Kevin MacDonald
October 14, 2007
Elaine McArdle
was lobbied by the Israel Lobby. Of course, this is not exactly unusual, nor
is it illegal. Indeed, it is standard practice among lobbyists of all kinds. As
she notes, AIPAC provided first-class, all-expenses-paid trips to Israel for 40
US congressmen just last summer. Journalists are eager to participate as well,
although it appears that this is viewed as less than ethical by at least some
mainstream news organizations.
Still, there are probably very
few congressmen of any longevity who haven’t participated, and, as she notes,
most journalists have only one question about whether to participate: “Where do
I sign up?” Free trips to Israel for US military personnel and politicians are
also a standard policy of the
Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. And
Birthright Israel annually organizes trips to Israel for 20,000 young Jews
in an effort to deepen their Jewish commitment.
What stands out about McArdle
is that she is very self-conscious about the psychological processes involved.
She is quite aware that persuasion often works at an unconscious level. Giving
someone a gift taps into a reciprocity norm that is doubtless a remnant of our
evolved psychology. People who don’t reciprocate did not make good allies or
friends, and this happened over a sufficiently long period to result in
specialized brain mechanisms designed to detect reciprocators and cheaters.
As McArdle notes, this is true the world over. For the non-sociopaths among us,
when we receive something from someone else, we feel a need to reciprocate or at
least have positive feelings toward that person.
Since I am engaged in trying to
understand Jewish influence in general, McArdle’s article gets one thinking
of what other psychological processes are involved in various sorts of Jewish
influence. Of course, none of these processes are unique to Jewish influence.
It’s just that Jews are a very good at the influence game.
The Israel Lobby and its influence on US foreign policy are Exhibit A for
this perspective. So it’s reasonable to suppose that one aspect of their success
is being better than most at tuning in to people’s psychological tendencies and
to use them to further their perceived interests.
At a basic level, going on a
trip in a group makes the person a member of an ingroup. Psychologists have
found that being a member of an ingroup results in positive attitudes toward
other members of the ingroup. Even though there is no explicit quid pro quo
going on, the norms of the ingroup are molded by the tour guides and even by the
itinerary itself.
In effect, the people on the
tour are being inculcated into a Jewish world view—one in which Jews are the
quintessential victims. McArdle’s group was shepherded to an Israeli family that
had been in the area hit by Hezbollah rockets last summer. There is a palpable
sense of fear “Children today, we were told, still wet their beds in fear. … I
wondered how long I … could tolerate the omnipresence of danger.”
They are also taken to Yad
Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust Memorial Museum. Similarly, the Birthright Israel
trips for Jewish youth start with Holocaust seminars in New York, then proceed
to Poland to visit Auschwitz, and then to Israel where participants visit
historical sites intended to instill strong Zionist feelings. Especially
important are border outposts “where the ongoing threat to Israel’s security is
palpable” (Woocher,
1986; p. 150). Among these Jewish visitors, the result is a sense of dread:
A participant in Birthright Israel says, “I never
felt unsafe [in Poland], but I couldn’t wait to get to Israel where I knew that
we would be wanted and accepted.”
Indeed, as I noted in A
People That Shall Dwell Alone (see
Chapter 7), “a permanent sense of imminent threat appears to be common among
Jews. … [F]or Jewish families a ‘sense of persecution (or its imminence) is part
of a cultural heritage and is usually assumed with pride. Suffering is even a
form of sharing with one’s fellow-Jews. It binds Jews with their heritage—with
the suffering of Jews throughout history.’”
There is also a sense of
psychological bonding with Israelis at a person-to-person level. McArdle refers
to her experience as “an unforgettable and emotionally charged week with warm,
likable people — generous hosts and tour guides whom I worried about after
returning to the safety of life in Massachusetts.”
She experiences empathy for
these Israelis as fellow ingroup members who are living in danger, and she
worries about their safety. But she never gets to experience empathy with the
Palestinians on the other side of the wall—the ones living in Bantustan-like
concentration camps in the apartheid West Bank.
McArdle also mentions that the
experience was “emotionally charged.” A great deal of
psychological research shows that experiences that have intense emotional
overtones are much more likely to be remembered and to have a long term
influence. As McArdle is well aware, people need not be consciously aware of
these memories to be influenced by them.
Another psychological aspect of
Jewish influence is that Jewish intellectual and political movements are
promulgated from highly prestigious sources. An important feature of our
evolved psychology is a greater proneness to adopt cultural messages
deriving from people with high social status. This was certainly true of all the
movements discussed in The Culture of Critique, and there is no doubt
that the Israel Lobby is
intimately entwined with elite media, elite universities, and well-funded
think tanks.
And finally, it’s not only
journalists like McArdle who have to worry about the possibility of unconscious
bias. We all do. Movements such as the Israel Lobby have typically presented
themselves not as furthering Jewish interests but as furthering the interests of
the society as a whole. Neocons such as
Richard Perle typically phrase their policy recommendations as aimed at
benefiting the US. He does this
despite evidence that he has a strong Jewish identity and despite the fact
that he has typical Jewish concerns, such as anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and
the welfare of Israel. Perle poses as an American patriot despite credible
charges of spying for Israel, writing reports for Israeli think tanks and op-eds
for the Jerusalem Post, and all the while having close personal
relationships with Israeli leaders.
This was also true of all the
movements I described in The Culture of Critique: The Jewish commitments
and motivations of the main players were never a subject of discussion, and the
movements themselves were presented as scientifically sound and morally superior
to the traditional culture of the West. As a result, non-Jews are invited to see
these Jewish activists as disinterested social scientists, or, in the case of
the neocons, as patriotic fellow Americans — as “just like themselves.” We are
invited to view these Jewish activists as part of our ingroup, with all that
that entails psychologically.
In my ideal world, Jonah
Goldberg’s op-eds and Paul Wolfowitz’s advice to presidents and defense
secretaries should be accompanied by a disclaimer: “You should be cautious in
following my advice or even believing what I say about Israel. Deception and
manipulation are very common tactics in ethnic conflict, so that my pose as an
American patriot should be taken with a grain of salt. And even if I am entirely
sincere in what I say, the fact is that I have a deep psychological and ethnic
commitment to Israel and Judaism. Psychologists have shown that this sort of
deep commitment is likely to bias my perceptions of any policy that could
possibly affect Israel even though I am not aware of it.”
As I noted in The Culture of
Critique, “many of the Jews involved in the movements reviewed here may
sincerely believe that these movements are really divorced from specifically
Jewish interests or are in the best interests of other groups as well as Jews.
… But, as [evolutionary theorist Robert] Trivers (1985)
notes, the best deceivers are those who are self-deceived."
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