I Confess: I Am A Member Of Opus Judaei

Marty Peretz
New Republic
30 April '10

John J. Mearsheimer, who is co-author (with Stephen Walt) of The Israel Lobby, a who’s who they’d rather have called The Jewish Lobby, has finally come clean and done a morphology of American Jewry, splitting it into two schools each personified by perhaps a dozen individual Jews.

The first he calls “righteous Jews.” This list includes Noam Chomsky, Richard Falk, Norman Finkelstein, Tony Judt, a certified nutcase named Philip Weiss, and other more-or-less unknowns—Naomi Klein, for example. Given the thesis of his book—that the other lobby is more than indifferent to American interests—it’s illuminating to examine whom he considers upright, even seraphic, with regard to these interests. It is telling to note that Chomsky is the first of these supposed patriots. The others, please believe me, are roughly of the same ken. I’d bet anything that Professor Falk, just as one other instance, has never, ever paused to think of what might be an American interest he could support in a foreign controversy.

Mearsheimer’s morphology was made public on April 29 at his Hisham Sharabi Memorial Lecture to the Palestine Center in Washington, D.C. Sponsored by the Jerusalem Fund—I myself was for more than a decade chairman of the Jerusalem Foundation, another charitable organization with a different agenda that also included excellent medical facilities, schools, parks, batter women’s shelters, youth clubs, sports centers for the city’s Arab neighborhoods—the lectureship honored a professor at Georgetown who had left Palestine in 1947 (just like Edward Said’s family) even before there was a war in the country, refugees avant la guerre. These upper-class deserters carried the psychological burden of abandoning the cause and leaving the fellahin to fight for it. Said lived out his life with the at last exhausted dogma of “Orientalism” as his creed and screed.

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