequel, which captured apparently sober Israelis in Tel Aviv saying similarly impolitic things about Obama and Palestinians. The videos wound up on the left-wing blog Mondoweiss, whose founder, Philip Weiss, focuses on the Israel-Palestine conflict from a self-described non-Zionist perspective. “The videos are enormously important,” Weiss told Tablet. “The suppression of the videos strikes me as lamentable and predictable and ostrich-like.”