Why does this man want to end the U.S.-Israel special relationship?

Why does this man want to end the U.S.-Israel special relationship?
In a no-holds barred conversation, Haaretz’s Chemi Shalev talks at length with Prof. Stephen Walt, coauthor of the notorious 'Israel Lobby,' about accusations of anti-Semitism and U.S. foreign policy.
By Chemi Shalev
Haaretz
Apr. 17, 2014

A few minutes after this interview got under way, Stephen Walt began to lose his patience with me. You’re wrong, he snapped. You didn’t read carefully. You are repeating yourself. You keep on interrupting. Why don’t you let me finish? Do you want to hear my answer or are you only interested in your question?

When I listened later to the recordings, I had to admit that Walt had a point. My questions were at times unpleasant, even rude, and I did keep cutting him off, uncharacteristically, if I may add. It’s true that I had warned myself that some readers wouldn’t appreciate a cozy interview with a man who has been widely described as an Israel-hater, if not an anti-Semite, but I assumed that any feigned belligerence on my part would be largely symbolic. As far as I could recall, my own views were not all that distant from his.

My attitude changed in the 48 hours before the interview, especially during the last four hours, on the train to Boston, when I finished re-reading the book that Walt had written with his colleague John Mearsheimer, of the University of Chicago, “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy.” I did not remember that the book had upset me as much when it was first published in 2007, but maybe I only skimmed it then. By the time I walked the two blocks from the Harvard Square subway station in Cambridge to the John F. Kennedy School of Government, where Walt teaches, I was already seeing red.

The essence of the book – and I’m sure Walt could provide quotes to correct any misrepresentations on my part – is that there is a multi-faceted and all-powerful “Israel lobby,” as the authors term it, that plays a decisive role in forging American foreign policy toward the Middle East. Were it not for this lobby, the United States would not have gone to war in Iraq in 2003, a decision that most people now view as a strategic and tragic mistake. The dominance of the lobby is the reason for the “special relationship” between Israel and the U.S., which not only harms wider American interests in the region but is also a prime motivator of jihadist terrorism aimed at the U.S., including the attacks of September 11.

Walt and Mearsheimer’s lobby is an omnipotent octopus with countless tentacles that deters Congress, controls the media and runs rings around the White House. It includes not only the usual suspects, such as AIPAC, the ADL and the Conference of Presidents and all of its constituent members. According to Walt, even J Street, which was created after the book was published and which is shunned by the Jewish establishment, is part of the Jewish lobby. The lobby encompasses not only Jewish and Christian groups that support Israel, but also a nation-wide web of individuals who are part of a “community,” in one way or another, that works “to defend, advance or protect” the special relationship between Israel and the U.S. in any way, shape or form. This includes not only journalists such as the conservative Charles Krauthammer, but also Thomas L. Friedman, who has criticized the lobby and would no doubt be surprised to be listed as one of its active members.

“So are you a part of the anti-Israel lobby in America?” I ask Walt.

“There is no anti-Israel lobby,” he replies.

“But you say it doesn’t need to be an organization, only a community of interests, and you are actively engaged in trying to undermine the special relationship between Israel and the U.S.,” I insist.

“No”, he answers again, “I actively work in favor of what I think would be a normal relationship between the United States and Israel, which would be better for both countries. That’s not anti-Israel, that’s pro-Israel.”

“But that’s what Safire and Krauthammer and all the rest of the people that you place in the lobby also believe. They work to support the special relationship and you work to undermine it,” I persist.

“Excuse me,” Walt says, raising his voice, “Don’t accuse me of being anti-Israel, because I’m not. We don’t use those terms. Our point was to try and explain why the U.S. and Israel have this very unusual relationship, with enormous amounts of support, that no American politician will criticize in public. One way to explain it is to say that this is domestic politics, and maybe it’s the operation of a very powerful interest group that is skewing American policy, making it different than our relationship with France or Japan or other democracies.”

Walt says that one should not overstate Israel’s strategic importance to the United States, “which is not to say that Israel isn’t occasionally useful, but the idea that it is this island of stability that helps us in all sorts of ways is overstated.” He also claims that the support of the American public doesn’t explain the “special relationship,” because that support is “very soft.” Most Americans, he says, don’t really care one way or another.

So there are Congressmen walking around with a belly full of complaints about Israel that they are too afraid to utter out loud?

“Absolutely. If I were a Congressman, I’d be very reluctant to do it. It just buys you trouble.”

Maybe it’s not that important to them. They don’t go around criticizing France or Britain either.

“We don’t give France and Britain $3 billion a year, and we don’t have people flying planes into buildings because of them.”

That’s an offensive claim. The fact that Osama bin Laden may have asserted that he was standing up for the Palestinians doesn’t mean that I have to believe him. I don’t believe that the U.S. is a ‘Crusader’ country either. Most researchers don’t think that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was an essential part of his worldview.v “Well, then, we disagree on the literature. I think most researchers who have looked carefully at bin Laden’s career and his thoughts would argue that his concern for Palestine was a key motivation for him. Not the only one, but one of them.”

Do you propose that if one neutralized the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and American support for Israel, there would be no conflict between radical Islam and America? Is the Arab Spring connected to Israel?

“No. It is not a magic bullet. We say explicitly in the book that if the United States had a different relationship with Israel and if you solved the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it would not end all problems in the region. Nonetheless, despite the Arab Spring, the Palestinian issue continues to resonate in the Arab street, which makes it harder for the United States to get their cooperation. That’s what the last two U.S. commanders of CENTCOM [U.S. Central Command, which oversees the military theater of North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia] told Congress – that the Palestinian conflict handicaps America’s efforts to deal with other problems in the region. This is a direct result of our remarkable relationship with Israel. It’s a puzzle that has to be accounted for. Something peculiar is going on here.”

‘Modern blood libel’

Walt and Mearsheimer’s quest to solve the “peculiar puzzle” began in 2002, when the Atlantic Monthly approached Walt, then the academic dean at the Kennedy School, and Mearsheimer, co-director of the Program on International Security Policy at the University of Chicago, to research the sensitive topic. “After 9/11, everyone kind of understood at some vague level that there was something wrong with America’s relationship with this part of the world, but there was a part of that story that wasn’t being talked about very openly,” Walt says. But after almost three years of work with the Atlantic, its editors decided to dump the project, possibly because they anticipated the kind of storm that broke out in 2006, when Walt and Mearsheimer’s paper was posted on the Harvard website and published in the London Review of Books. And even that storm was only a prelude to the typhoon of controversy and the torrents of condemnation that engulfed the expanded book version that was published by Farrar, Straus Giroux in the summer of 2007.



One of the main reasons for the outburst of protests against the book was the eminent academic credentials of its authors. Both Walt and Mearsheimer are considered to be leading theoreticians of the realist school of international relations. Walt created the concept of “balance of threats,” which modified the prevailing rule of “balance of power” in explaining the behavior of nation-states, while Mearsheimer is credited with the theory of “offensive realism,” by which states tend to try to realize the maximal power that their relative position in the world enables.

“We didn’t ask to do this – we were asked,” Walt says of his sudden interest in the domestic aspect of U.S. foreign policy, an angle of observation usually shunned by contemporary realists. “But we felt that we were in an unusual position to do this. One, we were a couple of boring, mainstream academics. We weren’t Noam Chomsky. We weren’t Norman Finkelstein. We weren’t easy to dismiss. We weren’t married to Palestinians. We’d never taken any money from the Saudis. We had a certain amount of credibility in the sense that we had nothing to gain from doing this. And therefore, if we weren’t willing to, with tenure at two major universities, who would?”

The timing of the publication of both the article and the book also played a major role in both the publicity and the notoriety that it achieved. In the summer of 2007, the American public had already realized that it had been misled by the Bush administration over the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The cost of that deception, intentional or not, was 4,000 American dead and 22,000 wounded, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi casualties, a staggering financial cost measured in the trillions and the emergence of the U.S. as the most hated country in the world.

And then these two well-respected academics show up to pin the blame squarely on the shoulders of Israel and its (mostly Jewish) lobby. To put it crudely, Osama bin Laden destroyed the Twin Towers because of the “special relationship” between Israel and the U.S., and George Bush crippled America because of that relationship’ssupporters.

Walt’s Harvard colleague Alan Dershowitz described the findings as a “modern blood libel.” Democratic Congressman Eliot Engel called the paper “the same old anti-Semitic and anti-Zionist drivel.” Journalist Jeffrey Goldberg blasted its “malignant and dishonest spirit.” Political science professor Eliot Cohen, of Johns Hopkins University, declared it anti-Semitic, plain and simple. The ADL’s Abe Foxman published an entire book to undermine Walt and Mearsheimer’s “myth of Jewish control.” Even Chomsky and Finkelstein said that Walt and Mearsheimer were exaggerating.

Walt dismissed the many criticisms that I insisted on reading out to him, saying that most of them “were not serious” and had either distorted what was written in the book or actually invented things that were the complete opposite. The Nation’s Eric Alterman “didn’t read the book very carefully,” the objections of The New Yorker’s David Remnick were “silly,” and Chomsky “is wrong on this, as he is on many things.”

“It’s laughable when we’re accused of saying there’s some kind of conspiracy going on. This isn’t a conspiracy – it’s American politics, pure and simple. The entire political system in America is set up to empower interest groups of all kinds. The United States has had an embargo on Cuba since 1960. Everybody understands this embargo is a complete and utter failure, that our policy toward Cuba is a joke, right? But we still have it. Is that because the American people are overwhelmingly hostile to the aging Castro family and want to maintain this embargo forever? No. It’s because for a long time, we have had a well-organized community of Cuban-Americans who care greatly about this particular issue, and nobody else in America cares at all.”v “Another example: The National Rifle Association. Why is there no gun control in the United States, even in the wake of school shootings and other disasters? It’s because there’s a very powerful, well-organized lobby. Every year in the United States, they pass a farm bill. Every agricultural economist in America knows it’s not a very good piece of public policy, but it’s what the political system produces. Or take the finance industry. Why is it so hard to regulate the finance industry in the United States, despite what happened in 2008? Because financial organizations give enormous contributions and are well wired into the political system. “

I’m sure you understand that accusing the lobby of responsibility for the war in Iraq is in a different league than these other issues that you’ve mentioned. Don’t you think the neoconservatives in the Bush administration wanted to go to war without any connection to the Israeli lobby?

“We made it abundantly clear that we didn’t regard AIPAC or even the neoconservatives as solely responsible, and we say in several places that under different circumstances they would never have been able to get the administration to go to war. We also make it clear that [President George W.] Bush and [Vice President Dick] Cheney played a critical role. But the neoconservatives had been pushing for some kind of military action against Saddam since the late 1980s, and they hadn’t convinced [President Bill] Clinton and they hadn’t convinced Bush until after 9/11. Then we have a ‘perfect storm’ of circumstances. The Iraq War wouldn’t have happened absent the lobby’s influence, but the lobby alone could not get the United States to go to war in Iraq.

“But once the campaign for war begins in 2002-2003, other organizations and other individuals that we would call part of the lobby weigh in to help sell it. The Israeli government itself was quite ambivalent about this idea when it first came out of the United States, and actually was more worried about Iran, as I think it remains more worry about today. It was only after Bush and company said, look, we’re doing Baghdad first, and then we’ll turn our attention to these people in Tehran, that the Israelis got on board.”

But you know very well that some parts of the Israel lobby won’t do something that’s connected to Israeli security unless they’re not sure the Israeli government supports. Were they more gung-ho than the Israeli government? That hardly sounds credible.

“We documented pretty carefully that AIPAC quietly supported going to war, and the [executive director] of AIPAC, Howard Kohr, said as much. That that was one of his major accomplishments in 2002. This is in the period where I think Bush has already made the decision, right? But he’s got to get public support for it, he wants to get congressional approval, and the interesting question is what if all these [Israel lobby] organizations had been completely neutral? Or, God forbid, what if a few of them had opposed the war?”

There still would have been a war.

Not so sure.

Not so sure is one thing, writing a book is another.

“I have to pound this into your head: We do not say the Israel lobby was solely responsible for the Iraq war. We say it would not have happened if the lobby had not existed and had not pushed forth.”

That’s very close.

“No, excuse me. If 9/11 had not happened, I don’t think we would have invaded Iraq. If we’d had more trouble when we went into Afghanistan, if that campaign had gone badly from the beginning or if we’d had the kind of trouble we had later in Afghanistan, I think Iraq would have been put off. Major decisions like this involve a whole series of things coming together. Nine-eleven, which was a shocking event for the United States, gets the Bush administration to think about alternatives. They happen to have a number of people who are big advocates of invading Iraq in key positions. Then the apparent success in Afghanistan convinces Cheney and Bush and Rumsfeld that we have this magic military that can go in and do wonderful things on the cheap, and so there’s not much risk involved. It makes it very hard for potential critics to object.“

So we’re talking about an administration that was hawkish, influenced by its success in Afghanistan, with a tendency to solve things by force, with this unsettled account with Saddam, whom it believes has weapons of mass destruction. It doesn’t seem like Bush and Cheney needed a lot of persuasion, so the Jewish lobby played, at best, a supportive role.

“But, isn’t it peculiar that after the United States is attacked on 9/11 by Osama bin Laden, who is located in Afghanistan, that we respond to that by attacking Iraq? A country that had nothing whatsoever to do with 9/11?”

So, you’re saying the Israel lobby made that connection between Saddam Hussein and 9/11?

“They didn’t come up with the idea themselves.”

Do you have proof of that?

“Paul Wolfowitz, four days after 9/11, at Camp David, said that our first response should be to overthrow Saddam Hussein. So the idea is put in front of – “

But Paul Wolfowitz is part of the administration. He’s the deputy secretary of defense. Why is this the Israel lobby?

“Wolfowitz is part of the Israel lobby. It’s been clear throughout his career.”

Aren’t you absolving the American hawks, who ruled this country for at least eight years, of any responsibility? Are you saying that Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld were just putty in the hands of the Israel lobby? Are they simpletons?

“Well, if you’ve read the book and I haven’t persuaded you, then I haven’t persuaded you. And we’ve spent almost all of our time talking about one chapter of the book.”

Israel has won

So we moved on to the Palestinians. Walt says that Israel has, in fact, “won the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” because when the Palestinians accepted Israel’s existence, “they were essentially saying you guys won.” But Israel failed to be magnanimous in victory, as Winston Churchill counseled, because it only offered them “a small statelet” which they couldn’t hope to sell to their own public.

Walt believes that future historians will look back at the 1990s, to the Oslo Accords and Bill Clinton’s terms in the White House, and reach the conclusion that a golden opportunity to make peace was missed. When I ask him to assess responsibility for the failed peace talks in Camp David in 2000, he gives Israel and the U.S. 40 percent each, and the Palestinians 20 percent, “because they are the weaker party.” When I make the remark that weaker parties don’t necessarily resort to terrorism, he agrees that the Palestinians “committed crimes” but says that “they were doing it in the context of Israel failing to fulfill its commitments.” When I suggest that the book is rather skimpy about Hamas, Palestinian terrorism or Arafat’s machinations he replies: “Both sides have done things that we would regard as objectionable, reprehensible, whatever.”

You say that terrorists use the U.S.-Israeli relationship, of which you are highly critical, to justify their terrorism and then you say that it should be scrapped. Aren’t you both justifying terrorism and succumbing to it?

“Of course not. Killing innocent people is always a bad thing. The point is to understand why something is happening. If there’s a phenomenon that you don’t like, and you want it to stop, one of the ways of figuring out how to get it to stop is to figure out why it’s occurring. So, if people are engaging in anti-American terrorism because of our relationship with Saudi Arabia, and we have 10,000 troops in Saudi Arabia, we ought to ask ourselves: How badly do we need those troops? Is terrorism a price we ought to pay, or if that’s what’s causing this, maybe we could do something else with those troops. Similarly, if in fact some people are committing acts of terrorism because they have become convinced that the United States is backing Israel, and Israel is doing horrible things to the Palestinians, we ought to understand that, and ask ourselves what that means for our policy.”

Let’s move on to Iran. You compare it to the Soviet Union in the Cold War, but Israelis will tell you Tehran is nothing of the sort. How can you dismiss the Israeli concerns?

“I think that the Israelis and some in America have exaggerated the danger that a nuclear Iran would pose. Of course, I think it would be better if Iran never acquires a nuclear weapon. But people have been worried about every country that has acquired nuclear weapons. When Russia got it, we thought it would be horrific. Ultimately it wasn’t. When China got a weapon in the 1960s, people were saying that Mao was an acknowledged mass murder, who had real contempt for human life, who had written things about nuclear wars. So, he got nuclear weapons, not much happened. I see no evidence that Iran’s leadership is suicidal and there’s no reason to believe that if they ever got a nuclear weapon that they would actually use it against Israel or anyone else, because to do so would be an act of national suicide.”

Do you think you might feel different if you were living in Jerusalem in 2002, and every two or three weeks there was a suicide bomber?

“There is no question that I might feel different, but one of the things that we’re paid to do is step back and ask, does that really tell us very much about what Iran’s leaders might do? They might send soldiers to die, as they did in the Iran-Iraq war, often in some pretty gruesome ways, but that doesn’t mean they will do something that puts their entire regime at risk.

“So, Israelis and Americans and plenty of other people recognize that Iran’s nuclear program is a problem. Where the disagreement has been is over what’s the best way of dealing with this problem. Do we try to work out a diplomatic arrangement with them, or do we use military force to try and disarm them?

“I’d make two points. One is that you can’t really solve this problem with military force, and you’re more likely to make it worse. And second: This is a beautiful illustration of a point we tried to make in our book, which is that the Israel lobby doesn’t control everything. They have been the most persistent and loudest advocates of a military response to this problem, but they’ve been unable to persuade the Obama administration. And the AIPAC-sponsored sanctions bill never got out of the Senate, because the Obama administration said look, this is not helpful to us right now.”

But that’s can also be an illustration of the idea that the Israel lobby only succeeds in persuading administrations to do what they’re predisposed to do.

“I think that’s too simple. Lobbies often have an impact, not just by getting their preferred outcome, but by making sure there are some policies that never even get considered. You can move the range of debate, the set of acceptable options, partly out of the way, even if you don’t get all the way to your preferred outcome. So, Congress has raised the bar for what a deal with Iran will have to be and that puts some constraints on what Obama is able to negotiate. But needless to say, our experience in Iraq, and in Afghanistan now have also made it harder to persuade anybody in the United States to get into another war in that part of the world.”

I ask Walt whether he is disappointed with Obama’s performance, given his advocacy against the special relationship with Israel.

“Yes,” he says, “but I think he’s been more of a disappointment to himself. His goal when he took office was to get a two-state solution and to end the war in Iraq. He very much wanted to diminish the amount of bandwidth the Middle East was taking up. He failed completely on the two-state solution, and while he did get out of Iraq, he can’t be particularly happy with what’s happened there. And then I think he was blindsided by the Arab Spring, and he discovers that the Middle East is still taking up enormous amounts of time and attention.

“There has been some unusual friction between the United States and Israel,” Walt says approvingly, “although there have been bumpy moments in the past. I think the administration did not think long and hard what its strategy was going to be. Going back to 2009, when Obama was really riding high, he gave the Cairo speech, and he tried to put pressure on Netanyahu, but I don’t believe the administration ever thought through what they would do if Netanyahu dug in his heels and said no, which is essentially what he did. They had no plan B, and they began to realize that the political costs here in the United States were considerable.

“At that point, Obama made a decision that it was really only the seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth issue on his agenda and that there were other things that mattered more. But if that’s what you were going to do, why start down that road?

“He underestimated how hard it was going to be. There has been this view in American politics, and it harkens back to [Yitzhak] Shamir and [George H.W.] Bush, that it’s absolutely important for an Israeli prime minister to have a good working relationship with the U.S. president, and that it can cost an Israeli prime minister a lot if that relationship looks bad. That may have been true 20, 30 years ago, but I’m not sure it’s true anymore. Netanyahu became more popular in Israel the more he quarreled with Obama. I don’t think Obama handled this issue well.”

I ask Walt what he would do if it were up to him: “I’d be having a much more blunt conversation with our Israeli friends about where we think our interests are aligned and where I think our interests differ. I wouldn’t try to cut off the aid package, because it would go through Congress regardless of what I wanted to do. But if that were in my hands, I would make American support for Israel much more conditional on an end to settlement construction. A more serious willingness to engage with the Palestinians before it’s too late to actually get a peace deal.”

But the Israeli people may have chosen a government that is not amenable to those demands.

“Countries don’t always have the same interests, and if our interests are in [there being] a two-state solution, and if Israel decides it wants to go a different way, so be it. That’s Israel’s choice, and they can do that. But then the United States should be able to make its own choices, too.”

Understanding Putin

Do you agree with John Kerry’s assertion that the U.S. is engaged in 21st-century diplomacy while Vladimir Putin is pursuing 19th-century imperialism?

“I think we have focused far too much attention in the United States on Putin’s personality and far too little on the basic geopolitical interests at stake. If you’re Russia, and you’ve been invaded three times in a couple of hundred years, at extraordinary cost, and you’ve watched the West expand NATO eastwards, you have seen the United States put ballistic missile defenses in Poland, and they tell you that it’s about Iran, but you know that Iran doesn’t have nuclear weapons yet, and doesn’t even have long-range ballistic missiles yet... And then, finally, if you’d seen what happened in 2008 when the Bush administration proposes an action plan for Ukraine and Georgia, and the next thing you know, we get the Russian-Georgian War. Why we didn’t think there was going to be a reaction is beyond me. I think it’s quite clear they were – the administration was completely blindsided. As were the Europeans.” Is there a common thread of naiveté here? “I don’t think it’s naiveté. It was certainly a failure to think through what the basic interests were. And I think when the Ukrainian revolt against [former President] Yanukovych began, we were too quick to side with the demonstrators and too slow to reiterate that our long-term interest was in a neutral Ukraine. Not really in their sphere. Not necessarily in our sphere. And some combination of collaboration and reassurance, as well as a warning to the Russians back several months ago, was probably the best way to approach it, as opposed to what we did.”

Is the Obama administration conducting a “realist” foreign policy?

“They certainly they have not approached Ukraine in a way that I would regard as particularly realist. But if realism means pragmatic, then I think they have been fairly pragmatic in their dealings with the Middle East. There’s no clear unifying principle in their response to the Arab Spring, for example: It’s different in Libya than in Bahrain, and Egypt is another matter altogether. I wrote a book on revolutions, and the thing about major social upheavals is they are really hard to read. A lot of people, me included, have some egg on our faces for trying to forecast where Egypt was going, for example.

“I think Morsi himself was surprised by the outcome he got, and the fact that the [Muslim] Brotherhood screwed up as badly as they did is partly a reflection of a movement that had lived for 70, 80 years as essentially a dissident, underground or quasi-underground movement suddenly being asked to run the country, and failing very badly.”

Israelis think events in the Middle East have proven them to be realists, and everybody else to be idealists.

“With the exception of the attempt to incorporate the West Bank, and all of the demographic problems that that creates, I would argue that the Israelis were sort of the ultimate realists, at least during the first 25-30 years of the existence of the state. Israelis like to say, understandably, that they are in a very difficult neighborhood and they can’t be too sentimental: You had to cut deals where deals needed to be cut, and you had to be ruthless when things needed to be ruthless. If I were to be critical of Israeli strategic judgment, it would be that after the miracle of ’67, strategic judgment got worse over time. And so you get the Lebanon War in 1982, and the occupation, which becomes an enormous headache later on.”

Do you support the two-state solution?

“Yes. Which unfortunately means that I’m now a supporter of something that I think is less and less likely. And I don’t know quite what to do with that.”

Generally speaking, after the reaction to the Bush administration that brought about the election of Obama, is the pendulum now swinging the other way?

“I actually think that the continuities in American foreign policy after the Cold War ended are quite striking. The aberration, which I do not attribute solely to the Israel lobby, is the first four years of the George W. Bush administration. It’s the only time the United States takes huge risks. Clinton was very busy in foreign policy, but he was very careful not to put ground troops in any place where they might get hurt. He wanted to use air power. And Obama’s been very similar. Obama’s willing to send Special Forces and drones and a few more ground troops to Afghanistan, but by and large, he does not want to do anything big and expensive. But the continuity of America wanting to be the indispensable nation, wanting to exercise global leadership – that really hasn’t changed.”

But Republicans accuse Obama of diminishing America’s aspirations to be dominant.

“I don’t think that’s correct. I think he’s given plenty of speeches in which where he’s made it clear that keeping the United States number one is an important priority. I think you couldn’t come out of the financial crisis and Iraq and Afghanistan without getting some adjustment. You make a bunch of big mistakes, you pay a price. But we’re still very busy in lots of parts of the world. We still have military power deployed, you know, on every continent. We still have the world’s largest, most capable military. The one thing we may have learned is that we’re not very good at occupying and running other societies. Nobody’s very good at doing that.”

No regrets

We are reaching the end of the interview, which has become much calmer – or perhaps we are both just worn out. I ask Walt whether he had anticipated the ferocious response to his article, and how it affected his life.

“We knew that we would face a firestorm of criticism, because we had seen what had happened to a few others who said similar things in the past,” he says. “The precise nature of it, and the speed, the immediacy of the response, did surprise me. It was literally going to bed one night and getting up the next morning in a rather different world. I didn’t fully anticipate that.

“How has it affected my life? I think it has altered the trajectory I might have had. I think it’s made it impossible for me to serve in the U.S. government, because it would be just too politically controversial. Even if someone wanted me, say, to work on U.S. policy in Asia, it would just be not worth it. I’m not so valuable that a president or a secretary of state would want to deal with the political fallout. It has probably had some impact on my upward mobility in academia – if I wanted to be a dean or something like that.

“But it has not a major impact on my friendships or my relations with other scholars. I don’t think I’ve lost any truly close friends as a result of this, including people who might have disagreed with me, and who have talked about it with me. And it opened up a whole set of new professional connections contacts, many of them in the American Jewish community... So there were some friends out there I didn’t know I had until after this got written.”

Does it bother you that people think you’re an Israel hater or call you an anti-Semite?

“Nobody should like being accused of being an anti-Semite, so I don’t enjoy that aspect, but I know it’s false, so I’m sorry that people have a mistaken view of my attitudes. That’s all I can do. I can’t correct them. I’ve said what I’ve said, and if they have an erroneous view of what my character is really like, that’s unfortunate.”

As we get ready to say goodbye – to the relief of us both, I think – Walt says that he has no regrets about the book and that besides updating it, his perceptions haven’t changed with the passage of time. He thinks that his book with Mearsheimer did indeed “break the taboo” about the Israel lobby and I tend to agree. I think it’s also true to say that the lobby itself has significantly downsized its public profile as a direct result of the book and the ensuing controversy.

But I also tend to agree with political commentator and scholar Walter Russell Mead’s observation that, “Although Mearsheimer and Walt make an effort to distinguish their work from anti-Semitic tracts, the picture they paint calls up some of the ugliest stereotypes in anti-Semitic discourse. The Zionist octopus they conjure – stirring up the Iraq war, manipulating both U.S. political parties, shaping the media, punishing the courageous minority of professors and politicians who dare to tell the truth – is depressingly familiar.” And I agree with the many critics of the real-life pro-Israel lobby who have written that there is a book to be done about its influence and the possible damage that it has caused to both the U.S. and Israel – but this book isn’t it. In my view it is one-sided, tendentious, distorted and, yes, prejudiced.

On my way back to New York, I suddenly remembered my mother, of blessed memory, who grew up in the Sudetenland, in Czechoslovakia, before World War II in a very small Jewish community in a German-speaking town. In those circumstances, she would say, Jews developed a sixth sense that allowed them to detect both Jews and anti-Semites who may have been pretending to be something else. It is a shame, I thought, that I have not inherited her gift.

Mergers and acquisitions: the world of the elite has changed, but not necessarily for the better

The world of the elite is not more democratic since M&A took over. Wealth is more concentrated than ever. When the doors to inner sanctum of American money were breached, the first thing the victors did was to slam them shut again.

"M&A has a deceptively mundane definition. It means taking control of a company, with or without the consent of the executives running it...

"The company assured the court that before any decision, no monies would change hands. Over the long weekend, the status quo would remain intact so that the judge could safely delay his ruling on the case until after the break. The judge, on Revlon's word of honor, agreed to postpone his decision until the Tuesday after Columbus Day..."

The Lucky Sperm Club: Jews, M&A and the Unlocking of Corporate America
By John Weir Close
Posted by Paul Solman
PBS
Jan. 2014

..."Since 1975, the US economy has been transformed in ways that are not yet well understood," wrote economics journalist David Warsh recently in his weekly Economic Principals column.

...They call themselves the Lucky Sperm Club. It is the 1980s and Shapiro is soon to be a member of the set of young lawyers at the rising firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom who are fortunate enough to sit at the feet of Joe Flom, the guru of a generation, a gruff and slightly hunch-backed, recently obese, small man with both pitiable social insecurities and serene confidence in his prodigious intellect.

Flom and his arch-rival and co-conspirator, Marty Lipton, are inventing modern mergers and acquisitions, or M&A, which, because of these two men, will soon become both a craft with a name all its own and a phenomenon that has ruled global commerce ever since.

At Lipton's firm -- Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz -- a similar if unnamed group of young men is also ascending rapidly to top positions and growing ever richer, working directly and often virtually singled-handedly with powerful clients, with Lipton's genius always accessible. In all but name, the Lucky Sperm Club is rapidly spawning new chapters at other firms and banks around Manhattan and beyond as the emerging specialty gathers shape.

M&A has a deceptively mundane definition.

It means taking control of a company, with or without the consent of the executives running it. Since it is expensive to build a business from nothing, it is often seen as more profitable to take over what has already been built by others. In one stroke, you expand your business and eliminate a competitor.

If you're purely an investor, you can keep the company or sell it off for profit.

To gain control of a corporation in the modern era, you either offer to buy the stock from the existing shareholders or ask them to vote their shares in favor of your nominees for the board of directors, who, if elected, turn over the company to you.

That's basically it. It sounds simple, and it is, but variations proliferate as fast as the human mind can invent them.

M&A has grown rampantly in power and complexity to reach a global value of around $4.7 trillion at its recent highest point, more than the GDP of Germany, the fifth largest economy in the world. M&A has revolutionized corporate Earth and enriched the members of the guild as perhaps none of them ever imagined.

As explored in my recent book, "A Giant Cow-Tipping By Savages," modern M&A has not been driven by Scottish immigrants in Pittsburgh or French Huguenots in the Hudson Valley capturing entire swathes of the nation's resources in the absence of government regulation. To the contrary, in the late 20th century, M&A was driven by two Jews, Marty Lipton and Joe Flom, who had simultaneous epiphanies about how to take advantage of new government regulation -- in other words, how to turn the rules into an instruction manual for transforming the buying and selling of companies into a profession in itself. But rather than seek to buy, sell or keep companies themselves, they became the Sherpas, interpreting regulatory maps and making up new law as they went along.

As recently as the 1970s, Jews and all others not of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestant ascendancy were still excluded from any position of real power at the bar, on the bench, at banks and in boardrooms. America was still an agglomeration of ghettos: Italians knew Italians, Jews knew Jews, Poles knew Poles, Irish knew Irish, WASPs barely knew any of them existed and the Cabots spoke only to God.

"When I came to New York in the '70s, the WASP aristocracy still reigned," the Lucky Sperm Club's Shapiro recalls. "You didn't see an Asian face above Canal Street. You didn't see a black face in a law firm unless it was the mailroom. You certainly didn't see an Hispanic face. Swarthy Italians and Jews? They were not people you dealt with."

Yet again, as happened so often in their history, the Jews somehow found their own methods to carry them past such barriers, and once those blockades were destroyed, other demographics followed.

But it was primarily Jews who first became expert in taking over companies against the will of their existing executives. The white-shoe law firms and elite investment banks found this simultaneously distasteful and tantalizing in the same way medieval merchants viewed the lending of money at interest. Both groups were discouraged from joining in one of the most profitable enterprises of their day: the old merchants by, among other things, an ecclesiastical ban on the practice of usury; the new lawyers, by the establishment's social codes of behavior. Again, the Jews found themselves in control of an industry that then perpetuated the stereotype: the omnipotent, venal Machiavellian, hands sullied by the unsavory. But the business of takeovers paid the rent. And then some.

Yes, they were making money. And yes, that got the attention of the rest of Wall Street. But the takeover gang was also having fun. They were running through the streets wielding megaphones and announcing the revolution. They changed everything. Like West Indian slave revolts in the 1800s, which disrupted the fortunes of the likes of Jane Austen's Sir Thomas Bertram, the new M&A industry transformed public corporations -- the establishment's repositories of power and wealth -- into very public, very visible and very vulnerable sugar plantations open to all with the will, the intelligence, and sometimes, the personality disorders needed to gain entry.

M&A quickly divided itself into two separate but equally important gangs: the corporate acquirers who do the buying and the M&A advisers who show them how it's done. The former are the collectors. Like bower birds, who attract female mates with the colorful trinkets they gather to decorate their nests, these men began to collect compulsively: houses, wives, antique carriages, acres, books-by-the-yard, furniture, airplanes, companies. Dominant members of the species included Sir James Goldsmith, a British mogul with a secret terror of rubber bands who was reportedly the model for Sir Larry Wildman in the 1987 movie "Wall Street"; John Kluge, at one time the richest man in America after his breakup of Metromedia, who became infamous for his grisly pheasant shoot in Virginia; and Robert Campeau, known for bankrupting a swathe of North American department stores while fending off his own aging with the injection of fetal lamb brain cells.

The M&A advisers -- the lawyers and bankers who actually do the work -- are like vervet monkeys, more highly evolved than bower birds. Clever and quick social animals with a strict hierarchy, they have a special alarm for each species of corporate raider or, depending on the kind of deal, each potential target. Flom and Lipton and the lesser members of their respective monkey troops were the instant, and only, experts to whom judges and fellow lawyers would come on bended knee for explication of their alarm calls, the takeover assault weapons and the defenses against raiders that they were creating on the backs of menus at the hottest restaurants in town.

Skadden's Lucky Sperm Club adopted the Quilted Giraffe as its clubhouse -- at the time, the most celebrity-stuffed establishment in Manhattan. With sex in the bathroom and cocaine in the lost and found, the restaurant happened to track the same arc as early M&A from 1979 to 1990. And at Second Avenue and 50th Street, the Quilted Giraffe was also just six blocks from the offices of Skadden on Third Avenue. Along with the house red, Petrus and the Montrachet, the specialty was the "beggar's purse," an innocuous but seductive little crêpe confection bulging with beluga and crème fraîche, pulled into symmetrical creases by a drawstring of chives and topped with a gold leaf. It was the Proustian madeleine of the 1980s, typically $50 for each little morsel.

One autumn night in 1985, three of the Lucky Sperms, Stu Shapiro, Morris Kramer, Don Drapkin, and their progenitor, Joe Flom, could be found at their usual table, enjoying Havana's finest, smuggled in from Geneva in white plastic boxes, each with its telltale gold-foil ring removed. By this time, our hitherto ostracized takeover lawyers had taken their rightful place among the clout merchants of the day. Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall were at table eight near the door. Ivan Boesky and Mike Milken had just left. Henry Kissinger had lumbered into his limo after a long drinking session. Woody Allen had dibs on table seven, as on other nights did Mia Farrow, Diane Keaton and Adnan Khashoggi. Warren Beatty was, as usual, at table six. There was Jacqueline Kennedy in her blue Chanel suit with Jayne Wrightsman. You could see Donald Sutherland, Annette Reed and Brooke Astor. You could never see Bernie Madoff, who always ordered in and always at lunch.

Among the Lucky Sperm stars that night there was a certain air of schadenfreude. They were embroiled in their campaign to conquer Revlon for their client Ron Perelman and his company, known as Pantry Pride. Perelman at the time was an unknown adventurer and a serial acquirer.

In 1985, M&A was exploding into maturity in the courts and boardrooms, and the Revlon war epitomized this sudden transformation of both commerce and culture. Few American corporations in the mid-1980s embodied glamour and power more thoroughly and with more fanfare than Revlon, a global brand brought to full flower by its former leader, the self-aggrandizing and self-tortured Charles Revson and then by Revson's hand-picked successor, Michel Bergerac, who ensured that the company was the commercial and cultural lodestar of the establishment.

Bergerac created his own splendid court at Revlon's headquarters in the General Motors building, one of the most prestigious office addresses in the city. On the 49th floor, the Revlon rooms were done à l'Afrique. The walls were hung with heads of greater kudu and steenbok and the masks of the Urhobo, Bozo and Yoruba. The floors were covered with zebra and impala skins and dotted with elephants'-foot stools. It was a palace of the masters of all living things, the lords of all creation.

"There was this sense that we are the nobility. And who is this -- you should excuse the expression -- Jew from Philadelphia ...Who is he to interrupt our garden party in our Fourth-Floor-of-Abercrombie-&-Fitch-decorated headquarters in the city's fanciest building with the best views of Central Park in New York?" says Stu Shapiro about the predominant attitude within the Revlon kingdom they were trying to acquire.

"This Jew" -- Shapiro's client -- was Ronald Owen Perelman, salivating on his cigar, blurting out his ungrammatical fragments, daring to attack august Revlon, with its $2.3 billion in assets, from his perch atop a small, recently bankrupt Florida food chain with assets of barely $400 million. Perhaps most galling of all was the silly name of the upstart's company: Pantry Pride. The Revlon grandees called it "Pant-y Pride"; Ronnie was "Peril-man," pointedly pronounced in the French way by CEO Michel Bergerac so that it sounded like the name of a comic book super-villain.

Ronald Perelman, with the omnipresent cigar, in his townhouse two years after shocking the business elite with his coup at Revlon. Photo courtesy of Rob Kinmouth/Getty Images.

Revlon certainly had reason to feel impregnable, not only because of its size, but also because it had hired an army of the best New York M&A specialists who felt the same way: Arthur Liman leading a platoon from Paul Weiss, Marty Lipton of Wachtell and Felix Rohatyn in charge of a team from Lazard Frères. These advisers assured their client that they would never let Pantry Pride get its hands on Revlon. It was a lesson in how contempt and entitlement can fuel an arrogance that guarantees defeat.

At first, only one member of the board of directors saw "Peril-man" for what he was -- a Drexel-fueled, Skadden-led, adrenalin-stoked existential threat to the Revlon status quo. That Revlon board member was Ezra Zilkha, the scion of an ancient Baghdadi-Jewish banking family. Zilkha understood that Mike Milken, who turned his team at the investment banking gadfly Drexel Burnham into a West Coast Wall Street from his X-shaped throne at Wilshire Boulevard and Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills, was funneling borrowed money from bond buyers into Pant-y Pride, charging the borrower (Perelman) atmospheric interest rates but undamming an unstoppable surge of cash from investors looking for fat returns.

Zilkha at first found allies on the board only in Lewis Glucksman, the legendary head of Lehman Brothers, and Aileen Mehle, the celebrated columnist who wrote under the name Suzy Knickerbocker. It would not be long before the entire Revlon board and management, and indeed, the wider establishment itself, became increasingly appalled at the savages about to slay their first mastodon.

The fight had started with a knock at the door at Bergerac's townhouse by Ron Perelman on the night of June 14, 1985. He was soon shown the door. Bergerac would later say to an associate, "Can you imagine this guy, saying he's going to make me a rich man?" It may have been presumptuous, but it turned out to be true -- true, at least, that Perelman would make Bergerac a much richer man than he was already.

Revlon wasted no time. It quickly put in a poison pill, an amendment to the corporate by-laws which would make it more expensive for any bidder to get more than a modest percentage of Revlon's shares, and it began buying back as many as 10 million of those shares to keep them out of a predator's grasp, using notes or debt instruments in exchange for the stock. Unbeknownst to Ron Perelman, Revlon also opened secret talks with Teddy Forstmann of Forstmann Little, which provided money to managements in return for partial ownership, about dividing up Revlon between them, which would leave nothing left for Perelman to buy.

Again, Ezra Zilkha foresaw the future. He argued that the courts would see this arrangement as nothing more than a way to protect their own interests -- a new fence to keep the cow-tippers out of the milk-and-honeyed land of Revlon.

When the Revlon board met on Oct. 3, 1985, to approve its deal with Forstmann, which would leave the incumbents largely still in charge, Zilkha was in Jerusalem at the King David Hotel, joining in the discussions by phone and urging Bergerac to kill the plan before it was too late. The calls were agonizingly long, four to five hours at a stretch, exacerbated by a rabbi telephoning Ezra in the midst of it all to press him for a donation to a worthy cause. "The rabbi would have the operator interrupt my New York connection so he could talk to me instead," Zilkha recalls with a smile. "As you know, rabbis can be very persistent."

So can corporate raiders. On Oct. 9, after the board had joined hands with Forstmann, Arthur Liman of Paul Weiss convinced the three sides -- Teddy Forstmann, Ron Perelman and Michel Bergerac -- to come together to see if they could make peace. At around midnight, Perelman and his attendants were admitted to the Revlon sanctum, where they were seen as the revolting peasants. "I'll never forget those 20 or 30 guys coming off the elevators," Bergerac would later tell the writer Connie Bruck. "All short, bald, with big cigars! It was incredible! If central casting had had to produce 30 guys like that, they couldn't do it. They looked like they were in a grade-D movie that took place in Mississippi or Louisiana, about guys fixing elections in the back." Liman agreed: "What a scene. All the Drexels were in one room -- these guys with their feet up on Michel's tables, spilling their cigar ash on his rugs."

Worse even than their manners, it would soon emerge, was their new bargaining tactic, which Perelman announced that night. He was simply not going to do anything but win.

"We were sitting around in Perelman's office," one member of the team recalls, "which was in his townhouse in the 60s, filled with incredible art -- Modiglianis and Giacomettis, just unbelievable stuff -- and the deal was just kind of plunking along. Donny Engle and Leon Black [of Drexel] and [Skadden's] Don Drapkin and me. We were all talking strategy, and Drapkin suddenly had an idea. 'We'll raise them a quarter every time they bid,' Drapkin says. 'They won't be able to not sell to us because we'll raise them by the same amount every time. We won't care what it costs.'"

Of course, a quarter was not just a quarter. It was an increase of 25 cents for every share Revlon had outstanding, around $30 million for each increase of two dozen-and-one pennies. It was not only intensely irritating for Revlon, this "nickel-diming" racket, as target advisers called it, but it was also a shrewd and raw unsheathed show of financial power, backed as Perelman was, implicitly, by Milken's return-hungry investors.

And then Revlon sullied its own hands. As the Friday before the Columbus Day holiday approached, Revlon came before Justice Walsh, then a judge on Delaware's Court of Chancery. Its Forstmann alliance was under scrutiny. Would a Revlon deal with a leveraged buyout firm, in return for partial ownership of the company, be legal? The company assured the court that before any decision, no monies would change hands. Over the long weekend, the status quo would remain intact so that the judge could safely delay his ruling on the case until after the break. The judge, on Revlon's word of honor, agreed to postpone his decision until the Tuesday after Columbus Day.

But over the weekend, Revlon removed from the corporate treasury not only a tranche of Revlon stock but also $25 million in cash -- all earmarked for Forstmann to compensate him if his deal with Revlon were to fall through. There was no reason to have done this other than to remove the assets from the reach of the court's orders.

There is a little-used courtroom, more like an anteroom, off the Delaware Supreme Court chambers in Wilmington. The bench is large enough to seat all five judges, but the room is very small and very dark, and often very cold. It was to this place that then-Vice Chancellor Joseph Walsh, soon to move to the state's high court, summoned the two sides to the bar on Tuesday, Oct. 16, 1985. It was left to a Revlon adviser who had known nothing of his client's perfidy to face the cold ire of the judge who, learning of Revlon's removal of assets, quickly dismissed all of the company's pleas for succor.

The coup de grace in Delaware's Supreme Court was triggered by Skadden's Stu Shapiro. He argued that the Revlon directors had decided to protect themselves by giving away even more to protect themselves -- in this case, money to the owners of Revlon's traditional debt (its bonds and notes). These debt owners were angry at Revlon's plans to borrow additional money to finance their defense against Perelman's takeover since this new debt would jeopardize the company, and therefore, its bondholders.

Shapiro argued that the board members, facing not just bondholder anger but threats of lawsuits aimed at their own personal fortunes, had blinded them to their duty to get the best deal for the company's shareholders, the actual owners of Revlon. And, as they bought more and more Revlon stock, the owners were increasingly Ronald Perelman and associates -- investors whose loyalty was not to management or employees or the community, but to "maximizing shareholder value." It has been the maxim of corporate America ever since.

When the court stripped away Revlon's defenses, such as the deal with Forstmann, there was nothing for Revlon to do but turn over the keys to the kingdom to the dreaded Perelman for $1.8 billion. The consolation prize was that $1.8 billion was, at the time, an astonishing fortune. Bergerac and friends would be rich after all, as Perelman had promised.

After his oral argument triumph, Stu and his father (and fellow Skadden partner) Irving Shapiro were having a drink at the Rodney Square Club in Wilmington, co-founded by the elder Shapiro at a time in the not-so-distant past when Jews were not welcome in the city's other exclusive clubs. Renowned Delaware attorney A. Gilchrist Sparks III, Revlon's advocate, came over to their table to congratulate Stu on his performance. At that point, the court had not yet ruled, but Sparks knew it was to be Shapiro's day. It was fitting that a luminary in M&A, with an initial as a first name and a Roman numeral after his surname, would tip his hat to a Jewish lawyer at this club founded in response to discrimination after an M&A victory against an established elite.

A devastated Michel Bergerac came to see Ezra Zilkha at 30 Rock just two hours after the Revlon board met for the last time before Ron Perelman and his team took over.

"What has happened?" Bergerac said as he let himself down into a chair. "You have just made yourself $35 million with your golden parachute and the sale of your stock, Zilkha told his friend. It's November, Zilkha went on quickly. With me, you can talk any time, but it is almost tax season. I will call my Peat Marwick people for you. Go now and see how you can defer your taxes. "And that," Ezra recalls, "is exactly what Michel did."

Revlon was a triumph for Stu Shapiro, who won one of the most important court victories in the history of mergers and acquisitions. For Drexel, it was one of the first and most successful junk bond takeovers of a major corporation. For Shapiro's mentor and adviser throughout the Revlon saga, Joe Flom, it was sweet vindication. A brilliant Harvard law student and a law review editor, now the leader of fearsome Skadden, the young Flom had been routinely turned down by the law firm mandarins of the day, sometimes even told that his "background" was the "problem."

These old-line firms, among sundry other gatekeepers, from co-op board members to restaurant maîtres d'hôtel, could no longer stop Flom and his confreres, furious to succeed. "In the early '60s," Flom once remembered, "we were supposed to do an underwriting for a client, but when the client called his investment banker, he was told there were only seven [law] firms -- all old Wall Street firms -- qualified to do underwritings for the bank. So I figure... we've got to show the bastards that you don't have to be born into it."

And that's just what they did. The control of corporate America was arguably democratized in the process. And shareholders, regardless of identity or motives, gained an upper hand they have yet to relinquish, almost three decades later.

The ugly truth about the late, great American WASP--and the rest of the human race

Joseph Epstein demonstrates a limited ability to see the similarities between WASPs and the rest of the human race. He thinks WASPs are somehow different and superior to everyone else.

The problem with Mr. Epstein's analysis is that when WASPs were in power, every year presented a global financial crisis. Mr. Epstein presents himself as a sycophantic Anglophile with little pride in his own heritage. Perhaps he is not able to see in himself the envy he attributes to the Irish.

Or perhaps he does see it. I suspect that Mr. Epstein is more clever than he appears to be. I can't help thinking that his entire book is a satire. I think he looked deep into the hearts of everyone he knew, including himself, and told the ugly truth about the irrational, devious, envious thing that is the human heart.

UPDATE written ten minutes later:

Oh dear. I just learned a bit about Mr. Epstein's personal history. He doesn't seem to be a person who has much perspective on himself.

In 1970, when he was only 33 years old, long before he could rule out the possibility that one or more of his sons would be homosexual, he wrote, "if I had the power to do so, I would wish homosexuality off the face of the earth, because I consider it a curse, in a literal sense." He ended that Harper's Magazine article with, "There is much that my four sons can do in their lives that might cause me anguish, that might outrage me, that might make [me] ashamed of them and of myself as their father. But nothing they could ever do would make me sadder than if any of them were to become homosexual."

So I must change my opinion about the following essay being a satire. It's not. This guy is dead serious. And somehow, I am quite sure that Mr. Epstein found plenty of reasons to be ashamed of his sons. He has a limited capacity to appreciate the marvelous lives lived by people who are not heterosexual WASPs.

Mr. Epstein wrote one book about envy, and another about snobbery. He not only likes to think about who is superior to whom and who deserves to have more wealth, but also to talk at length about people who share his preoccupatons. I imagine that Mr. Epstein sheds more light on his own thinking than he intends. But these are important subjects, and it's good to get them out in the open.

Epstein seems remarkably similar to Justine Sacco, although he takes a lot longer to get to the point. Ms. Sacco managed to express herself clearly in one succinct tweet.

SECOND UPDATE: I tried to find out how Mr. Epstein's worries about his sons have worked out, but I can't find anything about his children. He never seems to mention them.

I found that "Joseph Epstein and his wife live in tree-lined Evanston, Illinois..." And that Mr. Epstein also talks about his mother and father, but I can't find anything about those sons whose futures he spoke of as holding such terrible possibilities for disappointment.



The Late, Great American WASP
The old U.S. ruling class had plenty of problems. But are we really better off with a country run by the self-involved, over-schooled products of modern meritocracy?
By Joseph Epstein
WSJ
Dec. 21, 2013

The U.S. once had an unofficial but nonetheless genuine ruling class, drawn from what came to be known as the WASP establishment. Members of this establishment dominated politics, economics and education, but they do so no longer. The WASPocracy, as I think of it, lost its confidence and, with it, the power and interest to lead. We are now without a ruling class, unless one includes the entity that has come to be known as the meritocracy—presumably an aristocracy of sheer intelligence, men and women trained in the nation’s most prestigious schools.

The acronym WASP derives, of course, from White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, but as acronyms go, this one is more deficient than most. Lots of people, including powerful figures and some presidents, have been white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant but were far from being WASPs. Neither Jimmy Carter nor Bill Clinton qualified.

WASPs were a caste, closed off to all not born within it, with the possible exception of those who crashed the barriers by marrying in. WASP credentials came with lineage, and lineage—that is, proper birth—automatically brought connections to the right institutions. Yale, Princeton and Harvard were the great WASP universities, backed up by Choate, Groton, Andover, Exeter and other prep schools. WASPs tended to live in exclusive neighborhoods: on upper Park and Fifth Avenues in New York, on the Main Line in Philadelphia, the Back Bay in Boston, Lake Forest and Winnetka in Chicago.

WASP life, though, was chiefly found on the eastern seaboard. WASPs had their own social clubs and did business with a small number of select investment and legal firms, such as Brown Brothers Harriman and Sullivan & Cromwell. Many lived on inherited money, soundly invested.

The State Department was once dominated by WASPs, and so, too, was the Supreme Court, with one seat traditionally left unoccupied for a Jewish jurist of proper mien. The House of Representatives was never preponderantly WASP, though a number of prominent senators—Henry Cabot Lodge and Leverett A. Saltonstall, both of Massachusetts, come to mind—have been WASPs. Looking down on the crudities of quotidian American politics, Henry Adams, a WASP to the highest power, called the dealings of Congress, the horse-trading and corruption and the rest of it, “the dance of democracy.” In one of his short stories, Henry James has characters modeled on Adams and his wife Clover, planning a social evening, say, “Let us be vulgar and have some fun—let us invite the President.”

[Maura Larkins' comment: What a vulgar thing to do. I'm not talking about inviting the President; I'm talking about calling it vulgar to invite the President. Mr. Epstein thinks this attitude is exemplary? Who taught him to think like this? It must have been some WASP wannabes. Perhaps a parent? Or high school or college classmates?]

So dominant was WASP culture that some wealthy families who didn’t qualify by lineage attempted to imitate and live the WASP life. The Catholic Kennedys were the most notable example. The Kennedy compound at Hyannis Port—the sailing, the clothes, the touch football played on expansive green lawns—was pure WASP mimicry, all of it, except that true WASPs were too upstanding to go in for the unscrupulous business dealings of Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. or the feckless philanderings of him and some of his sons.

[Maura Larkins' comment: WASPs don't do dirty business deals? How does Mr. Epstein come up with this stuff? How, exactly, does he think America was built? By blacks, Asians, Irish and other poor Europeans who created, on Native American land, the value that WASPs turned into their personal wealth through every dishonest trick they could come up with. And philandering? Are you kidding, Mr. Epstein? You sound like the worst kind of finger-pointing, deluded, self-righteous prig. The Mayflower Madam is probably falling off her chair laughing.]

That the Kennedys did their best to imitate WASP life is perhaps not surprising, for in their exclusion, the Irish may have felt the sting of envy for WASPocracy more than any others. The main literary chroniclers of WASP culture—F. Scott Fitzgerald, say, or John O’Hara—were Irish. (Both Fitzgerald and O’Hara tried to live their lives on the WASP model.) But the pangs weren’t limited to the Irish alone. To this day, the designer Ralph Lauren (né Lifshitz) turns out clothes inspired by his notion of the WASP high life, lived on the gracious margins of expensive leisure.

The last WASP president was George H.W. Bush, but there is reason to believe he wasn’t entirely proud of being a WASP. At any rate, he certainly wasn’t featuring it. When running for office he made every attempt to pass himself off as a Texan, declaring a passion for pork rinds and a love for the music of the Oak Ridge Boys. (His son George W. Bush, even though he can claim impeccable WASP lineage and went to the right schools, seems otherwise to have shed all WASPish coloration and become an authentic Texan, happily married to a perfectly middle-class librarian.)

That George H.W. Bush felt it strategic not to emphasize his WASP background was a strong sign that the decline of the WASP’s prestige in American culture was well on its way. Other signs had arisen much earlier. During the late 1960s, some of the heirs of the Rockefeller clan openly admitted feeling guilty about their wealth and the way their ancestors came by it. By the 1970s, exclusive universities and prep schools began dropping their age-old quotas on Catholics and Jews, lessening the number of legacies automatically admitted, and using racial preferences to encourage the enrollment of blacks. The social cachet of the Episcopal Church, a major WASP institution, drained away as its clergy turned its major energies to leftish causes.

Calling something elite, which was how WASPs of an earlier era preferred to think of themselves, became a denunciation. Being a WASP was no longer a source of happy pride but something distasteful if not slightly disgraceful—the old privileges of membership now seeming unjust and therefore badly tainted. An old joke has one bee asking another bee why he is wearing a yarmulke. “Because,” answers the second bee, “I don’t want anyone to take me for a WASP.”

The late 1960s put the first serious dent into the WASPs as untitled aristocrats and national leaders. For protesters of that generation, the word WASP didn’t come into play so much as the word Establishment, heretofore chiefly an ecclesiastical term. The Establishment was the protesters’ enemy and target. The Establishment was thought to have sent the country into Vietnam; it was perfectly content with the status quo, with all its restrictions on freedom and tolerance for unjust social arrangements; it stood for all that was uptight and generally repressive in American culture.

The Establishment took its place in a long tradition of enemies of American life. This list has included, at various times, Wall Street, Madison Avenue and the military-industrial complex—vague entities all. But there was nothing vague about the Establishment. They were alive and breathing, and they had such names as John Foster Dulles and Allen Dulles, W. Averell Harriman, McGeorge Bundy, Dean Rusk, Joseph Alsop, C. Douglas Dillon, George F. Kennan and Robert McNamara. The WASPs ruled the country, and for those who didn’t much like the country or the directions in which they saw it tending, the WASPs were a great and easily identifiable enemy.

The last unashamed WASP to live in the White House was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and he, with his penchant for the reform of American society, was considered by many a traitor to his social class. He is also likely to be the last to reside there. WASP culture, though it exists in pockets of private life—country clubs, neighborhoods, a few prep schools and law firms—is finished as a phenomenon of public significance.

Much can be—and has been—written about the shortcomings of the WASPocracy. As a class, it was exclusionary and hence tolerant of social prejudice, if not often downright snobbish. Tradition-minded, it tended to be dead to innovation and social change. Imagination wasn’t high on its list of admired qualities.

Yet the WASP elite had dignity and an impressive sense of social responsibility. In a 1990 book called “The Way of the Wasp,” Richard Brookhiser held that the chief WASP qualities were “success depending on industry; use giving industry its task; civic-mindedness placing obligations on success, and antisensuality setting limits to the enjoyment of it; conscience watching over everything.”

Under WASP hegemony, corruption, scandal and incompetence in high places weren’t, as now, regular features of public life. Under WASP rule, stability, solidity, gravity and a certain weight and aura of seriousness suffused public life. As a ruling class, today’s new meritocracy has failed to provide the positive qualities that older generations of WASPs provided.

Meritocracy is leadership thought to be based on men and women who have earned their way not through the privileges of birth but by merit. Careers open to the talented, is what Napoleon Bonaparte promised, and it is what any meritocratic system is supposed to provide.

The U.S. now fancies itself under a meritocratic system, through which the highest jobs are open to the most talented people, no matter their lineage or social background. And so it might seem, when one considers that our 42nd president, Bill Clinton, came from a broken home in a backwater in Arkansas, while our 44th, Barack Obama, was himself also from a broken home and biracial into the bargain. Sen. Ted Cruz, the man who leads the tea party, is the son of a Cuban émigré.

Meritocracy in America starts (and often ends) in what are thought to be the best colleges and universities. On the meritocratic climb, one’s mettle is first tested by getting into these institutions—no easy task in the contemporary overcrowded scramble for admission. Then, of course, one must do well within them. In England, it was once said that Waterloo and the empire were built on the playing fields of Eton. The current American imperium appears to have been built at the offices of the Educational Testing Service, which administers the SATs.

Whether Republican or Democrat, left or right, the leading figures in U.S. public life today were good at school. Bill Clinton had Georgetown, Oxford (as a Rhodes scholar) and Yale Law School on his résumé; Barack Obama had Columbia and Harvard Law School. Their wives, respectively, had Wellesley and Yale Law School and Princeton and Harvard Law School. Cruz went to Princeton and thence to Harvard Law School. Players all—high rollers in the great American game of meritocracy. Their merit resides, presumably, in having been superior students.

But is the merit in our meritocracy genuine? Of the two strongest American presidents since 1950—Harry S. Truman and Ronald Reagan—the first didn’t go to college at all, and the second went to Eureka College, a school affiliated with the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Eureka, Ill. The notion of Harry Truman as a Princeton man or Ronald Reagan as a Yalie somehow diminishes them both.

Apart from mathematics, which demands a high IQ, and science, which requires a distinct aptitude, the only thing that normal undergraduate schooling prepares a person for is… more schooling. Having been a good student, in other words, means nothing more than that one was good at school: One had the discipline to do as one was told, learned the skill of quick response to oral and written questions, figured out what professors wanted and gave it to them. Having been a good student, no matter how good the reputation of the school—and most of the good schools, we are coming to learn, are good chiefly in reputation—is no indication of one’s quality or promise as a leader. A good student might even be more than a bit of a follower, a conformist, standing ready to give satisfaction to the powers that be so that one can proceed to the next good school, taking another step up the ladder of meritocracy.

What our new meritocrats have failed to evince—and what the older WASP generation prided itself on—is character and the ability to put the well-being of the nation before their own. Character embodied in honorable action is at the heart of the novels and stories of Louis Auchincloss, America’s last unembarrassedly WASP writer. Doing the right thing, especially in the face of temptations to do otherwise, was the WASP test par excellence. Most of our meritocrats, by contrast, seem to be in business for themselves.

Trust, honor, character: The elements that have departed U.S. public life with the departure from prominence of WASP culture have not been taken up by the meritocrats. Many meritocrats who enter politics, when retired by the electorate from public life, proceed to careers in lobbying or other special-interest advocacy. University presidents no longer speak to the great issues in education but instead devote themselves to fundraising and public relations, and look to move on to the next, more prestigious university presidency.

A financier I know who grew up under the WASP standard not long ago told me that he thought that the subprime real estate collapse and the continuing hedge-fund scandals have been brought on directly by men and women who are little more than “greedy pigs” (his words) without a shred of character or concern for their clients or country. Naturally, he added, they all have master’s degrees from the putatively best business schools in the nation.

[Maura Larkins' comment: Who designed those schools, Mr. Epstein? Yes, exactly. Your friend thinks anyone is a pig who acts like a WASP without having the right bestowed by birth to be a leech on society.]

Thus far in their history, meritocrats, those earnest good students, appear to be about little more than getting on, getting ahead and (above al) getting their own. The WASP leadership, for all that may be said in criticism of it, was better than that.

The WASPs’ day is done. Such leadership as it provided isn’t likely to be revived. Recalling it at its best is a reminder that the meritocracy that has followed it marks something less than clear progress. Rather the reverse.




Wall Street Journal Op-Ed Bemoans The End Of White Rule In The United States
By Adam Peck
Think Progress
December 21, 2013

There are a lot of problems in Washington, D.C these days, but not many solutions to them. Inefficiency, an allergy to cooperation, and stiff resistance to pragmatism have all ground the federal government to a stand-still. But one op-ed contributor to the Wall Street Journal knows what the real problem is: not enough rich, white men.

In Saturday’s paper and online, author Joseph Epstein mourns the collapse of what he describes as the “genuine ruling class, drawn from what came to be known as the WASP establishment,” (WASP, the commonly-held acronym for White, Anglo-Saxon Protestant). Instead, he argues, we are living in a meritocracy, governed not by an elite subset of the uppermost crust of society but rather by a group of people who overcame some kind of adversity and achieved success thanks to their own merits, not based on what family they were born into. This, according to Epstein, is a tragedy.

Epstein’s embrace of white privilege (or is it power?) is almost too transparent, resembling something closer to satire than to outright racism. And yet he gives no reason to believe that he isn’t completely serious when he argues that modern day “corruption, scandal and incompetence” are hallmarks exclusive to this new era of non-white rule. Or when he memorializes the virtues of keeping those not born into the “WASPocracy” away from the halls of power. Or when he faults the leadership of the country’s top colleges for its role in ending white rule by “lessening the number of legacies automatically admitted, and using racial preferences to encourage the enrollment of blacks.”

Instead, Epstein argues, we should return to an era of WASP rule. Why? Because rich, white men born into rich, white christian families would never lead the country astray:

A financier I know who grew up under the WASP standard not long ago told me that he thought that the subprime real estate collapse and the continuing hedge-fund scandals have been brought on directly by men and women who are little more than “greedy pigs” (his words) without a shred of character or concern for their clients or country. Naturally, he added, they all have master’s degrees from the putatively best business schools in the nation.

Thus far in their history, meritocrats, those earnest good students, appear to be about little more than getting on, getting ahead and (above all) getting their own. The WASP leadership, for all that may be said in criticism of it, was better than that.

Epstein’s contempt for minorities — namely, that they don’t belong anywhere near positions of authority — isn’t reserved simply for race. Back in the 1970s, Epstein penned a story for Harper’s Magazine in which he expressed his desire to “wish homosexuality off the face of this earth.” He added, of his four sons, “nothing they could ever do would make me sadder than if any of them were to become homosexual.” Those comments led to sit-ins and protests outside of Harper’s offices, and Epstein has never apologized (and in fact dismissed his critics, some 30 years later, as simply incapable of understanding his own “textured thought”).

Perhaps that explains why Epstein reserves so little space (50 of his 2200+ word essay) to the shortcomings of WASP rule: he simply doesn’t care that many of the leaders from his idyllic “WASPocracy” looked the other way on issues of racism, homophobia, poverty and inequality when they were in power.

And while the U.S. Senate — historically the wealthier and less diverse of the two chambers — may not be sufficiently white for Epstein’s liking (only 95 percent of U.S. Senators are caucasian), they still do a very good job of tending to the needs of their fellow rich people instead of the needs of middle class and low-income families.

Jewish activists set sights on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, raising alarm in Muslim world; Army Rules Illegal Settlement Now 'Legal'

UPDATE

Israel Grabs More Palestinian Land
Army Rules Illegal Settlement Now 'Legal'
By Reuters
April 13, 2014

Israel has carried out a new land appropriation in the occupied West Bank, the Haaretz daily said on Sunday, in a move that could complicate efforts to extend troubled peace talks with the Palestinians.

Haaretz said the Defence Ministry declared nearly 250 acres (100 hectares) of territory in the Gush Etzion settlement bloc just south of Jerusalem “state land”. Asked by Reuters about the report, the ministry declined immediate comment.

The land appropriation, the left-leaning newspaper said, was the largest in years and could eventually lead to the expansion of several settlements and authorisation of a settler outpost built without Israeli government permission in 2001.

The measure, which falls short of annexing the land to Israel, is based on an Israeli interpretation of an Ottoman-era law that allowed the confiscation of tracts that had not been planted or cultivated for several years in a row.

Haaretz said the heads of nearby Palestinian villages that claimed the land as theirs were informed of the move last week and have 45 days to appeal.

It was not immediately clear whether the reported appropriation was part of sanctions that Israel has begun to impose in response to the April 1 signing by Palestinians of 15 international conventions and agreements during the current crisis in U.S.-brokered peace negotiations.

Hanan Ashrawi, a senior member of the Palestine Liberation Organization, accused Israel of trying to destroy chances for peace through a “frantic escalation” of settlement activity.

“This is the real face of the Israeli government,” she told Reuters. “This is a government hostile to peace moves and it’s taking steps which have a longer-term strategy.”

ISRAELI OPTIMISM

Speaking before the Haaretz report appeared, Israel’s chief peace negotiator, Tzipi Livni said on the YNet news site that she is optimistic the statehood negotiations will be extended beyond the original April 29 deadline for a deal.

“I believe that we are close enough to a decision on the part of both leaderships, encouraged by the Americans, to continue the negotiations,” she said.

Livni has been meeting her Palestinian counterpart Saeb Erekat in an intensive push over the past few days to try to salvage the talks.

Last week, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry suggested that Israel’s publication on April 1 of a tender for 708 homes for settlers in East Jerusalem was the proximate cause for the near collapse of the talks, which began in July.

Israel’s anti-settlement Peace Now movement said on its website that at least 90 of the 120 Jewish settlements built in the occupied West Bank since its capture in a 1967 war are on “state land”. Most countries regard the settlements as illegal.

Palestinians seek a state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with East Jerusalem as its capital, and fear settlements will deny them a viable country. Israel cites historical and Biblical links to the West Bank and Jerusalem and says Gush Etzion is one of the enclaves it intends to keep in any future peace deal.

Citing Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s signing of U.N. human rights conventions, Israel said on Wednesday it was limiting its contacts with Palestinian officials, although Livni could continue to meet negotiators.

Announcing another sanction a day later, an Israeli official said Israel would deduct debt payments from tax transfers which the Palestinian Authority routinely receives, and limit the self-rule government’s deposits in Israeli banks.

For his part, Abbas has accused Israel of violating a commitment to release two dozen prisoners at the end of March, including Palestinians convicted of killing Israelis, when the negotiations resumed. This is the last group of 104 prisoners Israel pledged to free as a confidence-building measure.


ORIGINAL POST

Hatem Moussa/AP - Gazans protest in Gaza City on Sept. 24 against visits to a disputed Jerusalem holy site by religious Jews, claiming it is a desecration of al-Aqsa Mosque. The hilltop compound is revered by Jews as the Temple Mount, the holiest site in Judaism, and by Muslims as the Haram al-Sharif, or Noble Sanctuary, the third-holiest site in Islam.

Jewish activists set sights on Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, raising alarm in Muslim world
By William Booth and Ruth Eglash
Washington Post
December 2, 2013

JERUSALEM — A small but growing movement by Jewish activists demanding the right to pray at the site of their destroyed temple, in the heart of this disputed capital’s Old City, is creating a potentially explosive clash with the Muslim world, which considers the spot holy and bans Jews from public worship there.

Each week, hundreds of Jews ascend the creaky wooden ramp built above the Western Wall and enter what is often called the most contested real estate on Earth. Many then embark upon a game of hide-and-seek with their police escorts — whispering forbidden prayers while pretending to talk into cellphones, and getting in quick but banned bows by dropping coins and then bending to pick them up.

Their proposals, long dismissed as extremist, are now being debated in the Israeli parliament and embraced by an expansionist wing in the ruling coalition government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

These political leaders, many in Netanyahu’s party, want Israel to assert more, not less, control over the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Old City, including the place known to Jews as the Temple Mount and to Muslims as Haram al-Sharif, or the Noble Sanctuary.

“We’re looking for it to be divided between Jews and Muslims,” said Aviad Visoli, chairman of the Temple Mount Organizations, which claims 27 groups under its umbrella. “Today, Jews realize the Western Wall is not enough. They want to go to the real thing.”

Two millenniums ago, this place was the site of the Jews’ Second Temple, destroyed in A.D. 70 by Roman legions under Titus, who cast the Jews into exile. The Western Wall, visited by 10 million people a year, is part of the remaining rampart built around the raised temple complex. Together, the wall and the site of the destroyed temple are the holiest landmarks in Judaism.

The same courtyard is home to al-Aqsa mosque, one of the oldest in Islam, and the Dome of the Rock, the golden landmark where tradition says the prophet Mohammad made his night journey to heaven.

For Palestinians and much of the Muslim world, any mention of changing the status quo at the site, the third-holiest in Islam, is incendiary. Protecting al-Aqsa has been a rallying cry for generations.

“This place belongs to the Muslim people, and no others have the right to pray here,” said Sheik Azzam al-Khatib, director of the Waqf, the Islamic trust that administers the site. Khatib said the mosque is a unifying symbol for the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims.

“If they try to take over the mosque, this will be the end of time,” Khatib warned. “This will create rage and anger not only in the West Bank but all over the Islamic world — and only God knows what will happen.”

The site, like all of Jerusalem’s Old City, was under Jordanian control until 1967, when it was captured by Israel during the Six-Day War. The Waqf administers and protects the site. Israeli police also patrol the area and accompany Jewish visitors while they visit.

Non-Muslim tourists are welcome to wander freely around the grounds. But non-Muslim prayer is forbidden. Jews in religious garb are taken aside at the entrance by Israeli security officers, screened more closely and sternly warned not to pray, bow, sing, tear their clothes in mourning or display any religious items.

Israel’s Chief Rabbinate has ruled that Jews should not enter the Temple Mount esplanade, for fear they will accidentally walk upon ground that is part of the Holy of Holies, the inner sanctum of the temple, where the Ark of the Covenant was kept and only the high priest was permitted to enter.

But political leaders are urging that this stance be reexamined. Rabbi Eli Ben-Dahan, deputy minister of religious affairs, has proposed giving Jews an hour a day to pray there.

“There is a growing reality among sectors of the population who want to go up there and pray, and there are rabbis who are encouraging their followers to do so,” Ben-Dahan said at a November committee hearing on the matter in the Knesset, Israel’s parliament. “The rabbinate needs to recognize this reality.’’

War of words

The hearing quickly devolved into a shouting match. “Every citizen of Israel should have the right to pray at their holy sites without harassment or being attacked,” said Miri Regev , the committee chairwoman. “If Jews want to go up to the Temple Mount to pray, they should have that right.”

“There is no such thing as the Temple Mount!’’ interrupted an Arab Israeli parliamentarian, Jamal Zahalka. “It does not exist. It is not there. ”

Legislators hurled shouts of “Barbarian!” and “Fascist!”

Arab Israeli lawmakers stormed out in protest.

“Because of your games at the al-Aqsa mosque, a third intifada could erupt,” Ahmad Tibi, deputy speaker of the Knesset and leader of the Arab political party Ta’al, told Regev. “You are a dangerous woman — to yourself, your children and all of us. Enough of playing with fire!”

In 2000, in the aftermath of failed peace negotiations mediated by President Bill Clinton, Israeli politician Ariel Sharon — campaigning to become prime minister — visited the Temple Mount with an escort of 1,000 police officers.

Some analysts say the visit sparked the second Palestinian uprising, often referred to as the al-Aqsa Intifada. Others claim that Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat was looking for an excuse to unleash the uprising and found one in Sharon’s action. In a report by former U.S. senator and peace negotiator George P. Mitchell, Sharon’s visit was called “poorly timed” and “provocative.” But the report said Israel’s use of lethal force against rioters in subsequent demonstrations had a greater negative effect.

Today, as yet another round of U.S.-brokered Israeli-Palestinian peace talks are underway, Khatib and other Islamic clerics warn that proposals to grant “time and space” to Jews looking to pray on the Temple Mount could ignite a holy war.

The clerics say they have pleaded with Israeli police to limit the number of Jews allowed to visit the site and warned that Jewish extremists are trying to change a delicate status quo and create new facts on the ground.

Uri Ariel, Israel’s minister of construction and housing, told reporters after a recent visit: “The Temple Mount is ours, and it cannot be argued about or negotiated. . . . It must be open for prayer at every hour, to every Jew.”...

“The Myth of Persecution”: Early Christians weren’t persecuted

A few decades ago, the Catholic Church removed a large number of people from its list of saints. Saint Christopher was a big loss, since so many people were driving around feeling safe because they had a Saint Christopher medal hanging from their rear-view mirrors. It turns out that these "saints," such as Christopher, the ferryman who carried a heavy child on his shoulders, might not have existed at all. Likewise, regarding Judaism, some archaeologists say that small Bedouin camps from thousands of years ago have been found in the Sinai desert, but not a trace of Jews wandering in that desert for forty years. Perhaps the Egypt story is an allegory for the years Jews spent searching for God, and the stories of Christian saints were allegories created to strengthen the resolve of early Christians who were struggling to carry the burden of their new religion.

“The Myth of Persecution”: Early Christians weren’t persecuted
The Romans did not target, hunt or massacre Jesus' followers, says a historian of the early church
By Laura Miller
Salon.com
Feb 24, 2013

In the immediate aftermath of the Columbine High School massacre, a modern myth was born. A story went around that one of the two killers asked one of the victims, Cassie Bernall, if she believed in God. Bernall reportedly said “Yes” just before he shot her. Bernall’s mother wrote a memoir, titled “She Said Yes: The Unlikely Martyrdom of Cassie Bernall,” a tribute to her daughter’s courageous Christian faith. Then, just as the book was being published, a student who was hiding near Bernall told journalist Dave Cullen that the exchange never happened.

Although Candida Moss’ new book, “The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom,” is about the three centuries following the death of Jesus, she makes a point of citing this modern-day parallel. What Bernall truly said and did in the moments before her death absolutely matters, Moss asserts, if we are going to hold her up as a “martyr.” Yet misconceptions and misrepresentations can creep in so soon. The public can get the story wrong even in this highly mediated and thoroughly reported age — and do so despite the presence among us of living eyewitnesses. So what, then, to make of the third-hand, heavily revised, agenda-laden and anachronistic accounts of Christianity’s original martyrs?

Moss, professor of New Testament and early Christianity at the University of Notre Dame, challenges some of the most hallowed legends of the religion when she questions what she calls “the Sunday school narrative of a church of martyrs, of Christians huddled in catacombs out of fear, meeting in secret to avoid arrest and mercilessly thrown to lions merely for their religious beliefs.” None of that, she maintains, is true. In the 300 years between the death of Jesus and the conversion of the Emperor Constantine, there were maybe 10 or 12 scattered years during which Christians were singled out for supression by Rome’s imperial authorities, and even then the enforcement of such initiatives was haphazard — lackadaisical in many regions, although harsh in others. “Christians were never,” Moss writes, “the victims of sustained, targeted persecution.”

Much of the middle section of “The Myth of Persecution” is taken up with a close reading of the six “so-called authentic accounts” of the church’s first martyrs. They include Polycarp, a bishop in Smyrna during the second century who was burned at the stake, and Saint Perpetua, a well-born young mother executed in the arena at Carthage with her slave, Felicity, at the beginning of the third century. Moss carefully points out the inconsistencies between these tales and what we know about Roman society, the digs at heresies that didn’t even exist when the martyrs were killed and the references to martyrdom traditions that had yet to be established. There’s surely some kernel of truth to these stories, she explains, as well as to the first substantive history of the church written in 311 by a Palestinian named Eusebius. It’s just that it’s impossible to sort the truth from the colorful inventions, the ax-grinding and the attempts to reinforce the orthodoxies of a later age.

Moss also examines surviving Roman records. She notes that during the only concerted anti-Christian Roman campaign, under the emperor Diocletian between 303 and 306, Christians were expelled from public offices. Their churches, such as the one in Nicomedia, across the street from the imperial palace, were destroyed. Yet, as Moss points out, if the Christians were holding high offices in the first place and had built their church “in the emperor’s own front yard,” they could hardly have been in hiding away in catacombs before Diocletian issued his edicts against them.

This is not to deny that some Christians were executed in horrible ways under conditions we’d consider grotesquely unjust. But it’s important, Moss explains, to distinguish between “persecution” and “prosecution.” The Romans had no desire to support a prison population, so capital punishment was common for many seemingly minor offenses; you could be sentenced to be beaten to death for writing a slanderous song. Moss distinguishes between those cases in which Christians were prosecuted simply for being Christians and those in which they were condemned for engaging in what the Romans considered subversive or treasonous activity. Given the “everyday ideals and social structures” the Romans regarded as essential to the empire, such transgressions might include publicly denying the divine status of the emperor, rejecting military service or refusing to accept the authority of a court. In one of her most fascinating chapters, Moss tries to explain how baffling and annoying the Romans (for whom “pacifism didn’t exist as a concept”) found the Christians — when the Romans thought about them at all...

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