Gabriel Schoenfeld

Gabriel Schoenfeld joined Commentary magazine in 1994 and is currently its senior editor. He has written on a wide range of subjects, including Israeli security, the Vietnam War, terrorism, nuclear proliferation, the cold war, anti-Semitism, and 20th-century German and Russian history. Schoenfeld's articles have also been published in a number of other leading publications, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the New Republic, the Atlantic Monthly, the National Interest, the New Leader, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Der Spiegel, and the Asahi Shimbun. His book, The Return of Anti-Semitism, was published in 2003.

Prior to joining Commentary, Schoenfeld was a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, D.C. In the 1980's, Schoenfeld served briefly as a temporary foreign-service officer with the USIA in the USSR. He also served on the staff of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan during his first term, beginning in 1978. Schoenfeld earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University's government department and lives in New York City.

Readers can send questions to rosnersdomain@haaretz.co.il.

Dear Gabriel,

Nearing the end of this dialogue, let's turn to the most serious foreign policy problem of this year. "If we are politically serious about stopping the ayatollahs from developing nuclear weapons", you wrote yesterday, "we can clean their clock. We need to remind ourselves of this more often, and we need to remind the ayatollahs as well".

Please explain in more detail what you think the US should do

The CIA and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community is in the dark about elements of the Iranian nuclear program. We know where many if not all of their nuclear facilities are located, and we have an idea of what is going on inside those facilities. But there are many things we do not know, including what kind of technical problems the Iranians may or may not have encountered in their massive effort to distill uranium to a weapons-grade purity.

We thus appear to be in the dark about exactly when the ayatollahs might get a bomb in their hands. Is it a year away, or two years or more? The uncertainty is itself a major problem, because given what is at stake, we cannot afford to be surprised as our intelligence agencies have been repeatedly surprised by major events in the recent past.

The UN is attempting a diplomatic solution the Iranian nuclear problem, but after years of talk, and more talk, it seems highly unlikely that Teheran will back down in the face of diplomatic action and porous sanctions. The alternative is military action, either by Israel or the United States. Israel would seem to have the capability to the job, as has been convincingly argued by two MIT military analysts, Whitney Raas and Austin Long, in a paper that appears in the spring 2007 issue of International Security. And if Israel has the capability, so obviously does the United States. One does not have to be a military expert to understand that a strike against the critical nodes of Iran?s nuclear project could set the bomb-development program back by years. The Iranian economy also has its fatal weaknesses, as in a chronic shortage of gasoline, which could be greatly exacerbated by strikes against its refineries. What the political effect of such an action would be inside Iran is obviously unknown.

Of course, any military action against Iran would in all likelihood be met by an Iranian counterstrike, which could come in many forms, ranging from acts of terrorism to salvos of missiles. These retaliatory actions might be very painful for the West. But the alternative, of letting the ayatollahs obtain the most fearsome weapon known to man, would be more painful. The longer we wait to stop them in their nuclear tracks, the more we risk the chance that our moment of decision will come too late.

Dear Mr. Schoenfeld,

Do you believe that the Walt-Mearsheimer article was anti-Semitic? I know there was big debate about it.

Thank you for your answer,

Eli Zomer


In the British newspaper, the Guardian, after they were already engulfed in the controversy provoked by their paper on the "Israel Lobby," Mearsheimer and Walt wrote that "both of us are philo-Semites and strongly support the existence of Israel." Perhaps they are both philo-Semites, and perhaps they do strongly support the existence of Israel. But if one examines the ideas put forward in their work and place them into the context of anti-Semitic thought in this country, as I did in an article in Commentary entitled Dual Loyalty and the "Israel Lobby," one might draw very different conclusions.

Back in the 1920's and 30's, men like Henry Ford, Charles Lindbergh, and the Catholic priest Father Coughlin were advancing the notion that Jews, and Jewish money, controlled Washington and were bent on pushing the U.S. into war in support of their own narrow and un-American group interests. I can find only one significant difference between what these anti-Semitic figures were saying then and what Walt and Mearsheimer have been saying now about the Jewish role in leading the U.S. into war in Iraq: Walt and Mearsheimer use footnotes in peddling this deeply anti-Semitic notion. Ford, Lindbergh, and Coughlin did not.


Dear Mr. Rosner and Mr. Schoenfeld

I wanted to ask why do you feel the need to attack Congressman Ellison, the only Muslim in Congress, and to alienate him from the Jewish community. Wouldn't it be better to help and support him, knowing that good relations between Jews and Muslims in America are in the best interest of both our communities (I'm a Muslim American).

Thank you

Samir Ahmad,
Los Angeles, CA

Is it wrong to attack Keith Ellison, the only Muslim member of Congress? I wrote about him in Commentary recently and I cited some of his past stances, including his activism inside the deeply anti-Semitic, hate-filled movement that is Louis Farrakhan?s Nation of Islam. Yes, Ellison has renounced this portion of his past, and that is welcome. But even now he persists in conduct that is alarming.

For one thing, there are his continuing ties to the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). That organization's name may sound benign enough, but it is anything but. It has just been named as an "un-indicted co-conspirator" in a terrorist fund-raising case brought by federal prosecutors. CAIR's officials have links to Islamists and anti-Semites of various stripes. Ellison not only refuses to criticize CAIR, he attends its functions as an honored guest.

In his most recent flap, Ellison compared the destruction of the World Trade Center on 9/11 to the Reichstag fire of 1933, which the Nazis exploited to consolidate their reign of terror. Ellison's point, disingenuously denied by him even as he said it, was that the Bush administration was using 9/11 to carry out a similar putsch. That of course is the kind of thinking one can find among Islamists and anti-American extremists around the world. If many Americans have a quarrel with Keith Ellison, it not because he is a Muslim, it is because he appears to be an extremist who is attempting to position himself as a member of the mainstream.

If Ellison genuinely entered the mainstream, and renounced all of his extremist ties and conspiratorial ideas, he would be welcomed by me and no doubt by many others as well.

Dear Gabriel,

I'd like to move to yet another topic - some might find a connection to the one we started with - and to another article you wrote, reacting to the study by Walt and Mearsheimer on the so-called Israel lobby.

In this article you say that "the wonder is not that" such ideas have "come back into circulation in the United States in a moment of high international tension. The wonder is that those ideas, thinly camouflaged in professorial doubletalk, are being seriously peddled not by the likes of Ford and Coughlin but by two highly respected professors from the heart of the American academic establishment.

An even greater source of wonder, and of dismay, is that those ideas have met with a large degree of acceptance in the elite circles from which Walt and Mearsheimer hail."

As the Walt-Mearsheimer book publication date is getting nearer, how worried should one be about this academic acceptance of the legitimacy of this duo's work?

Best,
Rosner

Dear Shmuel,

As your question indicates, I found the widespread acceptance of Walt and Mearsheimer's article on the "Israel Lobby" deeply troubling. The interesting issue you raise now is whether the re-circulation of those same ideas - this time in book form - will further the march of this brand of thinly veiled anti-Semitism into the elite circles of American life.

Perhaps because I veer between optimism and pessimism about such things, depending on which side of the bed I get out of, I believe there is reason to think that the Walt-Mearsheimer phenomenon has already peaked. When their initial article appeared in 2006, first in the London Review of Books and then as a paper issued by Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, it ignited a firestorm of controversy. There was an abundance of attacks on their work, including the one authored by me, which you kindly mention. There was also applause for them from many quarters, some of them quite predictable, and some not, including, for example, lavish praise from the white supremacist David Duke.

In their forthcoming book, it is likely that Walt and Mearsheimer may have added some details and nuances to the picture they already drew in their initial paper, but my sense is that they have already fired their heaviest shells. The issue has been debated, lines are drawn, and a bit of exhaustion and exasperation has set in. For this reason, the book might not get quite as much attention as the initial article did.

What is more, Walt and Mearsheimer have done and said a few things in the intervening period that have brought further discredit on their discreditable ideas. Back in August of last year, the two men spoke at an event in Washington DC sponsored by the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

Mearsheimer used the occasion to unfold an elaborate theory according to which the Israeli government, backed by "the Israel Lobby," conspired with high officials in the Bush administration to launch the Second Lebanon War. Reporters were in the audience and they pressed him for evidence. None was forthcoming. A mocking piece appeared the following day in the Washington Post. There is a measure of skepticism in the atmosphere about them and their project.

Of course, Walt and Mearsheimer will continue to find admirers and defenders. It is disquieting that they have come as far as they have, especially in the academic world. But American soil has never been fertile ground for anti-Semitic ideas, whether they are disseminated in the crude form of a Henry Ford or a Father Coughlin or in the more heavily footnoted garb of academia. The reception of their book this fall will tell us if the composition of American soil has changed in some fundamental respect. My bet is that it has not.

Dear Gabriel,

In your recent article Jews, Muslims and Democrats you write that "thanks in part to the stubbornly lopsided Jewish allegiance to the Democratic Party, the influence wielded by the Jewish community has not been increasing but receding, even while the numerical representation of Jews in public office has grown".

1. How can it be that more Jewish representatives have less influence?

2. Can you please specify some areas in which such receding influence is already visible?

Thank you,

Shmuel Rosner

Jewish representation in Congress is at an all time high. In November 2006, voters sent 30 Jewish Congressmen, all but one of them Democratic, and 13 Jewish Senators, all but two of them Democratic, to Washington D.C. In poll after poll, Jewish voters prefer Democrats to Republicans by margins of roughly five to one.

Given these numbers, Jewish influence inside the Democratic Party has always been large and remains large today. But by the logic of electoral politics, when any one voting segment is believed to be in the pocket of a given party, that party can to some degree afford to ignore the interests of that segment. This has increasingly been the case with Jewish voters and the Democratic Party. The trend is clearly discernible in the way in which the party has tolerated the emergence of a distinctly anti-Israel caucus within its ranks.

One important factor behind this anti-Israel caucus is the rising Muslim population of the United States. Although the numbers are hotly disputed and often exaggerated, the most accurate figure is believed to be somewhere near two million. Not in dispute is that Muslims are one of the fastest growing groups of the U.S. population, and that with increasing size has come increasing potency within American political life. This is especially so within the Democratic Party, signaled most notably by the election last fall of Keith Ellison, the first Muslim member of Congress and a former acolyte of Reverend Louis Farrakhan's viciously anti-Semitic Nation of Islam.

There is a point of contact between American Muslims, who embrace a reflexively anti-Israel stance, and today's Democratic Party, which has a growing contingent of voices suspicious of or hostile to Israel. Within that contingent, one particularly active element has been the Congressional Black Caucus, whose membership in recent years has included such reliably radical firebrands as Ron Dellums and Maxine Waters of California, Cynthia McKinney of Georgia, and Earl Hilliard of Alabama.

The Black Caucus is not alone. Other Democrats have been similarly ill-disposed toward Israel and/or American Jews. One thinks of James Moran of Virginia, notorious for asserting that the U.S. would never have gone to war in Iraq but "for the strong support of the Jewish community" or David Obey of Wisconsin and Senator Robert Byrd of West Virginia, both consistent opponents of U.S. aid to Israel, or far more notoriously, former President Jimmy Carter, who after embracing a long string of anti-Israel positions has lately been defending the bloody rule of Hamas in Gaza. The shift inside the party is further evident in the way in which radical anti-Israel groups like the Council of American Islamic Relations (CAIR), named recently by federal prosecutors as an "unindicted conspirator" in a case against Hamas fundraisers, are courted by influential Democrats.

My point in reciting all these facts is certainly not that the Republican Party is free from its own difficulties with respect to Israel and Jewish voters. CAIR has also been embraced by certain Republicans in recent years, and there are a handful of anti-Israel voices within the Republican Party, too. But the most significant fact is that the Democratic Party hosts the more politically significant and active elements hostile toward Israel. That is something new under the sun. Indeed, it reflects a sea-change within a party in which an anti-Israel stance would once have been regarded as anathema.

Dear Mr. Rosner,

I find your guest's first answer infuriating. Is he implying that Jews should vote for the Republican Party just to teach the Democrats a lesson - or maybe he is saying that we don't care enough about Israel when we vote for our party of choice (for reasons mostly related to domestic policy)?

Maybe you can ask him to clarify that.

Thank you,

The angry Deborah Hernick


Dear Deborah Hernick,

Thank you for your letter. Being angry and infuriated, I would suggest, is not the best frame of mind for carrying on a discussion. When I get angry, I tend to make mistakes and/or misgauge and misunderstand things. So too does that appear to be the case with you.

Thus, in the first place, my answer to Shmuel Rosner's question was intended to be descriptive not prescriptive. I was trying to call attention to a trend within the Democratic party, not to tell Jews how to vote. We can argue about the nature of that trend and its significance. Some of my critics, for example, contend that I have exaggerated longstanding and not all that important developments, and I have attempted to answer those charges, calmly, here.

But since you raise the question--I certainly did not raise it--of whether Jews should vote for the Republican party to teach the Democrats a lesson, my answer is definitely no. I would suggest a rather different course, which is one that begins with awareness of what is taking place within the party to which one belongs.

Take the case, once again, of Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, which I briefly touched on yesterday. In 2002, backed by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, McKinney campaigned in her Georgia district with the Reverend Farrakhan, Keith Ellison's former mentor, by her side. When Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, in the wake of 9/11, refused a multi-million dollar gift to the city from an Israel-bashing Saudi prince, McKinney issued an open letter backing the prince and asking him to give the money to black charities instead. None of this deterred Nancy Pelosi from endorsing McKinney that year, or even donating $5,000 to her reelection campaign. Now that Pelosi is attempting to hold together a broad coalition, she talks a different talk--but it is important to keep in mind the nature of some of the elements in that broad coalition, and how those elements are treated by the party leadership.

Of course, one can find objectionable behavior inside the Republican party. I said as much in my initial response to Mr. Rosner, but this Deborah Hernick's anger seems to have obscured. But there is ample reason to be disturbed by the tolerance of anti-Israel sentiments, and indeed, on occasion, outright anti-Semitism, in a party that would once have given such ideas and behavior a wide berth.

Ms. Hernick also would have me saying that voters like her don't care enough about Israel when they vote for the party of their choice for reasons mostly related to domestic policy. My own view is that it would be quite premature to say that a vote for the Democrats indicates a lack of concern for Israel. The party is not nearly that far gone. I am pointing to an emerging trend, one that can still be resisted, not a foregone conclusion.

But along with that emerging trend, what I find extremely disquieting is the vociferous denial among the party faithful, including the Jewish party faithful, that the trend even exists. Denial is extremely dangerous. What is not recognized and acknowledged cannot be combated and stopped.