Recently, I kicked up a hornets’ nest by suggesting that Zionism should not be “the centerpiece of American conservatism.” Yisrael Medad, an American Jew who settled in Israel in 1970 and who writes for the Jerusalem Post while working for the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Israel, took deep offense at my views. But my views are apparently not a subject Medad would have known about because, until he encountered my shocking thesis in the June Chronicles that “Zionism Should Not Be a Conservative Sine Qua Non,” it seems that this near contemporary of mine had “not heard of Paul Gottfried” or my crank opinions.

Indeed, my critic was forced to research my background to learn my identity. And through his diligence he discovered that I had something to do with the “alternative right,” that I somehow sympathized with Austrian clerical fascism, and that I was a “fellow traveler of National Conservatism.” None of these associations is clearly explained in his commentary, but since Medad begins with a solemn “confession” that he doesn’t know me from Adam, he had to dig deep for information about an obscure octogenarian.

Certain details about my life are unconvincing for Medad, so he treats them as mere allegation. Although he explains my “antagonism toward high-placed Zionists” by quoting directly statements of mine about what happened to me at Catholic University in 1987, Medad doesn’t take my account seriously. A detailed account of this incident is offered in my largely autobiographical work  Encounters, which was published in 2009. Medad intimates that I possibly fabricated this story about how a slew of neoconservative dignitaries called a dean to warn about my inadequate Zionism, which they believed rendered me unfit for a graduate professorship and prevented me from teaching ancient political theory in the proper way. At least in Medad’s tone of denial, he doesn’t go quite as far as David Frum who, in his infamous attack on the “unpatriotic right,” questioned my sanity for bringing up a misfortune he alleges I invented. Never mind the witnesses to what took place!  

Medad accurately quotes my belief that the incident at Catholic University “points to a problem that has not gone away, and which may be inherent in the American conservative movement. It is overly dependent on Zionist donors, like the Murdoch family and the widow of Sheldon Adelson.” To Medad, this just isn’t a problem at all.

But Medad also berates me for holding positions, which if he read my other recent writings, he would know I do not hold. I have never denied that Israel has a right to survive and may define itself, if its citizens chose to do so, as a Jewish state. I have also never questioned that even after the Roman dispersal of the ancient Jews, a Jewish population continued to exist in present Israeli territory. I’ve also made the point that the Arab states and the Palestinians imprudently refused the UN partition offered to both sides in 1947. Finally, I recall recently supporting both the Israeli and American bombing of Iran, and I did so much to the consternation of other traditional conservatives.  

Medad also seems to believe that because I don’t think the American conservative establishment should be the mouthpiece of the Israeli right and punish those who don’t accept that party line, I therefore don’t accept Israel’s right to exist. I’m not sure that one position follows from the other.

Contrary to what Medad states, the reason I give for why conservatives in the U.S. should be free to criticize Israel (without the fear of neocon reprisals) has nothing to do with Palestinians being expelled. I’m just against neocon bullying, having suffered its effects for many decades. I’m also tired of reading those nutcase positions taken by “conservative” recipients of neocon money, like the editors of American Spectator and Joel Berry of the not very funny Babylon Bee, who have been busy defending the Israeli bombing of the Holy Family Church in Gaza. The American Spectator has even gone after that passionate Christian Zionist Mike Huckabee, for raising moral objections to the bombing.

I also don’t deny that a sense of Palestinian nationhood came much later than Jewish nationalism, which has much older roots, but I’m not sure how this fact justifies the mass expulsion of Arab Palestinians (call them what you want!) from their homes in 1948. I’m also not sure how my mentioning the obvious here brings up “a strawman.” The unfortunate events mentioned did take place. Or is Medad denying that they did?

To prove his contention, that there “were Jews in Roman Palestine, and the land’s ‘Christianization’ did not alter its Jewish demography,” Medad cites the Jerusalem redaction of the Talmud that was completed in the fourth century. But the later Babylonian redaction has been more widely studied and applied, and by the sixth and seventh century three-quarters of the Jewish population was found in Mesopotamia, not in Israel. By then, Jews were scattered throughout the former Roman and Persian imperial world, and only a minority were able or disposed to live in their homeland. This is not to deny a continued Jewish presence in “Roman Palestine.” It is rather to indicate that area had ceased to be the focal point of Jewish communal existence after the largely successful Roman dispersion of the Jewish inhabitants.  

Medad also seems bothered by my “historical ridiculousness” in stating that European Jews did not have a moral right to dispossess Palestinian residents of what later became Israel. For me, continuing residence establishes a settler’s right, even if the property on which the Palestinian Arabs lived, as Medad reminds us, was often owned by foreign Arabs. But noting these facts, as I have stated many times, does not justify dispossessing those Jews who are now living in Israel and have built up the country impressively. It is merely to recognize that the Palestinians have something of a claim to the same territory; and however stupidly and violently they have acted politically, they do have some justice on their side. The right-wing Revisionist Zionist tradition that Medad represents originally planned to expel all Arabs from territorial Israel. Although their Likud descendants have moved away from that extreme position, we still hear echoes of it from American neocons, for example, when Ben Shapiro pushed that plan back in 2003.

And for the record, no, I don’t really think that Yisrael Medad just chanced upon the latest commentary of some elderly, unknown scribbler. His attacks sound too much like those of my other neocon detractors over the last 30 years to be an entirely random occurrence. My critic is also, quite significantly, associated with the Jewish News Syndicate, a Zionist Organization, the main donor of which is the undeniably neocon Adelson Foundation. I would venture to guess, therefore, that his hit piece was neither spontaneous nor something that went unrewarded.