The Canard of “Dual Loyalty”
March 9, 2019
Joseph Sobran
FROM an essay by the late great, persecuted columnist Joseph Sobran (1946-2010):
It was once considered “anti-Semitic” to impute “dual loyalty” to Jews — that is, to assert that most American Jews divide their loyalty between the United States and Israel. This is now passé. Today most politicians assume, as a matter of course, that Israel commands the primary loyalty of Jewish voters. Are they accused of “anti-Semitism” for doing so? Does this assumption cost them Jewish votes? Not at all! Dual loyalty nothing! Dual loyalty would be an improvement!
Once again, it’s a practical necessity to know what it would be professional suicide to say. No politician in his right mind would accuse Jews of giving their primary loyalty to Israel; but most politicians act as if this were the case. And they succeed.
You can read Jewish publications like Commentary for years, and you’ll read interminable discussions about what’s good for Israel, but you’ll never encounter the slightest suggestion that what’s good for Israel might not be good for America. The possibility simply never comes up. The only discernible duty of Jews, it seems, is to look out for Israel. They never have to choose between Israel and the United States. So much for the “canard” of dual loyalty.
The very word anti-Semite is reminiscent of the term anti-Soviet. It serves a similar function of facilitating imputations of ill-defined guilt.
The strength of Western law has always been its insistence on definition. When we want to minimize an offense, say murder or burglary, we define it as clearly as possible. We want judge and jury to know exactly what the charge means, not only to convict the guilty but, also, just as important, to protect the innocent.
Clear definitions put a burden of proof on the accuser, and properly so. If you falsely accuse a man of murder or burglary, not only is he apt to be acquitted — you may pay a heavy penalty yourself. As a result, few of us are afraid of being charged with murders and burglaries we didn’t commit.
By contrast, the Soviet legal system left prosecutors with a wide discretion in identifying “anti-Soviet” activities. Almost anything irritating to the Soviet state could qualify. An impossible burden of proof lay on the accused; guilt was presumed; acquittals were virtually nonexistent. To be indicted was already to be convicted. Since the charge was undefined, it was unfalsifiable; there was no such thing as a false accusation. As a result, the Russian population lived in fear.
The word anti-Semitic functions like the word anti-Soviet. Being undefined, it’s unfalsifiable. Loose charges of “anti-Semitism” are common, but nobody suffers any penalty for making them, since what is unfalsifiable can never be shown to be false. I once read an article in a Jewish magazine that called the first Star Wars movie “anti- Semitic.” I was amazed, but I couldn’t prove the contrary. Who could? And of course people in public life — and often in private life — fear incurring the label, however guiltless they may be.
If you want to distinguish between the innocent and the guilty, you define crimes precisely. If, however, you merely want to maximize the number of convictions, increase the power of the accusers, and create an atmosphere of dread, you define crimes as loosely as possible. We now have an incentive system that might have been designed to promote loose charges of “anti-Semitism.”
Silly as all this is from a rational point of view, the label of anti-Semitism is deeply feared. It does signify one thing: Jewish hatred. When I became a conservative as a college freshman, in 1965, nearly all Jews were liberals and Jewish intellectuals associated conservatism with “anti-Semitism.” Bill Buckley was often depicted as a fascist or crypto-Nazi; given the smears he endured, it’s understandable that he should go to great lengths to appear pro-Jewish, even if he somewhat overdid it by abetting smears of his fellow conservatives.
The situation changed somewhat when many Jewish intellectuals, upset by liberal criticism of Israel, became what were called “neoconservatives.” This term implied no deep adherence to conservative principles, but only the adoption of a few ad hoc principles useful to Zionism, with no basic departure from New Deal liberalism insofar as it was useful to Zionism. “Neoconservatism” was really a sort of “kosher” conservatism.
A few incidents from my years at National Review may illustrate the point.
In the mid 1980s, the neoconservative Earth Mother Midge Decter, wife of Norman Podhoretz, accused Russell Kirk of “anti-Semitism.” Kirk’s offense? He had made a mild quip that some neoconservatives appeared to believe that the capital of Western civilization was Tel Aviv. Never mind that he had a point. Kirk had been a founding father of modern conservatism and a National Review columnist for many years, yet the magazine not only failed to rally to his defense against this smear — it didn’t even report the incident! Decter’s attack was the biggest news of the season in the conservative movement, but Buckley was afraid to mention it. So was most of the conservative press.
At about the same time, Israeli troops shot up a Catholic Church on the West Bank during Mass — a horrible sacrilege that sent worshipers fleeing for their lives and provoked an angry protest from the Vatican. (The congregation had planned a march after Mass to protest the beating of a Palestinian priest by Israeli soldiers.) I mentioned the incident to Buckley, a fellow Catholic, at an editorial meeting and gave him a news clipping describing the event in detail; as I expected, the magazine ignored this too. Even the violent persecution of Catholics by Jews was unmentionable — in a “conservative” magazine owned and run by a Catholic.
When the Pollard spy case broke, the magazine called for the death penalty for Pollard — but excused Israel for sponsoring him, on grounds that it’s normal for friendly nations to spy on each other!
And so it went. I could have understood a favorable attitude toward Israel, having been pro-Israel for many years myself; but surely even this alliance must have occasional drawbacks. From time to time it’s necessary to criticize even friends. If we criticized our own government every week, why not Israel once in a while? But the magazine consistently refused to find the slightest fault with Israel, and since I left in 1993 it has gotten much worse. Today it has become assertively slavish, to a comical degree.
By 1993 I’d had enough. I wrote a column correcting some of the things Bill had written about me, in which I mentioned his evident fear; I wrote that he was “jumpy about Jews.” This was a pretty mild description of his terror, but the column got me fired, just as I expected. Since then it has become a neoconservative legend that I was fired for “anti-Semitism,” but the truth is that it was far more personal than that. Bill knew me too well to make such a charge. I was fired for making him look bad. He considered making others look bad his prerogative.
Since then I’ve noticed how eager and desperate mainstream conservatives are to avoid Jewish wrath. Again, they don’t just speak favorably of Israel; they refuse to acknowledge any cost to American interests in the U.S.-Israel alliance. They treat the two countries’ interests as identical; when they scold either government, it’s always — always — the U.S. Government for failing to support our “reliable ally.” They are in headlong flight from reality. They have none of the realism of James Burnham, whose writings and style of thought would be wholly unwelcome in today’s conservative movement.
They are frightened. You can sense this in their bluster, in the vicarious jingoism with which they address Israel. Their fear produces a peculiar intellectual thinness that pervades all their thinking on foreign policy. Gone is the critical intelligence that used to set the tone for such earlier conservative writers as Burnham, Kendall, Kirk, Whittaker Chambers, Frank Meyer, Thomas Molnar, and the other distinguished names that used to grace the masthead of National Review. Individualists have been replaced by apparatchiks. Zionism has infiltrated conservatism in much the same way Communism once infiltrated liberalism.
See more of Sobran’s essays here.
