Tag Archives: Peter Beinart

Jan 28 2013

Matt Seaton’s caricature of courage

The highly criticized cartoon published in The Sunday Times on Holocaust Memorial Day – depicting mangled, tortured Palestinians being buried over with bricks laid by the bloody trowel of a sinister Israeli leader – was defended by  in Haaretz on Jan. 28 as “grossly unfair” but “not antisemitic”.

Here’s the cartoon by Gerald Scarfe that we posted about yesterday, and which The Sunday Times editor has since defended as “typically robust“.

content_photo-2

While much has been written about the cartoon – and the timing of its publication – the Haaretz contributor offers a dissenting view, one which, though I believe to be misguided, is nonetheless clearly thought through, well-informed and serious.

However, one particular word used by a Guardian editor on Twitter to characterize Pfeffer’s defense of Scarfe’s work caught my eye.

Here’s the Tweet by Matt Seaton, the Guardian’s editor of the US edition of ‘Comment is Free’.

Seaton’s Tweet, suggesting that it took ‘courage’ for Pfeffer to defend Scarfe, represents a good illustration of the moral conceit often displayed by such contrarians – those whose opinions about Israel, antisemitism and other issues place them outside the mainstream of Jewish opinion and thus must face some level of opprobrium for their views. 

However, whether we’re discussing Peter Beinart’s advocacy for boycotting Israeli companies across the green line, Ben Murane struggling with the ‘chauvinism’ of Jewish particularism, or even Antony Lerman’s polemical assaults against the very right of Israel to exist as a Jewish state, the truth is that such Jews can confidently dissent from mainstream opinion with impunity.

Similarly, the only penalty that the contributor for the leftist Israeli daily will have to face for arguing that Jews, and others, are mistaken in their characterization of the Scarfe cartoon as antisemitic is, of course, dissenting opinions from those who take issue with his view.

Writers who trade in unpopular ideas within the political safety net that liberal, democratic societies provide them shouldn’t be so thin-skinned as to expect that freedom of speech requires freedom from criticism, and so vain as to fancy themselves, or their political fellow travelers, courageous for having to withstand such critiques.

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Jan 18 2013

What Jonathan Freedland doesn’t get

Cross posted by SnoopyTheGoon at Simply Jews

I’ve stumbled on a (new to me) appearance of Jonathan Freedland under the auspices of Open Zion section of the Daily beast, edited by Peter Beinart. It was surprising, since I thought that being a columnist for the Guardian and the Jewish Chronicle makes him busy enough, without resorting to another venue. But the article, titled What U.S. Jews Don’t Get About European Anti-Semitism was interesting enough by itself.

The general purpose of the article (and the venue used), if I get it right, is to prove to American Jews that the fears displayed by some of them about the allegedly precarious situation of the European Jewry are just undue histrionics. 

The article is full of arguments in favor of this attitude: from the mistaken outcry by prof Rubin (6 years ago, what a memory!) through the finely nuanced analysis of different anti-Jewish sentiments in different European countries and the right wing extremists supporting Israel (proving what, exactly? – but let’s leave it alone) to the rosy perspective for the British Jews…

There even is an illustration of the idyllic life led by the British Jews in that article:

BritishJewsWith a capture: “Jewish men walk along the street in the Stamford Hill area of north London, Jan, 19, 2011.” Wow, man, you don’t say…  unfettered Jews working around Stamford. How cool. 

All this sounds like a serious and overwhelming tranquilizer attack, but more about it later. What really made me mad is the following: 

“Beneath these two headline cases are a hundred other lesser points of friction, often on campus, situations where Jews and Muslims have clashed, frequently over the politics of the Middle East. A consistent trend, noticed by those who monitor anti-Semitism, is a surge in anti-Jewish hatred whenever the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians escalates.”

One does his best, trying to ignore that “situations where Jews and Muslims have clashed”, as if European Jews are equally guilty in the “clashes”. Of course, one should be careful not to favor any side, especially when that “Islamophobia” label is circling the air, looking for another warm body to stick to – but imagine the folks like the ones in the picture above attacking innocent London Muslims…

But Freedland’s matter of fact acceptance of the inevitable “clashes” (read “European Muslims attacking European Jews”), whenever the Zionists perform their usual dastardly deed – this is what really gets my goat. Ten years ago that point of view was aired by one of the biggest stains on British journalism, one Seumas Milne, in his slimy Guardian piece ‘This slur of anti-Semitism is used to defend repression‘. Its lead sets the tone:

“Ending Israel’s occupation will benefit Jews and Muslims in Europe”

While it’s unclear how European Muslims will benefit, the benefit for the Jews, according to Milne, is obvious: stop the occupation and the attacks by Muslims stop.

Which, in effect, makes the European Jews into hostages for the Muslim rage, whenever and for whatever reason they become unhappy with Israel (or anything else, for that matter – after all blaming the Jooz is customary). And it’s quite painful to see how a “progressive” Jewish journalist repeats this deranged viewpoint as accepted and acceptable by using it as a side remark, without any comment.

Speaking of comments, it would be interesting to understand Freedland’s personal view of the other passage in that text:

“Others have long been alarmed by the case of Malmö, Sweden, a city whose 45,000 Muslims make up 15 percent of the population and where Jews have been on the receiving end of persistent anti-Semitic attacks—a fact denied by the town’s Social Democratic mayor, who instead criticized Malmo’s Jews for their failure to condemn Israel. As he put it, “We accept neither anti-Semitism nor Zionism in Malmö.””

Why didn’t Jonathan comment on this is unclear, and I would love to be certain he thinks what I do about that dreck of a mayor. But how could one be sure?

Very sad. And now about the general thrust of the article, the tranquilizer attack. It is hard to argue the fact that some responses, coming from US Jews to the shenanigans of the various antisemitic elements in Europe, could be over the top. But the sad tradition of European Jewry to stick its collective head into the sand and to ignore the signs of danger couldn’t be overlooked. And no matter how much Valium does Jonathan shove down our craw, a brief detour to a moment of European history could put it into perspective:

  • From here: By the end of 1920, the Nazi Party had about 3,000 members.
  • From here: In the 1928 German elections, less than 3% of the people voted for the Nazi Party.

The humble results brought up above are easily dwarfed by current popularity of Front National in France, Jobbik in Hungary etc. One would say that there are very good reasons for the Jews (and other minorities) in Europe to feel somewhat shaky, especially as the economic crisis takes it toll. But no, Jonathan has an easy answer for that one too: 

“Episodes that Americans see as evidence of growing European hostility to Jews are often understood by European Jews to be criticism of Israel—in fact, not even criticism of Israel itself, but rather of a specific strain of Israeli policy: what we might call the Greater Israel project of continuing and expanding settlement of the West Bank.”

Clumsy. Very clumsy, Jonathan.

But probably heartily approved by Peter Beinart. So be it.

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Jan 17 2013

Jonathan Freedland’s illusions about the nature of modern antisemitism

Jonathan Freedland is one of the more decent and reasonable Guardian journalists.

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It’s sad that, at the Guardian, being a Zionist who takes anti-Jewish racism seriously warrants such a tribute, but in contextualizing antisemitism and the assault on Israel’s legitimacy at the Guardian and Comment is Free, it’s important nonetheless to make moral distinctions. For sure, Freedland is not Chris McGreal, and he certainly is not an ‘as-a-Jew’.

His recent essay, however, published at Peter Beinart’s site, Open Zion, titled ‘What US Jews don’t get about European Antisemitism‘, Jan. 14, displays the characteristic intellectual ticks evident in self-styled progressives who comment on antipathy towards Jews.  Freedland sets the tone early by ridiculing a few of the widely discredited stories about antisemitism in Europe, such as the false report six years ago that British schools had banned the teaching of the Holocaust.

In fact, Freedland spends a remarkable amount of space – nearly 25% of his essay – providing examples of what isn’t antisemitism, and mocking those who, he alleges, exaggerate the threat to Jews in the UK and the rest of Europe. 

Freedland writes:

“We are getting used to the fact that U.S. Jews seem ready to believe the worst of this part of the world. In the two cases I’ve mentioned, many Americans were all too willing to accept that British Jews were about to become latter-day Marranos, driven underground by an anti-Semitic government and its jihadist allies, huddling together to teach their children about the Holocaust in Hebrew whispers.”

Finally, getting to “real” antisemitism, Freedland notes the importance of making distinctions “between Western Europe on the one hand and Eastern and Central Europe on the other.

Freedland correctly cites the rise of the Hungarian neo-fascist party Jobbik, as well as Greece’s Golden Dawn party as an ominous indication of a dangerous cultural lurch towards classic European right-wing antisemitism.

Interestingly, Freedland spends little time, however, discussing Islamist antisemitism in Western Europe, and not a word is mentioned about the Judeophobia of the European left.

He writes:

“The most extreme case is surely last year’s multiple homicide—the victims, three children and a rabbi—in Toulouse, apparently by a jihadist maniac. Others have long been alarmed by the case of Malmö, Sweden, a city whose 45,000 Muslims make up 15 percent of the population and where Jews have been on the receiving end of persistent anti-Semitic attacks.”

Then Freedland engages in an egregious obfuscation, positing a stunning moral equivalence between victim and perpetrator, by adding the following:

“So, yes, in Western European countries the tension between established Jewish communities and emerging Muslim ones can be perilous.”

First, it’s important to establish that – based on a comprehensive study at Yale, on antisemitism in ten European countries, by Charles Small and Edward Kaplan – Muslims in Europe are dramatically more likely to harbor antisemitic views than non-Muslims.

While Freedland correctly notes that there “is a surge in anti-Jewish hatred whenever the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians escalates”, the implied cause and effect is erroneous.

The empirical data which Small and Kaplan analyzed strongly indicated that – contrary to what Freedland implies - anti-Israel sentiment consistently predicts the probability that an individual already harbors strong antisemitic views.

However, beyond the statistics, Freedland’s suggestion that there is anything resembling parity in attacks by Muslims against Jews and attacks by Jews against Muslims represents a staggering inversion.

Freedland only included two examples of Muslim antisemitism, but, of course, there are hundreds more he didn’t note. Here are a few plots to murder Jews by Muslim extremists in 2012.

  • In October, A former Portsmouth Football Club player was among a group of 11 alleged Islamic convert terrorists arrested in France for targeting Jews – 7 months after Mohammed Merah murdered Jewish children in Toulouse.
  • In July, Mohammed Sadiq Khan and his wife Shasta Khan were convicted of planning to bomb Jewish targets in north Manchester.
  • In March, Italian police arrested Mohamed Jarmoune, an Italian of Moroccan origin, who they suspected of planning an attack on a synagogue, at his home in Brescia.

Moreover, in the UK in 2011, 31 out of 92 total violent antisemitic attacks in the UK in 2011, according to the CST, were committed by Muslim/Islamist perpetrators – an extremely disproportionate number when you consider that Muslims make up roughly 4.8% of the population in England and Wales.

Would Freedland suggest that there are (evidently unreported) Jewish or Zionist terrorist cells engaged in similar plots and attacks against Muslim targets? Are there synagogue versions of the radical East London Mosque? Are there Jewish neighborhoods in London, such as Golders Green, understood to be no-go areas for religious Muslims? 

Of course, he certainly knows the answer to these questions.

However, there is a more important point which needs to be addressed.

Right-wing antisemitism in Europe  - certainly within the mainstream media, and at the Guardian – has been properly delegitimized in a way Islamist antisemitism has not.  When the BNP, EDL and other like-minded right-wing extremists march in London, there is something approaching moral unanimity on the racist, xenophobic danger they present.  However, such a moral consensus does not exist when demonstrations in the UK are held by sympathizers of Hamas, Hezbollah and other violently antisemitic movements.

Finally, sometimes CiF Watch is asked why we spend so much time condemning Islamist antisemtism and less amount of time condemning right-wing or neo-Nazi racism against Jews.  

The answer is simple.

White supremacists, and other extreme right-wing groups, don’t have a platform at ‘Comment is Free’, while Islamist extremists who are affiliated with groups openly calling for the murder of Jews (and, no, not merely Zionists) are routinely provided a platform by Guardian editors – evidently motivated by the risible belief that such violent radicals are giving voice to genuinely “progressive” values.

While I’d like to give Jonathan Freedland the benefit of the doubt that he sincerely is intolerant towards all forms of antisemitism, it’s difficult not to conclude that he lacks the fortitude necessary to confront the dangerous legitimization of Islamist inspired Judeophobia in the UK – particularly at the media institution where he’s currently employed.  

 

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Jan 13 2013

Peter Beinart vs. the American Jewish community

Polemics and analyses which represent nothing more than preconceived anti-Israel conclusions in search of supporting evidence are nothing new at the Guardian Group.  Nonetheless, the absence of empirical evidence in Peter Beinart’s attempt to support his claim, in an essay at ‘The Observer’ (sister paper of the Guardian) on Jan. 12, ‘Jewish Americans may be increasingly disenchanted with Netanyahu. But their priorities lie elsewhere‘, is still quite striking.

Beinart, the former New Republic editor who recently re-invented himself as a Jew who’s ashamed of Israel’s stubborn refusal to unilaterally declare peace in the ‘new Middle East’, and thus allow his delicate conscience to escape the unbearable social weight of Zionist vigilance against Palestinian intransigence, seemed determined to convince the Guardian coven that he’s in the vanguard of an unstoppable Jewish progressive revolt against Jerusalem.

Characteristically, Beinart spends no time reflecting upon what the terms “right” and “left” denote in the current political context – and seems breezily unconcerned with the messy nuances of Israel’s pragmatic consensus forged by the sobering failures of Oslo, the dangerous results of an illusory land for peace strategic calculus, and Islamism’s regional ascendancy.

To the marginal Beinart-style Jewish left, moral enlightenment means never having to prove your a priori progressive advantages over your more “tribalist” coreligionists.

His posturing begins thus:

“In Israel, public discourse is moving right.

…

In Jewish America, by contrast, public discourse about Israel is moving left. You can see it in the increasingly harsh criticism of Binyamin Netanyahu‘s government by mainstream Jewish commentators such as New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman and New Yorker editor David Remnick.

…

Are many of these liberal, relatively secular Jews, especially in the younger generation, uncomfortable with Israel’s current drift? Yes”

However, the political sensibilities of most American Jews have long since drifted away from the increasingly irrelevant intellectual echo-chamber which Beinart imputes so much significance – most having long ago steered their URL clear of such New York establishment media institutions.

Contrary to Beinart’s fanciful wishes, the Zionist sensibilities of most American Jews have not wavered.

A 2012 poll by Lutz Global, on behalf of CAMERA, found continuing, deep support for Israel and a “strong belief in Israel’s commitment to peace efforts and apprehension about its existential situation.” Survey respondents similarly expressed strong support for Israel’s right to self-defense and fierce opposition to those (such as Beinart) who endorse BDS against the Jewish state – with 71% opposing boycotts against Israel, and 68% opposing a boycott of products made in cities beyond the green line.

 A full 85% agreed that Israel ‘is right to take threats to its existence seriously,’ and that Israel’s concerns are neither “irrational’ nor overstated”.

The Lutz poll also demonstrated that American Jews possess a strong belief that “the Israeli government (84%) and its people (85%) are committed to establishing genuine peace between Israel and the Palestinian people.” Respondents were extremely skeptical of the Palestinian commitment to peace and consider Palestinian incitement against Jews to be a major obstacle to a long-term agreement (77%) - far more so than settlements (12%) or “occupation” (12%).

Beinart then turns to Iran, and writes the following:

“So is Netanyahu free to do whatever he pleases without worrying about the American Jewish response? On the Palestinians, maybe. But on Iran, no. That’s because war with Iran, a war in which the US could easily become engulfed even if we don’t drop the first bomb, is a much higher priority than the Israeli-Palestinian peace process (or lack thereof). It’s a higher priority for Americans, for liberal American Jews, and for America’s president. It’s an issue on which Obama, as evidenced by the Hagel nomination, is not prepared to defer to Aipac. And it’s an issue that could, if America goes to war, mobilise those liberal American Jews who would not mobilise politically on the peace process but did mobilise against the war in Iraq.”

So, is American Jewish opinion at odds with the overwhelming majority of Israeli Jews who believe that a nuclear armed Iran would represent an existential threat to their nation?

According to another comprehensive 2012 survey of American Jewish opinion by the AJC the answer is a resounding “no”.  The Iranian nuclear program concerns the vast majority of American Jews: 89 percent are “very” (56 percent) or somewhat (33 percent) concerned about it. Only 11 percent say they are not too concerned or not concerned at all.

Additionally, 64 percent of American Jews surveyed said that, if diplomacy and sanctions fail, “they would support the U.S. taking military action against Iran to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons.” Also, 75 percent would “support Israel taking such action if diplomacy and sanctions fail.”

Contrary to Beinart’s claims, the research indicates that American Jewish opinion is solidly in alignment with Israeli Jewish opinion on the most important issues regarding peace and security for the Jewish state.

Not surprisingly given the outcome of the recent US election, the same AJC poll showing broad support among American Jews for Israel also demonstrates that the overwhelming majority also back President Obama, which would indicate that such Jews don’t see their Zionism as in any way inconsistent with their liberal political orientation.

Beinart, in one passage in his Observer piece, cites data allegedly indicating that “only” 58 percent of younger American Jews even could identify who Binyamin Netanyahu is.

However, based on the polling data, I think it’s fair to ask how many younger American Jews have any idea who exactly Peter Beinart is.

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Nov 18 2012

What war is good for: Jonathan Freedland and the empty platitudes of ‘peace’

“War is an ugly thing but not the ugliest of things;
the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feelings
which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse.
A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight,
nothing which is more important than his own personal safety,
is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free
unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.”

- John Stuart Mill

The memo at Guardian HQ explaining the ‘root cause’ of Israel’s operation ‘Pillar of Defense’ evidently has been distributed far and wide within their coven of activist journalists.

While Guardian reporters, and ‘Comment is Free’ contributors, have varied in the degree of malice they impute to the Jewish state for launching strikes against terror targets in Gaza, the message they’ve conveyed to their readers is clear: Don’t believe the Israeli ‘narrative’ that the state is acting to stop thousands of rockets from being launched at their cities by a malevolent Islamist terror group committed to its destruction.

Harriet Sherwood, Simon Tisdall, ,  and, of course Steve Bell, are among the Guardian reporters and commentators who are vexed by the idea that the Jewish state would see fit to defend its citizens from a well-armed terrorist movement on its border, and see something more cynical – indeed something much darker – in the decision to launch ‘Pillar Of Defense’.

Jonathan Freedland’s video commentary – ‘Why has Israel decided to attack Gaza now?‘, focusing almost entirely on the supposed electoral reasons behind the war – is a telling case because Freedland is a unique Guardian journalist; he’s a proud Jew who supports Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.

Not that Freedland hasn’t in the past succumbed to ‘J Street/Yachad/Peter Beinart leftist narrative which mistakes love for Israel with obsessive criticism, but, by all accounts, he is a decent, reasonable and mostly sober commentator.

However, as you watch this video, you’ll note that Freedland spends about 2 minutes and 37 seconds (out of a 2 minute and 52 second interview) on the alleged electoral reasons, and only 15 seconds explaining the context of Hamas rocket fire.

Additionally, in a full commentary about the war at ‘Comment is Free’, Freedland, in ‘The battle between Israel and Gaza solves nothing‘, Nov. 15, repeats the same reasoning:

“Why did Israel hit back now? The Hebrew press immediately assumed the key date was political, not military: 22 January, when Israelis go to the polls. There are plenty of precedents for outgoing governments taking military action, hoping to create a wave of national unity that will carry them to victory: Cast Lead itself fits that pattern. Binyamin Netanyahu may well have wanted to push aside his Labor rival and prevent his predecessor, Ehud Olmert, making a planned comeback – forcing both to fall into line as patriotic cheerleaders. Similarly, Barak found a way to remind voters of his supposed indispensability.”

However, Freedland’s suspicion of Israeli motives is as notable as his facile understanding of the broader issues of war and peace. 

His commentary ends, thus.

“Above all, the pain and anguish inflicted by yet another round of civilian deaths and injury will sow hatred in the hearts of another generation, who will grow up bent on revenge and yet more bloodshed. This keeps happening, decade after decade, for one simple reason: there can be no military solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Both sides will say the action they have taken is necessary. But it will solve nothing.” [emphasis added]

This last highlighted passage gets to the heart of the matter, and defines, as much as anything, the false, and dangerous, political assumptions of the Guardian Left.

A basic understanding of Israeli history, it seems, would inspire Freedland to take note of the fact that it was the use of force, and the credible threat of force, which has protected the Jewish state from Arab efforts, over the last 64 years, to ‘throw the Jews into the sea’.  Negotiations with its enemies didn’t occur organically, but only as the result of Israeli military victories which prompted its defeated foes to grudgingly accept that they did not have the capacity to fulfill their destructive aims.

By what means, other than through military force, would Jonathan Freedland suggest should be used by Israel to defang terrorist groups in Gaza (Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Popular Resistance Committees, and others) which possess thousands of rockets and the will to martyr thousands of their citizens in the cause of Jihad?

The perception of weakness and a lack of resolve – for any nation, yet alone the tiny Jewish state –  represents a dangerous provocation.

‘Peace’, when dealing with an enemy committed to your destruction, is not a serious strategy, but merely an empty and quite dangerous platitude.

The overwhelming majority of Israelis, their passionate supporters abroad and defenders of Western democracy more broadly understand this intuitive moral and political fact. 

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May 10 2012

Philly Diarist: Beinartism writ small

Beinartism (Read this post by our friends at Fresno Zionism to get up to speed on the term.)

Thursday, May 3, 2012. Philadelphia:

Me: “Can I please have a bag for my kippah? I live overseas and don’t want it to get lost on the trip back.”

Sales attendant: “Sure. Where do you live overseas?”

Me: “Israel.”

Sales attendant (after a brief pause and a troubled look): “What do you think about the Palestinian issue ?”

Me: “What do you mean?”

Sales attendant: “Do you think they deserve a state? Because I believe they deserve a state.”

Me: “Well, many Israelis are concerned that a new Palestinian state wouldn’t in fact bring peace and may only lead to more terrorist attacks and, as in Gaza, give rise to a government led by a radical, undemocratic and violent movement.”

Sales attendant: “Well, I just believe that the Palestinians deserve a state.”

Me: “And I just replied to your question.”

This exchange, on my last day visiting my family in Philadelphia, didn’t take place in just any old Judaica store. It took place between me and a middle-aged Jewish woman who worked in the gift shop of the newly opened National Museum of American Jewish History, across from the Liberty Bell in the city’s historic district.  

I had been in the U.S. for nine days prior to this encounter and never received similar queries from anyone else when I mentioned in passing, in the context of the conversation, that I was from Philly but now a citizen of Israel.

To my family and close friends back in the U.S. my Israeli citizenship is a source of pride, and a topic of conversation which typically revolves around my day-to-day life in Jerusalem, my job, whether my Hebrew has improved and suchlike. 

The woman I encountered, however, conveyed a palpable discomfort at my first mention of the “I” word.  

I couldn’t stop wondering if it was even conceivable that she would have challenged a Turkish visitor to the museum to defend their policy towards the Kurds. Or would she have challenged a Chinese visitor she just met to a debate about Tibet?  Would she have begun a conversation with a guest to her shop from a European nation with troops in Afghanistan or Iraq how they felt about high civilian casualty numbers?

This question actually wasn’t even about Israel. It was about her ― an act of morally posturing. She was setting herself apart from me. 

She didn’t attempt to refute the brief argument I presented regarding Israel’s security concerns, but simply repeated what she “believed”. It wasn’t really a conversation at all.

So convinced are such people, with something approaching a secular faith, that peace would be the inevitable result of Israeli withdrawals from the disputed territories they often can’t be bothered to defend their premise. Their argument – any serious observer of the region would have to admit – has at the very least been called into question following the results of Israeli withdrawals from southern Lebanon and Gaza.

While it’s possible the saleswoman I encountered never read Peter Beinart’s recent musings on the Israeli Palestinian Conflict, she certainly shares much of the former New Republic editor’s hubris.

Indeed, the most gnawing omission in Beinart’s original essay on (as he titled his subsequent book) “the crisis of American Zionism” – published at The New York Review of Books under the title “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment” – is that it doesn’t mention what should be expected of Palestinians at all.  In fact, Beinart only refers to Palestinians a few times, and always as passive actors.

He writes of the urgent need to promote a “Zionism that recognized Palestinians as deserving of dignity and capable of peace”, and commends Jews (like himself) deeply devoted to human rights for all people, Palestinians included”. [emphasis added]

In the spirit of my interlocutor’s query, Beinart, in his more than 4500 word essay, did not (even in passing) meditate upon the security implications of his proposals. 

If Israelis are to take criticism by Jewish Americans seriously we must first be convinced that their opinions are informed by a rigorous and morally sober understanding of the political realities of the region in which we live.  As such, perhaps we can expect a bit of humility in the face of the ascendancy of Hezbollah and Hamas following our experiment with the “Land for Peace’ formula in 2000 and 2005.  And I think we can be forgiven for asking why they believe a future Palestinian state will necessarily produce peace, tolerance and co existence ― values clearly lacking in the political cultures in Gaza and the PA. 

I truly want to believe that such critics are motivated by more than just moral vanity, but the longer I live in the Jewish state (especially in the midst of an ‘Arab Spring’ which hasn’t produced a thaw in our neighbors’ antipathy towards our very presence) the harder it is to take their desperate desire to ‘save us from ourselves’ seriously. 

Israelis – who will have to suffer the real world consequences of any future peace agreement – aren’t in any way asking for ‘uncritical support’ from American Jews: only that the premises of their critiques be supportable.

And, finally, if you work at a Jewish institution and meet someone from Israel please consider being as polite and courteous as you would with a visitor from any other country. You may want to make friendly small talk. And, if you absolutely must discuss the politics of his or her country then, whatever you ask, at least be open-minded and truly listen to the answer. 

I don’t think that’s too much to ask.

Related articles
Apr 11 2012

‘Boycott Israel,’ the movie, starring actress Emma Thompson

 

This is cross posted by Ben Cohen, and originally appeared at Jointmedia News Service.

If Hollywood ever makes a movie about the movement to boycott Israel, I can think of no one better suited to the starring role than Emma Thompson.

I imagine Thompson’s character as a schoolteacher or a librarian, dowdy looking with just a hint of prettiness. She lives alone in a cozy apartment filled with potted plants and books on personal growth, third-world politics and vegetarian cookery.

Her significant other is a fluffy cat that nestles in her lap every night as she sits in front of her computer reading the latest dispatches from occupied “Palestine,” her face etched with righteous disbelief.

She doesn’t have time for a boyfriend, but that won’t stop her would-be suitor, an equally self-righteous, mildly kooky Jewish writer—think Peter Beinart—from trying to win her heart.

By the time we’re halfway through the film, Emma will have decided that she simply must visit the West Bank, despite the enormous dangers posed by the Israeli occupation forces. She comes to this awareness while attending a Passover seder hosted by her aspiring boyfriend, during which he pulls out a fading photograph of his great-grandmother who was murdered during the Holocaust. 

Fighting back the tears, he confides that, “If she could see what Israel has become, she’d die all over again from the shame.” The two fall into each other’s arms, waking the next morning to a breakfast of matzo brei— as Emma tries to pronounce the name of the dish she’s eating, we giggle through the obligatory moment of light relief—before she’s whisked away in a taxi to the airport, and thence to the beautiful-yet-tragic land of Palestine.

In the West Bank, she cavorts with cute little kids—“just like the ones I teach back home”—drinks mint tea with effusive women who bear the daily humiliation of occupation with a smile and a shrug, and admires the steely-eyed men who stand up to the nasty Israelis with all the conviction of a Gandhi or a Martin Luther King.

Emma embraces their anger but concludes that violence is not the answer. Just before she leaves the Palestinian village that now feels like home, she regales the enthusiastically nodding villagers with a speech—tearful, of course—expounding on the importance of non-violence. “Don’t use bombs,” she exhorts. “Use boycotts.” Their applause can be heard all the way to the adjacent Israeli army base, where the commander is suddenly struck by the realization that the Palestinian aspiration for freedom can never be crushed.

Roll the credits. And don’t call it a chick flick.

With a movie like this one, art would be imitating life—to be precise, Emma Thompson’s life. Recently, the Oscar-winning actress joined with other darlings of stage and screen to protest the participation of Tel Aviv’s venerable Habimah Theater in a London festival that is performing the plays of William Shakespeare in 37 different languages.

In a letter published by The Guardian—a liberal newspaper with a long track record of publishing anti-Semitic material—Thompson and her cohorts slammed “Habima” [sic] for its “shameful record of involvement with illegal Israeli settlements in Occupied Palestinian Territory.” They ended with a demand to exclude the theater from the festival. No such objections were voiced concerning the participation of a Palestinian theater troupe, nor the involvement of the National Theater of China, which is directly funded by one of the world’s most repressive regimes.

In fact, there are many good reasons to ditch political objections and keep the festival open to all—which its organizers, to their credit, have done, in spite of Thompson’s fulminations. To perform Shakespeare is in itself a celebration of artistic freedom. Habimah’s version of “The Merchant of Venice,” the play that gave us the figure of Shylock, the Jewish moneylender who embodies anti-Semitic canards even as he challenges them, is sure to be enticing. And I would genuinely love to see how actors from communist China interpret the story of “Richard III.”

For those like Emma Thompson, though, boycotts are predicated on supposedly universal principles and then applied to only one target—Israel. To understand the strategy here, it’s worth recalling the campaign in the UK for a boycott of Israeli academic institutions. Ten years ago, an article in The Guardian noted that Israel’s universities are victims of their own success:

“The nature of Israel’s academic pre-eminence,” the article explained, “makes it vulnerable to a boycott.”

The same logic applies to the flourishing arts scene in Israel. The excellence of a theater like Habimah, along with its enthusiasm to perform outside Israel’s borders, renders it a sitting duck for boycott campaigners. In their warped view of the world, Palestinian freedom can only be achieved by quarantining Israelis on the basis of their nationality.

Thus do apparently free-spirited artists echo the racist policies of the Arab League, which began its boycott of the Jewish community in Eretz Israel in 1945, three years before the state of Israel was born.

What, then, is the appropriate response to Emma Thompson and those like her? Certainly not to make the movie I described earlier. Instead, they should be given a taste of their own medicine.

We are often told that Jews run Hollywood—the same Hollywood that carried on casting Vanessa Redgrave, Emma Thompson’s fellow Brit, in leading roles after she denounced so-called “Zionist hoodlums” in an Oscar acceptance speech in 1978. Will the studio moguls continue to indulge Thompson as they indulged Redgrave? Or will they show some gumption, and tell her that, for as long as she seeks to discriminate against Israeli artists, she will be banished from our screens?

I think I know, sadly, what the answer is. But I’d love to be proved wrong.

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Apr 3 2012

Comment is Free, Jane Eisner & a modest question for Peter Beinart & the American Jewish Left

Jane Eisner’s March 28th Comment is Free essay, Peter Beinart’s problematic Zionist BDS proposal, was interesting in several respects.

First Eisner praised  Beinart’s “new and controversial proposal for a targeted boycott of products from Israeli settlements” (meant to pressure Israel to withdrawal completely from the West Bank) as representing a valiant effort to test “how big the Jewish tent really is.”

Eisner characterized Beinart’s proposal for “BDS” as a “movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel (BDS)…targeting only the territories beyond the Green Line – the area captured by Israel in 1967 that should make up a new Palestinian state or, in Beinart’s words, non-democratic Israel”

Eisner criticizes the proposal as impractical, arguing that the vast majority of Israeli products are manufactured in Israel proper, and that such a targeted boycott would have little if any effect on Israel’s economy.

Then, while Eisner also raises a slight moral objection to Beinart’s embrace of the BDS movement, she nevertheless concludes:

What Beinart has accomplished, though, is to pinpoint a deep frustration and confusion on the part of many Jews who want to stop the peace process from unraveling and who wish to see and end to the occupation that leaves Israel’s security intact. This is the constituency of Jewish opinion that wants to reclaim the high moral ground in the struggle for Israel’s democratic soul.

For that reason, he and his ideas – no matter how outrageous, no matter how self-serving – deserve a place inside the tent. He asks an uncomfortable, difficult, yet essential question: if well-meaning American Jews who love Israel believe that the occupation of Palestinian land and people is detrimental and wrong, what are those Jews to do?

However, the most gnawing omission in Beinart’s original essay on “the crisis of American Zionism” published at The New York Review of Books, under the title “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment“, is that it doesn’t mention what he expects of Palestinians – and indeed Beinart only refers to Palestinians a few times, and always as passive actors.

He writes of the urgent need to promote a “Zionism that recognized Palestinians as deserving of dignity and capable of peace”, commends Jews (like himself) deeply devoted to human rights for all people, Palestinians included” and challenges “Israel’s behavior in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.”

In addition, he fails to even reflect, in an over 4500 word essay, on the security implications of withdrawing from the disputed territories, and never once acknowledges the injurious results of Israeli withdrawals from Gaza and S. Lebanon.

So, to liberal American Jews like Beinart, I’d like to ask a simple question in relation to what you demand of Israel and American Zionists:

What do you demand of the Palestinians?

  • Do you expect Palestinians to cease endemic antisemitic incitement in their mosques, state-controlled media, and culture?
  • Do you expect Palestinians to stop honoring terrorists, and finally promote the values of peace and co-existence, and endorse the Jewish state’s right to exist?
  • Do you expect Palestinians to create genuinely democratic institutions?
  • Do you expect Palestinians to take steps to end codified misogyny, such as their judicial system which rarely punishes men found guilty of honor killings?
  • Do you expect them to decriminalize homosexuality?
  • Do you expect Palestinians to adopt genuinely liberal norms regarding a free press and freedom of speech? 
  • What steps do you expect Palestinians to take to inspire confidence that a nascent Palestinian state will be peaceful, and won’t devolve into an Islamist controlled polity, as in Gaza, or a terrorist dominated country like Lebanon?
  • And, more broadly, do you expect the same moral performance from Palestinians as you do of Israeli Jews?

For Beinart, and many of his allies on the American Jewish left, the only actors who possess moral agency in his tale of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict are Jews – and seems supremely concerned with the necessity of such Jews maintaining the “moral high ground” at seemingly any cost.

Such liberal American Jews seem remarkably nonchalant about the real life consequences of their proposals – advancing opinions not based on a rigorous examination of Israel’s complicated regional security threats, which include Islamist terrorist movements committed to the Jewish state’s destruction on two borders, but a desire to maintain their own “progressive” standing.  

This dynamic – supreme moral vanity and an unwillingness to bear the unpleasant consequences which accompany even the most responsible use of political and military power – has been aptly characterized by Ruth Wisse as moral solipsism.

Until liberal American Jews show a genuine willingness to reflect on such questions about Palestinian responsibility, the vital issue of precisely what kind of Palestinian state Israelis can expect to arise and, more broadly, to what degree they’re willing to hold Palestinians (and the larger Arab world) to the same moral standards they hold Zionists, its hard not to conclude that their polemical assaults on the “Zionist establishment” are informed by both narcissism and quintessentially liberal racism.

I remember a conversation with a friend just before Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in 2005, in which he assured me that such a move would give Israel the “moral high ground”, and garner political support for the Jewish state in the event that the newly independent Palestinian state in Gaza devolved into a terrorist enclave, and the IDF was forced to engage in military actions in response.

As Hamas’s ascendancy and the obsessive international criticism, and delegitimization, as the result of the Gaza War indicated however, both assumptions, widely held by many on the Jewish left, were proven wildly inaccurate.

If the price of preventing a similar or even more dangerous political and military dynamic on our state’s eastern border is the loss of support from Peter Beinart and his political allies, it is a cost that Israelis (and those Zionist allies unburdened by the desire to remain popular within progressive political circles) must be willing to pay. 

There’s nothing noble, admirable, moral (or “liberal) about promoting policies which will likely result in greater Jewish victimhood. 

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Mar 26 2012

Peter Beinart and the Crisis of American Jewish Liberalism

Peter Beinart

Peter Beinart, former editor of The New Republic, has recently entered the ideological enterprise of delegitimization – convinced that he alone possesses wisdom about how to solve the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict which has eluded Israeli leaders for over six decades.

Beinart’s book, The Crisis of Zionism, doesn’t merely argue that Israel should withdrawal from the West Bank but, in criticizing the occupation, evokes the ugly specter of racism and segregation in the pre-Civil Rights American South. 

From his book blurb:

An American Jewish community that sent its sons and daughters to Mississippi when African-Americans were denied equal citizenship merely because they were not white cannot turn away when millions of West Bank Palestinians are denied rights simply because they are not Jews.

You understand that only by giving Palestinians their own country in the West Bank and Gaza Strip can Israel again become a Jewish state that offers the right of citizenship to all the people within its domain.

And you understand that if Israel collapses as a democratic Jewish state, Zionism itself will die.

Of course, like so much of what passes for liberal thought on Israel, Beinart has almost nothing to say on what he expects of the Palestinians in the context of his hopes for peace and co-existence.

Does he expect them to end antisemitic incitement or take steps to reform a political culture which honors terrorism? Does he demand that they build democratic institutions, hold free and fair elections and extend even nominal rights to women, gays and religious minorities?

No, Beinart’s liberal racism can not assign even the most rudimentary moral agency to Palestinians – the quintessential ethnic abstraction.

Further, does Beinart even wonder what the real-life results will be if Israel abides by his advice and withdrawals to 1967  borders, and what will happen if, as in Gaza in 2005 and S. Lebanon in 2000, such withdrawals only embolden the most violent terrorist movements, and make Israelis even more vulnerable to rocket fire and other acts of deadly terrorism?

No, there isn’t a crisis of Zionism.

There’s a crisis of his brand of American Jewish liberalism – “intellectuals’ who have lived in their own mind too long, truly incapable of imagining life outside the safety of their own cognitive bubbles.

Such political sages are not equipped with the moral imagination necessary to empathize with a modern Jewish state under siege, surrounded by hideously antisemitic Islamist terrorist movements who are quite explicit in their malevolent designs.

Do such sensitive souls ever wonder why Palestinian society never seems to produce their own version of Peter Beinart? Why don’t such critics ever demand reciprocal Palestinian self-reflection or empathy for the (Jewish) “other”?

Finally, does Peter Beinart ever wonder what the consequences will be if he’s wrong?

If the policies he advocates lead not to peace but to war, to more bloodshed and greater Jewish suffering, will he say he’s sorry? Will he finally repudiate his naive belief that “they are just like us”?

Of course not.

He will remain far removed from the deadly serious issues of war and peace in the Middle East.

He’ll write another book. He’ll become a fellow at another think tank.

Peter Beinart can opine on issues with the liberating sense of his own impunity to their potential real-world consequences, knowing that he will never, ever have to deal with the dangers paved by his best intentions.

Israelis like me, my friends, my wife and family, however, aren’t so privileged.

(Finally, here’s a powerful Shabbat sermon by Reform rabbi Ammiel Hirsch against Beinart’s call for BDS against Israelis living beyond the green line, from his pulpit at the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in Manhattan.)

Related articles on Beinart’s assault on Israel’s legitimacy (H/T Challah Hu Akbar): 
Feb 15 2012

Guardian’s former Iran correspondent legitimizes bizarre anti-Israel conspiracy theory

H/T Steve

Geneive Abdo is a former Iran correspondent for the Guardian and current contributor to major American newspapers, as well as Al-Jazeera. 

She is a fellow at the Century Foundation which, according to Commentary Magazine‘s Michael Rubin, has close ties to the White House.

Abdo recently suggested to Australian public radio that Israel had bombed its own diplomats in India in order to have an excuse to blame Iran:

(Journalist) ELEANOR HALL: Iran’s leadership says it’s sheer lies that it’s behind the attacks and that the Israelis have planted the bombs themselves to discredit Iran?

GENEIVE ABDO: Well I think that’s entirely possible. I mean, if you consider what the Israelis did for many years in Lebanon and other parts of the Middle East, that theory is not so farfetched.

And, as Rubin observed, “What progressive analysis would be complete without obsessing about the dark shadow of a “Jewish lobby?”

ELEANOR HALL: So how dangerous do you think the situation is right now?

GENEIVE ABDO: Well, I think it’s very dangerous. It’s far more dangerous than probably any escalation tension that we’ve seen in 30 years. So, you know, you have the Israelis not willing to live with a nuclear Iran. You have the Iranians going forward with their nuclear program. And you have an American president trying to be re-elected with a Jewish lobby in the United States that’s extremely powerful.

So, we have a “specialist” on Iran, working for an influential progressive think tank, who legitimizes bizarre conspiracy theories and advances tropes about the injurious effects of organized Jewry.  

But that’s not all.

Abdo is a speaker at the upcoming conference, in Washington, DC, of the left-wing Israel lobbying group, J Street  - an event which also features Peter Beinart.

Perhaps one of the biggest conceits of Israel’s critics are their frequent suggestions that there’s something brave about their stance, positing that anti-Israel views are stifled, and that activism can cost you professionally.

As Noah Pollock observed of Peter Beinart’s claims to this effect:

Beinart imputes that critics of Israel within the Jewish community and elsewhere have been rendered mute and ineffective by the power of politically conservative Jews and the Washington lobby they supposedly control. 

The presence of Geneive Abdo, an anti-Israel conspiracy theorist who advances antisemitic canards, at a conference of a well-funded American Jewish lobbying group, would suggest, however, that such politically powerful conservative Jews are doing a horrible job of muting such “alternative” voices. 

Related articles
Feb 14 2012

What Peter Beinart won’t report: PA TV thanks Palestinian children for fertilizing land with blood

H/T Margie

“The idea that the problem is Israel, that the problem is the Jews, protects Palestinians from having to confront [their] inferiority or do anything about it or overcome it. The idea among Palestinians that they are victims means more to them than anything else. It is everything. It is the centerpiece of their very identity and it is the way they define themselves as human beings in the world.”

“Palestinians will never be reached…until they are somehow able to get… beyond this sort of poetic truth that they are the perennial victims of an aggressive and racist Israeli nation.” - Shelby Steele

Sorry, I typically file such stories as “What the Guardian won’t report”, but in light of Peter Beinart’s latest foray into the delegitmizing enterprise – convinced, it seems, that peace would be achieved if not for racist Zionist policy  - it seems apropos to occasionally note facts the earnest liberal journalist evidently finds inconvenient to his narrative of Israeli villainy.

Beinart’s failure to hold Palestinians accountable for perpetuating a culture which glorifies terrorism, and promotes antisemitism, represents a dynamic his former colleague at The New Republic, Jim Sleeper, would likely characterize as “liberal racism“.

This week, official Palestinian Authority TV reported from a Fatah celebration in a refugee camp in Lebanon and focused on the following slide shown at the celebration. Fatah’s message was that children are created so that their blood will be “fertilizer” to saturate the land:

Sickness, hate, pathos?

Banish the thought!

No. I’m sure its all about “the settlements”.

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Dec 17 2011

Why do they hate the Jews? The Guardian and the toxicity of liberal racism.

Properly contextualizing the Guardian’s coverage of Israel, the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, and and the politics of the Middle East, requires more than merely critiquing and fisking their reports and commentary regarding Israel.   An accurate understanding of the factors which inform the Guardian’s obsessive criticism of the Jewish state also demands an accounting of what they don’t report about the wider region. 

As such, their silence in the face of endemic Muslim antisemitism – including in the Palestinian Authority –  speaks volumes about the rigidity of their ideology, and the lengths to which their commentators and journalists will go to avoid facts which contradict their guiding political narrative of Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians, and the larger (Islamist) Arab word.

While every illiberal act or view exhibited and expressed by individual Israelis – now matter how marginal – is magnified by the Guardian and framed as indicative of Zionism’s essence, undeniable evidence that reactionary, racist views about Jews (and not merely Israelis) represents normative Arab mores is almost never explored.

The most egregiously flawed moral reasoning which informs much of the Guardian’s coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian (and Israeli-Islamist) Conflict is the implicit argument that Zionism (the presence of one majority Jewish state in the Arab/Muslim world ) causes antisemitism. 

Of course, even if this causation was accurate it wouldn’t excuse Jew hatred, any more than the behavior of Muslim terrorists would morally excuse Western anti-Muslim racism.

Moreover, the fact that annihilationist Islamic antisemitism predates Israel’s occupation of the West Bank – and indeed predates the existence of the modern Jewish state - suggests that such ferocious animosity represents the root cause of the conflict.

Beyond the Guardian, even liberal Jewish commentators who aren’t anti-Zionists – such as Peter Beinart and Thomas Friedman – frame every Israeli home built across the Green Line as a catastrophic ”impediment to peace” and yet possess an inexplicable moral blind spot when it comes to a culture of Muslim antisemitism which historian Robert Wistrich has characterized as “comparable to Nazi Germany“.

If Muslims were held to the same moral standard as Jews the following video would not only go viral, but cause genuinely liberal commentators to express the passionate moral outrage typically expressed when encountering evidence of Western racism.

But, we clearly don’t live in such a world. 

The harm to Israel (and the future of democratic values in the Middle East) caused by such liberal racism, which demands that the following chilling Jew hatred will never become part of the West’s meme, is incalculable.

(Click image to go to MEMRI video)

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Apr 1 2011

Why to oppose to J Street. And, why it matters.

This is cross posted by the always thoughtful Yaacov Lozowick, who blogs at Yaacov Lozowick’s Ruminations

A number of people, some quite thoughtful, disagreed with my position against J Street yesterday. Since I spent part of the day doing Pessach cleaning, I was able to listen to some of the sessions of the recent J Street conference. I heard Rabbi Saperstein, Jeremy Ben Ami, Peter Beinart, Bernard Avishai, Daniel Levy and Roger Cohen, and was also able to hear when the audience applauded for which statements.

Daniel Levy at one point made a statement about how if it were to be proven that the Arab world really isn’t willing to live in peace alongside Israel “then Israel wasn’t such a good idea, was it?” but then he went on to say that of course, the Arabs are willing. You’ll pardon me if I don’t feel compelled to regard Levy as a fellow Zionist in any form or way, even if he was once an aide to Yossie Beilin.

Apart from Levy, however, here’s what I found.

These J Street speakers and guest speakers are more or less aligned with the positions of Meretz, perhaps a shade to its left. Meretz, of course, is a legitimate Zionist party, even though it has lost almost all its Israeli voters and hovers near extinction. Yet J Street isn’t Meretz, it’s something much more troubling, and worthy of our disdain.

First, Meretz positions sound different and more acceptable from Israelis. The reason the party has lost most of its voters is that we’ve empirically tested its proposals, and lots of people have died as a result – not once, but repeatedly, in 1993-6, in 2000 (twice, once in Lebanon and once with the Palestinians), in 2002, in 2005, and in 2006; arguably also in 2008. Having its basic assumptions serially disproved has discredited Meretz, but if after all that some Israelis still wish to hang on, that’s their right; the rest of us don’t take them seriously, and that’s our right. It’s actually surprising how very little animosity Meretz generates these days, especially when compared to their heyday. They’re an oddity, and one doesn’t get aggravated about oddities; one pities them, or suffers them for the color they add.

The J Street people seem not to have noticed any of this, which is either very peculiar or very disturbing. If they’ve simply not been watching, what gives them the right to have an opinion about life and death matters they can’t make the effort to understand? If they’ve been watching and refuse to accept what is there to be seen, how exactly do they portray themselves as being on our side?

Second, there’s a consistent tone of disdain of Israeli society coming from these people who I find arrogant and very distasteful. Americans left and right have lost their civility in political discourse; Israelis, admittedly, never had it. Yet there are codes in language, deeper than mere words, and the subtext of these J Street spokesmen when discussing Jews from Russia, religious Jews and centrist Jews, is ugly. I find no other word for it. Just as their compassion for Israel’s Arabs (the citizens) is odd. There’s a level of identification with them which is totally lacking when they talk about the majority of the Israeli Jews. I say this as someone who wishes only the best for Israel’s Arabs.

Another widespread sentiment they’ve got about Israelis is moral superiority. We American Jews, we understand human rights, democracy, dignity and so on, not like our benighted Israeli cousins who need to learn from us because they’ve turned into an embarrassment. I”m not going to respond in detail to this, but it needs to be rejected vehemently. It’s the opposite which is true. Israeli Jews, unlike American ones, live in a hard reality which beats down on those admirable human values and could easily smother them. Yet it doesn’t. Israelis know more about raising children to be moral human beings at time of adversity, more about respecting one’s enemy’s dignity, more about respect for law under extreme duress, than most American Jews can even begin to imagine. How could they? When are they ever faced with true moral quandaries, or required to pay a price for preserving their values? Do Israelis sometimes fail? Of course. Are American Jews ever put in situations where they’re ever even tried? Perhaps, but they don’t spring to mind.

Then there’s the matter of having enemies. Nothing I heard in all those speeches gave any cause to believe the speakers understand what an enemy is; they certainly can’t imagine the Palestinians are such. To the best of my recollection, the word Hamas was never mentioned. The Palestinians, when they were talked about, are noble and suffering people who must be reached out to, must be embraced, must be comforted. I have Palestinian friends, and am seeking more of them; through them I try to understand how they see us and how they see themselves. Yet I never forget that so far, we’re at war. I’m convinced the ones I know personally are all right, but there are many in their society who would gladly kill me, my family, and my society. There’s a war on, it’s not over, and it’s not something that can be talked away with nice sentiments. War mean enemies: a concept – I repeat myself but it’s a crucial distinction – the J-Street people seem quite oblivious of. So far as I can tell, they can’t imagine an enemy, astonishing as that may sound.

All of this, serious as it is, perhaps still doesn’t justify the distaste I have for these people. So they disagree with me and with most Israelis on many matters: so what? You know how many things there are I disagree on with various factions of Israelis? Heaps and heaps.

The difference between those disagreements and J Street is in the reason J Street exists: to put pressure on the American government. I’d add, to put pressure on the American government to harm Israel, but my Meretz friends will tell me it won’t harm Israel. J Street isn’t a talk club, it’s a lobby, which intends to have an impact on policy.There’s an extreme irony in this, since what J Street is essentially saying – quite openly and explicitly – is that the sovereign political decisions of the Jewish State need to be upended. True, the Jews didn’t have the ability to make sovereign decisions until Zionism created Israel, but now that the Jews have Israel they’re making the wrong decisions and need the outsiders to correct their mistakes for them. If this isn’t anti-Zionism by Jews, I don’t know what it would look like.

Finally, to sum it all up, there’s the content of the pressure that needs to be put on Israel. All of the speakers I heard, and most of what I had previously heard and read about J Street, agree that the reason there’s no peace between Israel and Palestinians is that Israel isn’t interested, or isn’t serious. At the moment they blame “Netanyahu and Lieberman”, but Netanyahu and Lieberman were democratically elected (not by me – but they do represent a real majority). Should it be a different Israeli government, however, the J Streeters will say the same about them (since that government won’t make any more peace than this one). So let me return to my paragraph yesterday about the Big Lie: I’ve marked the parts which the J Streeters clearly seem to accept, in bold; the parts in italics some of the J Streeters seem to accept.

The Big Lie of our day has a number or versions. The Jews are not a nation and deserve no state. The Jews have no historical rights to the land they call Israel, and even if they do, they’re anachronistic and cannot justify harming the Palestinians. The Palestinians have been in their homeland for time immemorial, and were pushed out by the Jews. The Jews continue to aspire to ever more control of the land, and to ever more oppression of the Palestinians. The Jews’ way in war is uniquely evil and cruel. The Palestinians yearn for peace, but the Israelis refuse to allow it, because they haven’t finished taking Palestinian land, or because they don’t recognize the Palestinians as equally human. The Jews protect their nefarious projects through sinister control of power-brokers, most importantly the United States.

I have no doubt many of the supporters of J Street mean well. Really and truly. But context is important, and when Jews say loudly that the Israelis are to blame for the lack of peace, or that they’re immoral or becoming so, and that foreign powers must restrain them: well, that’s anti Israel, and it plays into the lie of our day.

Mar 3 2011

J Street Needs Another Lane

This is cross posted by David Suissa

I was watching the J Street convention on their Web site the other day, and it reminded me a little of those underground meetings among religious settlers in the West Bank. That is, a constant flow of red meat served to the fervent and the like-minded.

In the case of J Street, this red meat can be boiled down to this: It is really, really, really, really important that Israel reach a peace agreement with the Palestinians.

One fervent speaker after another came down from the mountaintop to convince an already convinced audience of how really important this goal is. Whether it was Peter Beinart fearing for Israel’s democratic future, or Rabbi David Saperstein appealing to our highest Jewish values, or Sara Benninga finding her meaning in life by leading weekly demonstrations at Sheikh Jarrah, the theme was the same: Israel must make peace and end the occupation as soon as possible.

And who’s the bad guy in all of this? Take a guess. With the J Street crowd, the underlying assumption is always that the major obstacle to peace is Israel. Palestinian obstacles to peace? They’re as likely to be mentioned at a J Street convention as Avigdor Lieberman is of being invited.

Sometimes I wonder what it must feel like after three days of one of these J Street smugfests. How do you go from feeling absolutely certain that you are right to feeling even more certain that you are right?

I remember when Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun invited me to speak several years ago at one of their peace conventions in New York City. I was glad that he did, because it gave me a chance to ask a few hundred peaceniks a question they probably rarely hear: “When is the last time any of you woke up in the morning and asked yourself: ‘What if I’m wrong?’ “

No one raised their hand.

Yes, compassion is a great Jewish virtue, I told them, but so is humility. I confessed that, initially, I didn’t believe in the Oslo peace process (because I didn’t trust Arafat), but I asked myself, “What if I’m wrong?” and I ended up going along with it. So, I suggested, “What would happen if you all asked yourselves that same question?”

When I look at J Street now, I see some obviously good intentions (“We want peace!”), but not much humility. What comes across more than anything is an orgy of ideological self-confirmation toward pressuring Israel.

That’s disappointing. I expect more from open-minded liberals who claim to care for the “other side.” For one thing, I expect they would also care for the other side of an argument.

Have they studied, for example, the Palestinian Authority’s global campaign to undermine and demonize Israel and the corrosive effect this has had on the peace process? Have they studied why the Palestinians have consistently rejected offers to end the occupation and make peace with a Jewish state?

As a “pro-Israel” group, why hasn’t J Street pressured the Palestinians to end their glorification of terror and indoctrination of Jew-hatred that has made so many Jews reluctant to take more risks for peace?

As a “pro-peace” group, why did they not pressure the Palestinians to return to the peace table during the first nine months of a unilateral 10-month settlement freeze which the Obama administration itself lauded as “unprecedented”?

To balance their countless speakers who advocate putting more pressure on Israel, why haven’t they included speakers like Itamar Marcus of Palestinian Media Watch, who has documented the continued anti-Semitic incitement in official Palestinian media, or an award-winning Mideast journalist like Khaled Abu Toameh, who makes a powerful case that the Palestinian Authority’s primary interest is not to make peace with Israel – but to delegitimize the Jewish state?

If the goal is to bring together two sides, isn’t it important to scrutinize both sides?

Why doesn’t J Street bring in experts to explain the danger of Hamas taking over a Palestinian West Bank and pointing 10,000 rockets at Israel’s nuclear installations, potentially creating a catastrophic meltdown in the Jewish state? Talk about fearing for a country’s democratic future.

J Street’s relentless focus on pressuring Israel isn’t only unfair, it’s also remarkably ineffective. A couple of years ago, Palestinian and Israeli leaders were negotiating directly as a matter of course. Now, in the face of the enormous and single-minded global pressure on Israel, Palestinians are negotiating in international forums on how best to demonize Israel. They won’t even consider talking to Israel until it commits to freezing all construction in disputed territory, including, I presume, freezing any renovation of the restrooms at the Western Wall.

We’ve seen that the greater the pressure on Israel, the faster the cockier-than-ever Palestinians have run away from the peace table. J Street’s reaction to all this is to bring 2,000 people together in Washington, D.C., to put even more pressure on Israel and urge the Obama administration to do the same.

In other words, after two years of generating bumper-to-bumper traffic on the failed road called “let’s pressure Israel,” J Street has decided that the best thing to do is to attract even more traffic to that road.

Maybe they ought to consider adding another lane to their congested highway and calling it “Let’s pressure the Palestinians to stop undermining Israel and return immediately to the peace table.”

In Los Angeles, we would call that the carpool lane.

Jun 27 2010

Plaiting Sawdust

Reading Antony Lerman’s latest CiF offering was about as productive as plaiting sawdust.

Lerman’s attempts to present Zionism as some sort of reactionary stance which is toxic to any green shoots of peace in the Middle East by citing supposed foundations for his view from sources such as Moshe Arens, through the World Zionist Congress to Peter Beinart fall as flat as an under-baked soufflé due to his usual stubborn insistence upon avoiding any mention of the full range of factors which have contributed to the failed peace-making attempts of the past two decades.

“Israel may show all the signs of being a typical westernised, post-ideological society. But in response to growing international pressure over recent years and with the country’s centre of political gravity drifting to the far right, Zionist ideology appears to be playing an increasingly important role in decision-making and in determining the face that Israel presents to the world. “

With typical sleight of hand, Lerman in this opening paragraph attempts to persuade the reader that there is a link to be made between Zionist ideology and the ‘far right’, thereby attempting to discredit the former by linking it to something the reader will instinctively reject. This does not stand up to scrutiny from any angle: Zionism is something which transcends or precedes political viewpoints for most Israelis and is the mesh which holds this truly multi-cultural and far from ‘post-ideological’ society together.

Neither is it any more true to say that Israel has moved to the right from a political point of view than to make the same statement about the United Kingdom based upon the results of the recent elections there. The party which received the most votes in the last Israeli elections was Kadima, but coalition building sometimes produces strange bed-fellows as the British people should now be finding out. Both the current Likud-led government and the vast majority of the Israeli people today accept and support the concept of a two-state solution; thirty years ago this was an eccentric fringe opinion in Israeli society. If anything, Lerman would be more correct if he pointed out that as in many European countries, the Left in Israel has caused itself to become increasingly less relevant and centrists either mildly to the right or left, but with little to distinguish between their policies and principles, command the majority vote.

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