David Warsh: Getting personal about the Israeli-Hamas warTheY

Hamas logo

The Israeli flag

SOMERVILLE, Mass.

Is it possible to criticize Israeli policy in Gaza and the West Bank without being anti-Semitic? The question seems worth asking, even if it almost certainly means being called anti-Semitic by some.  Surely it is possible to deplore Hamas without being called anti-Palestinian.

I don’t know what to do with this except to be personal about it.

I grew up in a suburb of Chicago in which racism was pervasive, though mostly polite, because no people of color lived there. Unspoken replacement theology held sway – that is, the premise that Jews, followers of the Old Testament – the Hebrew Bible – eventually would be converted to the principles of the New Testament, the Christian Bible.  

Folkways of the village in the Fifties exhibited some pretty strange ideas about gender, too.  The use of atomic bombs and carpet bombing against civilian populations during World War II raised few objections. And as for the indigenous populations we had displaced? The hockey team was named for them.

A large part of my education since has involved escaping those prejudices, by degrees, via participation in “movements” of various sorts: college, civil rights, anti-war, pro-women, and now, opposition to Israel’s “Second War of Independence;” that is, its special military operation in Gaza. 

Revolted as I was by the Hamas raid, my first reaction to the news of the massacre of some 1,200 innocents was to ask myself what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should have done?  I had grown up to become a member of a Congregational church; I could use my confirmation instead of a birth certificate to obtain a passport, or so I was told.  For a time, I had been a Zionist:  I knew a good deal about the Holocaust; I had thrilled to the film Exodus in high school.  

Netanyahu should have turned the other cheek, I thought, called out Hamas to worldwide disgust and scorn, and resigned.  It took only a day to realize that recommending the Sermon on the Mount to the Israeli Defense Force was no solution. That set in motion this skein of thought.   

I had never seen, until I came across the other day, , in an article in The Atlantic,  President Dwight Eisenhower’s advice in a letter to one of his brothers, in 1954, in the early stages of the Cold War:

You speak of the “Judaic-Christian heritage.” I would suggest that you use a term on the order of “religious heritage” – this is for the reason that we should find some way of including the vast numbers of people who hold to the Islamic and Buddhist religions when we compare the religious world against the Communist world. I think you could still point out the debt we all owe to the ancients of Judea and Greece for the introduction of new ideas.

Advice as sage today as it was then. Even much-loathed former Commies might be included in the heritage of humanity today. I’ll leave it to historians, Biblical scholars, ethnologists, anthropologists, and sociologists to pick apart the differences. But theologian Paul Tillich’s phrase “Judaic-Christian heritage,” which offered such comfort during the years after World War II, is no longer part of my vocabulary.

Having said this much, I must come to the point.  I am aghast at the Israeli government’s invasion and occupation of Gaza; appalled by its plan to occupy the territory after the slaughter stops; embarrassed by the United States’ veto of the 13-1 United Nations Security Council resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire.

I object to the congressional and donor bullying of university presidents. The American newspapers I follow seem to have been somewhat intimidated as well. (Here is a long view of the situation in The Guardian that makes sense to me.) The stain on the reputations of the leaders and policymakers involved, including those in the United States and Iran, can never be erased.

I have had this privilege of writing this column, called Economic Principals, for 40 years.  I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t say this much about current events in the Middle East. It is, however, as much as I have to say. I’m against the war in Ukraine, too, but after twenty years of following its genesis, it is a problem I know something about. 

The relevance to these matters of economics should be clear, at least intuitively. I pledge to work harder to spell it out.

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Swedish Television does an excellent job on its short profiles of each year’s well Nobel laureates.  The link offered here last week to their visit with Harvard economist Claudia Goldin didn’t work. Here is one that does. At fourteen minutes, it is well worth watching.

David Warsh, a veteran columnist and an economic historian, is proprietor of Somerville-based economicprincipals.com, where this column originated.

Chris Powell: Military-industrial complex is fine with Conn. delegation

This building in the affluent Hartford suburb of Farmington, Conn., was United Technologies’ headquarters in 2015-2020.

— Photo by Daniel Pennfield

MANCHESTER, Conn

In his farewell address 60 years ago President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against what he called "unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex." Since he was a military hero, perhaps only Eisenhower could give such a warning during the Cold War without risking denunciation as a Communist.

But Eisenhower's warning has never been heeded, and President Biden, with his defense secretary, is essentially proclaiming the victory of the military-industrial complex. The new secretary is retired Army Gen. Lloyd Austin, who upon leaving the Army a few years ago joined the board of directors of military contractor and Waltham, Mass.-based Raytheon Technologies Corp., which recently acquired Connecticut-based United Technologies Corp. Austin will have to sell Raytheon stock he received for serving on the board. It may net him as much as $1.7 million.

Acknowledging what will be his continuing potential for conflict of interest, Austin pledges to avoid decisions involving Raytheon for a year. But this can't worry Raytheon much about its investment in the general, since the corporation plans to be doing government business a lot longer than that.

With Austin at Defense and former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen becoming Treasury secretary after receiving at least $7 million in speaking fees from big banks and investment houses in the last three years, the federal government's two most lucrative agencies will have been securely captured by their primary beneficiaries.

With the exception of Sen. Richard Blumenthal, the members of Connecticut's congressional delegation -- all supposed liberals -- are fine with this exploitation. After all, the state is full of investment bankers and military contractors and what's good for them may be considered good for the state. As for the country, that's something else.

Even Blumenthal's concern about Austin probably became a mere quibble. Federal law prohibits military officers from becoming defense secretary until they have been out of uniform for seven years, so Austin needed a waiver from Congress. Such waivers have been granted twice before. Blumenthal said that to uphold the principle of civilian control of the military, he opposed another waiver. But few other members of Congress objected to it, and Blumenthal and those others still had it both ways, voting against the waiver and then voting to appoint Austin once the waiver is granted.

Besides, with the Democrats in full control of the federal government, conflicts of interest and civilian control will barely register against the party's new highest objective in Cabinet appointments -- racial, ethnic and gender diversity. Austin is Black and so meets the decisive qualification.

xxx

PAY AS YOU THROW?: The administration of Connecticut Gov. Ned Lamont seems to have determined that state government no longer can make any money by burning trash to generate electricity at the state Materials Innovation and Recycling Authority's facility in the South Meadows section of Hartford. Such generation apparently is now much more expensive than electricity generated from natural gas, and the facility's equipment already needs renovation estimated to cost more than $300 million.

So the authority plans to close the facility by July 2022, turning it into a trash-transfer depot and shipping to out-of-state dumps the trash now being burned. This is not only retrograde environmental policy; it likely will raise costs for the authority's 70 client towns. As a result the authority and the towns are discussing how to reduce their "waste streams" -- possibly by charging residents a fee for every bag of trash collected, a system called "pay as you throw."

There would be some sense to this, since it would cause people to take more responsibility for their trash, the packaging of what they buy, and recycling. But this also would increase the risk of illegal dumping, even as Connecticut's roadsides and city streets are already strewn with trash.

It might be best for state or federal sales taxes or fees to recover in advance the disposal costs of everything sure to wear out, as the state already does with beverage containers and mattresses and used to do with tires.

Government needs to teach people more about the trash issue. But all that roadside litter suggests that many people are unteachable slobs.

Chris Powell is a columnist for the Journal Inquirer, in Manchester, Conn.

Chris Powell: Eisenhower's secret campaign to defeat Joe McCarthy

Ike and McCarthy, by David A. Nichols (Simon and Schuster. $27.95. 379 pages).

With demagoguery now running rampant  across America,  in large part because of a president indifferent to the truth and the dignity of his office, David A. Nichols's book is a fascinating voyage to a similarly threatening time that at least had a happy ending.

Nichols, a scholar of the administration of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, aims to correct the misimpression that Ike was timid in the face of the country's second great Red Scare (the first one came right after World War I). Rather, Nichols writes, in his first two years in office Ike became devoted to breaking the scare's primary perpetrator, Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy, with a secret political campaign run from the White House by the president's aides.

The impression of Eisenhower's timidity arose in part from his steady refusal to confront McCarthy or even mention his name as the senator kept charging, usually without evidence, that the federal government was riddled with Communists who were security risks if not outright spies for the Soviet Union. Of course there were Communists and spies, but McCarthy seldom got near one of any importance. Yet Eisenhower restrained himself even when McCarthy updated his smear of the Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman administrations, Democratic administrations -- from "20 years of treason" to "21 years of treason" -- encompassing the first year of the Eisenhower administration, the administration of a fellow Republican.

Eisenhower, Nichols writes, loathed McCarthy from the start but didn't want to talk back to him, believing -- or maybe rationalizing -- that this would elevate the senator and give him even more attention. Eventually Eisenhower and his aides decided that the country needed to see more of McCarthy, not less, so that the senator's bullying, intemperance and distortions would become his most prominent characteristics in the public mind.

The result was the famous Army-McCarthy Hearings in 1954 before a Senate committee, largely staged by the president and his supporters, at which the central issue became not Communist infiltration at all but McCarthy aide Roy Cohn's confidential and unseemly hectoring of the Army to get favors for another McCarthy aide, G. David Schine, who had just been drafted into the Army. Cohn and Schine were suspected of having a homosexual relationship. {Roy Cohn was later a close mentor of Donald Trump.}

Here Nichols makes plain that the supposed good guys were not above McCarthyite tactics themselves. For the Army's lead lawyer, Joseph Welch, who has gone down in history for puncturing the senator with the famous rebuke at a televised hearing -- "Have you no sense of decency, Sir?" -- had just used televised innuendo to suggest Cohn's homosexuality and to exploit prejudice against homosexuals.

Further, Nichols shows, Eisenhower himself, as president, initially flirted with and patronized the fascism of anti-communist politics, at one point proposing to outlaw membership in the Communist Party. The president also dissembled and induced his associates to dissemble about the creation of the Army's report on Cohn's interventions for Schine, even getting Secretary of the Army Robert T.B. Stevens to commit perjury about it.

Journalists of the time don't come out so well either, as Nichols shows many of them sensationalizing McCarthy's reckless allegations and others, including CBS's Edward R. Murrow, colluding with the White House press office against the senator.

Eisenhower, in light of some of those who followed him, turned out to be a pretty good president, siding soon enough with free thought and speech and due process of law. But it is hard not to wonder if the president would have come around so soon if McCarthy had not targeted the Army, from which Ike had retired as the general who had led the Western armies against Hitler.

And while McCarthy quickly fell from national influence, sunk into alcoholism, and died prematurely, his censure by the Senate remains misunderstood. The two counts of the censure had nothing to do with McCarthy's abuse of supposed Communists and their sympathizers and his contempt of due process but rather his affronting the dignity of the Senate itself.

Nichols has told and extensively documented a compelling story. Anyone interested in American history and politics may have a hard time putting this book down.


Chris Powell is managing editor of the {Manchester, Conn.} Journal Inquirer and a frequent contributor to New England Diary.