Almost exactly 16 years after the Israel lobby won a bitter high-profile battle against a key appointment by the then-director of national intelligence, it seems to have one won another, virtually without firing a shot.
The abrupt withdrawal this week of the appointment of Daniel Davis, who has criticized Israel’s conduct of its war in Gaza, as deputy director of national intelligence for mission integration under DNI Tulsi Gabbard reportedly resulted from complaints by pro-Israeli forces within the Trump administration and Congress, as well as outside groups, including the Anti-Defamation League.
The withdrawal recalled a much more protracted and dramatic fight over the appointment by former DNI Adm. Dennis Blair (Ret.) of former Amb. Chas Freeman, Jr., a legendary Foreign Service Officer and former senior Pentagon official, as chairman of the National Intelligence Council (NIC) at the outset of the Obama administration in March 2009. After several weeks of controversy and in the face of fierce and arguably defamatory criticism, Freeman took himself out of consideration.
Davis, a senior fellow at Defense Priorities and a retired Army officer who helped expose the failures of the U.S. military intervention in Afghanistan during the Obama administration, fell victim to what had been a quiet campaign to prevent his appointment that surfaced publicly Wednesday when the Jewish Insider website reported that he had been tapped for the job.
The Insider reported that, as recently as January 12, Davis had called Israel’s Gaza campaign “ethnic cleansing” and Washington’s support for the war “[o]n a moral level…a stain on our character as a nation, as a culture, that will not soon go away.” It also quoted him as saying “the ramifications [of a military attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities] “could be “terrible for us and for Israel.”
Pro-Israel forces were quick to pounce. The ADL immediately denounced Davis’ appointment on X as “extremely dangerous,” noting that he “has diminished Hamas’s 10/7 attack, undermined US support for Israel’s right to defend itself, and blatantly denies the grave threat the Iranian regime poses to global stability and American interests.”
Opposition was also reportedly voiced by more traditional, pro-Israel Republicans within the administration and Congress, and, while the New York Times noted that his criticisms of Israel were “similar to certain critiques by liberal Democrats,” the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Agency, Virginia Sen. Mark Warner told Politico Davis was “utterly unqualified.”
While the result was the same, Davis’ moment in the D.C. spotlight was mercifully brief compared to the three-week ordeal undergone by Freeman in February 2009 when Blair hand-picked him to chair the NIC, which, among other responsibilities, is tasked with producing National Intelligence Estimates — that is, the consensus judgments on a given issue of all 16 U.S. intelligence agencies.
A polyglot with unusually wide-ranging experience, Freeman served as chief interpreter during Richard Nixon’s historic 1972 trip to China, deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Beijing in the 1980s and ambassador to Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War. He was also principal deputy assistant secretary of state for African affairs, and assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, among other posts.
Freeman was also known for his outspoken, iconoclastic, and often critical views of U.S. foreign policy, including the George W. Bush administration’s “global war on terror” and Washington’s de facto support of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.
“Our unconditional support …aids and abets the adoption of policies [by Israel] that are unilateralist, militarist, counterproductive, and inevitably self-defeating,” he noted in a lecture at MIT a few months before his appointment as NIO chair in a typical observation that enraged the Israel lobby, particularly hardline neoconservatives whose views generally aligned with Israel’s Likud Party. (Two decades of Freeman’s lectures on the Middle East, China, and U.S. foreign policy can be found here.)
The campaign, conducted mainly through the blogosphere and on Capitol Hill, was spearheaded by Steven Rosen, a former top official at the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). In the first of nearly daily blog posts published by the hardline neoconservative Middle East Forum, Rosen called Freeman’s views on Israel a “textbook case of old-line Arabism” and his appointment “profoundly disturbing.”
Rosen’s denunciation was immediately taken up by other neoconservative and pro-Israel commentators in the Wall Street Journal, the Weekly Standard, The National Review, and The New Republic, as well as neoconservative websites, blogs and Likudist groups, notably the Zionist Organization of America and the ultra-hawkish Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs.
“Chas Freeman Is Bigoted And Out Of Touch” was the headline of an editorial by The New Republic’s then-publisher Martin Peretz, who claimed that the decorated ambassador was “bought and paid for” by the Saudi government via his chairmanship at the time of the Middle East Policy Council (MEPC), a Washington-based think tank that was partially funded by members of the royal family.
The current editor of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, likewise argued that Freeman, “well-known [sic] for his hostility toward Israel,” was also “a well-known advocate for the interests of Middle Eastern autocracies.” He was particularly incensed that the MEPC had published “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” an article by foreign policy realist scholars John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, that was denounced by, among other pro-Israel groups, the ADL as a “classical conspiratorial anti-Semitic analysis…”
The charges didn’t end with his alleged attitudes toward Israel and the Middle East. In his Wall Street Journal op-ed, Gabriel Schoenfeld and other neoconservative commentators claimed Freeman was unfit due to what they alleged was his downplaying of China’s military buildup, his past service on an advisory board of China’s largest oil company, and his alleged defense of Beijing’s bloody 1989 crackdown against protests in Tiananmen Square based on an uncontextualized excerpt from a post by Freeman in a private Internet discussion group of China hands.
A number of China experts known for their human rights advocacy, however, rejected the charge that he was a “panda hugger” and affirmed that he was a “stalwart supporter of human rights” during his China-related service at the embassy and the State Department.
The neoconservative campaign against Freeman also received pushback from more establishment media sources, including Washington Post columnist David Broder; Time’s Joe Klein, who called the attacks “assassination;” Foreign Policy’s David Rothkopf (“lynching by blog”); The Atlantic’s Andrew Sullivan; and Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria, who hosted Freeman on his CNN program, “GPS.”
Seventeen retired ambassadors, including several former U.S. ambassadors to Israel, also came out in support in a letter to the Journal. But much of that pushback came either after weeks of online attacks or, as in his “GPS” appearance, after Freeman had taken himself out of consideration.
Indeed, the campaign against Freeman was waged as much on Capitol Hill as on the web. Although the position to which Blair had appointed Freeman was not subject to Senate confirmation, various key lawmakers, notably New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman, and then-Illinois Rep. Mark Kirk — all three among the top ten recipients of campaign funding by pro-Israel PACs between 1990 and 2024 — denounced Freeman’s appointment.
Unlike Gabbard, DNI Blair stuck by his appointee throughout the assault, even testifying before the Senate Select Intelligence Committee to rebut the various charges that had been leveled against Freeman just hours before Freeman announced he was withdrawing.
In a statement issued immediately after his withdrawal, Freeman was characteristically direct both about the campaign against him and its implications. “The outrageous agitation that followed the leak of my pending appointment will be seen by many to raise serious questions about whether the Obama administration will be able to make its own decisions about the Middle East and related issues,” he wrote. “I regret that my willingness to serve the new administration has ended by casting doubt on its ability to consider, let alone decide what policies might best serve the interests of the United States rather than those of a Lobby intent on enforcing the will and interests of a foreign government.”
Asked by RS for his reaction to Davis’s withdrawal, Freeman emailed:
“Daniel Davis is a morally grounded, articulate, and intellectually honest realist. He has always focused on the national interests of the United States, as anyone familiar with his online and other commentary can attest. He's exactly the sort of person who should be speaking truth to power in the Trump administration. But …the Israel Lobby insists on Israel – not America – first, and opposes the American intelligence community engaging in the sort of objective analysis that Israel insists its own intelligence agencies provide. …Can any honorable person now hope to serve our country in positions of public trust without being subject to baseless but incapacitating caricature by special interests?”
It's a question worth asking.
