Ezra Klein, Franklin Foer, and a herd of elephants get on a streetcar
Ezra Klein, Franklin Foer, and a herd of elephants get on a streetcar
The “Blob” resets.
[Editor’s note: I prepared this piece prior to the announcement yesterday that, to quote the New York Times, “The United States has warned Israel to increase the flow of humanitarian supplies into the war-devastated Gaza Strip within the next 30 days or risk losing military aid, American officials said Tuesday.” How “definite” that “not a threat”, as the administration “explained”, will prove to be remains to be seen, but even this show of determination by the Biden administration is welcome, if long overdue. Still, this good news—if it isn’t merely window dressing for the last month of Kamala Harris’ campaign—doesn’t affect my criticism here of both Ezra and Franklin. And the Times itself was dubious of the substance of the administration’s stance, quoting Aaron David Miller, a former Middle East peace negotiator for the United States who is now with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, as follows: “The Israelis will do enough to appear to be improving the humanitarian conditions, and the administration will play along regardless of how serious that effort is”.]
If this post sounds an awful lot like an earlier one, “Jonathan Chait, Bret Stephens, Ross Douthat, and a dozen elephants walk into a bar”, well, that’s because it is. In the earlier post, two thirds of the text dealt with two Jews, Jonathan Chait and Bret Stephens, talking about Israel while pretending not to talk about Israel and also pretending not to notice that they’re both Jewish. In this post, two Jews, Ezra Klein and Franklin Foer, talk about Israel and what Israel is doing in Gaza, pictured above, while pretending not to notice 1) that they’re both Jewish and 2) that there’s such a thing as an Israel lobby in the U.S. of A. At issue is a post by Ezra Klein in the New York Times, “How Biden’s Middle East Policy Fell Apart”, an interview by Klein of Foer as a result of a recent major “feature” at the Atlantic by Foer, The War That Would Not End, though “The War That Joe Biden Is Afraid To End” might be more apropos. For most of the interview Klein simply sits back and listens to Foer explain away yet another Middle Eastern foreign policy disaster engineered by “the Blob”, America’s foreign policy establishment, which, decade after decade, has racked up failure after failure around the globe, with no acknowledgement of failure and no punishment for it. When Klein does offer pushback, it’s intelligent and on point, but he rarely pursues the matter, always letting Foer have the final, flabby, evasive, “Blobby” word.
Reading the whole thing in the Times (there’s more audio on the podcast that I haven’t listened to), I have to start by stating how unimpressed I am with Foer. He constantly assures us that he knows what everyone is thinking, which I very much doubt is the case. For example, Foer tells Klein
So it [the Biden administration] begins talking to Mohammed bin Salman, who is very keen to normalize relations with Israel. Because over the course of his career as crown prince, he’s observed American politics. He’s seen how his reputation has started to slide, and he realizes that he’d rather bet on the United States as a military power. He’d rather bet on the United States as an economic power. He’d rather have American A.I. than Chinese A.I.
So he wants to create a deal where he’s able to enter into a defense pact with the United States, where we agree to protect his kingdom, essentially, against Iran. And we provide them with air defenses and other things in exchange for tethering himself to the U.S. dollar. And he realizes that the centerpiece of this plan has to be normalizing relations with Israel. Because there’s no way a mutual defense treaty is going to pass the U.S. Senate unless there’s some carrot, some enticement for progressives who abhor Saudi Arabia to join. So a Palestinian state is that enticement.1
Uh, really? Foer knows this how? Did bin Salman tell him so? And even if he did, how did would Foer know if bin Salman were telling the truth? Furthermore, Foer blandly passes over such gaping questions as to why the U.S. needs to enter into a defense pact with Saudi Arabia, not to mention the fact that the whole notion of a “Palestinian state” has been anathema to Israel for the past 30 years, so the whole idea of a “grand bargain” has been, to my skeptical mind, a mere hustle to keep the U.S. on a string, exploiting the Biden administration’s increasingly desperate hunger for a big foreign policy win, as well as extracting incidental favors and privileges along the way, granted for fear of disrupting the “big picture.”
Klein, to his credit, pushes back: “Nothing I understand to be true about Israeli politics on Oct. 6 a year ago suggests that Netanyahu or the people in his cabinet or the mainstream of Israeli society would have accepted anything that would have been recognizable as a Palestinian state.” Foer disagrees: “But I know almost a year before Oct. 7, there were conversations that Netanyahu was having with President Biden. And Netanyahu is privately telling him: Look, I want to get this deal. I’m willing to ditch the far right of my coalition in order to get this deal.”
Uh, really? Well, not really. Foer continues:
Is he sincere in this? I think that there’s part of Netanyahu who always believes that he can whittle a better deal out of whoever he’s negotiating with. Will it be a real Palestinian state? I think he thinks that he can keep twisting and twisting and twisting until it’s a nub of what you and I might consider to be a legitimate, viable Palestinian state. And he knows on the other end that the Saudis have their own domestic political reasons for achieving a nominal Palestinian state but the Saudis don’t actually care about the substance of it.
In other words, Netanyahu has absolutely no intention of allowing a Palestinian state to exist, so any statements he might have made to the contrary were just “lies”, as anyone less gullible than, well, the entire Biden administration’s foreign policy apparatus, not to mention Franklin Foer, might have known.
As the interview progresses, one has to wonder why Klein ever bothered to put it up, because Foer, whenever backed into the slightest of corners, begins hemming and hawing and, basically contradicting himself. Here’s Klein
When the ground invasion began, nobody I talked to thought it was going to be over by Christmas. You have Israel going into Gaza, into urban fighting. They are never going to allow Hamas to rule there. They have no day-after plan. They’re going to have all kinds of unforeseen things happen.
I think hearing that the Biden administration, at least in your reporting, was told — and maybe even bought — that this would be over by Christmas, even though nobody would tell them how it would be over. Which part of the administration is fooling itself here?
And here’s Foer’s “response”:
I think you’re pointing out this contradiction or this naïveté in a way that’s extremely persuasive, especially in retrospect. The one thing that I could say in the administration’s defense here is that foreign policy is conducted by human beings, and it’s conducted in this cauldron where the United States and this administration — because of emotional attachments, because of strategic attachments — is kind of locked in this alliance with the Israelis. And it is a naïve, wishful optimism that they have about Israel’s capacity to pivot to its next phase.
Yes, “foreign policy is conducted by human beings”, who in this case proved to be totally incompetent and self-deceiving! Totally incompetent and self-deceiving, that is to say, when they weren’t flat-out lying, as in the numerous reports by the Biden administration over the summer that an agreement on a cease-fire was “imminent”, or just in the process of being “nailed down”, or “hammered out”, or whatever industrial strength metaphor was preferred. Well, at least the Biden folks have proved that the Saudis and Israelis aren’t the only ones who know how to hustle the rubes—or at least rubes named Franklin Foer.
I lack the patience to go through all of Foer’s own incompetencies and evasions as an “analyst”, but will chew more than a little on the “agreement” the two men reach at the end of the interview, that the “leverage” that the U.S. possesses over Israel is generally “overrated”, which is a little “funny”, because neither suggests that Biden should have threatened to cut off U.S. aid entirely if Israel didn’t stop invading every country in sight, aid that in the last year has totaled $17.9 billion! Or that the U.S. should threaten to stop vetoing UN resolutions that target Israel. Hey, that might work!
And even if it didn’t, so what? Why is the American taxpayer on the hook for all those 1,000 pound bombs? If we aren’t getting anything out of Israel that we want, why, when the chips are down, do we back them anyway, back them as we back no other nation in the world? Why, by indulging Israel, do we make both Israel and ourselves reviled and despised around the world? And why do we participate in the literal destruction of Gaza, described in Daniel Larison’s recent post in his blog Eunomia, “A Year of Slaughter and Starvation”?
The answer, of course, is the Israel lobby. Right after Israel invaded Gaza, Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer (also Jewish) startled a lot of people by saying that it was time for Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu to step down. Chuck Schumer criticizing Israel, or at least someone in Israel! Okay, that’s news! Well, fast forward a couple of months, and Chuck is inviting Netanyahu to address Congress, where he can trash Biden and promote Trump right here in the USA! Nice!
I have written over and over again about the unwillingness of America’s foreign policy establishment, the military intellectual complex, to ever acknowledge its failures, particularly its disastrous attachment to “regime change”, which has inflicted staggering costs on not only the U.S. but the entire world, pursued with complete lack of success for almost 25 years now in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and Syria, and now, it seems, on the menu for Lebanon. Matthew Petti, writing in Reason, has the story: “Biden Pulls America Even Deeper Into the Middle East”. In his closer, Petti quotes U.S. State Department official Amos Hochstein on the administration’s “plans”:
The U.S.-funded Lebanese Armed Forces "should be the primary security mechanism that defends Lebanon along its borders. Other security and police should be strengthened as well to provide internal security," Hochstein said. “And at the same time, have a new government, once we elect, select—once Lebanon elects—a president, have a new government that can address the critical needs of the country. That is how we bring about the end of this conflict.”
Afterwords—Is American foreign policy a Jewish plot? No.
It isn’t. The people who have “run” American foreign policy, in the Bush administration, in the Obama administration, in the Trump administration, and the Biden administration are, largely, not Jewish. They are a mixture of true believers in American dominance, like Dick Cheney and John Bolton, true believers in American virtue, like Hillary Clinton and Samantha Power, and true believers in an ever existent Cold War military, like all those dudes at the Pentagon, along with their defense contractor pals and their think tank parasites, who are paid by the Pentagon to tell the American people that the Pentagon needs more money. The Israel lobby works in a massively lucrative, and massively destructive, symbiotic relationship with all of these groups, multiple hands endlessly washing the other, and endlessly washing away the stains of catastrophic failure. And no one is ever to blame! For a classic example of this Beltway Blob hand-washing hustle, brought to you courtesy of who else? the New York Times, see my overwrought “commentary”, Yo, New York Times! Want to know who started the War in Iraq? Look in the goddamn mirror!