I have a confession. Until my attention was drawn to his Chronicles article, “Zionism Should Not Be a Conservative Sine Qua Non,” I had not heard of Paul Gottfried.
Forced to use Google, I discovered that Paul Edward Gottfried (born in 1941) is an American political philosopher, historian and writer, a former Professor of Humanities at Pennsylvania’s Elizabethtown College (an institution of which I was not aware), editor-in-chief of the paleoconservative (a term I do not know) magazine Chronicles (which I do not read) and an associated scholar at the Mises Institute, a libertarian think tank. I didn’t know that he is considered part of the “alternative right” or that some consider the H.L. Mencken Club, which he founded, a white nationalist group. He insists that he is not to be considered “in the same camp with white nationalists” or associated with “pro-Nazi.”
He was born to a Jewish family that had fled Budapest, Hungary, after the violence there in 1934, and landed in the Bronx, N.Y., and then moved to Bridgeport, Conn. The year 1934 was when the Christian Social Party of Engelbert Dollfuss merged with other nationalist and conservative groups to establish an authoritarian regime based on conservative Roman Catholic and Italian Fascist principles. They then found themselves first involved in a semi-civil war against the Social Democrats’ Schutzbund, a workers’ militia, and, after the assassination of Dollfuss, the object of a Nazi-initiated coup a few months later.
I was surprised to learn that the 83-year-old had attended Yeshiva University, my alma mater, as an undergraduate, and later, Yale University for graduate studies. I found it interesting that the Mises Institute’s “foundational ideas are of permanent value, and oppose all efforts at compromise, sell-out and amalgamation of these ideas with fashionable political, cultural and social doctrines inimical to their spirit.” A fellow traveler of National Conservatism, an idea incubator where Yoram Hazony is quite involved, and whose ideas, that “national identity and national states are essential for freedom and true self-government,” Gottfried approves.
However, at present, he is arguing in that recent Chronicles essay “against making Zionist nationalism a centerpiece of American conservatism.” I doubt that that is because anti-Zionism is now fairly fashionable. Or am I wrong?
Why would Gottfried adopt such a position? After all, Zionism is an authentic nationalism, perhaps the oldest national identity framework, going back some 3,000 years or more. Zionism is faithful to the Jewish people’s national essence of shared history, religion, rituals and customs, a unique language, and a rich heritage of cultural success and accomplishment.
Zionism has created a state where, now that the Likud/Herut ideology has been dominant for over four decades, conservative ideas have overcome Israel’s original dominating Marxist Socialist hegemony. Under Benjamin Netanyahu’s leadership, a new axis of states in contradistinction to the “open Europe” has been created that is solidly conservative. Zionism is the West’s current best bulwark against ascendant and triumphalist Islamism, an ideology that would wash away the heritage and traditions Gottfried champions.
Although he assigns his antagonism to a personal incident when, in 1987, having “offended high-placed Zionists,” he discovered that the dean of humanities at Catholic University of America was supposedly “warn[ed] against giving me a graduate professorship in political theory” having thought to be “not quite reliable in the matter of Israel.” This was when he acknowledged that he “strongly supported the Israeli right-wing” and was aligned with the editors of Commentary magazine. To this day, his mind is still boggled why he was not thought to be sufficiently pro-Israel.
The incident remains with him as it points to a “problem” inherent in the American conservative movement: it is “overly dependent on Zionist donors, like the Murdoch family and the widow of Sheldon Adelson.” Seemingly, that “problem” has “undoubtedly contributed to the bitter opposition against Israel coming from the outlying right, typified by the Ron Paul Institute, the Mises Institute, as well as some writers for Chronicles.”
Adopting an inverse Marxist interpretation, he is convinced that “professional and financial advantages that accrue to Zionist advocates … have everything to do, however, with making a career at The Wall Street Journal, becoming a Fox News celebrity or editor at National Review, and being allowed to hobnob with influential conservatives.”
He is sure “Zionist benefactors of the conservative movement throw their weight around” and that “to be a conservative in good standing, it seems that one must be an unqualified Israeli nationalist.” His proof is “please turn on Fox News for a few hours or read the WSJ editorial page.”
In short, while not being an opponent of Israel, he demands that “conservatives and others should have the right to criticize how the Israelis wage war without being denounced by Conservative Inc. as antisemites.” Nevertheless, a Zionist litmus test should not be imposed on members of conservatism. It is not proper and harmful. But why?
Well, Gottfried believes “Israeli forces in 1948 drove out of their homes hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.” True, he notes, the Arabs did start that war, first having rejected a political compromise, and many of their later troubles could have been avoided. However, he doesn’t follow through with that paradigm of constant diplomatic rejectionism that has continued until this very day, not to mention the Arab engagement in terror as practiced since 1920, at the very least. That should indicate Israel is dealing with an unreasonable and irrational community that has consistently proven unreliable as regards Israel’s security needs, economic development and regional cooperation.
He has also “heard” a Zionist claim that “the Palestinians settled in Israel as latecomers, long after Jews had been there continuously since ancient times.” However, he knows an additional “complicated truth”: “those Jews who managed to stay in their homeland became Christians, and, later, Muslims, depending on the dominant power in the area.”
This from a professor, thinker, ideologue and public intellectual.
There were Jews in Roman Palestine, and the land’s “Christianization” did not alter its Jewish demography. The Jerusalem (“Palestinian”) Talmud’s editing ended by “the early fifth century.” There were Jews in seventh-century Byzantine Palestine, and they lived in many villages. Jews, as Jews, lived in the Land of Israel throughout the early Muslim period, as Moshe Gil writes. And on and on, including living as Jews during the Crusader period, the Second Arab-Muslim Conquest, the Mameluke Period and the Ottoman Period into the 19th century.
Gottfried sets up a strawman: “Israel was not an empty land waiting for European Jews to reclaim it … the idea that Jews who arrived from Eastern Europe during the late 19th century were the long-absent owners of Palestine. Am I supposed to believe that the Palestinians whom these Jews encountered were all recent squatters?” But the Arabs of what became the Palestine Mandate considered themselves until 1920 as Southern Syrians. Moreover, most of the privately owned land therein was not owned by Arab residents in the area.
He then takes a further step into the realm of historical ridiculousness in writing, “those Jews who arrived thousands of years later were different from the people whom the Romans drove out. They came from a different culture and part of the world, and … these Europeans did not have a moral right as ‘original settlers’ to dispossess the Palestinians.”
So, à la Gottfried, a national people are only due to a culture and the part of the world that they come from? Of course, from where does he presume that European Jews originated, if not the Land of Israel in the first place? And what about the Jews from Middle Eastern, North African and Asian countries who also over the centuries repatriated back to the Land of Israel with a different cultural background, and yet the same religious practices, the same national language and shared customs, even if different in Sephardi communities rather than Ashkenazi ones?
In his last lashing out, Gottfried insists that “it’s time for the right to rid itself of its unseemly obsession with Israel loyalty tests. There is a difference between hating Israel and sounding like a cheering gallery on steroids.”
No one, professor, need “cheer.” One does have to be faithful to the historical record, to the truth of the history of the Jewish people as well as the great morality that is in supporting Israel and Zionism as it faces an implacable enemy—from the ranks of white nationalist antisemites to Islamist antisemites to Marxist antisemites, and all those in-between.
