RUTHFULLY YOURS

The night the Iran nuclear deal was announced was a sleepless one for Harvard Law Professor Alan Dershowitz, utterly distraught by the terms of the agreement. “I got up and emailed my eBook publisher and said I have an idea. What if I do an eBook that could be out in time for the congressional debate? He thought it was a great idea,” Dershowitz explained in an exclusive interview with the Salomon Center for American Jewish Thought. “He gave me two weeks to write it. He got it in eleven days.”

Fears of Iran obtaining a nuclear weapon have haunted supporters of Israel and advocates of Middle East peace for over a decade, stoked by frequent public reminders by back-to-back regimes of the Islamic Republic that their goal is the annihilation of the Jewish State. “This book took me less than two weeks to write and ten years to research, so I’ve been thinking about and writing about this potentially for ten years,” explained Dershowitz. “I wrote my first long article about this in 2005. I had my ideas and I’ve been following the deal very closely.

“This use of anti-Jewish incitement as a political tool is a sickening new development in American political discourse, and we have heard too much of it lately—some coming, ominously, from our own White House and its representatives. Let’s not mince words: Murmuring about “money” and “lobbying” and “foreign interests” who seek to drag America into war is a direct attempt to play the dual-loyalty card. It’s the kind of dark, nasty stuff we might expect to hear at a white power rally, not from the President of the United States—and it’s gotten so blatant that even many of us who are generally sympathetic to the administration, and even this deal, have been shaken by it.”

The White House and its allies shouldn’t need to smear American Jews–and a sitting senator–as dual loyalists to make their case.

Chuck Schumer is a politician—a skilled and successful one. Which means that today’s announcement, following months of wildly uncharacteristic silence, that the senior Senator from New York is opposing the Administration’s nuclear deal with Iran is first and foremost a reflection of his calculations as to where his own self-interest lies. It does not take an electoral genius to imagine why a Senator from New York State might oppose a deal that keeps many Jewish voters—and an even higher percentage of non-Jewish voters—up at night. Keeping your base happy is generally the first rule of political survival.

Many years ago, I struck up a conversation with a Dutch businessman in a hotel in China. In the course of our discussion, I learned that he had been born in Asia, in the Dutch East Indies, today known as Indonesia. I quickly calculated that he was old enough to have been alive during World War II, so I asked what happened to him?

He told me that he and his parents spent the entire war in a Japanese prison camp.

“What was that like?” I asked.

He explained that because his family entered the camp when he was 3 years old and were liberated when he was 8, he really had no basis of comparison to anything else.

“That’s all I knew,” he said. “That was really my whole life up until then.”

They got by. They survived. As a child, he even found ways to play with some simple toys his mother made for him. He didn’t appear scarred in any way, and I thought our conversation had ended. But after a long pause, for some reason he opened up and began to tell me a story that I have never forgotten. It is a story that actually said more about my own country, its singularity and its values.

“When we were liberated,” he said, “these soldiers came into the camp. They were different. They looked like giants and they were all smiling.”

One of these giants quietly sat down next to him and gently lifted him on his knee. The soldier reached into his pack and took out a tin can, which contained a piece of bread, something the boy had never seen. Then he reached back and opened another can with a strange, colorful paste.

“I watched the soldier as he slowly spread jam over the bread and then he gave it to me.”

The man stopped there for a moment as his voice choked up, and then he turned and looked straight at me. “I travel all over the world.” He said. “I eat in very expensive restaurants .  .  . and I will never, ever, eat anything again that tasted so good.”

I didn’t realize that I was nodding in agreement and I said, “I know,” to which he quickly corrected me: “No, you will never know .  .  . and that’s a very lucky thing.”

Seventy years ago this summer, as World War II came to its climactic end, the world became a vast arena of liberated humanity. People came out of prison camps and attics, forests and cellars. Whole countries and populations were freed as the Nazi army crumbled and Japan surrendered. Millions of human beings, many of whom had been slaves for years, most of them starving, were suddenly released.

Their liberators included, along with our allies, a vast army of millions of young Americans—for some reason everyone referred to them as boys or “our boys.” Paul Fussell, the late writer, who was a young lieutenant in the 103rd Infantry, accurately titled his war memoir The Boys’ Crusade.

When the history of United States in the 21st century is written, the role of the Central Intelligence Agency will loom large in its early chapters. Two of the spy agency’s mistakes had terrible consequences for the future of the country. First, it failed to detect the September 11 plot. Second, it issued a faulty estimate that Saddam Hussein was developing weapons of mass destruction, which led to a major war. What went wrong?

Not long ago, Michael Morell hung up his trench coat after a 31-year career in the agency that took him from an entry level position to an array of high-level postings, ending up as CIA deputy director under Barack Obama. His memoir, The Great War of Our Time: The CIA’s Fight Against Terrorism–From al Qa’ida to ISIS, offers a tour of agency successes and failures and also explores a number of other highly controversial matters, including the “enhanced interrogation” of terrorists, and the agency’s convoluted role in the 2012 Benghazi imbroglio.