From Resistance to Accommodation

Abstract

The US invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and the disastrous results of the ensuing occupation placed American Jewry in a difficult and undeserving position. As the US occupation seemed to descend into increasingly more chaos, and as the original justifications for the war emerged as untenable, an unfortunate caricature emerged of American Jews’ political perspectives, which are presumably as diverse as those of any ethnoreligious group might be.¹ Such caricaturing enabled reactionaries to resurrect, and to deploy with great effectiveness, the nasty “dual loyalty” charge against prominent American Jewish neoconservatives who served in the Bush administration, which unfairly suggested that— within the context of formulating Middle East policy as US officials— these figures will always place Israel’s interests ahead of those of the United States.² While “Richard Perle,” “Paul Wolfowitz,” “Douglas Feith,” “Scooter Libby,” “Eliot Abrams,” “Dov Zakheim,” and “Eliot Cohen” are the names offered up as examples of high-standing American Jewish neo-conservatives in the Bush administration who were eager to see the United States invade Iraq, they very well may have believed that US and Israeli interests coincided with respect to toppling Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.