(I highlighted Gross’ article earlier today as an example of the Times’s generally odd stance toward Israel and Jewishness. And I noted that part of the reason this problem exists is that American Jews feel a unique investment in the newspaper. Harris’s essay begins, “I sat down to read the New York Times Travel section … ”—of course, because surely he does every weekend.)

Gross has dealt with the problems of travel and his Jewishness before—in Tablet Magazine. In 2009, he wrote about visiting the cemetery in Lithuania where some of his ancestors, murdered by the Nazis, now reside.

Gross painted himself as rootless, even deracinated, while at the same time envious of those who are not: “I grew up wondering what it must be like to have … an identity tied to more than just secular Judaism, New England, and Star Wars.” I find the resentment odd given that Gross had larger aspects of his identity there for the taking and chose not to take them. “There are no family-tree assignments in my immediate future,” he added, “and at the ripe old age of 35, I’m comfortable basing my identity on the here and now. Judaism matters little to me; it’s a vestigial organ, a curiosity.” Yikes.

And yet! Proving that there is always one more way to look at a New York Times article, the left-wing blogger Philip Weiss chastises Gross’ article for its failure to look at Israel’s decidedly more-than-iffy political burden (it’s not clear whether the post is by Weiss or a reader whom Weiss is quoting): “The Old City of Jerusalem is made out to be in Israel. There is only the vaguest reference to Arab East Jerusalem. He describes the wall as separating Israel from the West Bank—a clear error. … He talks about coming out of Yad Vashem and seeing ‘a picture-perfect valley, a white-washed village clinging to the far slope. I stared at it a long time before I could move on.’ This is presumably where the ethnically-cleansed village of Deir Yassin was.”

What’s ironic is that, as Michelle Goldberg argued in her profile of him, Weiss’ opposition to Israel is inseparable from his deep engagement with his own Jewishness. Though politically they are opposites (or at least far apart), Weiss and Harris have far more in common with each other than either does with Gross and his bizarrely, deliberately impoverished identity.

“Zero Interest in Ever Visiting Israel” [Huff Post]
Lost in Jerusalem [NYT]
NYT Travel Section Features Visit to Another Planet [Mondoweiss]
Related: Grave Missteps [Tablet Magazine]
Mondo Weiss [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: A Brief History of the NYT’s Israel Coverage

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]

While the piece meanders, its main thrust is that Jews, and particularly English (and presumably other European) Jews, having been 100 years ago the equivalent of Muslims today, must oppose European Islamophobia; as a corollary, especially shameful are “the Knesset members who have met in Israel with European rightists like Filip Dewinter of Belgium in the grotesque belief that they are Israel’s allies because they hate Muslims.” Finally—and it’s not clear how he makes the leap from that to this, although he claims “the lesson is clear”—“Jews, with their history, cannot become the systematic oppressors of another people. They must be vociferous in their insistence that continued colonization of Palestinians in the West Bank will increase Israel’s isolation and ultimately its vulnerability.”

(A quick caveat, and I make it as someone who after the Oslo massacre argued that the alliance of the Israeli and European right-wings was a bad thing: the Knesset members don’t meet with the Europeans “because they hate Muslims,” but because they like Israel—which is because they hate Muslims, but it’s not actually the same thing.)

Cohen refuses to paint the Israel question in anything but the broadest of strokes. (His post-Cast Lead report brought essential passion to the debate, but it too was marred by this lack of complexity.) If you are a Jew, you are either “fanning Islamophobia” or “the systematic oppressors of another people.” But actually, that’s not what life is for most diaspora Jews (it’s not even life for most Israeli Jews).

At the same time, he pulls back from the true courage of his convictions, mainly in order to avoid yet another laser-tripped wire: he seems to be saying that Jews of all peoples have a unique obligation not to be oppressors, but then expresses his reasons for opposing the occupation in rigidly realpolitik terms—”Israel’s isolation and ultimately its vulnerability.”

What is consistent throughout this incoherence is Cohen’s insistence that all Jews, “with their history,” have an obligation to adopt his view of the settlement enterprise—a view that this Jew (that is, me) happens to share. But this insistence commits the same category error as those Jews he bemoans for labeling him a self-hating Jew: both sides find the actions of all Jews implicated in the actions of some Jews; whether it is right-wing Israelis promoting settlements or Roger Cohen condemning them, somebody is crying shanda.

Roger Cohen is defining his Jewishness, negotiating his relationship to it, entirely by reference to Israel’s policies. Another Jew who does this, as Tablet Magazine columnist Michelle Goldberg documented, is the anti-Zionist blogger Philip Weiss, who wrote of Cohen’s argument, “I don’t see how that doesn’t end up in anti-Zionism.” He’s not wrong. And yet Cohen, in his stated opposition to boycotts, appears to establish plausible deniability of anti-Zionism. Is he in fact an anti-Zionist merely seeking to avoid one more laser-tripped alarm? Or does he support the state of Israel as it is now (minus the policies he dislikes), and can his worldview be non-simplistic enough to allow diaspora Jews to have opinions about Israel, even to feel an affinity with and an obligation toward it, without being ipso facto implicated in its actions? It’s something he needs to clarify.

Jews in a Whisper [NYT]
Roger Cohen Says Jewish Identity Must Be Founded on Opposition to Israeli Treatment of Palestinians [Mondoweiss]
Related: Eyeless in Gaza [NYRB]
Mondo Weiss [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: What to Make of the Oslo Attacker’s Zionism?

As Jeffrey Goldberg and Hussein Ibish’s op-ed, “Good News From the Middle East (Really),” argued last week, now’s no time to indulge in despair about Israel and Palestine. Conveniently for Jewish readers, then, two new books aim to give all of us a clearer understanding of who the Palestinians are by telling the stories of Sami al Jundi and Izzeldin Abuelaish, respectively, in The Hour of Sunlight: One Palestinian’s Journey From Prisoner to Peacemaker (Basic, February) and I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor’s Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity (Walker, January). Both men have suffered at the hands of Israelis: Al Jundi, who was a young aspiring terrorist, spent 10 years in Israeli jails, while Abuelaish, a fertility doctor who has worked in Israeli hospitals, lost three daughters instantly when an Israeli shell hit his house in Gaza in early 2009. Yet rather than revel in the infinite bitterness and rancor exuded by so many small minds on both sides, both of these men express hopes for a peaceful compromise that will alleviate the suffering of Palestinians and offer security to Israelis.

***

Those less interested in personal histories—that is, policy wonks who don’t mind shelling out $140 for 392 pages of academic prose—can brush up on how and why Israel keeps track of Palestinians in Surveillance and Control in Israel/Palestine: Population, Territory and Power (Routledge, December). Co-edited by David Lyons, who directs the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario—an apt position, one might say, from which to watch over this burgeoning field—the book includes contributions from Israeli, Palestinian, and Canadian scholars on topics ranging from “colour-coded paperwork for Palestinian population control” to the “behavioral profiling in Israeli aviation security.”

***

But, hey, if you want despair, you can certainly find plenty reason for it in books that rehash predictably nonproductive positions on the conflict. From Camp David to Cast Lead: Essays on Israel, Palestine, and the Future of the Peace Process (Lexington, February) offers up shocking news, such as: Avi Shlaim finds Ariel Sharon a bit too aggressive on the issue of the Palestinians! Nor should anyone be surprised by what they find in the new edition of The Goldstone Report (Nation, January) edited by Philip Weiss—unless, that is, they have thus far neglected to read Michelle Goldberg’s fascinating Tablet profile of the passionately anti-Zionist blog impresario.

***

Meanwhile, if you’d like to know how a literary scholar, trained in the analysis of verse, transforms herself into a noted anti-Zionist polemicist, The Jacqueline Rose Reader (Duke, February) walks you through the process. The collection includes Rose’s essays on Virginia Woolf and sundry psychoanalytic topics, an excerpt from her feminist sequel to Proust, and statements of her antipathy for Israeli policies (such as “Why Zionism Today Is the Real Enemy of the Jews”). For better or worse, Rose is the type of thinker who can acknowledge that academic boycotts of Israel have all sorts of problems—they’re “inconsistently and somewhat randomly applied,” and they shut down dialogue in precisely the situations in which open dialogue should be encouraged—but supports one anyhow, “on the grounds that, at the level of international politics, nothing is being done.”

***

One productive thing that both critics and supporters of Israel could spend more time doing: learning the languages spoken and written by Israelis and Palestinians. In the same way that it is generally accepted that it is necessary to speak Chinese to write with any authority about China, or French to write about France, one wishes more of the polemicists concerned about the Middle East would acknowledge that before they begin nattering on about solutions or abuses, they might want to study up. (Rose’s 2007 book on Zionism cites untranslated sources in French and German, but not, it seems, in Hebrew or Arabic.) The new edition of Sarah Nicholsen’s Complete Biblical Hebrew (McGraw-Hill, February) won’t help much, but Shula Gilboa’s Complete Modern Hebrew: A Teach Yourself Guide (McGraw-Hill, February) might. It seems, at least, that the book’s designers have been doing their best to learn a little more about Israel: While the 2004 edition had a cover image featuring that staple of the mostly non-Hebrew speaking Diaspora, the bagel, the new one features a somewhat more appropriate sivivon, which, while not particularly “modern,” at least generally displays four Hebrew characters.

In fact, in studying the languages, one cannot help but appreciate the interdependence of Jews and Arabs in Israel. Especially if you pay attention to the slang terms cataloged by Danny Ben Israel in Zubi!: The Real Hebrew You Were Never Taught in School (Plume, February)—the subtitle of which suggests the book has set its sights pessimistically on the rather limited audience of ex-Hebrew day schoolers (who, honestly, have probably picked up at least the basic obscenities). Ben Israel justly acknowledges that “Israel owes a lot to multilayered, gloriously obscene Arabic curses” like kus ocht abuk ars, not to mention in-al abuk—and shouldn’t people who share the same ways of expressing fury and disgust be able to find some way to live in peace?

But there is no denying the fundamentally Jewish nature of his enterprise. “Weiss,” Goldberg writes, “has abandoned a deeply assimilated life for a profound—if idiosyncratic and tortured—engagement with Jewish questions.”

Mondo Weiss

To the legion of Jews that Weiss has enraged, this will sound perverse. It’s certainly self-aggrandizing. But it also gets at the way that Weiss has abandoned a deeply assimilated life for a profound—if idiosyncratic and tortured—engagement with Jewish questions. As the founder of Mondoweiss, a blog that has become a nucleus of anti-Zionist writing, and a co-editor of a new book about Richard Goldstone’s report on Israel’s 2008 invasion of Gaza, Weiss says that he now thinks about Jewishness all the time. In his fierce critique of tribal identity, he’s found his tribe—one he believes is growing.

“I think I was alienated from a lot of Jewish communal life in my 20s, 30s, 40s,” Weiss says. “One symptom of that is the fact that I’d never been to Israel until 2006. I was 50 before I got to Israel.” Now that he is 55, Israel has become the center of his life. He goes to rabbinical conventions and corresponds with left-wing Israelis. “I love what I’ve undergone in the last few years,” he says. “And I love my engagement with Jewish communal life now.”

Of course, much of that engagement comes in the form of relentless criticism. Weiss’ blog is fulsomely, intensely anti-Israel—it’s a universe in which even Noam Chomsky, hero of anti-imperialists worldwide, is criticized for his residual attachment to the Jewish state. His obsessive focus on Israel has come at the expense of a successful career as a magazine journalist. Harvard-educated, he got his start writing for the New Republic and later contributed features to New York, and the New York Times Magazine and wrote a column for the New York Observer. Initially he launched Mondoweiss as a general-interest blog on the New York Observer website. When he started to focus on Israel, his editor warned him that he was becoming a crank.

He didn’t listen, and in 2007 he left the Observer, taking the blog with him. Today it operates under the umbrella of the nonprofit Nation Institute, which allows Weiss to solicit tax-deductable contributions. But its budget comes entirely from donations, and Weiss has to rely on his wife, the writer and editor Cynthia Kling, to help support him.

It’s a little hard to figure out why Weiss threw so much away for a cause that was so new to him. Naturally, he sees a linear moral logic to his journey. He looks at contemporary Israel and is appalled. Because he came to Middle Eastern issues late in life, he has no fond memories of labor Zionism, or maddening recollections of the times Palestinians spurned opportunities for peace, to complicate his anger. As one long alienated from Jewish life, he hasn’t developed the habit, common to many American Jews, of reflexively giving Israel the benefit of the doubt. For him—as it is for many younger Jews—Israel is defined by Avigdor Lieberman and Operation Cast Lead, by Shas and settlements.

Weiss first became interested in Israel in the run-up to the Iraq war. “I felt there was some element of Jewish organizational life that was behind this war because it was good for Israel,” he says. The notion that the neoconservatives spoke for American Jews horrified him, and it imbued him with a sense of responsibility to speak out as a Jew. As he dove into books about Jewish and Middle Eastern history, he came up against what he saw as the essential conflict between Zionism and American liberalism—which, after all, defines itself precisely by its refusal to privilege any race or religion. Liberal Zionists are used to holding these ideas in uneasy tension. Weiss could see nothing but stark dissonance. “I don’t believe in the necessity of a Jewish state,” he says. “Most Jews disagree with me, and that is sort of the heart of my crisis.”

The idea that American Jews might someday find themselves persecuted and in need of refuge strikes him as paranoia. “Temperamentally, I lack a paranoid gene,” he says. He grew up, he adds, hearing that Jews would always and everywhere be in danger. “And my whole experience has been the opposite.”

That still doesn’t quite explain why he jettisoned so much to devote himself to anti-Zionism. But there’s something in Weiss that reacts intensely to disillusionment. Once he rejects conventional wisdom, he’s willing to swing wildly, even heedlessly, in the other direction. In the 1990s, he was a staunch Bill Clinton defender. But when Clinton disappointed him, he began a long flirtation with all sorts of anti-Clinton conspiracy theories. His New York Observer columns painted an image of a menacing cabal of thugs sitting in the White House and snuffing out their enemies. As he wrote in 1998, “Everywhere Bill Clinton goes, he makes Chinatowns.” He was particularly fixated on Vince Foster’s suicide, which he was convinced was part of something larger and more sinister. He has more of a paranoid gene than he realizes.

He regrets some of this now. “I have problems with loyalty in life, and I felt little loyalty to the Democrats when I sensed the small-town corruption that hung around Clinton,” he wrote in 2009. “I wanted to expose it. It was the wrong impulse because as John Homans, my friend/editor, used to berate me, You’re arming people who disagree with you on policy matters. Did I help elevate W? … And would Gore have kept us out of Iraq? Maybe. That’s why I feel bad about what I did.”

Friends have suggested that the same impulse that sent him after Clinton may drive some of his writing about Israel. Though his voice can be reflective, he seems to enjoy pulling wild ideas from the fever swamps and giving them a respectful airing. He’s particularly interested in Jewish power, manifestations of which he diligently catalogs.

“Over and over, American presidents have said they oppose the colonization program; over and over these instincts have been nullified politically because of the Jewish presence in the power structure,” he wrote in 2009. “The Senate is dominated by Democrats, and 1/5 of them are Jews, even though Jews are just 2 percent of the population. The Washington Post has said that over half the money given to the Democratic Party comes from Jews. Obama’s top two political advisers are Jewish, Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod. The news lately has been dominated by Obama aides Kenneth Feinberg and Larry Summers. And what does it mean that the Treasury Sec’y gets off the phone with Obama to confer immediately with Lloyd Blankfein of Goldman and Jamie Dimon of Morgan (Dimon’s Jewish; Blankfein would seem to be)?” He didn’t say what exactly this did mean, particularly regarding Israel—it was just an invitation to conspiratorial speculation. From there, Weiss went on to list Jewish journalists including Ezra Klein, Andrew Ross Sorkin, Terry Gross, and Nina Totenberg.

Now, it’s fair for Weiss to argue that Jews, owing to their success, are far more secure in the United States than they realize, and that their politics should reflect that, just as it’s more than fair to criticize the pro-Israel establishment for its destructive impact on American foreign policy. What’s outrageous is the imputation of a unified Jewish agenda to all these disparate figures, most of whom have nothing to do with Barack Obama’s Middle Eastern policy, and some of whom are far to the left of virtually all non-Jewish Republicans on Israel issues. Netanyahu has reportedly slurred Emanuel and Axelrod as self-hating Jews; there’s certainly no evidence that they’ve urged softness on settlements.

Not surprisingly, some Jew-haters see Weiss as a native informer, telling the plain truth about the Zionist octopus. “Philip Weiss is a unique American Jewish voice—a Jew without all the usual rationalizations and blind spots–at least most of them,” Kevin MacDonald, a leading anti-Semitic theorist, wrote last May. MacDonald has bandied the idea of taxes on Jews and quotas against them in order to “achieve parity between Jews and other ethnic groups.”

Weiss isn’t responsible for his fans, of course. But when he wrote about McDonald’s embrace, there was something notably equivocal in his rejection of a figure who most American journalists and thinkers would find beneath contempt. “I find a lot of what MacDonald has said elsewhere bracing and bold,” he wrote. “He is alive to important sociological trends that few people are talking about out loud.” Only then did he call him out for his open racism and disdain for Jewish suffering.

Yet Weiss can’t simply be written off as a victim of self-loathing. His ambivalence toward the Jewish world is too complicated, suffused with attraction as well as lacerating anger. When he first went to Israel, he says, he was surprised by his satisfaction at seeing Jews with guns. He was moved by the silence in West Jerusalem on the Sabbath, and by the struggles of young Israeli leftists like those who’ve clustered around the +972 blog. “I am ethnocentric,” he says. “And as much as I’m involved in Palestinian solidarity, I emotionally look to other Jews.”

“I find his writing about Israel to be infused with a real Jewish concern,” says J.J. Goldberg, former editor of The Forward and a friendly acquaintance of Weiss’. “Some people who are associated with him write about Israeli wrongdoing with what seems like glee. He seems to have regret.”

Lately, Weiss is particularly gratified to see a growing number of Jews moving in his direction. “I think there’s going to be a big anti-Zionist moment in American Jewish life,” says Weiss. “I just think it’s inevitable.”

He may be right. Take Lizzy Ratner, for example. One of Weiss’ co-editors on the Goldstone book, Ratner is a former New York Observer writer who was born into New York’s elite Jewish establishment—her father is millionaire real-estate developer Bruce Ratner. Lizzy was 4 years old the first time she went to Israel; during college she spent a semester there and was at the rally when Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated. Her horror led her to get involved in pro-Palestinian work.

“The moment I crossed a checkpoint, 15 minutes from Jerusalem, the world changed,” she told me. “My worldview shattered. You grow up being told ‘they’ want to push us into the sea and we have to do everything we can to stop this evil enemy that wants to kill us and is going to kill us, and then you meet the terrible evil enemy, and not only are they nice, and decent, but they’re actually oppressed.”

Returning from Israel in the 1990s, Ratner looked for a community of people who shared her concerns with the Middle East, and she couldn’t find it. She’d go to Palestinian solidarity meetings, and only three others would show up. Gradually, she drifted away from the issue altogether, until outrage over Gaza inspired her to get involved again. She found a movement to plug into. “Now I look at Phil and Adam’s website”—Adam Horowitz has been Weiss’ partner at Mondoweiss since 2008—“and I look at Jewish Voice for Peace—something undeniable is welling up,” she says.

Meanwhile, as Weiss has become more enmeshed in the world of left-wing anti-Zionist Jews, he’s become at least a little more sensitive to Jewish concerns. “I know I’ve made a lot of mistakes on my site over the years,” he says. “I think in my alienation from the Jewish community, I said stuff that I regret on a number of occasions.” He even has second thoughts about some of more strident attacks on neoconservatives. “The neoconservative thing is a very confusing thing to me,” he says. “I think it’s appropriate to talk about Jewish neoconservatives, but there’s an element of red-baiting. I haven’t come down fully on that issue. I know I’ve hurt people.”

And so his alienation from the Jewish community has been transformed into a new sense of mission within it. “There’s a crisis! There is truly a crisis in the two-state solution,” he says. “That de-marginalizes me.” He’s right, whether that fills you with hope or with dread.

Well, they can’t both be right!

Blank Tablet: Distorted Defense of Boycott Discredits Publication [Commentary Online]
What Did You Do in the Loyalty Oath War? [The Scroll]
‘Tablet’ Is Mobbed Up With Neocons [Mondoweiss]
Related: Imaginative Assault [Tablet Magazine]
All in the Family [Nextbook.com]

These detractors missed the point of my article, which had nothing to do with the indiscernible beliefs of individuals; rather, I was instead illustrating that these pundits, their audiences, and the major media companies hosting their blogs, are complicit in the common work of mainstreaming the kind of anti-Semitic language, ideas, and discourse that were once confined to extremist hate sites on the far right.

Let’s start with a very recent example: After I contacted Foreign Policy’s Editor-in-Chief Susan Glasser for comment before publication of last week’s column, FP.com quickly excised dozens of the most egregiously anti-Semitic comments that stuck to Walt’s posts. Perhaps they should have also vetted some of the links that Walt himself embeds for the edification of his readers. Consider this recent post where Walt has inserted a link under the name Ariel Sharon, which leads to a 2002 article on the Media Monitors Network website:

The name Safire, as in William Safire of the New York Times, is a name they recognize well at the State Department. He is one of the high priests of Sulzberger’s New York Times empire which has a franchise to dictate terms to the State Department. Of course, it is Safire himself who appears to be taking in dictation work these days from his old pal, Ariel Sharon. Before you read on, note that the Boston Globe is also a publication owned by Sulzberger. Is their a civil war breaking out among the Yiddish Supremacists? Or is Sulzberger trying to deflect some of the damage that is bound to come his way as a result of transforming his media empire into just another corner of the Israeli Lobby? Who cares? Let Sulzberger explain his shadow government’s antics.

With this link Walt shows that he hangs out in the same fetid places as some of his most paranoid commenters. And yet it is true, as some of my critics, including Walt, contend, that he and his colleagues are not responsible for the views of their readers. Walt is not accountable for the rabble that hang on his every word and who feel vindicated by the fact that their dark fantasies about Jews are enhanced by a veneer of academic reasoning from a Harvard professor. Nor can Walt be blamed for the fact that David Duke lauded his work on the Israel lobby’s machinations in pushing the United States to war in Iraq. (“It is quite satisfying,” wrote the former Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, “to see a body in the premier American University essentially come out and validate every major point I have been making since even before the war even started.”) Even though a sewer follows Walt wherever he goes, he is not that sewer’s keeper.

I did not feel the need to make the case that Walt himself is an anti-Semite. There are plenty of credible voices who have pursued that line of argument. They have made a case that the book he co-authored with John Mearsheimer, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, was an anti-Semitic tract. Still others equally credible believe that Walt simply flirts with anti-Semitism. Andrew Sullivan has also been called to account, more than once, for combining his strident, conspiratorial denunciations of Israel, “Jewish neocons,” and “the Israel Lobby,” with his pronounced obsession with circumcision. Even as Glenn Greenwald and Philip Weiss have both been accused of obscuring the plain facts behind their frothing rhetoric about Israel, I never claimed that they were of the hothouse flower variety of anti-Semite known as the self-hating Jew.

Whether or not these bloggers are anti-Semitic is precisely the argument Walt and the rest want to have and precisely the one I do not. Anti-Semitism is an idea held in the mind that finally can only be confirmed—and can always be denied—by the mind holding it. I can no more discern what these bloggers really think about Jews than I can know whether they are thinking about the color blue or green. To get bogged down in this argument deflects attention from the issue that I am interested in here, which is not a mental state, but a process, an activity in which all four men openly engage: Jew-baiting.

Everyone knows that the media is reeling. For instance, New York Times staffers recently took a 5 percent pay cut after a hundred of their colleagues were laid off. And yet, compared to their colleagues at the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune, both of which have been gutted after sliding into bankruptcy, journalists at the Times are clearly the lucky ones. None of the big media companies has figured out how to make their Internet presence into a profit center that can sustain operations, even as they turn their hallowed brand-names over to opinion bloggers who can generate copy at a tiny fraction of the cost of traditional reporting. The Israel, or rather anti-Israel, market is one of the most attractive niche markets in this trade because it taps into a passionate audience that is interested in news and can generate immediate and measurable results—page views, hits, and comments. Even on his best days, Stephen Walt can’t hold a candle to premier sports, shopping, or pornography websites traffic-wise. But he can tap into the prurient passions of a niche market.

If Walt and the others may be acquitted of responsibility for their cesspools, what blame lies with their employers? It is hard to believe that if an author had a written a book, like Walt’s, that had been similarly branded as “nasty,” “paranoid,” and “riddled with errors of fact,” and the book was about, say, African-Americans, or Latinos, or gays—and endorsed by David Duke—that the author would be embraced by the U.S. intelligentsia in the name of open debate. Only their employers know why Walt and the others were hired or remain on staff—the editor of The Atlantic, James Bennet, declined comment through the magazine’s spokesman, while Salon editor Joan Walsh and The Nation Institute’s Taya Kitman did not respond to requests for comment—but it’s not outlandish to imagine that the number of commenters and pageviews these writers’ polemics draw would be a factor. Whether Foreign Policy knew they were getting the public sewer Walt elicits, or just a public intellectual, is unclear. (Foreign Policy’s Susan Glasser did not respond to a request for comment.) What is clear is that they decided to host Walt’s blog, give it prominent billing, and tolerate its commenters.

As was the case with Walt’s blog, Weiss’ sponsor must have brought him aboard fully aware of his anti-Israel sentiments (Mondoweiss was hosted by the New York Observer before the Nation Institute), but Greenwald was already on the Salon site before he turned his baleful attention to anti-Zionist polemics, and The Atlantic bought The Daily Dish before Sullivan started ranting about circumcision and the Jews. Unlike the rest, Sullivan doesn’t allow comments, but we still know what his readers think, because he publishes examples of their work. These published emails are scarcely different from the comments published under the posts of Walt, Greenwald, and Weiss, whose arguments serve as a dog-whistle, calling out the pack of haters whose remarks make explicit what was merely hinted at in the original, (usually) more respectable post. The commenters, many of them known to each other from like-minded Internet sites, feed off of each other’s semi-literate rage, elaborating upon their colleagues’ lies, myths, and slanders and serving up anti-Semitic invective. As the Jews, and sometimes non-Jews, arrive on the site to dispute the calumnies, the cyber-sport of Jew-baiting begins, driving up comments and traffic to heretofore-unreachable heights. Even as Sullivan’s technique to summon the mob seems slightly more sophisticated, it still uses a strategy that allows him to walk away with more traffic—he is currently ranked 15th in “standing & influence” in the entire blogosphere—but a little less of the stench.

In his review of The Israel Lobby, Walter Russell Mead explained how Jew-baiting has historically functioned: “Jews are in a double bind: refrain from responding with outrage and the charge becomes accepted as a fact, express utter loathing at the charge and give anti-Semites the opportunity to pose as the victims of a slander campaign by venomous Jews.” For the purposes of driving Internet traffic, it is helpful if Jews respond, but not necessary, as anyone who has waded through the cesspool knows. In this column last week the subject alone, without the rhetorical energies of Walt and company, also brought a record number of comments for this site, thanks to the efforts of commenters migrating from their own safe havens of invective in order to shout down reasoned debate.

To advertising salesmen and advertisers, of course, the subject of any given blog post is presumably immaterial: What matters are the numbers. But is targeting Jews that much more profitable than going after African-Americans or gays and lesbians or women? The answer is simple. People know they can get away with Jew-baiting because history shows that it has been done before and no one did anything to stop it.

***

Jew-baiting is simply one way that the new old media and old new media are trying to find their collective footing in a changing press environment and a bad economy. So, in the interests of sharing my understanding of this successful recipe with my colleagues in the opinion press, these are some notes on how to increase traffic to your struggling website.

The Jew-baiter’s Lexicon

Here are some of the euphemistic catchphrases that will cover your ass with your queasier colleagues in the press corps while announcing to those in the know that your cesspool is open for business, with examples drawn from top anti-Israel blogs:

1. “The Israel lobby”

A conspiracy theory by any other name, the “Israel lobby” has long been invoked to explain unconditional U.S. support for the Jewish state. This conceit hit the mainstream in 2007 with publication of the Walt-Mearsheimer book explaining that a broadly inclusive coalition of U.S. citizens of Jewish descent ranging from the far left to the far right are subverting U.S. foreign policy on behalf of Israel. Walt and Mearsheimer deny that what sounds, looks, and smells like a conspiracy theory about Jewish power is in fact one. Why? Because conspiracies about Jewish power are for anti-Semites, and they, by contrast, are tenured professors at two of the most esteemed universities in the United States, men who are simply trying to explain the mysterious forces that have poisoned the U.S. public so much that it overwhelmingly supports the Jewish state in poll after poll, subverting rational U.S. interests in the Middle East through a uniquely irrational process that is applicable to the behavior of no other state on the planet. That’s why.

Here, for instance, Stephen Walt finds the proof vindicating his claim that it was indeed the Israel lobby that drove the United States to make war on Iraq—Tony Blair says so! The problem however is that Tony Blair said no such thing. Walt not only wrenches Blair’s quote out of context, he also wildly twists the evidence surrounding the run-up to the Iraq war to fit his theory. In Walt’s account, the fact that Israel was vocal in its opposition to the Iraq war, until it eventually fell in line behind the George W. Bush Administration’s democracy-promotion crusade like a good ally, was a feat of astonishing misdirection, which appears to have fooled even Stephen Walt himself (as well as Mearsheimer). By the end, it appears, the United States was taken to war not by the Bush Administration but by a remarkably complete list of nearly every Israeli and American Jewish politician, journalist, activist, and thinker, liberal and conservative alike, including Ehud Barak, Benjamin Netanyahu, Ariel Sharon, “Every Israeli politician who Bill Clinton knows … and he knows a lot,” Howard Kohr of AIPAC, Nathan Guttman of The Forward, Michelle Goldberg of Salon.com, John B. Judis of The New Republic, Jeffrey Goldberg of The New Yorker, the Brookings Institution, Martin Indyk, the Jewish Council on Public Affairs, the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Mortimer Zuckerman, Matthew Berger of the Jewish Telegraph Agency; Dr. Mandell Ganchrow, executive vice president of the Orthodox Religious Zionists of America; Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism; David Harris, executive director of the American Jewish Committee; Gary Rosenblatt, the editor of The Jewish Week; and Rabbi David Saperstein of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism.

So how does Jew-baiting work in practice? Let’s look at the comments on this particular post.

“Bush and Cheney only had to walk down the hall to consult with Israel, considering how many in their cabinet and appointees have dual citizenships with Israel and were already actively involved with the Israeli government… All roads lead to PNAC, AIPAC, JINSA, ZOA, AEI, etc.” says one commenter, leaving out only ZOG in his paranoid alphabet soup. Another writes: “Everybody knows that many (not all) Jewish Americans care more about the security and preservation of the Israeli state than they do about the safety of American citizens.”

A commenter named Jacob, whom the other commenters appear to believe is Jewish, remarks that among other troubling issues with Walt’s argument is that his list of Jews responsible for the war seems to include virtually every public figure in the American Jewish community. Once baited, the mob zeroes in: “Calm down Jacob.” “Stop whining and make your point.” “Stick to the point and ease up on the histrionics.” “[Y]ou are, unfortunately, indicative of the sickness called Zionism that has perverted the Jewish community. It’s time to start to take RESPONSIBILITY for the actions of YOUR community. Get some help, Jacob.”

2. “Neocons”

This is a synonym often used to designate the kind of American Jew who has forced Washington officials to sacrifice U.S. interests, as well as U.S. blood and money, in order to make war on behalf of Israel’s desire to gobble up Muslim and Arab lands. First, the neocons slipped something into the well that Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, and other policymakers drank from before they made war on Iraq; now the neocons are eager to push the U.S. into a conflict with Iran. If Weiss is to be believed, Washington Times reporter Eli Lake and a bunch of other Jewish journalists with no evident influence on the decision-making process are in fact setting the agenda for the entire Barack Obama Administration. To the Mondoweiss audience, it appears to make perfect sense that the decision on how to deal with the Iranian nuclear program will not be shaped by administration principals like Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Vice President Joe Biden but rather by Sen. Joe Lieberman’s op-ed in the Jerusalem Post. “[W]ith the neocons and aipac’s plugs in congress/media calling openly for war,” writes one commenter, “and with zionist liberals and fake leftists/progressives demonizing Iran more subtly to pave the way, how much longer before zionism, inc. gets their way on this?”

3. “Good Jews” vs. “Bad Jews”

If you give evidence that you have a problem with all Jews, you’re identifying yourself as an anti-Semite. It’s important then to make a distinction between two kinds of Jews—the “good Jews,” who agree with your conspiratorial views, and the “bad Jews,” who are often referred to with the shorthand term “Likudnik.” John Mearsheimer makes the distinction a bit more baldly, calling the bad Jews the “New Afrikaaners” and the good ones, “righteous Jews,” a cleverly nasty twist on the Jewish concept of the righteous gentile.

“Most American Jews,” writes Andrew Sullivan, “retain a respect for learning, compassion for the other, and support for minorities. But the Goldfarb-Krauthammer wing—that celebrates and believes in government torture, endorses the pulverization of Gazans with glee, and wants to attack Iran—is something else. Something much darker.” In other words, the “Krauthammer/Goldfarb wing” represents the bad Jewish thoughts of U.S. Jewry. As Leon Wieseltier put it in The New Republic, “[Sullivan’s] assumption, in his outburst about ‘the Goldfarb-Krauthammer wing,’ that every thought that a Jew thinks is a Jewish thought is an anti-Semitic assumption, and a rather classical one.”

4. “Conflict of interest”

Stephen Walt coined this phrase himself as a substitute for “dual loyalty,” which as he concedes, “has a regrettable and sordid history, given its origins as a nasty anti-Semitic canard in old Europe.” What he means by conflict of interest is in effect the same thing, but purged of that nasty history. It is not someone’s racial or ethnic background that should exclude them from policy-making roles in the U.S. government, writes Walt, but rather when “an individual’s own activities or statements give independent evidence of strong attachment to a particular foreign country” that they should be excluded from “an influential role in shaping U.S. policy towards that country.” Who qualifies as a source of independent evidence? According to Walt, working at AIPAC, or the Washington Institute for Near East Policy is sufficient proof of conflict of interest. That is to say, that the many hundreds of scholars, military officials, and policymakers who have worked at the Washington-based think-tank that reflects the bipartisan Israel-friendly position of the U.S. government should—uniquely—be disqualified from working on U.S. Middle East policy.

Walt claims that he’d have similar concerns about “key figures” “from the American Task Force on Palestine or the National Iranian-American Council.” And yet when President Obama named Chas Freeman to head the National Intelligence Council, Walt defended a man reported to have done advocacy work on behalf of Saudi Arabia and to have sat on the advisory board of a state-owned Chinese oil company. As Freeman’s nomination began to unravel, thanks in part to the revelation that a former U.S. diplomat tapped to play a central role in the intelligence community believed U.S. support for the Jewish state was responsible for 9/11, Walt likened criticism of Freeman to McCarthyism, and adduced yet more evidence for the awesome power of the Israel lobby.

5. “No one can criticize Israel without being labeled an anti-Semite.”

This slogan entitles its speaker to slander Israel in any fashion without having to worry about being called an anti-Semite. Walt often makes the claim that critics of Israel are intimidated into silence, despite the fact that The Israel Lobby, published by one of the country’s most prestigious houses and home to 22 Nobel Prize in Literature winners, was widely reviewed in the national media and even hit the New York Times best-seller list. What this statement really means is that Jews control the media.

According to Glenn Greenwald, for the Israel lobby, “The real goal, as always, was to ensure that there is no debate over America’s indescribably self-destructive, blind support for Israeli actions.” Moreover, Greenwald explains, the Israel lobby has overpowered the American legal system: “Not even our Constitution’s First Amendment has been a match for the endless exploitation of American policy, law and resources to target and punish Israel’s enemies.”

6. “Hasbara”

Here’s another new entry in the lexicon, perhaps related to the fact that given the capricious nature of its one-time allies around the world, its virtual isolation from the international community and, of course, the anti-Israel press, Israel has of late devoted more of its human and financial resources to public relations. While it is true that all states engage in a range of activities to make its case to the rest of the world—from public diplomacy to propaganda—and some Middle Eastern countries are famous for spending hundreds of millions of dollars on such efforts, the use of the Hebrew word hasbara (meaning “explanation”) indicates that the Jewish state is engaging in a dark conspiracy to pull the wool over the eyes of the public in order to justify its crimes. After all, you can put lipstick on a pig, but it still isn’t kosher. Or, as Weiss notes before quoting a writer from The Guardian, “Why do they persist in trying to defend the indefensible?”

“I single out Israel in part because of the lies, because the lobby has gotten away with this since Truman’s day,” writes Weiss. And a commenter responds: “Also because they threaten the livelihoods of those who criticize them.”

7. The Awesome Power of Jewish Mind-Control

Remember that one aspect of The Israel Lobby’s central thesis is that marching orders for the war in Iraq were whispered into the ears of key Bush Administration decision-makers—Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, Rice—by Jews. In this view, because Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith were working under Rumsfeld at the Pentagon they must have exercised their mesmeric powers of Jewish mind-control to bend the U.S. government to their will. In a separate example, Andrew Sullivan wrote—with no actual evidence to support his pretty loaded claim—that his arch-nemesis Sarah Palin was being “indoctrinated by Joe Lieberman and AIPAC as we speak.”

What happens if you don’t read the script the Jews have handed you? They’ll silence you, says Walt’s co-author John Mearsheimer. “[T]here’s no accountability for Israel on any issue,” the University of Chicago professor recently told a Washington audience. “If I went to the Middle East, and visited Israel, and I was killed, somebody shot me, do you think there would be any accountability? The Israelis can do almost anything and get away with it.”

One way to avoid the awesome power of the Jews is to link to truth-sites beyond their control, as Stephen Walt does in the example I cite at the beginning of this piece, and allegedly to even more extreme hate sites which will gladly receive readers who might have previously been a little too timid to explore the darkest parts of the web without an escort.

8. I like Jews. I just don’t like Zionists

In rationalizing the excesses of your blogger or his more voluble commenters, explain that they are simply critical of Zionism, which is different from anti-Semitism. Even as Martin Luther King explained that, “When people criticize Zionists they mean Jews, you are talking anti-Semitism,” this particular trope has become so naturalized that no one will think to ask why Jewish nationalism, among all the varieties of nationalism promoted by the world’s myriad of ethnic, racial, and religious groups, is singled out for opprobrium.

In fact, there is no apparent contradiction in loathing Zionism and at the same time celebrating opposing forms of nationalism. Palestinian national aspirations remind Philip Weiss “of the life-and-death struggle for freedom our brave ancestors experienced during the Revolutionary War.” In Weiss’ view, anyone—like himself, for example—who stands against Israeli aggression and with the resistance partakes of that heroism. In this inversion of reality, it is not Hezbollah and Hamas who use Arab civilians as human shields, but Israel.

9. The uniquely evil evil that is Israel

Here we move from the merely tactical use of loaded vocabulary to the conceptual level. Israel is so extraordinarily beyond the pale that its behavior does not even merit comparison with states like China, which brutally occupies Tibet, or India, which occupies Kashmir, or Poland, which stands on parts of what used to be eastern Germany, or Sri Lanka, which recently extirpated the secessionist Tamil Tiger movement after a brutal three-decades long civil war, or the United States of America, which annihilated the Native American peoples. Indeed, the only states that resemble Israel are Nazi Germany and South Africa’s apartheid regime, neither of which exists any longer. Get it?

Watch the comments section fill to the brim at Mondoweiss when Israelis are likened to Nazis: “It’s not so much the methods but the ideology,” writes commenter “Shingo.” “The racial and ethic supremacy. The belief in maintaining bloodlike purity and opposition to mized [sic] marriages.” Another argues, in response to a different post that, “Israel threatens world peace like no other country.” That’s not quite right, as Weiss explains in the post: “I constantly compare the conflict with the battle over slavery in this country in the 1850s.”

While sweeping and unsubstantiated rhetoric has its place, it is best at times to use a more subtle approach. Consider a recent Robert Mackey post from the New York Times’ Lede Blog, which regularly appears on the front page of the Times website, concerning the story of the Arab man found guilty of rape by deception. Never mind that rape by deception statutes—however stupid they may be—are also on the books in California and Tennessee. Mackey portrays this episode as yet another instance of Jewish supremacism. Perhaps if this were in the print edition of the New York Times, the reporters or their editors might have been obliged by normal reporting standards at the very least to read to the end of the Haaretz piece they link to, which explains that two Jewish Israelis have been sentenced under the same law. But, it’s not a newspaper; it’s a blog.

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.”