Part 2: The Transparent Cabal...Who Are the Neocons?...Israeli Origins of the Middle East War Agenda

The Transparent Cabal: 

The Neoconservative Agenda, 

War in the Middle East and the National Interest of Israel 

By Stephen Sniegoski

“ . . . a passionate attachment of one nation for another produces a variety of evils. Sympathy for the favorite nation, facilitating the illusion of an imaginary common interest in cases where no real common interest exists, and infusing into one the enmities of the other, betrays the former into a participation in the quarrels and wars of the latter without adequate inducement or justification. It leads also to concessions to the favorite nation of privileges denied to others which is apt doubly to injure the nation making the concessions; by unnecessarily parting with what ought to have been retained, and by exciting jealousy, ill-will, and a disposition to retaliate, in the parties from whom equal privileges are withheld. And it gives to ambitious, corrupted, or deluded citizens (who devote themselves to the favorite nation), facility to betray or sacrifice the interests of their own country, without odium, sometimes even with popularity; gilding, with the appearances of a virtuous sense of obligation, a commendable deference for public opinion, or a laudable zeal for public good, the base or foolish compliances of ambition, corruption, or infatuation.”

—George Washington

Chapter 3 

Who Are the Neocons?

Although the term neoconservative is in common usage, a brief description of the group might be helpful. The term was coined by socialist Michael Harrington as a derisive term for leftists and liberals who were migrating rightward. Many of the first generation neoconservatives were originally liberal Democrats, or even socialists and Marxists, often Trotskyites. Most originated in New York, and most were Jews. They drifted to the right in the 1960s and 1970s as the Democratic Party moved to the anti-war McGovernite left.[1]

The Jewish nature of the neoconservatives was obvious. It should be pointed out that Jews in the United States have traditionally identified with the liberals and the left, and most still do. (Liberals in the American context represent the moderate left.) Liberalism seemed to allow for advancement of Jews in an open, secular society; to many Jews, conservatism, in contrast, represented traditional Christian anti-Semitism. Moreover, as political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg points out in his The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State, Jews were in favor of the American liberalism’s creation of the welfare state in the period between Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s and Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society in the 1960s, which brought many Jews into power positions in the federal government apparatus.[2]

But those individuals who became neoconservatives were perceptive enough to see that in the 1960s liberals and the left were identifying with issues that were apt to be harmful to the collective interest of Jewry. As historian Edward S. Shapiro, himself of a Jewish background, points out:

Many of the leading neoconservative intellectuals were Jewish academicians who moved to the right in the 1960s in response to campus unrest, the New Left, the counterculture, the Black Power movement, the excesses of the Great Society, the hostility of the left to Israel, and the left’s weakening opposition to Communism and the Soviet Union. They became convinced, wrote Mark Gerson, a perceptive student of the neoconservatives, has written, that the left was “distinctively bad for the Jews.”[3]

In response to efforts to deny the neoconservatives’ Jewishness, Gal Beckerman wrote in the Jewish newspaper Forward in January 2006: “it is a fact that as a political philosophy, neoconservatism was born among the children of Jewish immigrants and is now largely the intellectual domain of those immigrants’ grandchildren.” In fact, Beckerman went so far as to maintain that “If there is an intellectual movement in America to whose invention Jews can lay sole claim, neoconservatism is it.”[4]

Concern for Jews abroad and Israel, in particular, loomed large in the birth of neoconservatism. Proto-neocons adopted a pronounced anti-Soviet policy as the Soviet Union aided Israel’s enemies in the Middle East and prohibited Soviet Jews from emigrating. “One major factor that drew them inexorably to the right,” writes political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg,

was their attachment to Israel and their growing frustration during the 1960s with a Democratic party that was becoming increasingly opposed to American military preparedness and increasingly enamored of Third World causes [e.g., Palestinian rights]. In the Reaganite right’s hard-line anti-communism, commitment to American military strength, and willingness to intervene politically and militarily in the affairs of other nations to promote democratic values (and American interests), neocons found a political movement that would guarantee Israel’s security.[5]

Neoconservative Max Boot acknowledged that “support for Israel” had been and remained a “key tenet of neoconservatism.”[6]

In the United States, it is sometimes taboo to say that the neoconservatives are primarily Jewish or that they are concerned about Israel, but neocons did not conceal these connections. The original flagship of the neoconservative movement was Commentary magazine, which is put out by the American Jewish Committee and has styled itself as “America’s premier monthly journal of opinion.” The American Jewish Committee pronounces as its mission: “To safeguard the welfare and security of Jews in the United States, in Israel, and throughout the world.”[7]

It was Norman Podhoretz, editor-in-chief of Commentary for 35 years until his retirement in 1995, who transformed the magazine into a neoconservative publication, offering writing space to many who would be leading figures in the movement. Ironically, when Podhoretz first became editor, he allied himself with New Left radicals, who vociferously opposed the war in Vietnam. Murray Friedman writes in The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy that under Podhoretz’s editorship, “Commentary became perhaps the first magazine of any significance to pay serious attention to radical ideology.” However, Podhoretz started his move rightward by 1967, and by 1970, “his conversion to neoconservatism was complete.”[8]

Friedman points out that Podhoretz, like most who gravitated to neoconservatism, did not dwell on Jewish interests and the fate of Israel until latter half of the 1960s and the early 1970s, when his “sense of his own Jewishness intensified.”[9] Friedman notes that

A central element in Podhoretz’s evolving views, which would soon become his and many of the neocons” governing principle was the question, “Is It Good for the Jews,” the title of a February 1972 Commentary piece.[10]

Exemplifying this greater focus on Jewish interests, Friedman observes that

Commentary articles now came to emphasize threats to Jews and the safety and security of the Jewish state. By the 1980s, nearly half of Podhoretz’s writings on international affairs centered on Israel and these dangers.[11]

Benjamin Ginsberg similarly maintains:

A number of Jews ascertained for themselves that Israeli security required a strong American commitment to internationalism and defense. Among the most prominent Jewish spokesmen for this position was Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary magazine. Podhoretz had been a liberal and a strong opponent of the Vietnam War. But by the early 1970s he came to realize that “continued American support for Israel depended upon continued American involvement in international affairs – from which it followed that American withdrawal into [isolationism] [preceding brackets in original] represented a direct threat to the security of Israel.”[12]

Having a married daughter and grandchildren living in Israel, Podhoretz’s identification with the Jewish state transcended intellectual conviction. With the beginning of the Gulf War of 1991, Podhoretz actually went to live with his daughter in her home in Jerusalem in order to show his solidarity with Israel, which Saddam had threatened to attack by missiles, and did so to a limited extent.[13]

Podhoretz was a neoconservative of exceptional influence. As neoconservative Arnold Beichman contended: “in the ideological wars of the 1970s and 1980s, Podhoretz had become an intellectual force who by himself and through his magazine contributed mightily to the global victory against communism.”[14] Denoting Podhoretz’s significance, President George W. Bush awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, on June 23, 2004.[15]

In terms of membership, neoconservatism is not exclusively Jewish. There are gentiles who identify with the neoconservative movement – some because of its ideas but probably also because membership can be career enhancing at a time when it has been difficult for scholars, especially white male scholars, to even break into academia, where supply greatly exceeds demand and where the environment has not been hospitable to individuals of a conservative bent. For one thing, the numerous neoconservative think tanks and media outlets can offer numerous jobs. “One thing that the neocons have that both other factions of conservatives and liberals don’t have,” wrote Scott McConnell, editor of the American Conservative, “is they can employ a lot of people.”[16] Work in those jobs can provide the credentials for important positions outside neocon-controlled domains – government, academia, media, and the literary world. Moreover, the extensive neoconservative network can facilitate personal advancement in all parts of the establishment.

It would appear that Jewish neoconservatives seek to feature their gentile members, and use their existence to deny the Jewish nature of their movement. But the fact of the matter is that the movement has been Jewish inspired, Jewish-oriented, and Jewish-dominated. As historian Paul Gottfried, himself Jewish and a close observer of the neoconservative scene, pointed out in April 2003:

The term “neoconservative” is now too closely identified with the personal and ethnic concerns of its Jewish celebrities. Despite their frequent attempts to find kept gentiles, the game of speaking through proxies may be showing diminishing results. Everyone with minimal intelligence knows that Bill Bennett, Frank Gaffney, Ed Feulner, Michael Novak, George Weigel, James Nuechterlein, and Cal Thomas front for the neocons. It is increasingly useless to depend on out-group surrogates to repackage a movement so clearly rooted in a particular ethnicity – and even sub-ethnicity (Eastern European Jews).[17]

Similarly, John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt in The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy point out in their reference to the existence of non-Jewish neoconservatives that “Jews nonetheless comprise the core of the neoconservative movement.”[18]

Neoconservatives are distinguished by more than just their ideology and ethnicity; they are not simply conservative Jews. They have formed and sustained close personal connections between themselves over a long period of time. As will be discussed later, this network has been perpetuated by becoming institutionalized in a number of influential think tanks and organizations. These close ties help to explain the neocons’ great power, which far exceeds their rather limited numbers.[19]

Social anthropologist Janine R. Wedel describes the successful neocon network as a “flex group,” which she defines as an informal faction adept at “playing multiple and overlapping roles and conflating state and private interests. These players keep appearing in different incarnations, ensuring continuity even as their operating environments change.”

Wedel continues:

As flex players, the neocons have had myriad roles over time. They quietly promoted one another for influential positions and coordinated their multi-pronged efforts inside and outside government in pursuit of agendas that were always in their own interest, but not necessarily the public’s.

The neocon flex players

always help each other out in furthering their careers, livelihoods and mutual aims. Even when some players are “in power” within an administration, they are flanked by people outside of formal government. Flex groups have a culture of circumventing authorities and creating alternative ones. They operate through semi-closed networks and penetrate key institutions, revamping them to marginalize other potential players and replacing them with initiatives under their control.[20]

But while personal advancement is involved, the flex players pursue much more than this, being “continually working to further the shared agenda of the group.”[21] What Wedel fails to bring out, however, is that the “shared agenda of the group” involves the advancement of the interests of Israel, as the neocons perceive Israel’s interests.

The neocon network is especially solidified by the existence of relationships by blood and marriage. Norman Podhoretz is married to Midge Decter, a neoconservative writer in her own right. Their son, John Podhoretz was a columnist for the neoconservative New York Post and Weekly Standard before being announced as the new editor of Commentary in October 2007. And their son-in-law is Elliott Abrams, who worked for Senator Henry ‘Scoop’ Jackson and later served in the State Department during the Reagan administration, where he was involved in the Iran/Contra scandal. Abrams was director of Near Eastern Affairs in the National Security Council during George W. Bush’s first term and was promoted to Deputy National Security Adviser in the second term.[22]

Irving Kristol, who is regarded as the “godfather” of neoconservatism (though his focus tended more to domestic matters in contrast to Podhoretz’s concern for foreign policy), is married to Gertrude Himmelfarb, also a major neoconservative writer. The Kristols’ son, William (Bill) Kristol, is currently a leading figure in the neoconservative movement as editor of the Weekly Standard, which surpassed Commentary to become the major neoconservative publication.[23]

Meyrav and David Wurmser are another neoconservative couple. Israeli-born Meyrav Wurmser was Director of the Center for Middle East Policy at the Hudson Institute. In 2005, she became head of the Hudson Institute’s Zionism Project, which involves a two-year study to look at “the identity crisis of Israel and Zionism,” and to come up with recommendations “that can aid” in resolving it.[24] She also wrote for the Jerusalem Post and was co-founder of the Middle East Media Research Institute. Her husband, David Wurmser, is a leading neoconservative writer who was director of the Middle East program at the American Enterprise Institute prior to entering the Bush II administration, where he held various positions, becoming in 2003 an adviser on Middle Eastern affairs to Vice President Dick Cheney.

Neoconservatives Richard Perle, James Woolsey, and Paul Wolfowitz were all acolytes of the late Albert Wohlstetter, a professor at the University of Chicago and the University of California at Berkeley and a nuclear strategist at the RAND corporation, who now has a conference center named for him at the influential neoconservative American Enterprise Institute (sometimes referred to as “Neocon Central”) in Washington, D.C. Gary Dorrien in Imperial Designs describes Wohlstetter as the “godfather of the nuclear hawks.”[25] Throughout the Cold War, Wohlstetter denigrated America’s nuclear strategy of deterrence, and instead advocated a war-fighting stance, which he held could actually best serve to deter war. He contended that other American experts grossly underestimated the military power of the U.S.S.R. and that it was essential for the United States to build up its military strength.[26]

In 1969, Wohlstetter landed Wolfowitz and Perle[27] their first Washington jobs as interns for Democratic Senator Henry (“Scoop”) Jackson of Washington. Jackson was a hard-line Cold Warrior, champion of Israel’s interests, and neoconservative icon.[28] It was likely through Wohlstetter that Perle met the now-notorious Ahmed Chalabi, who would head the Iraqi exiles and play a significant role in inducing the United States to make war on Iraq in 2003.[29]

While Wolfowitz would stay only briefly with Jackson, Perle would remain for over a decade. During this time, Jackson’s office became an incubator for the incipient neoconservatives. Staff would include Elliott Abrams, Douglas Feith, Frank Gaffney, R. James Woolsey, and Michael A. Ledeen.[30]

Many significant neoconservatives were followers of political philosopher Leo Strauss. These included Paul Wolfowitz; William Kristol; Stephen Cambone, under secretary of defense for intelligence in the Bush II administration; and Robert Kagan, who teamed with William Kristol at the Weekly Standard. Kagan is the son of leading Yale University Straussian Donald Kagan and brother of Frederick W. Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute.[31]

This list of connections is far from complete (and will be developed more in other chapters) but it helps to reveal an important fact about the neoconservative movement. As political writer Jim Lobe explains it:

Contrary to appearances, the neocons do not constitute a powerful mass political movement. They are instead a small, tightly-knit clan whose incestuous familial and personal connections, both within and outside the Bush administration, have allowed them to grab control of the future of American foreign policy.[32]

It should also be emphasized that the neoconservatives are far from being an isolated group; to the contrary, they work closely with others, where common interests serve as the attraction. For example, neoconservatives have received broad support from the Christian right for most of their activities. To attract support on their particular issues, neoconservatives often have created ad hoc citizenship groups, such as the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. Moreover, their advocacy of a strong military attracts defense intellectuals, some mainstream conservatives, and representatives from defense interests. On the other hand, the neocons find allies among various Jewish Americans, who may not support all of their hard-line militaristic positions or their more conservative domestic positions, but agree on the issue of staunchly supporting Israel and its foreign policy objectives. In this latter category are such liberal pro-Zionists as Senator Joseph Lieberman, former Congressman Stephen Solarz, Congressman Tom Lantos, the New Republic’s Martin Peretz, and representatives from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). A few more traditional conservative Jews such as columnist William Safire, who pre-existed the neocons on the right, closely identify with the neoconservatives regarding Israel and American policies in the Middle East. As commentator John Christison, a former CIA analyst, observes: “It suffices to know . . . . that the neocons and the [Israel] lobby together form a very powerful mutual support society, and their relationship is symbiotic in the extreme.”[33]

When the they first emerged in the early 1970s, the neoconservatives worked primarily through the Democratic party – they sought to combat the leftist orientation that had enabled George McGovern to become the Democratic presidential standard bearer in 1972. “The 1972 campaign proved to be a watershed for the neoconservatives,” Gary Dorrien notes, “For them, the McGovern candidacy epitomized the degeneration of American liberalism. McGovern’s world view, like his slogan – ‘Come Home, America’ – was defeatist, isolationist, and guilt-driven.”[34]

McGovernites were not simply opposed to American military involvement in Vietnam, they were opposed also to the continuation of the Cold War with its global opposition to Communism and its concomitant massive military spending. The military retrenchment they sought, however, would have had negative repercussions for Israel, dependent as it was on American military assistance, and especially since it was targeted as an ideological enemy by the Communist countries and the world left. As Benjamin Ginsberg writes of that era:

Many liberal Democrats . . . espoused cutbacks in the development and procurement of weapons systems, a curtailment of American military capabilities and commitments, and what amounted to a semi return to isolationism. These policies all appeared to represent a mortal threat to Israel and, hence, were opposed by many Jews who supported Israel.[35]

“Increasingly,” Murray Friedman maintains,

neocons came to believe that the Jewish state’s ability to survive – indeed, the Jewish community’s will to survive – was dependent on American military strength and its challenge to the Soviet Union, the primary backer of Arab countries in the Middle East.[36]

Neo-conservatism’s first political manifestation was as the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, which was formed in 1972, when most neoconservatives entertained hopes of reclaiming the Democratic Party and American liberalism. As James Nuechterlein, himself something of a neocon, notes:

Most of the leading neoconservatives were Jewish . . . and Jews found it extraordinarily difficult to think of themselves as conservatives, much less Republicans. In the American context, to be a Jew – even more a Jewish intellectual – was to be a person of the left.[37]

Murray Friedman similarly writes in The Neoconservative Revolution that at that time

neocons still associated conservatism with golf, country clubs, the Republican Party, big business – a sort of “goyishe” fraternity – and with the ideological posturing of right-wing fanatics. They viewed traditional conservatives as having little empathy for the underdog and the excluded in society. They thought of themselves as dissenting liberals, “children of the depression,” as Midge Decter declared, who “retained a measure of loyalty to the spirit of the New Deal.”[38]

In the 1970s, the neoconservatives’ political standard bearers were Senator Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Neoconservatives basically wanted to return to the anti-Communist Cold War position exemplified by President Harry Truman(1945–1953), which had held sway through the administration of Lyndon B. Johnson (1963–1969). Anti-Communist foreign policy, however, had been widely discredited among mainstream liberal Democrats by the Vietnam imbroglio. While neoconservatives were opposed to the McGovern liberals in the Democratic Party, whom they viewed as too sympathetic to Communism and radical left causes, they did not identify with the foreign policy of mainstream Republicans. Rather, neoconservatives opposed Henry Kissinger’s policy of détente with the Soviet Union, with its emphasis on peace through negotiations, arms control, and trade, which was being pushed by the Nixon and Ford administrations. They viewed the détente policy as defeatist and too callous toward human rights violations in Communist countries.

For the neoconservatives, the human rights issue centered on the right of Jews to emigrate from the Soviet Union. That right was embodied in the Jackson-Vanik amendment, which was especially the work of Jackson’s staffer Richard Perle. By requiring that American trade favors to the Soviet Union be based on the latter’s allowance of freer emigration, this amendment undercut the Nixon-Kissinger policy of détente, which sought to establish better relations with the Soviets through trade. While neoconservatives were only a small minority among Jews, on this issue they were joined by the Jewish mainstream.[39]

The Jackson-Vanik amendment was a major achievement for American Jewry. “Congress had rolled over administration resistance and passed a proactive law that changed the structure of U.S.-Soviet relations,” writes J. J. Goldberg. “Whether or not the legislation helped its intended beneficiaries, the Jews of Russia, it sent an unmistakable message around the world that the Jews of America were not to be trifled with.”[40]

The neoconservatives remained loyal Democrats in 1976 and looked with hope toward the presidency of Jimmy Carter. But the neoconservatives soon came to realize that Carter did not seem to perceive a dire Soviet expansionist threat. From the neocon viewpoint, the Soviet Union was advancing around the globe while Carter appeared to lack the will to resist. Norman Podhoretz would maintain that under Carter, the United States “continued and even accelerated the strategic retreat begun under the Republicans.”[41]

Moreover, Carter pursued policies that went directly against what the neoconservatives considered to be Jewish interests, especially in his failure to provide sufficient support for Israel. The neoconservatives were alarmed by the Carter administration’s attempt to pursue what it styled an even-handed approach in the Middle East, fearing that Israel would be pressured to withdraw from the occupied territories, with only minor border modifications, in return for Arab promises of peace. What especially caused neoconservative outrage was the media revelation that UN Ambassador Andrew Young had a secret meeting in New York with the United Nation’s Palestinian Liberation Organization observer. Reports surfaced that Israeli intelligence had recorded the diplomats’ conversation and leaked it to the American press. Negotiating with the PLO was a violation of American policy. Young was one of the pre-eminent Black leaders in America and Blacks made up a key part of Carter’s constituency. Faced with strong Jewish protests, Carter replaced Young at the UN. However, his successor, Donald McHenry, supported a Security Council resolution declaring Jerusalem to be occupied territory and charging Israel with extraordinary human rights violations, which led to further Jewish outrage. As a result of these activities, Friedman writes, “Carter . . . was seen by neocons as fundamentally hostile to Israel.”[42]

By the beginning of 1980, the neoconservatives had given up on the Democratic Party. According to John Ehrman, a historian of neoconservatism:

In the neoconservatives’ view, its [the Democrats”] foreign policies were firmly in the hands of the left and the party no longer opposed anti-Semitism or totalitarian thinking – indeed, they believed that these tendencies were now in the party’s mainstream.[43]

The neoconservatives gravitated to the Republicans where they found kindred spirits among that party’s staunchly anti-Communist conservative wing, which was also disenchanted with the détente policy of the Nixon and Ford administrations. It was only among the right-wing Republicans where there still remained firm support for the idea that Soviet Communism was an evil and implacable ideological enemy – an attitude that the conventional wisdom of the times looked upon as outdated and gauche.[44]

Welcomed in as valuable intellectual allies by the conservative Republicans, the neoconservatives had made their momentous shift just as the most successful right-wing Republican of the modern era, Ronald Reagan, won the presidential election of 1980.

Despite being newcomers to the conservative camp, neoconservatives were able to find places in the Reagan administration in national security and foreign policy areas, although at less than Cabinet-level status. “Reagan’s triumph in the election,” Friedman contends, “provided the neocons with their version of John F. Kennedy’s Camelot.”[45]

A fundamental reason for their success was that the neoconservatives had the academic and literary standing and public reputations, which traditional conservatives lacked. The neoconservatives had published widely in prestigious establishment intellectual journals. Some had impressive academic backgrounds and influential contacts in political and media circles. This is not to say that neoconservatives necessarily exhibited superior intellectual skills or academic scholarship compared to many traditional conservative intellectuals, but rather that they possessed establishment credentials and respectability. The fact that they had recently espoused liberal positions bolstered their credibility in the establishment. None had ever expressed rightist views that might be considered taboo from the liberal perspective. Consequently, they could not be easily ignored, ridiculed or smeared, as could many marginalized traditional conservatives. Reagan political strategists believed that neocons could serve as effective public exponents of administration policy.[46] It should also be added that the more illustrious neoconservatives tended to bring in other, usually younger, neocons with negligible scholarly or public achievements.[47]

Significant neoconservatives in the Reagan administration included Richard Perle, assistant secretary of defense for international security policy; Paul Wolfowitz, assistant secretary of state for East Asian and Pacific affairs and later ambassador to Indonesia; Elliott Abrams, assistant secretary of state for human rights and later as assistant secretary of state for hemispheric affairs, where he played a central role in aiding the Contras in the Iran-Contra affair, for which he was indicted; Jeane Kirkpatrick, ambassador to the United Nations (who had on her staff such neocons as Joshua Muravchik and Carl Gershman);[48] Kenneth Adelman, director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, 1983–1987; Richard Pipes, member of the National Security Council on Soviet and East European affairs; and Max Kampelman, ambassador and head of the United States delegation to the negotiations with the Soviet Union on nuclear and space arms, 1985–89. Michael Ledeen was a special advisor to Secretary of State Alexander Haig in 1981–1982, consultant for the Department of Defense (1982–1986), and a national security advisor to the president, who was intimately involved in the Iran-Contra scandal. Frank Gaffney and Douglas Feith served under Perle in the Defense Department. Feith also served as a member of the National Security Staff under Richard Allen in Reagan’s first term.

In the Reagan administration, the neoconservatives allied with the militant right-wing anti-Communists and combated Republican establishment elements in order to fashion a hard-line anti-Soviet foreign policy. Neoconservatives were in the forefront of pressing for Reagan’s military build-up and de-emphasizing arms control agreements, which had been a foreign policy centerpiece of previous administrations, both Republican and Democrat.[49]

In contrast to the longstanding American defensive Cold War strategy of containing Soviet communism, the neoconservatives pushed for destabilizing the Soviet empire and its allies. They did not invent this strategic doctrine which originated with such seminal conservative thinkers as James Burnham and Robert Strausz-Hupe. The goal behind this offensive strategy was to actually bring about the defeat of the Soviet Union, instead of just achieving stalemate, which would be the best that could be obtained by defensive containment. But while not the originators of an offensive Cold War strategy, the neocons were the first to successfully promote its implementation.[50]

In their effort to implement the offensive Cold War strategy, the neocons especially supported the provision of extensive military aid to the militant Islamic Afghan “freedom fighters” in their resistance struggle against the Soviet occupation. The military aid, which had begun in the Carter administration, had been very limited. Richard Perle played a pivotal role in equipping the “freedom fighters” with the all-important shoulder-borne Stinger missiles, which proved to be lethal to the previously invincible Soviet helicopter gunships.[51] Ironically, the neoconservatives now portray these very same Muslims that they helped to militarize as a deadly terrorist threat to America and the world.

The neocons played a significant role in the success of Reagan’s policies. Steven Hayward, an AEI fellow and the author of The Age of Reagan, maintains that “Ronald Reagan would not have been elected and would have been able to govern us effectively without some of the prominent neo-conservatives who joined the Republican side.”[52] Murray Friedman writes, “The neocons reinforced Reagan’s hard-line beliefs on international communism and provided much of the administration’s ideological energy, giving the Reagan revolution ‘its final sophistication.’”[53]

In essence, the neocons did not invent a new strategy for international relations, but lent an air of establishment respectability to doctrines that had been in the repertoire of the American right-wing from the early days of the Cold War. The related elements of sophistication and respectability contributed by the neocons were very important because the hard-line policies implemented by Reagan had traditionally been ridiculed and reviled by the liberal establishment as being completely beyond the pale.[54] The liberal establishment pedigrees of the neocon Reaganites and the power in the media exerted by such neocon instruments as Commentary magazine were able to partially deflect the liberal media criticism, preventing Reagan from being successfully caricatured as a zany right-wing warmonger, as had often been the case with previous conservative leaders.[55]

Admirers credit the neoconservatives with playing a major role in bringing about the demise of the Soviet Union, and there would seem to be considerable truth to this claim.[56] “History has proved the neoconservatives largely right on the Cold War,” writes Gal Beckerman in the Forward.

Among the many factors that brought an end to the Soviet Union – already a dying animal by the 1980s – was the shove given to it by this rhetoric. By challenging the Soviet Union head on, rhetorically, in covert action and through an expensively renewed arms race, the United States managed to call the Soviet bluff. Neoconservatives provided language that depicted the Cold War as an urgent zero-sum game in which America the Good had to assert itself so that Evil Communism could be obliterated. And indeed, the Soviet Union collapsed.[57]

However, critics of the neocons point out that Reagan, during his second term, moved toward rapprochement with Gorbachev’s Soviet Union – a move that was strongly resisted by the hard-line neoconservatives – and that it was that softer approach that allowed Gorbachev to enact his reforms, bringing about the unraveling of the Soviet empire. Historian John Patrick Diggins observes that the difference between the neoconservatives and Reagan was that

he believed in negotiation and they in escalation. They wanted to win the cold war; he sought to end it. To do so, it was necessary not to strike fear in the Soviet Union but to win the confidence of its leaders. Once the Soviet Union could count on Mr. Reagan, Mr. Gorbachev not only was free to embark on his domestic reforms, to convince his military to go along with budget cuts, to reassure his people that they no longer needed to worry about the old bogey of “capitalist encirclement,” but, most important, he was also ready to announce to the Soviet Union’s satellite countries that henceforth they were on their own, that no longer would tanks of the Red Army be sent to put down uprisings. The cold war ended in an act of faith and trust, not fear and trembling.[58]

Even if Reagan’s moderation of the neoconservative hard-line anti-Soviet policy ultimately induced the voluntary unraveling of the Soviet empire, nonetheless, it seems reasonable to conclude that it was the hard-line policies espoused and implemented by neocon Reaganites that forced the Soviet Union to that position. Certainly, the Soviet regime appeared very sturdy, despite the country’s economic difficulties, during the pre-Reagan era – and such was the assumption that guided American policy in the Nixon, Ford, and Carter administrations. During the 1970s, expert opinion did not predict an inevitable Soviet collapse in less than twenty years time. And certainly, no Soviet leader, including Mikhail Gorbachev, sought the downfall of the Soviet system and its mighty military machine. Taking this into account, one has to say that the neoconservatives were a factor, even a significant factor, in the downfall of the seemingly invulnerable Soviet empire at the end of the 1980s – and, most incredibly, it was a downfall that did not involve a major military confrontation. From the American perspective, it can be seen as nothing other than a major victory.

Now for a brief aside: The role of the neoconservatives in the Reagan administration is highly relevant to the thesis of this book. For if it is appropriate to perceive the neocons as influential regarding Reagan administration foreign policy, one should be able to connect them to Bush II’s war on Iraq and his overall Middle East policy. In fact, as the following pages illustrate, the neocons were far more powerful during the Bush II administration than they had been during Reagan’s time, both inside and outside of government. In the Reagan era, they were relative newcomers; by the time of the Bush II era, they had become an established, institutionalized force. Moreover, in the Reagan administration the neocons were basically implementing an anti-Soviet policy, which had long been the staple position of the traditional right and, consequently, they had extensive support from numerous administration figures of a traditional conservative bent and from President Ronald Reagan himself; in the Bush II administration, in contrast, the neocons single-handedly converted the administration to their Middle East war agenda, overcoming significant internal opposition in the process.

A fundamental point about neoconservatives, which is not always noted, is that they did not become traditional conservatives. Instead of adopting traditional American conservative positions, they actually altered the content of conservatism to their liking. Neoconservatives have been anything but the hard right-wingers that their leftist critics sometimes make them out to be. Neoconservatives supported the modern welfare state, in contrast to the traditional conservatives, who emphasized small government, states’ rights, and relatively unfettered capitalism. Neoconservatives identified with the liberal policies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and even Lyndon Johnson, the bête noires of traditional conservatives, though rejecting much of the multiculturalism and group entitlements of more recent liberalism. “The neoconservative impulse,” Murray Friedman maintains, “was the spontaneous response of a group of liberal intellectuals, mainly Jewish, who sought to shape a perspective of their own while standing apart from more traditional forms of conservatism.”[59] Gary Dorrien in The Neoconservative Mind points out that the neoconservatives “did not convert to existing conservatism, but rather created an alternative to it.”[60]

What especially characterizes neoconservatives is their focus on foreign policy. This is underscored by the fact that some who have espoused leftist views on domestic matters, such as Carl Gershman and Joshua Muravchik (who have been members of the Social Democrats USA), can be full-fledged members of the neoconservative network by virtue of their identification with neocon foreign policy positions.[61]

Although the American conservatives of the Cold War era were anti-Communist and pro-military, they did not identify with the strong globalist foreign policy, which is the sine qua non of neoconservatism, but actually harbored a strain of isolationism. Conservatives’ interventionism was limited to fighting Communism, even rolling back Communism, but not nation-building and the export of democracy, which is the expressed goal of the neocons. Conservatives were perfectly comfortable with regimes that were far from democratic. Nor did traditional conservatives view the United States as the policeman of the world. Most significantly, traditional conservatives had never championed Israel, which had largely been the position of the liberal Democrats.[62]

While traditional conservatives welcomed neoconservatives as allies in their fight against Soviet Communism and domestic liberalism, the neocons in effect acted as a Trojan Horse within conservatism: they managed to secure dominant positions in the conservative political and intellectual movement, and as soon as they gained power they purged those traditional conservatives who opposed their agenda. “The old conservatives of the eighties were being swallowed up by the alliance that they initiated and sustained,” notes historian Paul Gottfried.[63]

Neoconservatives were especially active in setting up or co-opting various right-of-center think tanks and corralling the money that funded them. “Neoconservative activists,” Gottfried observes, “have largely succeeded in centralizing both the collection and distribution of funding for right-of-center philanthropies.”[64]

The neocons would even take over that great intellectual citadel of the conservative movement, the National Review, founded by the icon of the Cold War right, Bill Buckley. As Gary Dorrien writes in Imperial Designs, “By the late 1990s even the venerable National Review belonged to the neocons, who boasted that they had created or taken over nearly all of the main ideological institutions of the American right.”[65]

The ultimate result of the neoconservatives’ maneuvering was to effectively transform American conservatism and, to a lesser extent, the Republican Party. Jacob Heilbrunn, senior editor at the liberal New Republic would write in 2004 that neoconservatives “formed, by and large, the intellectual brain trust for the GOP over the past two decades.”[66]

Some intellectual conservatives, who eventually took on the name paleoconservatives, tried to resist this takeover from the days of the Reagan administration.[67] “Long before French protesters and liberal bloggers had even heard of the neoconservatives, the paleoconservatives were locked in mortal combat with them,” wrote Franklin Foer in the New York Times.

Paleocons fought neocons over whom Ronald Reagan should appoint to head the National Endowment for the Humanities, angrily denouncing them as closet liberals – or worse, crypto-Trotskyists. Even their self-selected name, paleocon, suggests disdain for the neocons and their muscular interventionism.[68]

In essence, the neoconservatives are not like the traditional American conservatives, whom they have effectively supplanted and marginalized. As Paul Gottfried observes, the transformation of American conservatism involved

personnel no less than value orientation . . . as urban, Jewish, erstwhile Democratic proponents of the welfare state took over a conservative movement that had been largely in the hands of Catholic, pro-[Joe] McCarthy and (more or less) anti-New Deal Republicans. That the older movement collapsed into the newer one is a demonstrable fact.[69]

The neoconservatives have done nearly the same thing in the Republican party, at least in regard to its national security policy; there they have replaced not only the traditional conservative figures, but also the more moderate establishment wing that was identified with the elder George H. W. Bush. The upshot of all this is to say the neocon influence is very substantial. As Murray Friedman writes in his The Neoconservative Revolution: “The most enduring legacy of neoconservatism . . . has been the creation of a new generation of highly influential younger conservative Jewish intellectuals, social activists, and allies.” When neoconservatism began in the early 1970s,

the movement consisted of perhaps two dozen individuals. Their numbers today [2005] have increased to hundreds of individuals threaded throughout the news media, think tanks, political life, government, and the universities . . . . Their influence has been felt everywhere.[70]

None of this is to say that neoconservatism is anything like a mass movement. It has, however, ascended to the heights of power. While the grass roots conservatives and Republicans do not know, much less subscribe to, the full neoconservative agenda, the trauma of 9/11 and the “war on terror” made them largely unwitting followers of the neocon leadership. The post-9/11 success of the neoconservatives and their war agenda will be discussed at length in the following chapters.

Neoconservatives have not been unaware of their successful takeover of the conservative movement. Irving Kristol, who has championed “a conservative welfare state,” writes that

one can say that the historical task and political purpose of neoconservatism would seem to be this: to convert the Republican party, and American conservatism in general, against their respective wills, into a new kind of conservative politics suitable to governing a modern democracy.[71]

In his 1996 book, The Essential Neoconservative Reader, editor Mark Gerson, a neocon himself who served on the board of directors of the Project for the New American Century, jubilantly observes:

The neoconservatives have so changed conservatism that what we now identify as conservatism is largely what was once neoconservatism. And in so doing, they have defined the way that vast numbers of Americans view their economy, their polity, and their society.[72]

Friedman, in The Neoconservative Revolution, sums up the major impact that neocons have had on conservatism, and, in so doing, is not averse to emphasizing their Jewish orientation: “This book suggests that Jews and non-Jews alike are becoming more conservative, in part because of their neoconservative guides, who have made it more respectable to think in these terms.” He suggests that the motivation of the neoconservatives derives from the beneficent impulse inherent in Judaism: “The idea that Jews have been put on earth to make it a better, perhaps even a holy, place continues to shape their worldview and that of many of their co-religionists.”[73][what a crock of crap, all Jews care about beyond their apartheid state is damn money DC]

A more negative result of neoconservative takeover has been presented by the rightist evolutionary biologist Kevin MacDonald, who likewise focuses on the issue of Jewishness. MacDonald contends that the

intellectual and cumulative effect of neoconservatism and its current hegemony over the conservative political movement in the United States (achieved partly by its large influence on the media and among foundations) has been to shift the conservative movement toward the center and, in effect, to define the limits of conservative legitimacy. Clearly, these limits of conservative legitimacy are defined by whether they conflict with specifically Jewish group interests in a minimally restrictive immigration policy, support for Israel, global democracy, opposition to quotas and affirmative action, and so on.

Significantly, MacDonald holds that

the ethnic agenda of neoconservatism can also be seen in their promotion of the idea that the United States should pursue a highly interventionist foreign policy aimed at global democracy and the interests of Israel rather than aimed at the specific national interests of the United States.[74]

Although neoconservatives of the Reagan era were adamantly pro-Israel, the issue of Israel versus the Arab states of the Middle East did not loom large then. Israel did have a favored place in American foreign policy. Neoconservative Reaganites identified Israel as America’s “strategic asset” in the Cold War, and Israel actually helped the United States fight communism in Latin America and elsewhere.[75] J. J. Goldberg maintains that

the Reagan administration set about making itself into the most pro-Israel administration in history. In the fall of 1981, Israel was permitted for the first time to sign a formal military pact with Washington, becoming a partner, not a stepchild, of American policy. Israel and American embarked on a series of joint adventures, both overt and covert: aiding the Nicaraguan contras, training security forces in Zaire, sending arms secretly to Iran. Cooperation in weapons development, sharing of technology, and information and intelligence reached unprecedented proportions. Israel’s annual U. S. aid package, already higher than any other country’s, was edged even higher. Loans were made into grants. Supplemental grants were added.[76]

Despite its support for Israel, the United States under Reagan also relied heavily on Arab and Islamic governments to counter Soviet influence, sometimes to the consternation of neoconservatives and other proponents of Israel, as when the Reagan administration successfully pushed for the sale of early warning radar aircraft (AWACS) to Saudi Arabia in 1981.[77] On the whole, however, the issue of Israel versus other Middle Eastern countries would not move to the forefront until the end of the Cold War during the administration of President George H. W. Bush (1989–1993). But before we continue with this history of the American neoconservatives, it is appropriate to examine developments in Israel.

Chapter 4 

Israeli Origins of the 

Middle East War Agenda

While the neoconservatives were the driving force for the American invasion of Iraq, and the attendant efforts to bring about regime change throughout the Middle East, the idea for such a war did not originate with American neocon thinkers but rather in Israel. An obvious linkage exists between the war position of the neoconservatives and what has been long-time strategy of the Israeli right, and to a lesser extent, of the Israeli mainstream.

The idea of a Middle East war had been bandied about in Israel for many years as a means of enhancing Israeli security. War would serve two purposes. It would improve Israel’s external security by weakening and splintering Israel’s neighbors. Moreover, such a war and the consequent weakening of Israel’s external enemies would serve to resolve the internal Palestinian demographic problem, since the Palestinian resistance depends upon material and moral support from Israel’s neighboring states.

A brief look at the history of the Zionist movement and its goals will help to provide an understanding of this issue. The Zionist goal of creating an exclusive Jewish state in Palestine was complicated by the fundamental problem that the country was already settled with a non-Jewish population. Despite public rhetoric to the contrary, the idea of expelling the indigenous Palestinian population (euphemistically referred to as a “transfer”) was an integral part of the Zionist effort to found a Jewish national state in Palestine. “The idea of transfer had accompanied the Zionist movement from its very beginnings, first appearing in Theodore Herzl’s diary,” Israeli historian Tom Segev observes.

In practice, the Zionists began executing a mini-transfer from the time they began purchasing the land and evacuating the Arab tenants . . . . “ Disappearing” the Arabs lay at the heart of the Zionist dream, and was also a necessary condition of its existence . . . . With few exceptions, none of the Zionists disputed the desirability of forced transfer – or its morality. However, the Zionist leaders learned not to publicly proclaim their mass expulsion intent because this would cause the Zionists to lose the world’s sympathy.[1]

The challenge was to find an opportune time to initiate the mass expulsion process when it would not incur the world’s condemnation. In the late 1930s, Ben-Gurion wrote: “What is inconceivable in normal times is possible in revolutionary times; and if at this time the opportunity is missed and what is possible in such great hours is not carried out – a whole world is lost.”[2] The “revolutionary times” would come with the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948, when the Zionists were able to expel 750,000 Palestinians (more than 80 percent of the indigenous population), and thus achieve an overwhelmingly Jewish state. Leading Israeli historian Benny Morris has concluded that the expulsion of Palestinians by the Zionist leadership was a deliberate policy. “Of course. Ben-Gurion was a transferist,” Morris asserted in a Ha’aretz interview with Ari Shavit in January 2004. “He understood that there could be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in its midst. There would be no such state. It would not be able to exist.”[3]

Many in the Israeli leadership did not think that the original 1948 boundaries of the country included enough territory for a viable country, much less the longed for entirety of Palestine, or the “Land of Israel.” The opportunity to acquire additional land came as a result of the 1967 war; however, the occupation of the additional territory brought the problem of a large Palestinian population. World opinion was now totally opposed to forced population transfers, equating such an activity with the unspeakable horror of Nazism. The landmark Fourth Geneva Convention, ratified in 1949, had “unequivocally prohibited deportation” of civilians under occupation.[4]

Since the 1967 war, the major issue in Israeli politics has been what to do with that conquered territory and its Palestinian population. A fundamental concern has been the significantly higher birth rate of the Palestinians. Demographers have pointed out that by 2020 the Jewish population of Israel proper and the occupied territories would be a minority. This would threaten the very Jewish identity of Israel, which is the very reason for its existence.[5] “In fact,” historian Baruch Kimmerling notes, “the loss of that demographic majority could be a prelude to politicide and the physical elimination of the state.”[6][Why should these people be allowed to have their 'pure' state, while multiculturalism is being shoved down every other nations throat?DC]

The concern about a Palestinian demographic threat to the Jewish state was intimately related to the belief in the need for war against Israel’s external enemies. Because the Zionist project of creating an exclusive Jewish state was opposed by Israel’s neighbors, the idea of weakening and dissolving Israel’s Middle East neighbors was not just an idea of the Israeli right but was a central Zionist goal from a much earlier period, having been promoted by David Ben-Gurion himself. As Saleh Abdel-Jawwad, a professor at BirzeitUniversity in Ramallah, Palestine writes:

Israel has supported secessionist movements in Sudan, Iraq, Egypt and Lebanon and any secessionist movements in the Arab world which Israel considers an enemy. Yet the concern for Iraq and its attempts to weaken or prevent it from developing its strengths has always been a central Zionist objective. At times, Israel succeeded in gaining a foothold in Iraq by forging secret yet strong relationships with leaders from the Kurdish movement.[7]

It was during the Suez crisis in 1956 that Prime Minister Ben-Gurion would present a comprehensive plan, which he himself called “fantastic,” to representatives of the British and French governments to reconfigure the Middle East. This took place in secret discussions in Sèvres, France in October 22–4, 1956, where the plot was worked out by officials of the three states to attack Egypt with the goal of taking over the recently-nationalized Suez Canal and ultimately removing Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who as the leader of Arab nationalism, was seen as a threat to Western and Israeli interests.[8]

Ben-Gurion’s comprehensive plan would have greatly expanded the war objectives. He called for the division of Jordan, with Israel gaining control of the West Bank as a semi-autonomous region. The remainder of Jordan would go to Iraq, then run by a pro-Western monarchy, in return for the latter’s promise to resettle Palestinian refugees there and make peace with Israel. Israel would also expand northward to the Litani River in Lebanon, an area inhabited mainly by Muslims, thus serving to turn rump Lebanon into a more compact Christian country. The Straits of Tiran in the Gulf of Aqaba would also come under Israeli control. These changes would take place after the replacement of Nasser’s regime with a pro-Western government, which would make peace with Israel. Ben-Gurion’s proposal failed to generate support. The French, who were the major force behind the war plot, emphasized the need for immediate action, which precluded the move for more expansive war objectives. Needing French support for the anti-Nasser venture, Ben-Gurion backed away from his broader geostrategic scheme.[9]

Israel’s goal has been not simply to weaken external enemies, but, by so doing, also isolate and weaken the position of the Palestinians – the internal demographic threat that poses the greatest danger to the Jewish supremacist state. Kimmerling refers to the Palestinians as Israel’s only “existential” enemy because “only the stateless Palestinians could have a moral and historical claim against the entire Jewish entity established in 1948 on the ruins of their society.”[10] The neighboring Arab states thus threaten Israel by providing spiritual and material aid to the Palestinian cause. Without outside aid the Palestinians would give up hope and be more apt to acquiesce in whatever solution the Israeli government might offer. Abdel-Jawwad writes:

Sequential wars with the Arab world have given Israel opportunities to exhaust the Arab world, as well as tipping the demographic and political situation against Palestinians. Even regional wars which Israel has not participated in have benefited Israel and weakened the Palestinian national movement. The first and second Gulf War are a few examples.

Abdel-Jawwad goes on: “Finally, the second Gulf War of 1991 resulted in the expulsion of the Palestinian community from Kuwait, which formed one of the primary arteries of Palestinian income and power in the occupied territories.”[11]

In general, however, during the first phase of Israel’s existence with the left in power, the idea of using offensive war to bring about regime change and regional reconfiguration tended to be only a small undercurrent in the government’s strategic thinking. With the coming to power of the right wing Likud government in 1977 under Prime Minister Menachem Begin, Israel would pursue a more militant policy where war would be seen as the major means of improving Israel’s geostrategic situation. Historian Ilan Peleg in Begin’s Foreign Policy, 1977–1983 refers to this dramatic change as the start of Israel’s “second republic.”[12] Peleg writes:

Begin quickly deserted the traditional defensive posture [of the Israeli left], of which he was highly critical in the first three decades of Israel when he was in the opposition. He adopted an offensive posture characterized by grandiose expansionist goals, extensive and frequent use of Israel’s military machine, and political compellence rather than military deterrence as a controlling factor.

Begin

did not believe that coexistence between Jews and Arabs – in Israel, on the West Bank, or in the region in general – was possible. He was determined to establish Israeli hegemony in the area, a new balance of power in which Israel would be completely dominant.[13]

The right had not governed Israel until 1977, and while there was not a total dichotomy between the left and right regarding internal and external relations with Arabs, the Israeli right had been the most militant in its policies toward the Palestinians and toward Israel’s Arab neighbors – beliefs that rested on a strong ideological foundation.

The Israeli right originated in Revisionist Zionism, whose founder and spiritual guide was the gifted writer Ze’ev Jabotinsky. Jabotinsky protested the exclusion of Transjordan from British Mandate Palestine, and in response he established the Revisionist Party in 1925, which was so named because it sought to “revise” the terms of the League of Nations Mandate by the re-inclusion of Transjordan in Mandatory Palestine. Its policies were characterized by the quest for “Eretz Israel” – which, at the minimum, entailed complete Jewish control of all land on both sides of the Jordan River – and also by the primacy of military force in foreign policy matters. Peleg writes: “Jabotinsky’s approach to the conflict came to be dominated by popular ideas of ‘blood and soil,’ a Jewish version of Social Darwinism.”[14]

Jabotinsky’s most remembered phrase was the “iron wall,” the name of an essay he wrote in 1923. Jabotinsky’s essay holds that the Arabs would never voluntarily accept a Jewish state and would naturally fight it. To survive, the Jewish state would have to establish an “iron wall” of military force that would crush all opposition and force its Arab enemies into hopelessness. From this position of unassailable strength, the Jewish state could make, or dictate, peace.[15] It was the “iron wall” strategy that would characterize the thinking of the Israeli right, and to a certain extent, as historian Avi Shlaim points out, the Israeli left and the State of Israel itself.[16]

It was inevitable that Israel under the leadership of Menachem Begin would follow the hard-line policy of Jabotinsky. In fact, historical events had made Begin and his followers even more militant than Jabotinsky.[17] The more militant radicalism resulted from Begin’s leadership of the terrorist Irgun, which fought the British and Palestinians in the 1940s, and the trauma of the Holocaust. Begin tended to view all criticism of Israel as tantamount to anti-Semitism and the militant resistance of the Arabs as comparable to Nazi genocide.[18]

With the beginning of independent Israel in 1948, Begin headed the Herut Party. But it was not until the formation of the Likud bloc of right wing parties in 1973, of which the Herut constituted the central core, that the right had the chance to win enough votes to govern.

The first Begin government in 1977 had its moderate and restraining elements, and its crowning achievement was the Camp David Accords with Egypt. Defense Minister Ezer Weizman, along with Foreign Minister Moshe Dayan, steered Begin away from his warlike instincts. With the departure of these moderates, the Begin Cabinet became dominated by more militant individuals, the most important of whom was Ariel Sharon, who served as Defense Minister from 1981 to 1983. Sharon, who came from a military background involving counter-terrorism and even terrorism, translated Begin’s hard-line attitude into actual policy.[19]

With the Likud’s assumption of power, the most far-reaching militant proposals entered mainstream Zionist thinking, involving militant destabilization of Israel’s neighbors and Palestinian expulsion. An important article in this genre was by Oded Yinon, entitled “A Strategy for Israel in the 1980s,” which appeared in the World Zionist Organization periodical Kivunim (Directions) in February 1982. Yinon had been attached to the Foreign Ministry and his article undoubtedly reflected high-level thinking in the Israeli military and intelligence establishment. According to Peleg,

The Yinon article was an authentic mirror of the thinking mode of the Israeli right at the height of Begin’s rule; it reflected a sense of unlimited and unrestrained power . . . . There can be no question that the hard-core Neo-Revisionist camp as a whole subscribed, at least until the Lebanese fiasco, to ideas similar to those of Yinon.[20]

Yinon called for Israel to bring about the dissolution of many of the Arab states and their fragmentation into a mosaic of ethnic and sectarian groupings. Yinon believed that this would not be a difficult undertaking because nearly all the Arab states were afflicted with internal ethnic and religious divisions. In essence, the end result would be a Middle East of powerless mini-states that could in no way confront Israeli power. Lebanon, then facing divisive chaos, was Yinon’s model for the entire Middle East. Yinon wrote:

Lebanon’s total dissolution into five provinces serves as a precedent for the entire Arab world including Egypt, Syria, Iraq and the Arabian peninsula and is already following that track. The dissolution of Syria and Iraq later on into ethnically or religiously unique areas such as in Lebanon, is Israel’s primary target on the Eastern front in the long run, while the dissolution of the military power of those states serves as the primary short term target.[21]

Note that Yinon sought the dissolution of countries – Egypt and Saudi Arabia – that were allied to the United States.

Yinon looked upon Iraq as a major target for dissolution, and he believed that the then on-going Iran-Iraq war would promote its break-up. It should be pointed out that Yinon’s vision for Iraq seems uncannily like what has actually taken place since the U.S. invasion in 2003. Yinon wrote:

Iraq, rich in oil on the one hand and internally torn on the other, is guaranteed as a candidate for Israel’s targets. Its dissolution is even more important for us than that of Syria. Iraq is stronger than Syria. In the short run it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel. An Iraqi-Iranian war will tear Iraq apart and cause its downfall at home even before it is able to organize a struggle on a wide front against us. Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run and will shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into denominations as in Syria and in Lebanon. In Iraq, a division into provinces along ethnic/religious lines as in Syria during Ottoman times is possible. So, three (or more) states will exist around the three major cities: Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, and Shiite areas in the south will separate from the Sunni and Kurdish north.[22]

Yinon’s prediction that war would bring about the religious/ethnic fragmentation of Iraq fits in quite closely with the actual reality of the aftermath of the United States invasion in 2003, with the division among Shiite, Sunni, and Kurds. Certainly, his forecast in 1982 was far more accurate than the neocons’ rosy public prognostications prior to the 2003 invasion about the easy emergence of democracy. But from the Likudnik perspective, the reality of a fragmented Iraq was much to be preferred to the neocon pipe dream.

Significantly, the goal of Israeli hegemony was inextricably tied to the expulsion of the Palestinians. “Whether in war or under conditions of peace,” Yinon asserted,

emigration from the territories and economic demographic freeze in them, are the guarantees for the coming change on both banks of the river, and we ought to be active in order to accelerate this process in the nearest future.

In Yinon’s view,

It should be clear, under any future political situation or military constellation, that the solution of the problem of the indigenous Arabs will come only when they recognize the existence of Israel in secure borders up to the Jordan river and beyond it, as our existential need in this difficult epoch, the nuclear epoch which we shall soon enter. It is no longer possible to live with three fourths of the Jewish population on the dense shoreline which is so dangerous in a nuclear epoch.[23]

In a foreword to his English translation of Yinon’s piece, Israel Shahak, a noted Jewish Israeli critic of Zionism, made the interesting comparison between the neoconservative position and actual Likudnik goals.

The strong connection with Neoconservative thought in the USA is very prominent, especially in the author’s notes. But, while lip service is paid to the idea of the “defense of the West” from Soviet power, the real aim of the author, and of the present Israeli establishment is clear: To make an Imperial Israel into a world power. In other words, the aim of Sharon is to deceive the Americans after he has deceived all the rest.[24]

To reiterate, the Yinon article embodied the general thrust of Likud strategists of the early 1980s. As Noam Chomsky wrote in Fateful Triangle: “much of what Yinon discusses is quite close to mainstream thinking.” Chomsky described the Israeli incursion into Lebanon in 1982 as representing an attempt to implement Yinon’s geostrategy.

The “new order” that Israel is attempting to impose in Lebanon is based on a conception not unlike what Yinon expresses, and there is every reason to suppose that similar ideas with regard to Syria may seem attractive to the political leadership.[25]

To bolster his thesis regarding Likudnik war strategy, Chomsky discussed an analytical article by Yoram Peri – former Adviser to Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and European representative of the Labor Party, and a specialist on civil-military relations in Israel – which came out in the Labor party journal Davar in October 1982. Peri described a “true revolution” in “military-diplomatic conception,” which he dated to the coming to power of the Likudniks. (Chomsky saw the shift as being more gradual and “deeply-rooted” in the Israeli elite.) Summarizing Peri, Chomsky wrote:

The earlier conception [during the reign of the left wing Zionists] was based on the search for “coexistence” and maintenance of the status quo. Israel aimed at a peaceful settlement in which its position in the region would be recognized and its security achieved. The new conception is based on the goal of “hegemony,” not “coexistence.” No longer a status quo power, having achieved military dominance as the world’s fourth most powerful military force, and no longer believing in even the possibility of peace or even its desirability except in terms of Israeli hegemony, Israel is now committed to “destabilization” of the region, including Lebanon, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Jordan. In accordance with the new conception, Israel should now use its military dominance to expand its borders and “to create a new reality,” a “new order,” rather than seek recognition within the status quo.[26]

Destabilization of its surrounding enemies would seem to be a perfectly rational strategy for Israel. Certainly, all countries, if they had enemies, would prefer them to be weak rather than strong. As Chomsky pointed out:

It is only natural to expect that Israel will seek to destabilize the surrounding states, for essentially the reasons that lead South Africa on a similar course in its region. In fact, given continuing military tensions, that might be seen virtually as a security imperative. A plausible long-term goal might be what some have called an “Ottomanization” of the region, that is, a return to something like the system of the Ottoman empire, with a powerful center (Turkey then, Israel with U.S.-backing now) and much of the region fragmented into ethnic-religious communities, preferably mutually hostile.[27]

Peri, however, thought that this destabilization policy would ultimately harm Israel because it would alienate the United States, upon whom Israel’s security ultimately depended. Chomsky summarized Peri’s critical stance:

The reason is that the U.S. is basically a status quo power itself, opposed to destabilization of the sort to which Israel is increasingly committed. The new strategic conception is based on an illusion of power, and may lead to a willingness, already apparent in some of the rhetoric heard in Israel, to undertake military adventures even without U.S. support.[28]

Israel embarked on just such a unilateral adventure in its invasion of Lebanon in 1982. And the disastrous result demonstrated the grave limitations of a unilateral war-oriented strategy for Israel.

When Israel Defense Forces invaded Lebanon on June 6, 1982, “Operation Peace for Galilee” was announced to the public as a limited operation to remove Palestinian bases. The real objectives of the operation were far more ambitious: to destroy the PLO’s military and political infrastructure, to strike a serious blow against Syria, and to install a pro-Israeli Christian regime in Lebanon. Israeli troops advanced far into Lebanon, even beyond Beirut, coming into conflict with Palestinians, Lebanese Muslims, and Syrians. Despite Israeli’s deep military penetration, the objectives remained unachievable. Israel became ensnared in Lebanon’s on-going civil war, from which it was unable to free itself for the next three years.[29]

Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, which caused well-publicized civilian casualties, including the massacre of Palestinians at Sabra and Shatila refugee camps outside Beirut, was a public relations disaster for the Begin government. World opinion turned against Israel. Strong criticism even arose in Israel, with Israel’s first mass peace movement demonstrating on the streets of Tel Aviv. The Israeli military was angry about the no-win war. And recriminations even flew back and forth within the Likud Party that Defense Minister Sharon had not informed Begin of the extent of the planned invasion.[30]

Significantly, Israel’s brutal actions in Lebanon shook support for the country in the United States, even among American Jews. On August 12, 1982, President Reagan personally demanded of Began that Israel stop the bombardment of Beirut. Later that month, Reagan insisted that Israeli forces withdraw from West Beirut. Israel quickly complied. Given the fact that Israel was so heavily dependent on American arms, the Begin government realized that it would severely harm Israel’s power if it were to alienate its major sponsor.[31]

The war in Lebanon ultimately led to Begin’s resignation in 1983. The invasion of Lebanon turned out to be Israel’s least successful and most unpopular conflict in its history. It was Israel’s Vietnam.

The failure in Lebanon led to much soul-searching in Israel. Israeli foreign policy expert Yehoshafat Harkabi critiqued the overall Likudnik war-orientation strategy – “Israeli intentions to impose a Pax Israelica on the Middle East, to dominate the Arab countries and treat them harshly” – in his significant work, Israel’s Fateful Hour, published in 1988. Harkabi believed that Israel did not have the power to achieve the goal of Pax Israelica, given the strength of the Arab states, the large Palestinian population involved, and the vehement opposition of world opinion. Harkabi hoped that “the failed Israeli attempt to impose a new order in the weakest Arab state – Lebanon – will disabuse people of similar ambitions in other territories.”[32]

Likudniks, however, did not see the Israeli strategy in the Lebanon debacle to be inherently flawed. Some on the Israeli right held that Israel did not push hard enough to crush its enemies – that it was affected too much by outside criticism. Harkabi maintained, however, that even if Israeli forces had crossed into Syria and occupied Damascus, Israel still would have failed to achieve true victory, but instead would have brought about an interminable guerilla war. Harkabi wrote that

the Lebanon War revealed an ongoing Israeli limitation: no matter how complete Israeli military triumph, the strategic results will prove to be limited. Ben-Gurion understood this when he said that Israel could not solve its problems once and for all by war. But this view is in stark contradiction to the spirit of the Jabotinsky-Begin ethos. It is no wonder that those who adhere to it cannot accept that the great event is of no avail.[33]

Harkabi was correct about the “spirit of the Jabotinsky-Begin ethos.” To many strategically-minded Likudniks, the fiasco of the 1982 invasion of Lebanon had not disproved the idea that destabilization of the region would be beneficial to Israeli security; nor had it disproved that such destabilization was achievable. Instead, the principal lessons many Likudnik-oriented thinkers drew from Israel’s failed Lebanon incursion was that no military campaign to destabilize Israel’s enemies could achieve success if it antagonized Israeli public opinion and if it lacked extensive backing from Israel’s principal sponsor, the United States.

One person who seemed to have learned these lessons was Ariel Sharon, who had implemented the invasion of Lebanon. As historian Baruch Kimmerling writes in Politicide: Ariel Sharon’s War Against the Palestinians:

Sharon [in 1982] faced only two major constraints that curbed him in some measure and prevented him from fully implementing his grand design – American pressure and Israeli public opinion, which was clearly influenced not only by the horror of Sabra and Shatila, but also by the heavy casualties and by the sense that the government had violated an unwritten social contract that the military, which was largely staffed by reserve soldiers, could only be used for consensual wars. Sharon learned this lesson well.[34]

What was needed was a military operation that had American support and did not burden the Israeli population.

But the idea that the United States would back Israeli destabilization efforts, much less act as Israel’s proxy to fight its enemies, would have seemed impossible in the 1980s. At that time, U.S. Middle Eastern policy, although supportive of Israel, differed significantly from Israel’s on the issue of stability. As Yoram Peri recognized, the United States was supportive of the status quo. While Likudnik thinking focused on destabilizing Israel’s Middle East enemies, the fundamental goal of U.S. policy was to promote stable governments in the Middle East that would allow the oil to flow to the Western industrial nations. It was not necessary for oil-rich nations to befriend Israel – in fact, they could openly oppose the Jewish state. The United States worked for peace between Israel and the Arab states, but it was a compromise peace that would try to accommodate some demands of the Arab countries – most crucially demands involving the Palestinians.

Peri had argued that if Israel went off on its own in destabilizing the Middle East, the United States would abandon Israel, to Israel’s detriment. What was needed for the Israeli destabilization plan to work was a transformation of American Middle East policy. If the United States adopted the same destabilization policy as Israel, then such a policy could succeed. For the United States’ influence among its allies and in the United Nations, where it held a veto, would be enough to shelter Israel from the animosity of world public opinion, preventing it from ending up as a pariah state such as the white-ruled Republic of South Africa. Better yet, though perhaps even unimagined in the 1980s, would be to induce the United States to act in Israel’s place to destabilize the region.

Such a policy transformation was impossible in the 1980s. However, through the long-term efforts of the American neoconservatives, that transformation would occur in the Bush II administration. The neocon advocacy of dramatically altering the Middle East status quo stood in stark contrast to the traditional American position of maintaining stability in the area – though it did, of course, mesh perfectly with the long-established Israeli goal of destabilizing its enemies. Virginia Tilley observes in The One-State Solution that

this vision of “dissolving” Iraq and Syria is antithetical to U.S. strategic interests, as it would generate entirely new and unpredictable local governments prone to unexpected policy changes. Nevertheless, it was wholly endorsed by a cohort of neoconservative ideologues, who later gained control of U.S. foreign policy in the administration of the second President Bush and fused Israeli policy into U.S. strategy.[35]

To reiterate, the central point of this chapter: the vision of “regime change” in the Middle East through external, militant action originated in Israel, and its sole purpose was to advance the security interests of Israel. It had nothing to do with bringing “democracy” to Muslims. It had nothing to do with any terrorist threat to the United States. These latter arguments accreted to the idea of regime change as the primary military actor changed from Israel to the United States. But the Israeli government would continue to be a fundamental supporter of the regional military action, even as the ostensible justifications for the action changed. Israel advocated the American attack on Iraq and preached the necessity of strong action against Iran.

It would appear that for Ariel Sharon during the Bush II administration, the strategic benefits that would accrue to Israel from such a militant restructuring of the Middle East were the same as those that Likudniks sought in the 1980s. But unlike Begin’s failed incursion into Lebanon in 1982, the Bush II effort not only relied upon the much greater power of the United States but was also wrapped in a cover of “democracy” and American national interest, effectively masking the objective of Israel hegemony. That helps to explain the much greater success of this intervention, which has come at no cost to Israel – but at a heavy cost to the United States.


notes
Chapter 3

[1] Gary Dorrien, The Neoconservative Mind: Politics, Culture, and the War of Ideology (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), pp. 1–18; Murray Friedman, The Neoconservative Revolution: Jewish Intellectuals and the Shaping of Public Policy (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 127–31.

[2] Benjamin Ginsberg, The Fatal Embrace: Jews and the State (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).

[3] Edward S. Shapiro, “Jews and the Conservative Rift,” American Jewish History87.2–3 (1999), p. 197.

[4] Gal Beckerman, “The Neoconservative Persuasion,” Forward, January 6, 2006, online.

[5] Ginsberg, Fatal Embrace, p. 231.

[6] Max Boot, “What the Heck Is a Neocon?,” Wall Street Journal. December 30, 2002, online.

[7] “Our Mission,” American Jewish Committee, http://www.ajc.org/WhoWeAre/MissionAndHistory.asp, accessed June 2, 2004.

[8] Friedman, Neoconservative Revolution, p. 122.

[9] Ibid., p. 148.

[10] Ibid., p. 147.

[11] Ibid., p. 148. The lodestar of Podhoretz’s political thinking was Jewish interests, of which protecting Israel was a primary element. Gary Dorrien points out that Podhoretz “declared that the formative question for his politics would heretofore be, ‘Is it good for the Jews?’” (Neoconservative Mind, p. 166).

[12] Ginsberg, Fatal Embrace, p. 204.

[13] Norman Podhoretz, “Bush, Sharon, My Daughter, and Me,” Commentary, April 2005, online; Ralph Z. Hallow, “American Jews Flock to Israel,” Washington Times, January 16, 1991, p. A-1.

[14] Arnold Beichman, “Jolly Ex-Friends for Evermore,” Policy Review, April/May 1999, online.

[15] Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient Norman Podhoretz, Medal of Freedom, http://www.medaloffreedom.com/NormanPodhoretz.htm, accessed November 16, 2007.

[16] Paul Gottfried, Conservatism in America: Making Sense of the American Right(New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007), p. 59.

[17] Paul Gottfried, “What’s In A Name? The Curious Case of ‘Neoconservative,’” VDare.com, April 30, 2003, online.

[18] Mearsheimer and Walt, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, p. 132.

[19] Mearsheimer and Walt note: “Many neoconservative are connected to an overlapping set of Washington-based think tanks, committees, and publications whose agenda includes promoting the special relationship between the United States and Israel” (The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, p. 130).

[20] Janine R. Wedel, “Neocon ‘Flex Players’ Await Bush’s Second Term,” Pacific News Service, November 3, 2004, online.

[21] Janine R. Wedel, “Flex Power,” Washington Post, December 12, 2004, p. B-4.

[22] Patricia Cohen, “New Commentary Editor Denies Neo-Nepotism,” New York Times, October 24, 2007, online; “Elliott Abrams,” Right-Web, http://rightweb.irc-online.org/ind/abrams/abrams.php, accessed November 16, 2007; Michael Dobbs, “Back in Political Forefront: Iran-Contra Figure Plays Key Role on Mideast,” Washington Post, May 27, 2003, p. A-1; Friedman, Neoconservative Revolution, pp. 168–72.

[23] Wilfred McClay, “Godfather,” review of Neoconservatism: Autobiography of an Idea by Irving Kristol, Commentary Magazine, February 1996, pp. 62–4.

[24] Shmuel Rosner, “They call it Project Zionism,” Ha’aretz, August 21, 2005, online.

[25] Gary Dorrien, Imperial Designs: Neoconservatism and the New Pax Americana(New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 45.

[26] For a discussion of Wohlstetter and his relation to Perle and Wolfowitz, see Dorrien, Imperial Designs, pp. 43–50.

[27] Wohlstetter’s daughter Joan was a classmate of Perle’s at Hollywood High School. Perle first met Albert Wohlstetter when Joan invited him for a swim at her home’s pool. Wohlstetter struck up a conversation about nuclear arms’ strategy and gave Perle a copy of his paper, “Delicate Balance of Terror,” which Perle perused while sitting on the deck of the pool. Richard Perle interview with Ben Wattenberg, “Richard Perle: The Making of a Neoconservative,” Think Tank with Ben Wattenberg, 2003, http://www.pbs.org/thinktank/transcript1017.html, accessed November 16, 2007.

[28] Alan Weisman, Prince of Darkness: Richard Perle: The Kingdom, The Power & the End of Empire in America (New York: Union Square Press, 2007), p. 30.

[29] Weisman, Prince of Darkness, p. 155; Elizabeth Drew, “The Neocons in Power,” New York Review of Books, June 12, 2003, online.

[30] Weisman, Prince of Darkness, p. 34.

[31] Jim Lobe, “Neocons dance a Strauss waltz,” Asia Times, May 9, 2003, online.

[32] Jim Lobe, “All in the Neocon Family,” AlterNet.org, March 26, 2003, online.

[33] John Christison, “Faltering Neo-Cons Still Dangerous,” CounerPunch, March 5, 2004, online.

[34] Dorrien, Neoconservative Mind, p. 166.

[35] Ginsberg, Fatal Embrace, p. 203.

[36] Friedman, Neoconservative Revolution, p. 148.

[37] James Nuechterlein, “Neoconservative Redux,” First Things 66 (October 1996), http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/ft9610/opinion/neuchterlein.html,accessed November 18, 2007.

[38] Friedman, Neoconservative Revolution, p. 127.

[39] Gary Dorrien, Imperial Designs, pp. 48–50; Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century(Princeton, N.J.: University of Princeton Press, 2004), p. 357; Alan Weisman, Prince of Darkness, pp. 35–44.

[40] J. J. Goldberg, Jewish Power: Inside the Jewish Establishment (Reading, Mass.: Addison Wesley Publishing Company, Inc., 1996), p. 175.

[41] Norman Podhoretz, “The Present Danger,” Commentary 69:3 (March 1980), p. 33, quoted in Gary Dorrien, Neoconservative Mind, p. 167.

[42] Friedman, Neoconservative Revolution pp. 149–50.

[43] John Ehrman, Rise of Neoconservatism: Intellectuals and Foreign Affairs, 1945–1994 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 136.

[44] For a discussion of the neoconservatives during the Carter and Reagan administrations, see John Ehrman, Rise of Neoconservatism, pp. 97–172.

[45] Friedman, Neoconservative Revolution, p. 152.

[46] Regarding their value to the right, Samuel Francis, a conservative critic of the neoconservatives, wrote, “For the right, the main service neoconservatives performed was to lend it a certain respectability that the right generally lacked – not only through academic and literary credentials but in the general tone they adopted . . . . Of course, it never dawned on the conservatives who welcomed them as allies, and soon as leaders, that the ‘respectability’ the neocons brought them was one defined and conferred by the dominant left and therefore made it impossible for the right to challenge the left at all.” Samuel Francis, “The Real Cabal,” Chronicles, September 2003, online.

[47] Paul Gottfried, Conservatism in America, p. 65.

[48] It is significant that in a Reagan’s right-wing administration, there would be rather left-wing individuals such as Muravchik and Gershman. Muravchik has been a prominent member of the Social Democrats USA. This did not preclude Muravchik from being a neocon in good standing with his membership in the American Enterprise Institute and the Jewish Institute of National Security Affairs.

[49] Reaganite Paul Craig Roberts (under secretary of the treasury in the Reagan administration), who became a staunch conservative critic of the neocons, writes: “In Reagan’s time we did not recognize that neoconservatives had a Jacobin frame of mind. Perhaps we were not paying close enough attention. We saw neoconservatives as former left-wingers who had realized that the Soviet Union might be a threat after all. We regarded them as allies against Henry Kissinger’s inclination to reach an unfavorable accommodation with the Soviet Union.” Paul Craig Roberts, “My Epiphany,” CounterPunch.org, February 6, 2006, online.

[50] Emphasis on the war-winning strategy is provided by Jay Winik, On the Brink: The Dramatic, Behind The-Scenes Saga of the Reagan Era & the Men & Women Who Won the Cold War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996). When this view had been expressed earlier by James Burnham on the pages of the conservative National Review, it was simply ignored by the establishment. When the war-winning theme was enunciated by the conservative 1964 Republican presidential nominee Barry Goldwater in his book Why Not Victory?: A Fresh Look At American Foreign Policy(New York: McGraw Hill, 1962), he was denounced by the establishment as near-insane advocate of global nuclear destruction. When neocons adopted this very same foreign policy strategy, however, it took on the air of near-respectability. In short, neocons did not invent the positions they advocated; by and large, they were not creative thinkers. Rather, because of their backgrounds in the liberal establishment, they gave an air of intellectual and political respectability to positions on the right that previously had been outside the bounds of discussion.

[51] Richard A. Clarke, Against All Enemies: Inside America‘s War on Terror (New York: Free Press, 2004), p. 49.

[52] Peter Robinson, “The Fight on the Right,” Transcript, Filmed on May 16, 2003, Uncommon Knowledge, Hoover Institution, http://www.hoover.org/multimedia/uk/2939711.html, accessed November 18, 2007.

[53] Friedman, Neoconservative Revolution, p. 154.

[54] Gary Dorrien reflects the establishment view of the evil nature of traditional conservatism: “Neoconservatives opposed feminism, affirmative action, multiculturalism, and modern liberalism without the baggage of a racist and nativist past” (Neoconservative Mind, p. 392).

[55] Neoconservative support was probably a factor that prevented the liberal establishment from caricaturing Reagan as it had conservative Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater in 1964. On the establishment’s virulent hostility toward Goldwater, see Lionel Lokos, Hysteria 1964: The Fear Campaign Against Barry Goldwater (New Rochelle, New York: Arlington House, 1967).

[56] Jay Winik, On the Brink; Friedman, Neoconservative Revolution, pp. 158–60, 175–6.

[57] Gal Beckerman, “The Neoconservative Persuasion,” Forward, January 6, 2006, online.

[58] John Patrick Diggins, “How Reagan Beat the Neocons,” New York Times, June 11, 2004, online.

[59] Friedman, Neoconservative Revolution, p. 128; he writes sympathetically that “The most fundamental ingredient marking neoconservatism has been its realistic and pragmatic approach to problems. The neocons found themselves at odds with that form of conservative libertarianism that seeks individual freedom, unrestrained by government. While increasingly doubtful of governmental solutions to problems, neocons were not hostile to government itself, particularly programs like Social Security. They saw no road to serfdom, as Hayek predicted, in the welfare state that they themselves had played no small role in creating.” Friedman, Neoconservative Revolution, p. 121.

[60] Dorrien, Neoconservative Mind, p. 369.

[61] The Social Democrats, USA (SD/USA) had its roots in the Socialist Party. The group’s philosophical forefather was the intellectual Trotskyite, Max Shachtman. In the 1970s, under the leadership of Carl Gershman, SD/USA supported Senator Henry Jackson, the icon of neoconservatives. It was ironic that in the administration of conservative Ronald Reagan, members of the SD/USA gained positions of power and influence in government. In 1984, Gershman took over the helm of the National Endowment for Democracy, a private but congressionally-funded organization created to support groups around the world that promote democracy. SD/USA member Joshua Muravchik was affiliated with the American Enterprise Institute and the Jewish Institute of National Security Affairs. Other neocons who have been members of SD/USA include Max Kampelman, Penn Kemble, Jeane Kirkpatrick (“Social Democrats, USA,” Right Web, http://rightweb.irc-online.org/groupwatch/sd-usa.php, accessed November 16, 2007).

[62] James Burnham, a major intellectual leader of the conservatism of the 1950s and 1960s observed that neoconservatives also differed attitudinally from traditional conservatives. He pointed out in an essay in National Review in 1972 that while the intellectuals who espoused neoconservatism might have broken formally with “liberal doctrine,” they nevertheless retained in their thinking “what might be called the emotional gestalt of liberalism, the liberal sensitivity and temperament.” In other words, even though neoconservatives no longer consciously believed in certain liberal ideas, they still showed the habits of thought and emotional reactions that those ideas had instilled. James Burnham, “Selective, Yes. Humanism, Maybe,” National Review,May 12, 1972, p. 516.

[63] Paul Gottfried, The Conservative Movement, revised edition (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993), p. 90, pp. 87–96; see also John Ehrman, Rise of Neoconservatism, pp. 186–87.

[64] Gottfried, Conservative Movement, p. 129; see also Gottfried, Conservatism in America, pp. 59–61.

[65] Dorrien, Imperial Designs, p. 195.

[66] Jacob Heilbrunn, “The Neoconservative Journey,” in Peter Berkowitz, Varieties of Conservatism in America (Stanford, Calif.: Hoover Institution, 2004), p. 108.

[67] Dorrien, Neoconservative Mind, pp. 341–9.

[68] Franklin Foer, “Once Again America First,” New York Times, October 10, 2004, Section 7, p. 22.

[69] Gottfried, Conservatism in America, p. 32.

[70] Friedman, Neoconservative Revolution, pp. 226–7.

[71] Irving Kristol, “The Neoconservative Persuasion,” Weekly Standard, August 25, 2003, online.

[72] Mark Gerson, “Introduction,” in Gerson, ed., The Essential Neoconservative Reader (Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc., 1996), p. xvi.

[73] Friedman, Neoconservative Revolution, p. 242.

[74] Kevin MacDonald, The Culture of Critique: An Evolutionary Analysis of Jewish Involvement in Twentieth-Century Intellectual and Political Movements (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1998), pp. 312–3.

[75] Ginsberg, Fatal Embrace, pp. 208–9.

[76] Goldberg, Jewish Power, p. 214.

[77] Gary Dorrien, Neoconservative Mind, p. 174.

Chapter 4

[1] Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate(New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000), pp. 404–5; For a history of the Zionist ideas on expulsion, see Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882–1948 (Washington: Institute of Palestine Studies, 1992).

[2] Norman Finkelstein, “Part I – An introduction to the Israel-Palestine conflict,” September 2002, From Occupied Palestine, http://www.fromoccupiedpalestine.org/node.php?id=734, accessed November 16, 2007.

[3] Ari Shavit, “Survival of the fittest,” Ha’aretz, January 8, 2004. Morris agreed with Ben-Gurion’s position: “Ben-Gurion was right. If he had not done what he did, a state would not have come into being. That has to be clear. It is impossible to evade it. Without the uprooting of the Palestinians, a Jewish state would not have arisen here.” Republished as Ari Shavit, “Survival of the Fittest?: An Interview with Benny Morris,” CounterPunch.org, January 16, 2004, online; For other comparable views expressed by Morris, see Jonathan Cook, Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State ( London: Pluto Press, 2006), pp. 106–8.

[4] Norman Finkelstein, “Part I – An introduction to the Israel-Palestine conflict,” September 2002, From Occupied Palestine, http://www.fromoccupiedpalestine.org/node.php?id=734, accessed November 16, 2007.

[5] Nur Masalha, Imperial Israel and the Palestinians: The Politics of Expansion(London: Pluto Press, 2000), pp. 200–7; Tikva Honig-Parnass, “Israel’s Recent Conviction: Apartheid In Palestine Can Only be Preserved Through Force,” Between the Lines, September 2001, http://www.between-lines.org/archives/2001/sep/Tikva_Honig-Parnass.htm, accessed February 12, 2003; Phil Brennan, “Israel’s Population Bomb in Reverse,” NewsMax.com, Oct. 19, 2002, online; Ed Hollants, “Israel: Democracy or Demographic Jewish State?,” Dissident Voice, February 12, 2004, http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Feb04/Hollants0212.htm, accessed November 16, 2007.

[6] Baruch Kimmerling, “The Pied Piper of Hamelin, or Sharon’s Enigma,” Dissident Voice, January 12, 2006, http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Jan06/Kimmerling12.htm, accessed November 16, 2007.

[7] Saleh Abdel-Jawwad, “Israel: the ultimate winner,” Al-Ahram Weekly Online, (Issue No. 634), April 17- 23, 2003, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/634/op2.htm, accessed November 16, 2007.

[8] Avi Shlaim, The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001), pp. 172–8.

[9] Ibid., pp. 172–8.

[10] Baruch Kimmerling, Politicide: Ariel Sharon’s War Against the Palestinians(London: Verso, 2003), p. 81.

[11] Saleh Abdel-Jawwad, “Israel: the ultimate winner,” Al-Ahram Weekly Online, (Issue No. 634), April 17–23, 2003, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/634/op2.htm, accessed November 16, 2007.

[12] Ilan Peleg, Begin’s Foreign Policy, 1977–1983 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), p. 47.

[13] Ibid., p. 181.

[14] Ibid., p. 5.

[15] Vladimir Jabotinsky, “The Iron Wall,” (originally published as “O Zheleznoi Stene,” Razsviet [Paris], November 4, 1923; published in English in The Jewish Herald [South Africa], November 26, 1937, see MidEastWeb.org at http://www.mideastweb.org/ironwall.htm),http://www.jabotinsky.org/multimedia/upl_doc/doc_191207_49117.pdf,and “The Ethics of the Iron Wall” (originally published as a continuation of “The Iron Wall,” Razsviet [Paris], November 11, 1923; published in English in The Jewish Standard (London), May 9, 1941, see MidEastWeb.org, URL noted), http://www.jabotinsky.org/multimedia/upl_doc/doc_191207_181762.pdf.

[16] Shlaim, Iron Wall; Meron Rapoport, “Avi Shlaim: No peaceful solution,” Ha’aretz, August 13, 2005, online.

[17] Avi Shlaim writes: “Jabotinsky’s prescription was to build the Zionist enterprise behind an iron wall that the local Arab population would not be able to break. Yet Jabotinsky was not opposed to talking to the Palestinians at a later stage. On the contrary, he believed that after knocking their heads in vain against the wall, the Palestinians would eventually recognize that they were in a position of permanent weakness, and that would be the time to enter into negotiations with them about their status and national rights in Palestine . . . . The real danger posed by the strategy of the iron wall was that Israeli leaders, less sophisticated than Jabotinsky, would fall in love with a particular phase of it and refuse to negotiate even when there was someone to talk to on the other side. Paradoxically, the politicians of the right, the heirs of Jabotinsky, were particularly prone to fall in love with the iron wall and adopt it as a permanent way of life” (Iron Wall, p. 598–9).

[18] Peleg, Begin’s Foreign Policy, pp. 51–93; Shlaim, Iron Wall, pp. 352–4.

[19] Peleg, Begin’s Foreign Policy, pp. 95–142; Yoram Peri, “Coexistence or Hegemony? Shifts in the Israeli Security Concept,” in The Roots of Begin’s Success, eds. Dan Caspi, Abraham Diskin, and Emmanuel Gutmann (London, U.K.: Croom Helm Ltd., 1984), p. 204.

[20] Peleg, Begin’s Foreign Policy, p. 184; see also Masalha, Imperial Israel and the Palestinians, pp. 94–5; Tilley, One-State Solution, pp. 107–8.

[21] Israel Shahak,trans. & ed., The Zionist Plan For the Middle East, a translation of Oded Yinon, “A Strategy for Israel in the Nineteen Eighties,” (Belmont, Mass.: Association of Arab American University Graduates, 1982), http://www.geocities.com/alabasters_archive/zionist_plan.html, accessed November 16, 2007.

[22] Ibid.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Noam Chomsky, Fateful Triangle: The United States, Israel and the Palestinians, Updated Edition, (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1999), p. 457.

[26] Ibid., p. 462, referring to Yoram Peri, “From Coexistence to Hegemony,” Davar, October 1, 1982.

[27] Ibid., p. 455.

[28] Ibid., p. 463, referring to Peri, “From Coexistence to Hegemony.”

[29] Peri, “Coexistence or Hegemony?” pp. 210–1.

[30] Peleg, Begin’s Foreign Policy, pp. 143–78.

[31] Peri, “Coexistence or Hegemony?” p. 211.

[32] Yehoshafat Harkabi, Israel‘s Fateful Hour (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), pp. 57–8.

[33] Harkabi, Israel‘s Fateful Hour, p. 97.

[34] Kimmerling, Politicide, p. 99.

[35] Tilley, One-State Solution, p. 108.

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