On Sun, 7 Apr 2002, Doug Henwood wrote:
> >> But let's shift the question: Why does the Wall St. Journal Comics Crew
> > > push for so hard a line in the Mideast?
> >
> >The WSJ editorial page position on Israel has long been somewhere to the
> >right of the Hebron Settlers. It's an invariant that's independent of
> >current events.
>
> Ok, but why?
>
> It's one of the major sites for American conservatism to "think" out
> loud. It's morally conservative, but not Xian fundie. The corporate
> culture of Dow Jones was basically midwestern isolationist for decades.
> So why is it so hardline?
I think you're conflating two questions here:
1) Why is the establishment pro-Israel? I.e., why does being against Israel brand you as being an unserious or marginal thinker?
2) Why is the Wall Street Journal pro-Israel?
The first is a long and involved question that runs parallel to how we developed the relationship. It requires a fair amount of history and sociology of culture, and I don't think it's the kind of question we can really close. That is, I think one could write a good book on it that shed a lot of light and at the end there would still be a lot of room for debate.
But the second question, unless I'm missing something, seems to be a question of personnel -- the editor (or owner) and the people he hires. He's the one who decides not to hire Pat Buchanan or Robert Novak even though they're eloquent and conservative. The Wall Street Journal in this case is not reflecting conservativism so much as shaping it.
Now why individual people support Israel strongly, why they get their own identities tied up in, that's a question at a different level of abstraction, and one that is often quite answerable, if you know the people involved. (Although it's still often fascinating in own right. A lot of the extremism of individual American Zionists is compensatory. They "protest too much" because they are trying to drown out the glaring contradiction that if they were real Zionists, they'd have moved there already. And wild horses couldn't make them live there! They're Americans! They like it here because it's fun and comfortable and safe! Which contradicts everything zionism is founded on, and everything they supposedly stand for. So they drown it out with zeal. In other words, they have a continuous and understable anxiety that they can be unmasked at any moment as a faux Zionist by any Israeli who wants to put the question, "So, why are you here?" So they do everything they can to prove the depths of their conviction with words in order to ward off actually having to live up to their creed. "Strong friends of Israel" really means "Zionists who think it doesn't apply to them." And don't question me! :o)
As to why conservatives are more hawkish on Israel than liberals are, isn't that generally true everywhere in foreign policy? That cet par, conservatives feel more comfortably at home being hawkish and liberals being dovish? They think the solution is military force before they see the question. And we think it must be politics.
Michael