crazies they don’t know how to take care of. We don’t want them.
But I don’t think this is unique to the American Jew ish
community. For w hatever reason, diaspora communities tend to be,
by and large, more extremist, chauvinistic and fanatic than people in
the home country. T hat’s true of just about every U S immigrant
society I can think of.
Support for the Israeli-U S position in the Middle East has been
largely uniform among American intellectuals, except for yourself,
Edw ard Said and a handful of others. W hat do you attribute that to?
T hings shifted very dramatically in 1967. T he love affair betw een
American intellectuals and Israel grew out of Israel’s smashing
military victory over all the Arab w orld. T hat w as at a time w hen
the U S w asn’t succeeding in its effort to demolish and control
Indochina. T here w ere all sorts of jokes about how w e should send
Moshe Dayan over there to show us how to do it.
T here w as also a lot of internal turmoil here, w hich w orried elite
opinion, including liberal opinion, a lot. Israel show ed how to deal
w ith the low er orders—really kick them in the face—and that w on
them a lot of points among American intellectuals.
T here w as an op-ed in the New York Times by an Israeli journalist,
Ari Shavit, w ho also happens to be a veteran of Israel’s 1978
invasion of Lebanon. In criticizing Israel’s April 1996 attack on
Lebanon, he w rote, “W e killed [several hundred Lebanese] believing
w ith absolute certitude that now, w ith the W hite House, the Senate
and much of the American media in our hands, the lives of others do
not count as much as our ow n.” You had access to the Hebrew
original of this. Did the Times make any changes?
T here w ere a number of interesting changes. For example,
Shavit didn’t say “the American media”—he specified the New York
Times. And he mentioned, as other institutions giving them
confidence, AIPAC, the Anti-Defamation League, the Holocaust
Museum [in Washington DC] and Yad Vashem [the Holocaust
Memorial in Jerusalem].
T his vulgar exploitation of the Holocaust is used to justify
oppressive control over others. T hat’s w hat Shavit w as talking