Weak

Ruth Wisse, an American Zionist and Harvard Professor of Yiddish literature, has an Op-Ed in Sunday's Washinton Post. The Post site headlines the story: Why Jews Are Weak. Is this an exercise story, I wondered?

Not exactly. She has a bone to pick with Mearsheimer and Walt and Jimmy Carter and anyone else who doubts that the Israel Lobby might be a really good deal for America.

These days, it's becoming downright chic to hint forebodingly that America's Jews are just too powerful. But whether it's the political scientists John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt or former president Jimmy Carter, those who accuse modern Jews of having excessive clout are getting it precisely backward. In the real world, Jews have too little power and influence. They also have too little self-confidence about defending themselves.

OK, I can understand that a Jew might want more power for Jews. Similarly Lutherans, Catholics, Muslims, etc. could have their own view about power and their interests. But if you write in the Washington Post, maybe you should be trying to persuade people who aren't Jewish that Jews need more power.

It's a remarkably incoherent essay. I guess being a literature professor doesn't mean you can write. Somewhere else, Wisse is quoted as saying something to the effect that she studied Yiddish Lit because she thought that subject offered the most information and understanding of the world. Her essay here displays that same keen logic and grasp of reality.

Consider a basic paradox. Even anti-Semites often give Jews credit for having exceptional intelligence. Self-congratulatory Web sites reckon that Jews, who make up about 0.2 percent of the world's population, have been awarded more than 160 Nobel Prizes. But if Jews are so smart, why do 22 Arab League countries account for a tenth of the Earth's land surface while the Israelis struggle to secure a country that is 1/19th the size of California?

The mind boggles. The mouth of this CapitalistImperialistTreif is tempted to say something nasty and sarcastic, like: "because they haven't had time to steal it yet?" But it won't. Because the Rabbi's wife already doesn't trust him.

Wisse goes on to observe:

In fact, there's an excellent historical reason why . . .

No ******* shit! Is it anything like the reasons that the Chinese have this big old country and the Lithuanians don't?

Jews, she says, are just too damn nice - a legacy of life as a barely tolerated minority.

Unlike their Christian and Muslim overlords, Jews had good reasons to avoid irking those from whom they sought acceptance.

From my point of view, almost everybody has reason to avoid pissing off their overlords, but yes, Jews were pretty much denied the OL job description for two-thousand years, which gave them some heavy duty practice in trying to be tolerable. Wisse seems to think that was a major handicap, since it led some misguided Jews like Rabin to treat Palestinians like they were really people.

After a bit more of her tendentious version of history, she gets down to her complaint.

What about American Jewry? Mearsheimer and Walt allege that a Jewish cabal dictates U.S. policy in the Middle East, helping Israeli interests and hurting U.S. ones. So have American Jews really begun to mobilize effectively to protect Israel, or are people again overstating Jewish power and its supposed dangers?

Those who read this space, or who have read M&W, will recognize her characterization of their argument as highly distorted, but never mind that. Next we get a long and improbable diversion on how nobody speaks up for Jews in the American Academy. It's a damn shame that Alan Dershowitz is such a shrinking violet. If he were a bit bolder he might be able drive out every single scholar who doesn't sign off on the Zionist manifesto.

But will she actually dispute M&W's argument? Well, sort of.

Likewise, in the post-9/11 fight against terrorism, American Jews can draw confidence from another intersection of interests, this time between Israeli and U.S. self-defense. The Arab war against Israel and radical Islam's war against the United States are in almost perfect alignment, which means that resistance to one supports resistance to the other . . .

Yes, Prof. Wisse, that's exactly what M&W accused Israel's lobby of doing - conflating absurdly different interests. Jews, it seems, were fighting for our liberty against the Pharaohs - and probably when Joshua was butchering his hapless victims too. Wisse doesn't hesitate to bring in Stalin and Hitler, because they were all Palestinians too.

The principal reason for an alignment between Radical Islam and Israel's enemies is the United States' slavish devotion to the agenda of Israel's right wing and its American supporters.
Wisse and her neocon allies would like us to believe that Americans are dying in Iraq for some larger cause that the US and Israel have in common. I don't believe it.