Anti-Semitism’s Long History in America’s Organs of Foreign Policy

When it came to light last week that the former CIA officer Valerie Plame is in the habit of promoting anti-Semitic screeds via social media, Dennis Ross—who has worked for five of the last six presidential administrations—was reminded of his own experiences at the Pentagon and State Department:

When I began working in the Pentagon during President Jimmy Carter’s administration, there was an unspoken but unmistakable assumption: if you were Jewish, you could not work on the Middle East because you would be biased. However, if you knew about the Middle East because you came from a missionary family or from the oil industry, you were an expert. Never mind that having such a background might shape a particular view of the region, the United States’ interests in it, or Israel. People with these backgrounds were perceived to be unbiased, while Jews could not be objective and would be partial to Israel to the exclusion of American interests.

Sometimes, I would find this view expressed subtly. Other times it would be overt, including well after Secretary of State George Shultz tried to change the culture of the State Department during the early years of the Reagan administration. For Shultz, being Jewish was no longer a disqualification from working on Arab-Israeli issues. . . .

[Despite these improvement], I remember well the time in 1990, when I was the head of the State Department’s policy-planning staff, that I was visited by a diplomatic-security investigator who was doing a background check on someone who had listed me as a reference. . . . At one point, the investigator asked me . . . if this person had to choose between America’s interests and Israel’s, whose interests would he put first? There was nothing subtle about this presumption of dual loyalty.

“Why would you ask that question?” I asked, even though I realized I might not be helping the person using me as a reference. He answered, “Because he is Jewish.” . . . This investigator was not a rookie. And his experience with senior State Department officials led him to believe it was natural to ask this question. Like most mythologies which take on a life of their own, the idea that Jewish-Americans might have dual loyalties was not challenged or questioned, it was assumed.

Read more at New York Times

More about: Anti-Semitism, Politics & Current Affairs, State Department, U.S. Foreign policy

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF