Jonathan Chait, who is increasingly fond of saying that anybody (or at least any conservative) who disagrees with him doesn’t know what he’s talking about, is a hack, etc., writes of Irving Kristol and Norman Podhoretz:
The truth is that the original neocons were very far from deep, emotional supporters of Israel. They were pro-Israel, but their pro-Israel views stemmed from their general hawkishness rather than vice versa. In any case, the neoconservative ideology was wildly simplistic and intellectually corrupt, as Frank well shows, but this particular understanding of it has always been misplaced.
I just have one question: What the Hell is Chait talking about? Does he honestly believe that the “original neocons” were Zionists because they were “hawks”? Based on what? The only “evidence” he provides is this excerpt from Foer’s essay:
Israel’s socialistic ethos alienated Kristol. “Truth to tell,” he later recalled, “I found Israeli society, on the whole, quite exasperating.” He was not alone. In 1951, he received a copy of a letter from a Columbia student named Norman Podhoretz. This missive had circulated to Kristol by way of Cohen, who had received a copy from its original recipient, Lionel Trilling. The letter was an account of Podhoretz’s first visit to Israel. “I felt more at home in Athens!” he told Trilling. “They are, despite their really extraordinary accomplishments, a very unattractive people, the Israelis. They’re gratuitously surly and boorish…. They are too arrogant and too anxious to become a real honest-to-goodness New York of the East.” On the basis of Podhoretz’s chilly response to the Jewish state, Kristol recruited him to write for Commentary.
Which is to say Chait provides no evidence at all.
A 21-year-old Norman Podhoretz found the Israelis “gratuitously surly and boorish,” while Kristol merely found Israeli society “exasperating.” This proves the “truth” that “the original neocons were very far from deep, emotional supporters of Israel”? Really?#more#
I can’t begin to list all of the “hawkish” American Jewish supporters of Israel who talk this way about Israelis, at least from time to time. Having recently visited Israel, I can attest that many Israelis are “exasperating” and “gratuitously surly and boorish” and many other Israelis recognize this about Israeli society.
Even Foer’s own essay (which I think is interesting but also quite tendentious in parts), demonstrates that Judaism and Jewish culture was a lifelong concern of Kristol’s. And any reading of Kristol’s copious relevant writing would demonstrate that Irving Kristol’s concerns for Israel had more — a lot more — behind them than a generic fondness for “hawkishness” (see, in particular, “Notes on the Yom Kippur War”). The same goes for Norman Podhoretz — who, by the way, was not one of the “original neocons.” I mean, are we really to believe the decades-long editor of the foremost Jewish-focused political journal in the country drew his Zionism solely from his “hawkishness”? And what about the other “original neocons” — were they all driven by their hawkishness? Marty Lipset, superhawk? Nat Glazer, militarist? Who knew?
And about this hawkishness thing. First of all, if Podhoretz’s zest for militarism is what drove him to support Israel, why was he both a Zionist and an early opponent of the Vietnam war before he became a hawk and supporter of it? And since when does hawkishness automatically drive support for Israel? NR used to be pretty hawkish back in the old days while being less than wholly supportive of Israel.
And how, exactly, was Irving Kristol a “hawk”? I’m not saying he wasn’t one, but if you’re going to talk about “general hawkishness” one of the last people you’d think of is Irving Kristol. His ideas on foreign policy were hardly generic in any way. I’m pretty sure he opposed the war in the Balkans (unlike his much more hawkish son, Bill). He was a fierce critic of NATO (much to the chagrin of many foreign-policy neocons). He wanted America to publicly forgo any claims that it would launch a nuclear first strike (he figured that, since we wouldn’t do it, we should say so). The National Interest, the foreign-policy magazine he founded, was much less neocon than a lot of people remember. And so on.
I could go on, but I should probably stop here. Maybe Chait felt he was offering some kind of backhanded defense of the neocons (they’re not Zionist stooges, they’re just bloody-minded militarists!). Maybe he knows something about this stuff he’s not letting on. But for the life of me, I have no idea what that could be.