Though I don’t subscribe to Commentary, I read its “Contentions” blog daily. “Opinion”? Definitely. “American intellectual life”? Keep dreaming.
I certainly don’t respect any intellectuals who can’t realize that journalism requires some basic disclosures. This is [...]]]>
“COMMENTARY is America’s premier monthly magazine of opinion and a pivotal voice in American intellectual life.”
Though I don’t subscribe to Commentary, I read its “Contentions” blog daily. “Opinion”? Definitely. “American intellectual life”? Keep dreaming.
I certainly don’t respect any intellectuals who can’t realize that journalism requires some basic disclosures. This is not about a list of Commentary‘s top private donors (though I’d love to have a look). It’s a matter of simple journalistic ethics, which might be too much for the flagship neoconservative rag.
A publication cannot have a writer cover a letter from an advocacy organization to a U.S. government official by another contributor to the publication without somehow saying so. This is patently obvious. (I’ll floss here, and say that Ethics was the only class I got honors in at Columbia Journalism School.)
What’s more, not only did Alana Goodman cover the letter by Noah Pollak, on the letterhead of his Emergency Committee for Israel, she didn’t even name him. Pollak, who is the letter’s only signatory, wrote often for Commentary before last summer, when he launched ECI, a right-wing Israel lobby organization. Now he writes less frequently, but has contributed to “Contentions” as recently as Monday, 21 February.
The letter was to Dennis Ross, a senior White House adviser for the Middle East, expressing “surprise” that the official would be speaking at the upcoming conference of the liberal Israel lobby group J Street. Pollak asked Ross to use his speech to counter potential criticisms of Israel from other conference speakers.
As for attributing the letter in her post, Goodman wrote only:
The Emergency Committee for Israel has outlined some of the troublesome statements made by other conference speakers in a letter it sent to Ross today. …
The Emergency Committee for Israel has rightly asked Ross to “seize this moment to explain why the Jewish State is not just one of our closest allies, but a country that fully deserves the admiration and moral support of all Americans.”
Naturally, the post was picked up by the neoconservative Washington Post pundit Jennifer Rubin, who used to work with Pollak at Commentary. Rubin recently traveled on ECI’s dime to Israel and the Occupied Territories (where she made a swell case for the one-state solution). I wouldn’t put Rubin on the hook for having worked with Pollak, but this is where the one-time disclosure gets problematic. How much wining and dining was done on this trip anyway?
Rubin’s bit on the ECI letter, in her morning round-up, was simply this:
Awkward: Middle East adviser Dennis Ross is asked why he’s going to a J Street conference with so many anti-Israel characters.
Ross’s attendance is especially cringe-inducing in light of this: “Four Kadima MKs who accepted an invitation to speak at this weekend’s J Street conference in Washington faced criticism on Wednesday from colleagues in their faction who said they should not be supporting the left-wing American lobby.”
The “awkward” link goes to Alana Goodman’s Commentary post. Why? Surely Rubin has enough of a relationship with Pollak that he forwarded her the letter yesterday when it appeared online. He’s an advocate, and she has an opinion blog at a mainstream outlet, and they just took a long trip overseas together.
The “anti-Israel” comment is a label Rubin has a penchant for slapping on any even mild critic of the Jewish state, so I won’t bother with that. But why would the astute Jennifer Rubin think that it’s “cringe-inducing” that members of Kadima, a center-right Likud spin-off, would have a problem with a liberal lobby group? Isn’t that politics as usual?
Oh yeah, Rubin doesn’t think “liberal Zionism” exists, having declared the term an oxymoron. That’s the kind of rigid ideological neoconservatism I would expect from this triumvirate of Commentary zealots. I don’t know why I’m surprised that the journal has sunk to such low journalistic — let alone intellectual — standards.
]]>Why revealing? Because Goldberg [...]]]>
Why revealing? Because Goldberg is perhaps the classic example of the ostensibly “liberal” Zionist pundit who ostentatiously touts his opposition to settlements as proof of his liberal bona fides. By doing so, he hopes to gain greater credibility when he calls for invading Iraq, or bombing Iran, or finishing the job during the Gaza assault. In this he is typical of many Jewish establishment pundits — Alan Dershowitz is another example — who use their nominal opposition to settlements as a fig leaf to cover their generally unquestioning support of the Israeli government. Generally speaking, these pundits did so in the confidence that they would never be forced to act on their statements against settlements.
Thus when the Obama administration actually pushed Israel for a full settlement freeze, their discomfiture was obvious, and most of the leading “liberal” voices of establishment Jewry suddenly got a bad case of stage fright. J Street and Americans for Peace Now were virtually alone in being willing to offer unambiguous public support for the exact policy that they had previously claimed to back. The Goldbergs and Dershowitzes of the world weren’t quite willing to admit that they simply opposed a settlement freeze, so they waffled furiously — it’s just that the timing wasn’t right, you see, and anyway, Israel should at least be allowed to build in the nebulously-defined areas that “everybody knows” it will keep in a peace deal, and anyway, can’t we just change the subject to Iran? (We can see more of this waffling from Goldberg today, as he first timidly proposes a settlement freeze outside of the Greater Jerusalem area — which, of course, exempts an enormous chunk of settlement-building from the “freeze” — before turning the mic over to neocon Robert Satloff to explain why any freeze is a terrible idea.)
This is why Goldberg’s gloating over the failure to impose a settlement freeze is so revealing. Of all the Obama administration’s mistakes in its Israel/Palestine policies, one of the biggest was assuming that the allegedly liberal Zionists in the American Jewish establishment actually supported the goals that they professed to support.
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