Document Type
Article
Abstract
[First paragraph]
The U.S. invasion of Iraq and its resulting occupation have placed American Jewry in a difficult - and largely undeserved - position, resulting in an unfortunate caricaturing of American Jews' political perspectives, which are presumably as diverse as any ethno-religious groups' might be [1]. Such caricaturing enables reactionaries to resurrect, and to deploy with great effectiveness, the nasty "dual loyalty" charge against prominent American Jews who have served in the Bush administration, unfairly suggesting that - within the context of formulating Middle East policy as U.S. officials - these American Jews will always place Israel's interests ahead of those of the United States [2]. Some figures, including Israel's top military commanders, for example, have identified Israel's key role in hyping the intelligence used to justify the U.S invasion of Iraq in March of 2003, suggesting that Israel's long-term security needs were the main motivation for the U.S. invasion [3]. Given the prominence of so many American Jews in key foreign policy positions dealing with the shaping of U.S Middle East policy within the Bush administration, a facile assumption has emerged: namely, that individuals such as Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, Elliot Abrams, and Paul Wolfowitz have really acted as agents of the state of Israel in their capacity as American officials.
Repository Citation
Abraham, Matthew. "Alan Wald's The New York Intellectuals and the Discourse of Shifting Alliances: Anticommunist Liberalism, Neo-Conservatism, and the Rise of Israelism as a Manifestation of Jewish Nationalism." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 8, no. 1, 2008, pp. 1–22. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol8/iss1/18