Volume 4 No 1 - Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

2012] THE ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM 227
Antisemitism was a “powerful and unconscious force” in a “different
America” for those little exposed to Jews and tasked with American foreign
service and policy responsibilities in the Middle East. 13 It should also be
noted, as Kaplan does, that among the more than twenty-five State Department
diplomats assigned to the Middle East beginning in 1922, Jews would
only occupy such positions in the last thirty years—Martin Indyk (served
1995-2001); Daniel Kurtzer (served 1981-2006); Dennis Ross (served
1989-1992 and currently); and James Steinberg (2009–present)—and that
among those serving were those overtly antisemitic; others, while not necessarily
antisemitic, were pro-Arab and pro-Palestinian officials who came
to regard the modern nation-state of Israel as a source of ongoing tension in
that part of the world, inimical to America’s best interests, and the American
Jewish community and its pro-Israel voices as contrary to the American
agenda.
THE FOUR-FOLD AMERICAN-ISRAEL STORY
Norman Podhoretz, for thirty-five years editor in chief of Commentary,
is certainly correct in characterizing the U.S.-Israel relationship as “complex.”
14 Perhaps, however, Robert Satloff of the Washington Institute for
Near East Policy, participating in the July 2010 Nixon Center Debate on
“Israel: Asset or Liability?” described it best when he stated:
Indeed, the first twenty-five years after the establishment of Israel, the
regional situation could be described as continuous war with periodic
outbursts of diplomacy. The second thirty-five years—the period since
1973, the period since the takeoff in U.S.-Israel strategic relations—can
best be described as continuous diplomacy with periodic outbursts of
war. Since 1973, there has not been a regional war or a state-to-state
conflict in the Arab-Israeli area. We have had limited wars—Israel versus
13. In a note to her essay “The Myth of Westerness in Medieval Literary Historiography,”
María Rose Menocal makes the observation, “On this side of the Atlantic,
the overt racism and anti-Semitism that is considered unspeakable today but
until recently was not only shocking but expected of the educated classes are both
described in some detail in Lash’s biography of Eleanor Roosevelt,” in The New
Crusades: Constructing the Muslim Enemy, Emran Qureshi and Michael A. Sells,
eds. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), 282. See Joseph Lash, Eleanor
and Franklin (Old Saybrook, CT: William S. Konecky Associates, 1999).
14. Norman Podhoretz, “Israel and the United States: A Complex History,”
Commentary, May 1998, 28-43.