LETTERS
Editor: In the Winter 1975 issue of Dissent, there is a "Public Notice" consisting of a paragraph from a review of my book Peace in the Middle East? by Theodore Draper, in which he alleges that...
...This incredible judgment distorts the rest of his analysis...
...And so Dissent is still on its feet...
...They have tried to maintain contact with the labor movement while others, more radical—at least in words—based all of their hopes for a revolution on the student youth...
...According to Chomsky's book, an editorial in Dissent back in 1964, the year before the massive US intervention, showed that its editors were "oblivious to the likely consequences of a United States-Saigon victory, though the story of Diem's murderous assault on the opposition (with American backing) in the post-1954 period was already well known...
...at the same time, over half the Arab residents of the Jewish-occupied area left voluntarily, thus aligning themselves with the Arab invaders...
...Stalin had just died, the Korean War had ended in a draw...
...Twenty years later, Dissent is still alive...
...For instance, Israel could have fostered an autonomous Palestinian polity on the West Bank, which might eventually set a precedent as a democratic Arab entity favoring peaceful relations with Israel...
...Surely this assessment must qualify as "realism...
...How can one expect success by systematically upsetting—and each time for good reasons—those who are closest to you...
...Instead, Lamm calls it "autism" and "ethnocentrism...
...If, in the Europe of 1900, "there was no hope of living among those nations with whom the Jews then lived," this was the case a fortiori of Israel in 1949, with one qualification only: 207 Israel in 1949 could defend herself militarily...
...Those who in the '30s had looked hopefully in the direction of the Soviet Union began to be aware of the tragic deviations in the fatherland of communism...
...Had the editors checked the original (pp...
...While agreeing that many nuances of opinion were possible in opposing the Vietnam War and without wishing to suggest that everything that appeared in Dissent on that, or any other subject, was always "correct," we do feel that Draper's version of the matter is accurate...
...On December 14, 1974, Draper printed a rebuttal to Chomsky that contains the following paragraph: From Dissent to Diem...
...An uncomfortable epoch, throughout which Dissent remained the center for a restless, nondogmatic reflection that at each occasion runs the risk of displeasing everybody...
...Lamm's argument sounds very much like this old theory...
...The Jews of Europe had faults, and Israel has faults...
...Now compare this with the situation of Israel among the Arab states after 1948...
...he merely accused it of calling for policies that could only lead to such an outcome...
...the Arab states were then starting to brutalize and expel their Jewish minorities...
...Better printed, better presented, still leading the good fight...
...to dissent from the support of the status quo now so noticeable on the part of many former radicals and socialists...
...It would not have tempted Egypt, since Israel had nothing tangible to offer in return for peace, and goodwill toward Israel was not one of Nasser's virtues...
...And we wish that Chomsky weren't so quick to charge "fabrication" against a man whose intellectual scrupulousness—agreeing with his opinions or not—we know to be of the highest order...
...The Arabs had expressed strong sympathy with the Nazis during World War II, to the point of endorsing the myth of the Zionist world conspiracy...
...There is an explanation in my response (New Republic, November 23, 1974...
...It is worth noting that, in a reply (December 14), Draper stands by his original fabrication, thus revealing that it is not merely a case of misreading or error of reasoning, as might have been charitably assumed...
...This is a shabby dodge for trying to make Dissent's conciliatory views into their opposite...
...When Zionists spoke of "normalization," they meant among other things that Jews should someday be entitled to their quota of all-too-human faults, and not have to establish their moral perfection as a prerequisite for other people's entertaining their right to exist...
...And let us not forget that in 1954 the thought of Senator Joseph McCarthy was still very much alive and that one of his faithful supporters, Richard Nixon, was vice-president...
...THE EDITORS reply: We printed as a "Public Notice" in our last issue a quotation from Theodore Draper's review of Noam Chomsky's book, in the course of which Draper corrected what he took to be an inaccurate rendering of a statement on Vietnam that appeared in Dissent in 1963...
...It was the epoch in which a. soothing general, Dwight Eisenhower, first Republican president since Hoover, drew the United States into an era of slothful well-being...
...The actual criticism that appears, which is quite different from the one that Draper invented, is based on a reading of the editorial which is quite accurate...
...Its name is also its initial program: Dissent...
...The balance is impressive...
...This was more than enough to predict, logically, a short life span...
...Despite frequent pogrom-like Arab attacks on Jews from 1929 onward, and the intransigent refusal of the Arab leaders to cooperate in any political settlement that would give the Jews a shred of sovereignty, the Zionists had used every means within their disposal to promote peace and compromise with the Arabs...
...Editor: I agree with Tzvi Lamm that our main preoccupation and top priority should be "building bridges" with the Arabs, and that, since 1967, Israel should have done much more than it did in this respect...
...If drastic land reform, the "coexistence of South and North Vietnam," and US developmental aid for both countries deserve to be linked with a "war of attrition," "continued intervention" and "Diem's murderous assault," words have lost their meaning...
...His professed hope that Israel could have significantly improved the chances for peace by doing one or another thing differently between 1949 and 1967 seems naive...
...208 LETTERS...
...Muste...
...179, 195), they would have discovered at once that Draper simply fabricated the position that he attributed to me, lifting two phrases from a sentence that is entirely different in content...
...Its first issue, in that reserved tone the review has always adopted, found the editors announcing their credo: The purpose of this new magazine is suggested by its name: todissent from the bleak atmosphere of conformism that pervades the political and intellectual fife of the United States...
...The first years were rich, from the intellectual point of view...
...and, heading that roster, two old fighters with prestige intact: Norman Thomas and A.J...
...I will not give details here...
...By a perfectionist standard, Israel should have offered rapprochement with Egypt in 1956—it would have done no harm, and would have placed Israel "beyond suspicion...
...Its situation is still precarious...
...Then, in 1948, the five neighboring Arab states attacked the newly born Jewish state with the hope of destroying it completely...
...by Theodore Draper, in which he alleges that my criticism of a Dissent editorial "utterly distorted [its] plain sense...
...All faults ought to be corrected...
...To justify the hallucinatory leap from Dissent's peaceful proposals to Diem's "murderous assault," Chomsky protests that he did not accuse Dissent of calling for a "war of attrition...
...This realization occurred at a time when Jews enjoyed full citizenship in all Western countries, when the governments of those countries treated them officially as they did all other citizens, when anti-Semitism consisted of a few pogroms in Russia whose victims numbered in dozens, the judicial persecution of one French army officer, and a widespread but lowly esteemed popular prejudice comparable in some ways to anti-black prejudice in modern America...
...Criticisms that one has concocted are naturally much easier to deal with than those that are actually presented...
...used to ridicule the theory (propounded by assimilationist Jews) that if Jews would only behave nicely and remove all grounds for offense, anti-Semitism would vanish for want of a pretext...
...Supporters of democratic socialism, the editors of Dissent are too lucid to entertain illusions...
...The alleged obliviousness of Dissent's editors is a purely Chomskian invention...
...We have not yet reached that stage of history...
...But when the West Bank Arabs recently expressed themselves in favor of Arafat and the destruction of Israel, I wondered whether any noble gestures on Israel's part might not be just so much moralistic play-acting...
...Dissent's editorial had actually advocated US support for drastic land reform in South Vietnam, the "coexistence of South and North Vietnam," and even US "developmental aid for both countries" (italics in original...
...To celebrate its 20th anniversary, Dissent put together in a special issue some of the most important articles it has published...
...But the 1967 war seemed to change the situation by giving Israel "hostages" with which to bargain for peace, and greater freedom of maneuver on many levels...
...to dissent from the terrible assumption that a new war is necessary or inevitable, and that the only way to defeat Stalinism is through atomic world suicide...
...I hope that I am correct in assuming that the editors of Dissent would not wish to be a party to this deception...
...But there is no regime that, sooner or later, is not tempted to abuse this freedom...
...Not to march in step, but to raise one's voice when everyone else is silent, to question the padded comfort of the American intelligentsia while, at the same time, proclaiming oneself to be socialist...
...became a national movement when its most sensitive people realized, while there was still time, that utter collapse was approaching, that there was no hope of living among those nations with whom the Jews then lived...
...Chomsky, replying in the New Republic (11/23/74), has charged Draper with a "fabrication" designed to defend the 1963 Dissent piece...
...Dissent — New York, 1954: a new review makes its appearance...
...And for years I always get the same answer: "It's rough...
...For many years I always put the same question to Stanley Plastrik, one of the magazine's editors, each time we meet again: "How is Dissent doing...
...But Dissent is anything but a refuge for the "chic radicalism" that is the privilege of material wealth and moral comfort...
...In 20 years Dissent witnessed the end of McCarthyism, the Vietnamese war, the Kennedy period and its brutal ending, the mass movement for civil rights, the backwaters of the counter culture, and Watergate...
...But Dissent is not wedded to success...
...For, at the very heart of Dissent's undertaking is a never-denied passion for freedom...
...But such faults have never been the root cause of Jewish catastrophe...
...I will merely observe here that the position attributed to me in the "Public Notice" is not expressed, implied, or even vaguely hinted at in anything I wrote...
...the editorial explicitly evoked Diem's regime as a reason for rejecting policies aimed at a United States-Saigon military victory...
...Worse yet, what I actually wrote directly contradicts Draper's fabrication, as the reader may easily verify...
...But the important thing is that for a long time Dissent has kept that questioning voice the Left, and not only that of the United States, will always need...
...A more detailed analysis of this and other equally serious misrepresentations and errors of fact and logic appears in a letter rejected as too long for publication, which I will gladly send to anyone interested...
...A Word from France The following comment, appearing in the November 1974 issue of the leading French review Esprit, was written by JACQUES BEKAERT...
...not to forget the Europeans: Ignazio Silone, George Lichtheim, Herbert Marcuse, Leszek Kolakowski...
...On the campus, a student generation prepared itself to taste the benefits of a society more and more consumerist in nature...
...In an essay published long ago, Irving Howe and Lewis Coser saw socialism not only as a search for happiness but "as the extension of freedom...
...I cannot accept his broader analysis...
...C. Wright Mills, Norman Mailer (Dissent published "The White Negro," his famous and controversial essay), the young Michael Harrington, Richard Wright shortly before his death, Paul Goodman, who had dreamed of the counter culture long before it became modish, Irving Howe...
...Lamm speaks of Zionism in its first period, the period of "realism": "Zionism...
Vol. 22 • April 1975 • No. 2
