Peter Beinart Unbound?
Anyone who actually writes anything about Israel that perfect strangers are likely to read had better believe he's got the wisdom, pointillist clarity and courage to unmask others' myopia and bad faith. Too often, though, the would-be Truth-teller, no matter where he stands on a political or religious spectrum, is less wise about Israel than he is driven by swift, dark currents in history and in himself that he may not have explored or even acknowledged.
Fortunately, I alone have gone the distance and exited the hall of broken mirrors and flying brickbats where public discussion of Israel rages. So I can explain, as no one else can, how both Israel's brutal, devious nationalists and its arch, airy universalist scourges are getting everything wrong.
Of course, I'm joking about my omniscience. Yet, posting this from a vest-pocket park on Masaryk Street in Tel Aviv, I'm glancing at the Israeli workers, students, and mothers and toddlers taking breaks here or passing through, and I'm also glancing at my laptop whenever the intellectual pinball machine that is the blogosphere lights up with a new explanation of former New Republic editor Peter Beinart's much ballyhooed conversion from his old magazine's Zionist perversity to The New York Review of Books' waspishly busy reprovals of that perversity.
A lot is missing from the Beinart fracas. Some of what's missing is right before me here in this park. Also missing is an understanding of how Beinart's pilgrimage began in Lithuania before he was born, and how it ran through Cape Town, South Africa, long before it took him from Martin Peretz's desk to Robert Silvers'. Is this a pilgrimage of conscience, or a career move, or smart politics -- or all three? There are several ways to approach that question. Let me at least turn over a few stones.
When Beinart was at The New Republic, he was an ardent promoter of Joe Lieberman for President in 2004 and a shrieking scourge of anti-Iraq war liberals through 2006. I recount some of this record in a review of his new book The Icarus Syndrome, which bookforum.com has just posted and which I urge you to read for grounding.
Now, in The New York Review, Beinart has come out with an apostate's-over-compensatory ardor against the American Jewish establishment's self-destructive efforts to align public opinion and policy with Israel's ugliest gambits and conceits.
The liberals on my screen, among them TPM's own redoubtable M.J. Rosenberg, an earlier and even more ardent apostate from the Israel Lobby, are touting St. Peter's epiphany on his road from the Council on Foreign Relations and The New Republic to J-Street and The New York Review. I give Beinart my own, more measured, applause in the bookforum.com review.
Sitting here half a kilometer from the spot where Israel's prime minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated in 1995 by a right-wing religious zealot, I agree with Beinart that Israel's energetically slippery American strategists and its governing coalition in Jerusalem are further isolating and degrading the Jewish state. Yet, looking up from my laptop, I see something that's not on screen or in Beinart's article and book, which barely mentions Israel in its penitential survey of American foreign-policy hubris across a century. Let me try to explain what's missing by saying something about the Israeli civil society I've encountered on this and other visits.
Tel Aviv's many shabby Bauhaus buildings and cheaply built plazas suggest to some a failed politics and aesthetic as urban renewal efforts have done in many American cities. But while Israel's wistfully modernist dimension has little elegance and even less that's exotic, it has refreshingly less pomp or pretension of the sort one encounters in, say, Vienna. What Israel has instead is an easy elan that's hard to dismiss and is not as compromised as many readers really insist on believing that it is by the racism or militarism that are commonly ascribed to the whole country.
When you've been on your own here (not in a tour group) for even just a few hours (I'm not talking about myself, since I've been here a bit longer than that; my first involvement in Arab-Jewish encounters here was in 1969), your aesthetic and moral centers of gravity begin to shift from American pieties and protocols of consumption to the more frank and trustworthy relations of a society whose synapses actually work. For all the growing inequalities, among Jews as well as between Jews and Arabs, that Israel's conservative free-marketeers have pushed under banners of religious nationalism, people aren't living as frenetically as Americans do on "need-to-know" networking and courtly ingratiation.
Jews and Arabs walk Israeli streets at any hour with none of the fear of street crime that urban Americans have coded into their body language. You can feel that curse lifting by your second day. There is very little binge drinking and alcoholism. Body language tends to be more supple and just plain relaxed. (I've just come from New York, okay?) Go to Israel's health clinics and hospitals -- it has one of the best and most universal public-health systems in the world -- and you see Palestinian doctors, nurses, and patients alongside Jewish ones.
There are fewer Rambos because there are fewer loners, and that's because most Israelis are or have been part of a citizen army where no one salutes anyone and everyone knows everyone through others they already know. There's an unadorned, level-headed candor and solidarity in everyday encounters, out of uniform as well as in.
Many Americans would envy Israelis' casual confidence that a stranger will honor a simple request or agreement. The shared civic-republican entitlement and mutual obligation are earned by exposing one's body and life to and for others in ways most of us haven't done. "Life is With People" was the silly title of a schlocky Schocken book about shtetls, but in Israel you feel it in a thick, civic-republican sense that makes the bad architecture seem ancillary or at best ornamental. As your center of gravity shifts, new nerve ends start growing.
Most TPM readers think of the military as too militarizing, especially in places like Israel, and so do I. But the universality of the army here complicates its norms with civilian ones in ways not so easy to parse or condemn. In America the abolition of universal conscription in favor of a volunteer army was actually a conservative master stroke against a civic-republican spirit that had been aroused by a sense of shared public destiny and the outrages of the Vietnam war. There is no doubt about a shared, imminent destiny in Israel, and you needn't be a Zionist to know it.
So people here still get out of their cars and direct traffic to clear up jams without waiting for cops, although it must be added that they are driving like maniacs and paying the price. Employees behind counters think and respond realistically rather than euphemistically to your inquiries and requests, a refreshing contrast to even the best American response, which is usually something like, "No problem." To me that phrase has always implied that even a simple request is almost a problem for a temp worker who's been put there without any real training or public incentive to perform..
I am not excusing anything. Israel's unpretentious, reliable public felicity and trust are fraying, and they're often (though not always) missing in relations between its Arab and its Jewish citizens within the old borders; and beyond that, they unravel completely in pretty much the ways they have done at the borders of American Indian reservations and urban ghettos and in the American South, whose civic graces eddied around color bars.
But, actually, things are more complicated in Israel, owing to conflicting senses of belonging and danger that are much older and deeper than anything that even paranoid American Tea Partiers can imagine. There are too many forces intent upon Israel's total elimination, and most of those forces come from societies that aren't nearly as democratic.
The dark side of Zionism has several sources of its own, as I'll indicate here, but one of them -- and it maddens even the "polite" eliminationists when I say this -- is a source you could understand if you could imagine what America would be like if it had had thousands of suicide bombings, proportionate to the 250 or so that drove Israel nearly crazy in the middle of the last decade but that Israel's critics never ponder. And yet, for all the paranoia, there was more than enough civic indignation in Israel last week to force Netanyahu's bone-heads to rescind their barring of the 81-year-old Noam Chomsky from entering the West Bank to teach at the Palestinian Birzeit University.
Chomsky embarrassed Netanyahu anyway by declining the new offer of admission and delivering his talk by video from Amman. Bully for him. I am not giving this government any credit for deciding to let Chomsky enter the West Bank; in George Bush's America a few years ago, Chomsky had "no problem" addressing an auditorium full of cadets at West Point. He was even given respectful applause and a plaque.
Yet I'm wary of characterizing Israelis any more harshly than we ourselves would have wanted to be characterized when Bush was our president and the Iraq War was emblematic of our country's national security strategy. Should our universities have been boycotted by the rest of the world, our scholars disinvited by other countries, on account of our brutal foreign policies? Weren't we all implicated -- in much the same way that we casually implicate all Israelis -- since Bush had won in 2004 by a clearer margin than Netanyahu would win by five years later? By that logic, shouldn't a boycott like the one proposed against Israeli universities have been proposed with extra vigor against Britain's under Tony Blair? Why wasn't it? Don't Americans and Britons have a lot more to answer for?
Again, I am not excusing anything. Israel has never seemed to me more sad and disgusting than when Ehud Olmert touted it as America's junior partner in George Bush's war on terror or when it has mimicked Americans' gluttonous consumerism or Singapore's go-go, lockstep capitalism. (That got Israel admitted last week by unanimous vote to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.) Even the almost perfectly idiomatic if faintly neo-connish American English of Benjamin Netanyahu, who grew up in Washington diplomatic and academic circles, is as cloyingly off-putting as the patter of an Anglophile Jew who's trying to get something for nothing by pretending to be something he isn't.
Such postures evoke everything foreseen by Hannah Arendt, who assisted solicitously at Israel's birth and worked for world Jewish organizations for many years but warned in the 1950s that if Israelis "continue to ignore [partnerships with neighboring] Mediterranean peoples and watch out only for the big, faraway powers, they will appear only as... the agents of foreign and hostile interests. Jews who know their own history should be aware that... the anti-Semitism of tomorrow will assert that Jews not only profiteered from the presence of the foreign big powers... but had actually plotted it and hence are guilty of the consequences...
"The big nations that can afford to play the game of power politics have found it easy to forsake King Arthur's Round Table for the poker table," Arendt continued; "but the small, powerless nations [the Jews in Palestine] that venture their own stakes in that game, and try to mingle with the big, usually end by being sold down the river."
Beinart invokes Arendt, who nettles myopic neo-cons so much that they sputter every few years over her supposed betrayals of the Jewish people. They cannot acknowledge or review the brilliant collection of her Jewish Writings, edited by her literary executor Jerome Kohn, from which the above excerpt is taken. Adam Kirsch couldn't do it a few weeks ago in the New York Times as he went out of his way to tie the sometime Nazi philosopher Martin Heidegger about Arendt's neck - but not about the necks of Heidegger's other Jewish adepts, including Leo Strauss, whose philosophy was more Heideggerian than hers.
Like Arendt, Beinart, the scourge of Israel's apologists, nettles The New Republic's Jonathan Chait, an often-reasonable and likable apologist for too much that Israel has done wrong. It is Chait who observes, on my screen here in a Tel Aviv park, that Beinart's AIPAC-bashing is "overwrought" because he hasn't outgrown the jejune idealism and moralism that made him declare a "liberal" war on Islamo-fascism in 2006. Beinart's bellicosity then heartened neo-conservatives, even though he tried to distance his war-whooping and left-bashing from their war whooping and left-bashing. Should liberals really be heartened by his new moral ardor now?
Chait casts Beinart's 180-degree turn now in terms somewhat reminiscent of the aphorism, les extremes touchent, meaning that a spectrum's ideological poles sometimes have more in common with each other than with the middling positions in between. Stalinists become neo-cons without altering anything in their cankered and bitter psychology; Beinart, yesterday's American hegemonic warrior against the multilateralist, anti-nationalist left, becomes Beinart, today's apostle of multilateralism against the nationalist, power-politicking right. His mental habits don't really change, and his moralism doesn't abate, because he sustains it more to restore his own good odor and emotional equilibrium than to deepen his insights and convictions and to reach out to ordinary American Jews or the ordinary Israelis around me in the park.
The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg notes that "the essay's placement, in the New York Review of Books, the one-stop shopping source for bien-pensant anti-Israelism, is semi-tragic. If Beinart's goal is to talk to the great mass of American Jews who support the institutions of American Jewry but who are troubled by certain trends in Israeli politics, this is not the way to do it. Who is he trying to convince? Timothy Garton Ash? Peter should have published this essay on Tablet, or some other sort of publication not associated with Tony Judt's disproportionate hatred of Jewish nationalism."
The supreme irony for Beinart is that the extremes at both ends of the Israel controversy touch each other within him in no small part because he carries both of their ethno-cultural inflections. These do matter: In the Israel controversy's public discourse and bare-knuckled politics, it's predominantly the descendants of Russian and Eastern European Jews -- whether American neoconservatives like Robert Kagan and Bill Kristol or members of the Knesset like Natan Sharansky and Avigdor Lieberman -- who drive the cankered, bitter, increasingly fascistic Jewish nationalism, with its opportunistic abuses of religion and its contempt for any social-welfarism that reminds it even fleetingly of the Communist totalitarianism that some of them escaped.
At the other extreme of the controversy, it's Britons -- and British Jews who are unlucky enough to have internalized British stereotypes of Jews in their formative years -- who dominate the cankered, bitter, obsessive, and hypocritically fine-spun loathing of Israel. Political decay, impotence and bitterness slither out of people in peculiar ways, and, for too many Brits, who have so much more to regret and apologize for and so much bottomless hypocrisy to plumb than Israel ever will, the anguish of decline slithers out against the Jews in eerily disembodied, oddly passionless ways:
"How odd of God to Choose the Jews," runs a characteristically disdainful verse by the 20th Century British journalist William Norman Ewer. (To which my own riposte is, "Moses, Jesus, Spinoza; Marx, Einstein, and Freud; no wonder the gentiles are annoyed.")
Well, there are lots of annoying people and things in the world, but British Jews who swallowed Ewer's hook on some playground or classroom in their early years seem condemned to writhe with it, much as American blacks who've internalized a standard of idealized whiteness turn it against blacks who are darker-skinned than themselves, and much as German Jews who'd internalized an idealized German kultur loathed the embarrassing Ostjuden from... Russia and Eastern Europe. Here - and let us not mince words - we are talking about self-hatred, a cold, fine-spun, exacting usurper of sound judgment.
Beinart's ancestors came from Lithuania, but before World War I they migrated, with a sizable contingent of other Litvaks, to South Africa. In the interwar years of Wilsonian nationalist awakening In Lithuania and all over Europe, many more Lithuanian Jews saw what was rising around them in their home of 500 years and opted for Zionism, transforming their ancestral, liturgical Hebrew into an old/new language and migrating to Palestine in the 1920s and 30s. Still others opted for the more universal promise of Communism in Europe and Russia, and others for capitalist opportunity in America. Those who stayed put were slaughtered -- more than 135,000 of them in the woods and fields around their towns and were buried in mass trenches by the Nazi Einsatzgruppen and their Lithuanian recruits in the summer of 1941.
Some Lithuanian-Jewish Communists had fled not to the USSR but to South Africa as well as to America, among them Joseph Slovo, a founder of the African National Congress. A few of the next generation of South African Jews were ANC sympathizers, like the young Ian Shapiro, now a political scientist at Yale. And some of these leftists later became neo-conservatives or bureaucratic apparatchiks in the manner I've mentioned, grafting an old mental morphology onto Established Power rather than onto a revolutionary pursuit of Power.
Beinart's family and most other South African Jews weren't leftists. They came seeking freedom from persecution and bourgeois. But in South Africa they internalized the idealized British standards I've mentioned, and few were immune to internalizing the "odd" but unrelenting British discomfort and pretended bemusement about Jews.
All this prompts many a British Jew's own efforts at expiation and projection. Even young Beinart, although he grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts and attended the Buckingham Brown and Nichols School and then Yale, where he was influenced by the Jewish nationalist political theorist Steven Smith, eventually spent a year at Oxford reckoning with whatever aspirations and insecurities the Brits of South Africa had implanted in his parents and, through them, in him.
This is a recipe for the unsavory mix of aspirations and fears we encountered in his writings and his trajectory as I sketch them briefly in bookforum. Although I don't share their positions, Chait and Goldberg have a point: Beinart, like the estimable Tony Judt, himself a British Jew, is right in principle about Israel's worst apologists, but he overstates his case for reasons having more to do with swift, dark currents in history and himself than with the complicated realities in Israel and Palestine.
How is Beinart resolving this? He is fulfilling a certain British stereotype of Jews. Above on this page, Bernard Avishai notes that Beinart recently "told Jeffrey Goldberg: '...my grandmother used to say, "the Jews are like rats," we leave the sinking ship. So yes, I'm a Zionist. I'm close enough to people who still have their bags packed.' He takes for granted that American Jews constitute a distinct 'community,' replete with communitarian institutions and an 'Establishment'"
I don't like what kind of American this makes him. Yes, history has often forced Jews to live with their bags packed. But if America is about anything, it's about becoming a republic where no one has to live that way. In Beinart I sense a shiftiness about this -- from his bombastic, crude, and suspect patriotism of a few years ago to what he tells Goldberg now about keeping his bags packed.
Again, I'm not excusing anything about Israel. There are plenty of dark, swift currents swirling around me here in Tel Aviv, to say nothing of Jerusalem and occupied Palestine. I'm just looking at hundreds of decent, ordinary people and realizing that there are wiser ways than Beinart's to be right about what their American Jewish cheerleaders and supposed champions are getting wrong.
Ack, really. Just all of you stop making this about Peter Beinart's pea-brained epiphanies. He never should have been elevated to such a level of cultural and political importance in the first place. Hundreds of people write smarter things than he does here at TPM every day and they aren't brought into the larger conversations the way this know-nothing nobody has been. If you want better politics you can't put these kinds of people at the top of your priority list. Oh look, Peter Beinart's grocery list. What does it mean?
May 19, 2010 11:10 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thank you.
May 19, 2010 12:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
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February 24, 2011 10:36 AM | Reply | Permalink
Thank you.
May 19, 2010 12:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
Oh look, Peter Beinart's grocery list. What does it mean?
That it's ALL the fault of those British self-hating Jews.
May 19, 2010 12:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
One can see here, already, where this thread of comments is going, and almost all of them lack is a forthright explanation of what the writers believe the people around me in this Tel Aviv park should do, or what should be done to them.
Most of you live in America and expect to go on living there, posting your posts and living your lives, despite all you know about the way the country was settled (and conquered, something like genocide, and I won't quibble here about the word), about the way its economy was built (heavily on slavery), and about the numbers of innocent people who've been slaughtered in brutal American misadventures abroad. Yet you live there, and expect to go on living there in a modicum of peace and well-being.
What do you believe you should do, or should accept having to you, in order to justify how your are living? And how does your answer differ, if at all, from what you think Israeli Jews should do, or have done to them? Spell it out, please.
Peter Beinart was a loud supporter and promoter of the U.S.'s most recent bloody misadventure, and it seems to me that he is atoning for it partly via condemning Israel. His latest book (which I reviewed in Bookforum and is linked in my post) does "atone" for the American side of his misspent years at The New Republic, not by reprising much of his war-mongering there but by re-assessing American foreign-policy itself. He is reorienting himself, and in the Bookforum revie, I give him my measured applause but wonder whether something about his atonement isn't also a little too convenient.
Similar reassessments are going on in Israel, where many things about Zionism are being reconsidered ("Zionism Reconsidered" was actually the title of one of Hannah Arendt's most prescient essays, which is in the collection of her Jewish Writings that I mention, link, and quote in my post.)
But in Israel's case, unlike America's, reconsideration has existential dangers. It's not as if most Israelis could or should return to the warm and welcoming bosom of Eastern Europe or Russia, or to the Arab countries where, in fact, 40% of Israeli Jews come from. What, then? One state? Two states? No state?
What I am asking is that those of you who are so morally aroused that you are posting so angrily here explain why you are expecting or demanding more of average Israelis than you are expecting or demanding of yourselves. If you are going to be morally, philosophically, or politically consistent, shouldn't some of you leave the U.S. and find another place and way to live? Explain, please, how exactly you intend to pay for America's original and ongoing sins, and how you expect Israelis to pay for theirs.
May 20, 2010 11:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
I will cough up a lung if you get anything more sophisticated than: two wrongs don't make a right...as a response...
a more nuanced response would be to view the situation through the prism of an Oz novel or with the haunted house melancholy of an Amichai poem...I don't know, he writes, if history repeats itself...but I know you do...they have put up many flags (he writes elsewhere)...we have put up many flags...
there are reasons the world often feels like a Graham Greene novel and usually it is because History does seem to have its own cunning (to borrow a phrase) and in that mysterious cunning one often finds a trap...a state of moral ambiguity...
what Kundera means in the Unbearable Lightness of Being... while also condemning the thugs...and wearily resigning himself to a terrible sense of what shall we do...
American brutality, as one of the more strident critics here put it recently, produced, with the assistance of god-fearing folks like, Verner von Braun, rockets to the moon...on the other hand...as Tom Lehrer phrases it about the same man..."all the widows and cripples of old London town...who owe their large pensions to...Verner von Braun...where the rockets come down is not my department...says Verner von Braun..."
I hear the von Braun space center in Alabama is really very impressive...I know a woman who took space camp classes there...she's in her third year of medical school...she's going to save lives when she can...and she went to a class in a school named for a man who tried to win the world for gangsters...
so it goes...
As I said...it reminds me of the scene at the end of Past Continuous...where Israel walks out of the hospital...but of course it is on point to remember that the books begins on April fools Day...
May 20, 2010 11:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
No one's saying that two wrongs make a right; my point is that, in politics, a double standard can turn your right into a wrong.
With a few welcome exceptions, this thread doesn't get serious until somewhere after the 90th comment, and I hope that readers will get there!
May 21, 2010 1:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
perhaps I was less than clear...I mean that it would surprise me if you got anything more sophisticated than that as a response to your interesting article...I do not think you are saying two wrongs make a right...I think your piece offers nuance and context...I didn't agree with all of it but found it interesting...
as I said it put me in mind of Shabtai's Past Continuous...and of a Yekka Prince I knew...those posts may be lost in the vortex but they are here on the thread.
Cheers
Marlow
May 21, 2010 3:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
a more nuanced response would be to view the situation through the prism of an Oz novel or with the haunted house melancholy of an Amichai poem...
Nuance here, means seeing things only from the perspective of Jews.
May 21, 2010 7:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
I don't care who the writer is only that they are intelligent...for example read Genet...hardly a fan of Israel but brilliant...or Graham Greene who was a fan of no government but was also brilliant...or read Darwish...or Adunis...or Mafouz...or Marquez...or Gordimer...or anyone else you like...but Plato was a fascist and the ideal city state is only ideal for those who hate what art reveals...which is complexity...
May 22, 2010 4:26 PM | Reply | Permalink
I pointed out that your sense of complexity of the situation in Palestine is based on listening only to Jewish voices. In reply, you added a whole list of writers from all over the world, proving my point. You're sense of "complexity" and "nuance" is built on silencing Palestinians. If you really cared for "complexity" you would have been able to mention a Palestinian poet or writer. They do exist, but you obviously think that one can get all the "nuance" of the situation that one needs from Jews only.
May 22, 2010 4:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
you fucking illiterate clown...
Adunis is from Syria...
and Darwish was Palestinian...
.
go fuck yourself...
and go read a book...
if you can...
May 22, 2010 5:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
I take it that you don't really love me.
Sigh. I'll have to live with that knowledge.
May 22, 2010 6:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
you didn't even recognize Darwish...
it's like talking about working class Liverpool in the 1960s...
and saying...
The Quarrymen...who are they...now let me tell you about England...
you're a joke...
live with that...
and being exposed as a fraud...
May 23, 2010 8:42 AM | Reply | Permalink
and Mafouz...
you fucking functional illiterate ass...
was from Egypt...
and I mentioned them...
because unlike you...
I can...
read...
May 22, 2010 5:24 PM | Reply | Permalink
In Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, she makes the point that what was peculiar about Eichmann was his ordinariness, his lack of any real "evil core". She calls this the banality of evil by which she means that the caricature of the Evil Person we have is inaccurate.
Take the German people. A highly civilized and moral people turned into accomplices to mass murder just by some clever media massage by the likes of Goebbels. How is that possible? Arendt concludes that what such people lack is a sufficient amount of thought. In particular thought constituting an internal dialogue within themselves. They simply are not reflective. They are superficial like most people. And because it is a superficial phenomenon that is not amenable to reason it can easily spread like a fungus.
When asking how it is possible that a people who contributed Moses, Spinoza, Marx, and Einstein to the world could not see that what they are doing to Palestinians is evil, you need to merely reflect on Arendt's analysis. No I'm not equating the holocaust with Israeli expansionist occupation. I'm merely pointing out that we would think that both should have evoked outrage amongst their respective people but they did not; at least not for the most part.
Given that that's the way it is in the modern world, the idea that political power must be fused with MORAL judgment (something that neoconservatives advocate, except that one suspects their understanding of "moral" amounts to not much more than obfuscating pabulum aimed at assuaging the masses in order to pursue imperial aims).
Here is where I am disturbed by Arendt's insistence that the political must be divorced from the moral; something which apparently Jim Sleeper goes along with. On the contrary! Since we cannot expect the Israeli people to stop their government from their present course, it behooves us--as a force majeure --to make them see the light.
May 22, 2010 1:28 AM | Reply | Permalink
Um... Andrew! What is there in your last sentence that is either true or advisable? There is quite a debate going on in Israel, whose governing coalitions fall every 18 months on the average. And what is the philosophical justification for the your assertion of what it behooves us to do?
May 22, 2010 2:19 AM | Reply | Permalink
"What I am asking is that those of you who are so morally aroused that you are posting so angrily here explain why you are expecting or demanding more of average Israelis than you are expecting or demanding of yourselves. If you are going to be morally, philosophically, or politically consistent, shouldn't some of you leave the U.S. and find another place and way to live? Explain, please, how exactly you intend to pay for America's original and ongoing sins, and how you expect Israelis to pay for theirs."
But as they are hypocrites obsessed with Jews they can not answer except with more invective and even less reason...(and sorry to say Keats and Negative Capability is here like asking kindergartners about Heisenberg)
I am beginning to suspect that your last line is a key to understanding their obsession with Jews...
as they are powerless to change the Pax Americana or to atone in any meaningful way for "past sins" or even current ones...
what better method than to change the topic and pose as fire-breathing liberals and leftists condemn Israel (notice the insistence on the recurring meme of how the once honorable Isralies have lapsed into the sin of power politics and Apartheid)...while fundamentally ignoring not just America's corruption (they pay lip-service to it as an issue) but ignoring their part in it; their part in maintaining it...
that's it...that's the key...
they couldn't summon the courage to do a damn thing about their guilt so...
fall back on the oldest trick in the book...
blame the Jews...
the eternal scapegoat...
May 25, 2010 9:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
Agreed. Who cares what this nobody Beinart writes or believes? He's just another well connected, over priveleged but not very well informed writer.
May 19, 2010 1:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
Destor, you really don't understand how the "intellectual" world of the US works, do you? let me explain it. The system is called a "court", and the "intellectuals" are really courtiers. And this is how it works:
There are some people who write the right things. They matter. That has nothing to do with their wisdom, or intelligence or knowledge or being right or anything. It means they know the right people and subscribe to the same beliefs that are "acceptable". An "acceptable" belief may be wrong, and it may be that everybody acknowledge that it is wrong. But still, the opposite of an "acceptable" wrong belief is unacceptable.
The people who matter matter because they talk about each other's acceptable beliefs, and they say about these beliefs that they are acceptable, which makes them acceptable, since an acceptable belief is a belief that the people who matter accept. Sometimes they deign to write about other people, who don't matter, to say that what they say is unacceptable, although sometimes they have to accept that those unacceptable beliefs are right, which doesn't make them acceptable.
Sometimes, order from the king, which uniquely in this particular court is not a person, but the diffuse presence of money, that what used to be unacceptable is now acceptable. The news spread slowly, and over time, all the people who matter follow. But it takes time, and while the news spread, some people stop talking to each other because the others got the news before them. The people who held the acceptable beliefs when they were still unacceptable remain unacceptable, because the important thing is not to be right but to be acceptable.
If you just let it sink you will see that the whole thing is a beauty to behold, how it all comes together.
Just accept it.
May 19, 2010 6:43 PM | Reply | Permalink
It's tough to accept when I've spent so much time and energy honing my own voice. I frankly feel shut out despite what I think are some pretty developed abilities.
May 20, 2010 9:40 AM | Reply | Permalink
Join the club. The very people who set up the financial crisis were called to fix it. I think that example proves the point Evildoer made above.
We are truly living in the most interesting times in American history. Our generation will be confronted with the reality of real change. Not phony change, but real change. The type of change that can't be papered over by nostalgia and cliched appeals to Never Existent Past.
The Tea Party is the last gasp of Mythological America. They are loud Change Deniers. But like King Canuc, they can raise their hands forever, and the tide will still come in.
But in everyday America (where we all actually live), the bill for globalism, crummy school, looting of the public treasury, are all coming due.
We need a new paradigm of what being an American means. It'll be a bumpy ride, but I still believe in the national project.
May 20, 2010 10:16 AM | Reply | Permalink
That's King Canute. Canute!
May 20, 2010 3:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks. My spelling bee career was short indeed.
May 20, 2010 5:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
There's some truth here, but on the whole your message is too pat. And your last sentence, ironical though you may have intended it to be, confirms your own penchant for patness. Surely the better course is to hover less close to the closed door and write something that soars over it. As your Avatar did.
May 22, 2010 2:56 AM | Reply | Permalink
You're not wrong about Beinart, Destor23, and I suspect that his great conversion is part pilgrimage of conscience, part career move, and part politics.
But this long post isn't only or even mainly about Beinart. It's a rich and savory stew that, inevitably, has attracted a frenzy of black flies, as evidenced in the comments below.
My post makes about a dozen negative and indeed harsh criticisms of Israel, but it also says some very admiring or at least mitigating things about the country, too, and some very critical things about some of its critics, including Beinart.
That is all simply too much for Israel-haters who double so unctuously below as champions of the oppressed, and their comments will exhibit their pain. Some of them tell us and themselves that they are suffering for humanity, in this case Palestinians. But most if not all of them don't care a whit more about Palestinians than do any of the Arab nations that assiduously blocked the nurture and creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank from 1948 to 1967, when Israel was doing nothing to prevent it.
What we have below is pajama histrionics, and the remonstrants are too agitated to notice how anti-capitalist my post and the linked BookForum review are. Their moral fury consumes them.
The best thing for others to do is to sweep the flies aside, print out the post, and take your time with it, away from all the buzzing.
May 20, 2010 10:08 AM | Reply | Permalink
Sorry, I didn't mean to reduce your entire post to observations about Beinart. I also admit some professional jealousy in this regard. I really feel like he got some opportunities that others of us deserved. Okay, that I deserved.
May 20, 2010 5:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
Destor
the very thing that makes you such a treasure here at the cafe is what prevents you from being accepted by the MSM. But there is a logic to that: The MSM must appeal to a sufficently large enough slice of the people AND be acceptable to those who write the checks that what goes on at the cafe simply just does not qualify.
May 23, 2010 11:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
When asking how it is possible that a people who contributed Moses, Spinoza, Marx, and Einstein to the world could not see that what they are doing to Palestinians is evil, you need to merely reflect on Arendt's analysis. No I'm not equating the holocaust with Israeli expansionist occupation. I'm merely pointing out that we would think that both should have evoked outrage amongst their respective people but they did not; at least not for the most part. günlük burç - kayu izle
January 24, 2011 9:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
Similar reassessments are going on in Israel, where aşk falı many things about Zionism are being reconsidered aşk falı ("Zionism Reconsidered" was actually the title of one of Hannah Arendt's most prescient essays, which is in the collection of her Jewish Writings that I mention, link, and quote in my post.)
But in Israel's case, unlike America's, reconsideration has existential türkçe fal bak aşk falı dangers. It's not as if most Israelis could or should return zar falı to the warm and welcoming bosom of Eastern Europe or Russia, or to the Arab countries where, in zar falı fact, 40% of Israeli Jews come from. aşk falı What, then? One state? Two states? No state? aşk falı
What I am asking is that those of you who are so morally aroused that you are posting so angrily here explain why you are expecting or demanding more of average Israelis aşk falı than you are aşk falı expecting or demanding of yourselves. If you zar falı are going to be morally, philosophically, or politically consistent, shouldn't some of zar falı you leave zar falı the U.S. and find another place and way to live? Explain, please, how exactly you intend to pay zar falı for America's original and ongoing sins, and how you expect Israelis to pay for theirs.
January 25, 2011 12:55 AM | Reply | Permalink
Not, not excusing anything, just arguing that Americans shouldn't try to help Palestinians by putting pressure on Israel, for example, by boycott, because that would be "hypocritical". Much more honest and virtuous to do nothing, avoid the extremes of Goldberg and Judt, and just bask in one's middle-of-the-road-wisdom. Hypocrisy is not the worse offense. Being able to help and refusing to do so for the sake of not being hypocritical is much worse, except for total narcissists.
PS. Tel Aviv is not "Israel." Have you been in an unrecognized village in the negev? How about a visit to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wadi_al-Na%27am ?
After that, we can speak about the virtues of militarism.
May 19, 2010 12:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
This nugget from Sleeper's post totally summarizes Israeli exceptionalism:
"To understand the dark side of Zionism you have to take a a moment to imagine what America would be like if it had had thousands of suicide bombings, proportionate to the 250 or so that drove Israel nearly crazy in the middle of the last decade but that Israel's critics never ponder. And yet, for all the paranoia, there was more than enough civic indignation in Israel last week to force Netanyahu's bone-heads to rescind their barring of the 81-year-old Noam Chomsky from entering the West Bank to teach at the Palestinian Birzeit University. "
Yes, the people Israel uprotted, oppressed and brutalized are the cause of the dark side of Zionism. So even when Israel murders, it's still the Arabs fault. And forget about all the kids the IDF murdered in Gaza, what really is offensive is that Chomsky was kept waiting.
May 19, 2010 1:50 PM | Reply | Permalink
safe to assume then that you will boycott all goods produced in America...
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/25/AR2007042502778.html
http://www.nirs.org/factsheets/pfsejfactsheet.htm
and of course you will never touch another drop of Fosters again...or watch a Russel Crowe film...
http://ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=33317
and of course...there goes that vacation to Europe...
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/apr/08/roma-discrimination-european-union
and after all an upstanding moralist such as yourself who wants to help the Palestinians so much...would call for a boycott of Europe because...
http://www.rferl.org/content/Georgia_Criticizes_French_Arms_Sales_To_Russia/1962310.html
and...
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,3121695,00.html
oh but wait...
the tribes of North America aren't being fucked over by Jews...so you don't care...and the French have been fucking the Africans since forever...
but you're certain Sleeper is a hypocrite because he doesn't mention Gaza or the West Bank but you...you're a member of the morality police...
even though you live in America and only type up screeds about the Jews...
and as to that cute wikii link you provided...
funny that it didn't explain what life was like for everyone (Jews included) in Israel in the 1950s...or 60s...or 70s...just the Bedouin...
and as long as we are talking about the Bedouin...
care to say how outraged you are by what they do to their women when they suspect them of having sex outside of marriage...
oh but wait...you don't care because they're not Jews...
I'd say go read a good book but we've already established you're a functional illiterate so it would be a waste of time...
go ahead sweetpea...
respond...
or don't...
the point here is to just goon establishing context for all the people reading this thread...
and before you think: he's just excusing the awful treatment of the Bedouin by bringing up the awful treatment of the tribes...
sorry sweetpea...
I'm not...it's to show that your outrage is myopic Jew-centric and hypocritical...
and that your criticism of Sleeper is just what we should expect from a clown who talks about supporting the Palestinians...
but doesn't even know who Darwish was...
May 24, 2010 6:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
You are an idiot, so keep repeating the apartheid apologist's talking points. We heard them a million times before, and the summary is always the same: "do nothing".
I will boycott what I want to boycott, and not what you want me to boycott, and I welcome every action that makes the world better, because the smallest good deeds done by a hypocrite is worth a million fully consistent moralists doing nothing.
As for Darwish, cf. http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/talk/blogs/e/v/evildoer/2010/04/identity-card-by-mahmoud-darwi.php
May 25, 2010 10:51 AM | Reply | Permalink
"done by a hypocrite"
so you admit it...
good for you...
perhaps there's hope...
next step...
a few classes on Arab and Palestinian literature...and a few on how to get over the pathology and neuroses that produced your obsession with Jews...
May 25, 2010 6:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
as to the Darwish poem...
safe to say you're equally outraged at the role the US plays in empowering racism in oh let's spin the wheel...New Orleans...or Baltimore...or the Jews being held hostage in Damascus...
or do you only resolve to be outraged by Jews...
and a funny thing about the "Nakba"...
the Arabs participated in the legally binding UN vote for the partition of the Mandate...
lost the vote...
started an illegal war...
committed war crimes...
and then did it all over again...
and again...
and again...
and kept losing...
but of course since you've admitted to being a hyporcrite...
it should surprise no one that you sound...
like a hypocrite...
who is obsessed...
with Jews...
May 25, 2010 6:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
So many words, yet no room for actual discussion of the continued occupation of the West Bank, no room for actual discussion of the Settlements or road blocks, no room for actual mention of the de facto residence and housing freeze for Arabs in all of expanded East Jerusalem, no room for mention of hundres of civilians killed by Israel in Gaza. No room even for the simpple fact that both sides violated Oslo before the ink was dry (increased settlements by Israel, incitement by the PA). No all we get is a history of Lithuanian Jews. Pathetic and pointless.
May 19, 2010 1:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
What can't be seen from Masarik st. doesn't exist.
The point is, Sleeper just landed in Tel-Aviv, and he already thinks like an Israeli. Or perhaps, with all the shared values between Israel and the US (colonialism, militarism, belief in manifest destiny and the redemptive power of violence), Sleeper's transition was, err...smooth.
May 19, 2010 1:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
especially if you've never heard of Darwish...
May 25, 2010 5:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
here is all you need to know about beinart:
"I'm not asking Israel to be Utopian. I'm not asking it to allow Palestinians who were forced out (or fled) in 1948 to return to their homes. I'm not even asking it to allow full, equal citizenship to Arab Israelis, since that would require Israel no longer being a Jewish state. I'm actually pretty willing to compromise my liberalism for Israel's security and for its status as a Jewish state."
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/05/goldblog-vs-peter-beinart-part-ii/56934/
beinart wants arabs to be field negros in israel, to sit in back of the bus, and to go only to arab only bathrooms, to have less health care, and less job opportunities.
hey beinart do you keep your your menorah wrapped in your white KKK hood?
May 19, 2010 1:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
So a "liberal" believes in two-tiered citizenship? Could you ask Mr. Beinart which country has the right--not just the power--but the right to assign Jews to a lower tier of citizenship?
May 19, 2010 1:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
What a weird article. Mr. Beinart's outrage seems disconnected from what Mr. Sleeper is "seeing and sensing here in Israel," meaning a public park in Tel Aviv; therefore, Sleeper concludes, it must be animated by "swift, dark currents in history," a swoon-phrase he uses to gesture helplessly and poetically to Lithuanian migration patterns, Jewish self-hatred, and the legacy of growing up Anglophilic in South Africa. Or something.
It doesn't even occur to Sleeper in his long post that the source of outrage might lie neither in Tel Aviv nor in history's swift dark currents but rather in today's occupied territories.
What a weird, blinkered, pretentious, morally narcissistic piece.
May 19, 2010 1:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
What a weird article. Mr. Beinart's outrage seems disconnected from what Mr. Sleeper is "seeing and sensing here in Israel," meaning a public park in Tel Aviv; therefore, Sleeper concludes, it must be animated by "swift, dark currents in history," a swoon-phrase he uses to gesture helplessly and poetically to Lithuanian migration patterns, Jewish self-hatred, and the legacy of growing up Anglophilic in South Africa. Or something.
It doesn't even occur to Sleeper in his long post that the source of outrage might lie neither in Tel Aviv nor in history's swift dark currents but rather in today's occupied territories.
What a weird, blinkered, pretentious, morally narcissistic piece.
May 19, 2010 1:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
The more the Zionists write, the more they expose Zionism. I hope Sleeper keeps writing. If he continues on, he'll ultimately praise the Confederacy because Judah Benjamin was the South's Attorney General, Secretary of War, and Secretary of State.
And (channeling Mr. Sleeper) to understand Mr. Benjamin, you need to imagine what it was like living in the proximity to so many slaves. Ever heard of Nat Turner....?
May 19, 2010 2:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
Again, I'm not excusing anything. There are plenty of dark, swift currents here. I'm just looking at hundreds of decent, ordinary people and observing that there are better ways than Beinart's to be right.
Translation:
1. a tourist's stroll in one neighborhood in Tel-Aviv gives one more insight and more authority on what political choices are right or wrong than everything that a) Palestinians might say. b) everything that is based on scholarship or in depth analysis.
2. The existence of ordinary people means than one can forget, r at least do nothing, about the plight of other ordinary people because certain ordinary people are too extra-ordinary for their ordinary routines to be disturbed by the ordinary needs of other people who are, apparently, less than ordinary, or less than people.
May 19, 2010 2:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
Give it a rest, guy. You haven't a clue who you're talking to, and it's not my obligation to tell you things that anyone can see you'd only abuse. Why don't you try to publish your own stuff somewhere where an editor will help you say things that are true. Then you can link it here for all of us to read.
May 19, 2010 3:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
Hit a nerve, did he? Nowadays, the serfs no longer bow when the carriages go by.
BTW, doesn't Rick Steves have a walking tour of Tel Aviv with a numbnail explanation of the I-P conflict?
May 19, 2010 3:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
The cross apologists for apartheid have to bear these days!
May 19, 2010 4:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
Recycling serfs and carriages is cute but a bit hoary, and if you mistake a TPMCafe post for a carriage, you must be a chipmunk.
Actually, I'll take back that metaphor and say that the stew I've prepared in this post is so rich and savory that it's sure to attract a frenzy of black flies. The best thing for others to do is to sweep them aside, print out the post, and enjoy it, away from the buzzing trolls.
May 20, 2010 9:43 AM | Reply | Permalink
Memo to Jim: Just because we criticize your reasoning and solipsisms, doesn't make us trolls.
May 20, 2010 10:21 AM | Reply | Permalink
The one who needs an editor is you sleepy. St. Paul, not St. Peter, had an epiphany while on the road to Damascus. St. Peter is the guy who denied Christ three times before breakfast. It's not 'mix and match' you know?
that's funny.
http:/jewssansfrontieres.blogspot.com Any time you want to say hello. Oh yes, you mean in the media where you have to be a Zionist to get published, like Dissent and The New Yorker? No, I cannot publish in that media. You are right. But I'd rather tell the truth than be loved by assholes.
May 19, 2010 3:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
Any good editor would help. It needn't be a Zionist one, although you seem to be under the impression that all editors are Zionists.
"St. Peter" is a reference to Peter Beinart. You do need an editor, EvilDoo. Really. You're a little overwrought. But I'll promise you this: The next thing you publish with an editor's help will be the next thing of yours that I'll read.
May 19, 2010 4:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
Jim, you're nicer than that. Come on.
May 19, 2010 4:50 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yes, St. Peter is a reference to Beinart. I got it. But it is the WRONG reference. You are so full of yourself that you cannot even admit that you got a reference wrong. I guess it's hard to admit with a degree from Harvard and all. Sorry to piss you off so badly.
May 19, 2010 4:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
Mr. Sleeper,
in light of your introduction to the "it makes me want to thwo up" (sic!) gang I thought you'd find the link below amusing for its telling glimpse into internet/blog posting...in particular I mean the description of the "Lord of the Flies types in their muumuus chain-smoking parliaments" etc...
http://childoftv.blogspot.com/2006/05/fourteen-days-of-west-wing-day-7-major.html
as to the "swift dark currents" I'm put somewhat in mind of the end of Shabtai's Past Continuous where Israel walks out of the hospital...as if to suggest a state of near-permanent ambiguity or perhaps something Sisyphean...the same swift currents perhaps?
as to other lines that are suggestive or stand out...I am puzzled by the description of M.h. as a "...sometime Nazi" almost, coup passe, no? I mean it is more serious than the sarcasm of saying, how can one be a little bit pregnant and yet of course goose for the gander the right would never apply an even brush to tar Arendt and Leo Struass...
and lastly as to the fine spun mysteries of how and why the polar extremes meet in your subject I am reminded of a Yekka Prince I knew who lived in Rehavia...with his Mizrahi goddess...and the looks of disdain they got when they walked through the 'hood (as it were...)
who the on-lookers were more afraid of would be hard to say...themselves of course as well as him for what they would call betrayal and of her for her beauty and what they would colonize by calling her "exotic" and thus without saying it make her dangerous...
but the swift dark currents storm and abate...
Simon Schama in his celebration of what was then called the triumph of capitalism in the wake of the soviet collapse and Reaganism and Thathcerism run amok, revved up an old story about a Chinese diplomat (Zhou Enlai?) being asked in Paris, (circa 1973) what he thought the effect of 1789 was...
too soon to tell, was the answer...
Thanks for the article.
cheers
M
May 19, 2010 11:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
Sorry! forgot to say that Scaham's retelling of the story is in his introduction to Citizens his very British take on the meanings of 1789.
May 19, 2010 11:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
thought you'd find the link below amusing
Well I did even if he didn't; much obliged. :-)
May 20, 2010 2:06 AM | Reply | Permalink
My memory was sparked after reading the Lord of the Flies tone to the posts and I googled the muumuu parliament smokers and...voila...one of my favorite scenes from that show...I always thought the Mcmurphy reference was hilarious...
cheers
M
May 20, 2010 9:19 AM | Reply | Permalink
You know the truth and you know your opponents are assholes. In political affairs those attitudes pretty much define an asshole.
In political affairs its impossible to get above group, class, race, or national interests. Impossible to get above who has power and wealth, and who doesn't. That's what the fighting is about.
Propagandists, blatherers, chatterers are just that; advocates for special interests, not knights in shining armor...or knights of any sort.
By the way, I agree with you about Sleeper's post and generally admire the way you express yourself although I don't usually like your positions.
May 20, 2010 4:12 PM | Reply | Permalink
Nope, the truth is true. and lies are lies, and it is possible to get above race, class and national interest. People do it all the time. Just because it isn't always easy, or because there is always a residue of reality in excess of truth, doesn't make it impossible or worthless to seek the truth. Sure, there are places where one doesn't know. But the existence of gray is not an argument against the existence of black and white. people who only see opinions clashing and deny that some things are true and some things are false usually have something to loose from the truth, although some are just victims of deliberate confusion.
People who want to get to the bottom of things engage in open discussion. people who fear the truth engage in reducing everything to allegedly equally valid opinions, or just recoil from arguments and assert their credentials and privileged status, as Sleeper does in this thread.
Insisting on the truth is not the "definition of an asshole" in politics. It is the condition of possibility of an exchange between equals, because the question "are we equal" is a question of fact, and the answer is an assertion that is either true or false. And therefore the possibility of telling the truth is the condition of possibility of justice. Those who don't want the truth of assertions decided do not want justice, which means they defend injustice.
May 20, 2010 7:12 PM | Reply | Permalink
We differ fundamentally.
Sometimes it is possible to discern some truths and to identify some lies. But far more often, grey is the rule. That's why historians are still arguing about the proper interpretation, and even the nature of, events which took place long, long ago.
As for conversations between equals, honest conversations which depend on fact and logic, they do take place, but rarely. And they hardly ever influence partisans who are less interested in truth than in winning. That's why I rarely post to sites like these, whether right or left. You find yourself either preaching to the choir or preaching at the wrong church. Useless.
May 20, 2010 9:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
"And they hardly ever influence partisans who are less interested in truth than in winning. That's why I rarely post to sites like these, whether right or left."
There seems to be some unconscious assumptions here that there are "partisans" on the left and right, and truth-seekers in the center and that only partisans post a great deal and of course care nothing about the truth. This is not my impression. I think there are partisans and truth-seekers across the political spectrum, though given my own biases I might see a higher percentage on one side or the middle or the other, depending on the issue. Centrists often take a completely unwarranted comfort in the notion that they occupy the center, apparently not thinking about how much the center shifts over the years towards what used to be an extreme position. Whether this applies to you I can't say.
Also, of course, the fact that people care enough to post with passion on an issue doesn't mean they aren't interested in what is true. It may or may not. People who don't have a liking for heated arguments have that right (I often avoid them myself on some issues), but that's a separate question from whether or not one cares about the truth.
May 21, 2010 10:33 AM | Reply | Permalink
Of course, you're right that there are partisans all across the political spectrum and that a passionate partisan is not necessarily blind to arguments which undermine his position. But how often does that actually happen? In my long experience as a lurker I would say almost never.
May 21, 2010 10:42 AM | Reply | Permalink
Doesn't the fact that you continue to post undercut your own argument?
May 21, 2010 5:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
Well Evildoer is right on this and you are wrong. We might be wrestling with finding the truth but that does not mean that there IS no truth but only some intermediate grey. The greyness is in our minds, reality is in black and white.
May 24, 2010 12:19 AM | Reply | Permalink
"Weren't we all implicated, since Bush had won in 2004 by a more decisive margin than Netanyahu would five years later?"
YES, we WERE implicated.
BUT:
1. W's America did not fundamentally rely on deceptive corruption of the national legislature of some completely different country. Bush and Cheney & Co. committed their outrageous cockups on their own (figleafs of willing coalitions strictly optional, no UN vetoes from elsewhere required). America has relied on no crooked counterpart to an AIPAC, at least not since roughly the days of Lafayette, when the analog to Mr. Sleeper's Tel Aviv laptop was a transatlantic mail delivery service taking months each way.
2. We got the hypocritical butterfingers of Bush, Cheney, Rove, et. al. off the levers of power here. Whatayahoo and the settler-nuts are still running Israel (into the ground of international pariahism).
Beinart's take on American pseudo-Zionist duplicity and hypocrisy is basically right on whether his ancestors were from Lithuania, Liguria, Lima or Luanda.
May 19, 2010 4:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
I'm still smirking that we actually take seriously a writer who claims you can--and should--have a "democracy" in 2010 with two tiers of citizenship. And he shows his "moderation" by actually supporting this distinction!
Beinart is a moderate....vintage 1858.
May 19, 2010 5:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
israel is an advanced country. it is 500 years ahead of saudi arabia. saudi arabis is in the 12th century middle ages with kings, beheadings, and serfs. meanwhile, israel is in the 17th century colonialism period.
May 19, 2010 6:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
and thank god America is a cutting edge 21st century colonizer that provides a haven for people like you to spout off about how Israel is in the 17th century...
and doesn't take your tax money to support enlightened places like Saudi Arabia...
so the difference between a pure as the driven snow person such as yourself who gives their money to support the subjugation of women and an Israeli who give their money to support the subjugation of a Palestinian is...
that you know a hypocrite when you see one...
just so long as they are in Tel Aviv...
and no one holds a mirror to your face...
oh but i forgot...you already made your case...
America is an "on-going noble experiment"...
but Israel...
well...you know...
it's full...
of...
Jews...
May 24, 2010 6:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
MythB, I have not scrutinized every line of his long NY R of B article, but surely the thrust of Beinart's argument there has to do with the long nasty drift of Israel towards ever more cowardly brutal intransigence and a more recent but more welcome growing dissent from this amongst the sorts of intellectual Jewish circles that were traditionally strong supporters of Israel. I suppose one could find minor flaws here or there in this otherwise undeniable valid if politically uncomfortable argument (politically uncomfortable for those who have been unjustifiably comfortable for too long) but what the heck does it have to do with classes of citizenship? It seems that your beef with Sleeper is not his taking pot shots at Beinart for an article Beinart did NOT write, but rather that Sleeper's non-written Beinart NYRB article addresses a different other topic than your non-written Beinart NYRB article. OR has Beinart in fact said something somewhere about two-tiered citizenship? Instead of mimicing Sleeper's dodging but "not excusing" why don't you be specific about this two-tier business, whatever it is (Arabs in Israel proper?, Gaza vs West Bank?) ?
May 20, 2010 8:20 AM | Reply | Permalink
Pretty simlpe, PTroub. In a real democracy, there is only one class of citizenship. So if Israel is a democracy then any citizen of Israel should have equal rights. Hence, if the Palestinians that live within the internationally recognized borders of Israel are considered citizens, they should have absolutely the same rights as Jewish Israelis. If not, then Israel is not a democracy anymore than the Jim Crow South was a democracy.
What Beinart reveals is the essential conflict between Zionism and liberalism. Because those pesky Arabs actually exist, the mytholigical "Jewish State" (free, equal, democractic, and Jewish) cannot exist. So he claims that the "right" for Jews to control a state exceeds all over considerations.
Here's a thought. If the Jews absolutely have to have a Jewish State so badly, then they can reduce their borders to those areas where the Jew lives lives. If they want the real estate, they get the people living on it.
May 20, 2010 10:30 AM | Reply | Permalink
MB, are you having a bad day? Your usual clever quips have been replaced by sloppiness in multiple directions. Never mind minor semantic sloppiness [Jim Crow South WAS democratic (small as well as big d) for whites and blacks who could pass literacy tests and pay poll taxes and avoid being lynched, there is an Arab party in the Knesset, and "the Jews (sic)...can reduce their borders to...where the Jew lives lives" (sic), i.e. none of America's five million Jews will be reducing any borders, thank you ].
The much bigger sloppiness is that you are ignoring what Beinart actually said in his NYRB piece, and making up, or quoting out of context, what he did say. He was speaking AGAINST the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and FOR your position that the real estate comes with people whose rights cannot be denied without rendering the whole illegitimate occupation amoral and hypocritical to boot. As a result your comments in critique of Beinart make even less sense than Sleepers'.
May 20, 2010 6:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
Hey, PTroub, yes I am having a bad day (see King Canute above!). I'm happy to take accept your analysis of Beinart, but the Jim Crow stuff is something else. You are confusing form with substance when you call the Jim Crow South a democracy. It is true that Jim Crow did not have de jure prohibitions on black citizenship, but it certainly had de facto exclusion.
As you know, in Jim Crow, (1) blacks were asked to take (impossible) literacy tests, which essentially disqualified anyone who tried to register; (2) if a black did successfully register, the voter would get a night visit from the Klan or the police ((often the same person) to discourage the voter from casting a ballot; and (3) voting and any other exercise of civil rights often led to loss of employment, an econmic boycott of business, a banks's refusal to lend seed money for planting season, etc. Essentially, the de facto oppression under Jim Crow was as strong as a de jure prohibition.
In law school, I remember the wonderful dissent of John Marshall Harlan in Plessy v. Ferguson, the famous case that validated "separate but equal."
Justice Harlan noted that in the South in 1896, it was an actionable defamation to call a white man a black man. A black man could never sue for being called a white man.
So, no, before 1965, the South was not a democracy.
May 20, 2010 6:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
MB, The US South was a democracy for whites and "passing blacks," unlike say most of the rest of the world in 1965 which consisted of oligarchies, tribal fiefs, totalitarian kleptocracies, and tinhorn military police states. Of course, Saudi Arabia's internal oppression does not excuse Israel's atrocious behavior domestically and internationally, but let's not pretend that Arabs in Israel are somehow being kept there as slaves against their will. They, like blacks in Jim Crow land sixty years ago, are second class citizens within a mostly democratic system. Your blurring of the important distinction between Israel proper and the occupied territories, would be like condemning the racist US of 1858 while acknowledging no difference between blacks in Mississippi and blacks in Massachusetts.
May 21, 2010 11:03 AM | Reply | Permalink
It's 2010, not 1964. Everything changes.
May 21, 2010 5:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
I know you are an advocate, not a truth seeker. But you and many others make a common mistake which I'd like to try to correct.
Israel's primary purpose, the reason it was established, is to serve as a haven for the Jewish people. It was, and is, meant to be a state governed by Jews and for Jews. Whether or not it is a capitalist democracy or a socialist welfare state or even an apartheid tyranny is secondary.
That's disturbing to many people for many reasons, some of them quite good. But those of you who insist that Israel discard that purpose in favor of secular, multi-ethnic democracy never, and I mean NEVER, insist that the surrounding Arab states do the same. That makes you, at best, terrible appeasers and, more likely, the worst of anti-semites.
May 21, 2010 11:04 AM | Reply | Permalink
careful...if you tell them the truth they get snappish and accuse you of the very things they are doing...
they accuse others of Exceptionalism and then dance around the connection between American interests and that which they condemn...in other words Israel is immoral for x y and z but the noble American Experiment is on-going and thus still open to modification...A.B.Yeshoua is a hypocrite for espousing Peace Now while still living in Israel bu Faulkner was innocent while living in Apartheid Mississippi...(and yes I am aware of Faulkners spirited condemnations of Jim Crow)
then they flip that around and say no it's not true...
but then you can point out that they have condemned Sleeper for sitting in a park in TA...
but wont condemn themselves for using machines made from slave labor...or that they pay taxes...and purchase goods produced by still more slaves...
and thus Sleepers question about just what should people do goes unanswered because the question and the answer are so paradoxical and complex that the pointy-headed appeasement crowd can't short circuit without actually answering the question...
it's easier to insist on a dialectic of good vs evil...with us or against us...
thus...they launch themselves from the high beam of moral outrage and stick the landing of American Exceptionalism...
and thus are using the very tactic they find abhorrent in others...
what they really mean is that Israel is a special and unique case...that it is uniquely illegitimate and uniquely immoral...
to maintain this fiction they insist that AIPAC is uniquely powerful and operates in isolation from all other lobbys...
the fact that this accusation is a bold faced lie and that it uses a stealth quality to insinuate that a gang of wealthy Jews operating in secret has taken control of American foreign policy is denied vehemently...
and when it raises hackles because it sounds exactly like the same tired excrement of the past...one is told there you go again! Every time someone criticizes Israel you scream Antisemitism!
no...not every time...
just when it sounds like Antisemitism...
sure they will concede that what happened to the tribes of North America was awful but then they will ignore posts where people say hey the Indians now have citizenship and the right to vote so how bad could it be...
except for the poverty...lack of oppurtunities...
malnutrition...corruption...exploitation drugs and violence...oh and the near total genocidal elimination of them as a people...it is true...they are citizens...
they will even concede that ghettos exist in America...but then they'll tell you that has nothing to do with Gaza or the West Bank...
because after all...the collapse of the Greek economy has nothing to do with the potential collapse of the American economy and things are not interconnected and so what if a liberal-minded person in Tel Aviv votes Peace Now...they are hypocrites...
but living in America...with its ghettos...full of people consigned to a violent scrum of drugs no jobs and endless rounds of race-baiting is different...completely different...ours is a noble experiment where as Zionism is illegitimate...
and they will concede that Israel should exist...within limitations they design...because they care so much for the Jews...and the Palestinians...
but seriously...you are of course correct...they may not intend it (though I find it hard to say they don't)but they sound exactly like appeasement-minded Antisemites...
decontextualise...deny historical cause and effect...move the goal post...
repeat...repeat...invective...repeat...
the result being a stone cyber wall immune to logic facts or reason...
good luck...
May 21, 2010 12:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
"A.B.Yeshoua is a hypocrite for espousing Peace Now while still living in Israel bu Faulkner was innocent while living in Apartheid Mississippi...(and yes I am aware of Faulkners spirited condemnations of Jim Crow)"
Actually, Faulkner was a bit of a hypocrite, a typical Southern liberal who wanted those Yankees to stop interfering. He wanted blacks to have equal rights, but not to upset the southern whites too much in the process. There are many similarities between the 50's South and modern Israel.
As for the rest of your post, there's a smidgeon of truth in it, but only a smidgeon. And frankly it's fascinating to me to see people adopting the Chomsky/Norm Finkelstein line IN DEFENSE of Israel. I first read about this issue seeing comparisons between how Israel treats the Palestinians with how America treated the Native Americans and it was meant as a condemnation of both. Nowadays the comparison is used by defenders of Israel. The responses you see aren't necessarily meant to say that America has done right by Native Americans--(you'd have to ask each individual what they meant to be sure)--they are meant to say that if one wants to take that comparison all the way, then Israel should let the Palestinians off the reservation.
There is something fundamentally perverse about this kind of "defense". I think it's meant to split critics of Israel in two--between those on the far left who would say "You're absolutely right, the US has a terrible human rights record, similar to Israel's" and those who might get caught up in the trap of trying to say we're much better. I wouldn't have predicted it, but politics tends to bring out the worst in people.
May 21, 2010 1:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
Indeed Fauklner was a bit of a hypocrite...just like everyone else which is one of the many themes running through his ouvre...that no one escapes...
however his views on Jim Crow are clear...
he was absolutely against it and at the same time though committed to a neo 19th century Romantic hope in redemption and ultimate liberation from the great historical death spiral he also saw History as a trap from which events themes and identities see-sawed back and forth over generations...and that those generational changes occurred with such glacial slowness that "change" was more fiction than fact...
he took the long view...which is the exact opposite of the line them up and condemn them NOW view being espoused here by the majority of posters...
and I see nothing typical about Faulkner at all...except perhaps for his accent...and he upset the local community no end...he was persona non grata among many of them and an apostate to most...
the point though was to use two figures from either place to highlight the inherent absurdity of the argument...History is a continuum...no end and no beginning...
and in our interconnected economy the idea of a singular route cause or an isolated group of causes for "the" "situation" in "the" west bank loses it's meaning...
a computer chip in Taiwan and the wheat fields of Kansas are as much "the Middle East" as Cairo and Tel Aviv...
thus the fury directed at one group or another is useless...and echos dead-end 19th century rhetoric of revolutions and national liberation movemtns that just ring hollow today...
and what is today called Apartheid already is the forge from which god only knows what other forces will emerge...which does not excuse it but rather creates a context...or attempts to...
so...
if Israel is an Apartheid state...
who is to blame...
who is responsible...
who pulls the levers and how does anyone change it...
no dount someone will say Likud is to blame the ones who vote for them and AIPAC...etc
but then like some quatum formula it breakds down into contradictions...
Likud is not a monolith any more than the deomcratic party in the US is...
the idea that the deomocrats don't talk off camera with their GOP counterparts and make deals is absurd...demonstrably false and so well documented that suggesting otherwise is just not to be taken seriously...
anymore than when people dismiss Israel's back door conversations with Iran or the Saudis or the Jordanians...or the Palestinians...
using the US as an example what do we find...
it is not Chomsky's argument at all...rather an argument that holds a world wide system of economic apartheid to blame for exploiting everyone in the permanent underclass or wage slave category...Isralies and Palestinians...everyone...
The US genocide against the tribes was a disaster...except that the Comanche were highly unlikely to storm Normandy...or invent penicillin...
which of course is a spurious point as the Comanche wouldn't have had to do it if the Europeans hadn't committed genocide in North America...
which is the point...
this is a view of History as a morass from which no one escapes...it is a circle and there is zero evidence to suggest it is not a circle from which anyone escapes...zero evidence...
Faulkner's view...Yeshoua's view...or the aforementioned Shabtai...
the idea that we are in a position of any moral integrity sufficient enough to call Israel an Apartheid state doesn't pass the giggle test...
where do our taxes go...
with whom do we trade...
what murderous thugs do we prop up...
if Israel is an Apartheid state than New York and Casper and Santa Cruz are Joberg and Ladysmith and Angola...but of course they are...
and when people use phrase without care and a wide brush it sounds intentionally or not like text book bigotry...
when someone posts repeatedly about "the Zionists" it is absurd and dangerous...there is and never has been a monolithic structure to the movement and it is a dynamic fluid creature of politics and culture...it contains thuggish Jabbos and Chomsky-esque doves...it is uptight Viennese Yekkes and Jersey cowboys...Seinfeld and Brooks and even republicans like Kantor...
calling Israel an Aprtheid state works if you extend that to include everyone else who is propping it up...
which is you...
and me...
and the outraged posters on this thread...
I paid my taxes last year...
did you...
time to get real...
want to do something about the Palestinians...
go on strike...
don't drive a car...
don't use a computer...
a cell phone...
don't buy clothes made by slaves...
or food...
and stop paying your taxes...
or keep participating...
and go right on lambasting Israel for being immoral...
at least it keeps the writers employed
May 21, 2010 4:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
"or keep participating...
and go right on lambasting Israel for being immoral..."
Thanks, I will. And also the US.
Your writing style is painful to read, btw.
May 22, 2010 12:36 AM | Reply | Permalink
btw...so...
...is...
Faulkner's...
May 22, 2010 4:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
"But those of you who insist that Israel discard that purpose in favor of secular, multi-ethnic democracy never, and I mean NEVER, insist that the surrounding Arab states do the same. That makes you, at best, terrible appeasers and, more likely, the worst of anti-semites."
Maybe you're right to stay out of internet debates--such a sweeping statement sounds like something a partisan would say.
I think every single state on earth should be a secular multi-ethnic democracy. The surrounding Arab states are mostly dicatorships (except Lebanon) and ought to become democracies--secular multi-ethnic ones. It's not going to happen any time soon. Probably not in Israel's case either.
You hear more criticism of Israel because we are constantly told by our politicians and pundits they share "our values". What that is supposed to mean is that they are a Western democracy. Well, no, they're not, or rather, they're a mixture of a Jim Crow democracy and an apartheid democracy. It's the hypocrisy of
this that bugs us.
May 21, 2010 1:33 PM | Reply | Permalink
All Western democracies are a mixture of Jim Crow democracy and apartheid democracy because, historically, people organized as tribes based on kinship. Nationhood and democracy are overlays.
You'll also find the tendencies toward Jim Crow and apartheid increase in direct proportion to the threat posed by neighbors and to the differences in their culture, religion and values.
Nor do I believe the primary source of indignation is hypocrisy. It's Jew hatred. Nothing else explains the consistent need to blame Israel for offenses which are common everywhere, the consistent blindness, or tendency to play down or dismiss, those shortcomings in Israel's neighbors. Or the refusal to acknowledge the existential nature of the threat posed by Arab hostility.
There's no denying that the situation is bad for everyone, that regardless of initial causes, Jews are now as hostile as Arabs, as intolerant, as cruel, as willing to "throw their opponents into the sea". But you can't solve the problem in any way that's so far been proposed. Nor do I have anything new to add.
May 21, 2010 2:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Nor do I believe the primary source of indignation is hypocrisy. It's Jew hatred. Nothing else explains the consistent need to blame Israel for offenses which are common everywhere, the consistent blindness, or tendency to play down or dismiss, those shortcomings in Israel's neighbors. Or the refusal to acknowledge the existential nature of the threat posed by Arab hostility."
100% correct...
May 21, 2010 4:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
What is not common amongst the many countries guilty of worse atrocities than Israel is AIPAC. Other than the Cuban lobby (whose actions of course do zilch to help Al Qaeda recruit) no other foreign group as the Israeli settlers and hardliners (and THE LIE we see again and again right on this page -that attacking Likud=attacking Israel- is exactly what Beinart is addressing) has such a well-oiled propaganda machine distorting US policy and corrupting our politics. Yes, there are many special interest lobbies as bad or worse than AIPAC, but what other one systematically exploits a major US minority in order to excuse atrocities abroad?
May 21, 2010 7:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
It's oil dependence - not AIPAC - which is "corrupting" American (and world) politics.
It was oil which caused the Europeans to intervene massively in the middle east before, during, and after WWI, and oil which caused George Marshall to oppose creation of the state of Israel.
It was that same oil which caused us to side with Israel when the Arabs chose to side with the Russians.
If we decide that we can get better and more reliable access to that oil by abandoning Israel we'll do it in a second, AIPAC or no AIPAC.
Right now Israelis and Jews look wonderful to white, Christian Americans because Arabs and Muslims look so bad. But history tells us that circumstances determine alliances and they both can change very fast.
Which brings me to your next post. Rosenberg and Avishai have a point when they claim that present policies might ultimately lead to the demise of Israel in some terrible war in the not too distant future. Their arguments - while nebulous and hysterical - are not completely unreasonable; technological advantage can only do so much to overcome great demographic and geographical disparities.
May 21, 2010 8:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
If oil dominated US policy towards Israel to the extent you suggest, we would have long since stopped supporting it.
May 22, 2010 1:42 AM | Reply | Permalink
Up to now we've had access to all the Middle Eastern oil we've wanted or needed and American companies have made great fortunes providing it. They would have made much more had the Arabs been prevented from nationalizing their resources...but the loss cannot be blamed on our alliance with Israel.
At present, Middle Eastern oil fields have peaked or are in decline (Matt Simmons) so Arabs no longer have the clout they used to. They can make things a lot worse for us...but they can't prevent the slow decline of petroleum based civilization.
Meanwhile the worldwide demand for oil is surging and it easy to see we are going to have to fight to maintain our share of it.
Israel is called a colony of Western civilization because it is a part of western civilization. It is stable and remarkably productive. The rest of the middle east is not. Arab countries and societies are a mess. They have exploding populations, uncompetitive economies, and feudal social relationships. They are all disintegrating or on the verge of doing so.
So who would you chose to aid us in defense of those declining resources?
May 22, 2010 1:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
You are rather confused about all this RM.
"It was...oil which caused us to side with Israel when the Arabs chose to side with the Russians."
Ridiculous. How much oil does Israel have?
"Israel is called a colony of Western civilization because it is a part of western civilization."
Not any more. That is why the civilized world condemns it for its cowardly atrocities slaughtering children in Lebanon and Gaza for no reason, and continuing a barbaric occupation of the West Bank, not to for its security, but for the convenience of its terrorist-settler lunatic fringe that in weird coalition politics of the Knesset has such disproportionate influence.
"So who would you chose to aid us in defense of those declining resources?"
Israel is not doing a DAMN thing to help America!!
How blind can you be? Do you imagine thatdumbed-down versions of AIPAC slogans are any substitute for the judgments of General Petraeus or President Obama? Are you in fact an American, or an Israeli settler
May 22, 2010 2:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
Israel has an army which we thought, and still think, might be useful if it came to a fight in the Middle East. It also has one of the world's best intelligence services.
General Petreus has issued mixed messages and is currently the media darling because his surge (which wasn't really his) saved Bush from a savage setback or worse. The long-term worth of his advice is still in question (he could easily be the next Greenspan). President Obama has no record of success or expertise at all. His efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan are not impressive and his Middle East policies have alienated Israel and accomplished little else.
Your characterizations of Israeli policies and actions are just party line. A different party than mine. That's all. Barely factual and grossly distorted, without reference to context or to the actions of others in similar situations. A perfect example of the kind of Israel bashing that has incensed so many like me.
May 22, 2010 3:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
"That is why the civilized world condemns it for its cowardly atrocities slaughtering children in Lebanon and Gaza"
the "civilized" world...
it's just too funny...
and the idea that any one would take this rehashed 19th century English Public school sense of decorum seriously or as anything other than what it is - the stealth ghettoization of the Jews by stating there is a distinction between the "civilized" world and...the Jews...is a joke...
the "civilized" world...
of mass slavery...denial of the most basic of human rights...economic exploitation...denial of basic needs including water food health care and housing...discrimination on the basis of religion or ethnicity...genocidal slaughter and institutionalized torture...
it's like when they asked Gandhi what he thought of Western Civilization...
and he said...
I think it's a good idea...
and your post with its sloppy Apartheid dialectic between the so-called civilized world and the Jews...
is why you sound like a bigot...
May 23, 2010 8:55 AM | Reply | Permalink
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n10/adam-shatz/mubaraks-last-breath
this article supports most of your point...
May 22, 2010 4:49 PM | Reply | Permalink
you really believe that the OPEC lobby is less able politically (less "well-oiled";-) than AIPAC...
I don't believe you believe that...
nor do I believe that the ground game of the various branches of the Irish lobby (from Unionists to Sin Fein etc etc) are slackers...
I don't believe the tech lobby which has its fingers in everywhere is less efficient or less ruthless than AIPAC...
nor do I think the Military Industrial Complex is less muscular than AIPAC...
and in fact I think part of AIPAC's success is precisely because they are in bed with all of the other lobbies..."AIPAC" is not what it appears once you dig down into its nuts and bolts...
Israel is working out a deal with Egypt for a natural gas pipeline to run from Egypt to Israel...
can you honestly delineate the number of people and otherwise publicly antagonistic groups who must be humping each other to make that deal a reality...
oil companies...
infrastructure companies (hello Bhectel and Haliburton...which means...Saudi Arabia!)...
banks...
intelligence agencies...
militaries...
Keneset members...
Egyptian government aparatchniks...
congressmen and senators...
insurance empires...
it's a Graham Greene novel...it's rotten top to bottom and side to side and everyone is in on it...
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n10/adam-shatz/mubaraks-last-breath
sorry but the idea of AIPAC being the worst of the worst is a mile wide and an inch deep...
and I'm increasingly convinced you know it's true...
May 22, 2010 4:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
Oh but if we stopped being nice to Israel, they would let us have their oil at bargain prices, and not only that but the Muslim world and western world would be one and live happily ever after. Hey, that reminds me, surely someone can find *proof* showing linkage between AIPAC and the "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day!" page on Facebook? What's taking so long on that?
May 22, 2010 4:55 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think that's due right after the Seinfeld marathon and symposium on the films of Mel Brooks opens in Damascus...
although...all kidding aside...
one of my more cherished memories is the evening I spent with a minor semi-major Arab poet...as he recited his translation into Arabic of... (I kid you not)Ginsberg's poem, Howl...
History is mysterious as hell...and from the smallest idea can come anything...for better and for worse...
so call me a cynical optimist...
cheers
M
May 23, 2010 9:21 AM | Reply | Permalink
the Irish...in Ireland...SinFein/IRA Unionists
the Arabs...Afghanistan...Egypt...Syria...the Gulf states (who receive more money through oil sales than all other countries combined)
the Brits...who have occupied Ireland Scotland and Wales for centuries...
the French...who launder billions from Africa while propping up the most violent genocidal thugs on the planet...
but your outraged...
by...
the Jews...
May 24, 2010 6:42 PM | Reply | Permalink
"no other foreign group as the Israeli settlers and hardliners (and THE LIE we see again and again right on this page -that attacking Likud=attacking Israel- is exactly what Beinart is addressing) has such a well-oiled propaganda machine distorting US policy and corrupting our politics"
flat our demonstrably false...
the oil lobby is superior in every respect...
to the point where it has successfully convinced dupes to insist that AIPAC/Israel/the Jews are better at it than Big Oil...
which receives more money more political cover and more patronage including the sacrifice of American lives to prop them up...
and convince everyone to look the other way while the commit one crime after another...
and the structure of your argument is identical to the classic anti Semite's view that a small group of wealthy Jews has high-jacked a nation's foreign policy...
corrupted its domestic politics and is like an insidious vermin leading us down the path of destruction...
which is why...
you...
sound...
like...
a...
bigot...
May 29, 2010 12:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
So IDF blasted the hell out of Gaza in January 2009 because Exxon-Mobil told them too? And Israel has been sheltered from international action against its atrocities and oppression thanks to the Saudi and Iranian oil company vetoes in the UN? And Shell, BP and Pemix draft letters on Israel signed by most of the US Congress? Medication time, Marly. Be sure to double up on the anti "..." pills.
May 29, 2010 2:57 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Of course, you're right that there are partisans all across the political spectrum and that a passionate partisan is not necessarily blind to arguments which undermine his position. But how often does that actually happen? In my long experience as a lurker I would say almost never"
I see now that you were describing yourself. Hypocrisy doesn't explain the criticism of Israel, eh? Just Jew hatred. Well, I think I can speak for quite a few people who can tell you that just isn't true--it's clearly true of some and equally clearly false of others, but as you say, a passionate partisan is pretty hard to convince.
May 22, 2010 12:47 AM | Reply | Permalink
Wow, that was dumb post. You know there are literally dozens of Black Countries in Africa. And the was only one Transvaal. I think the Africans had an obligation to protect those prosecuted French Huguenots and besieged Dutch Reformed Churchers. The world only produces a few Eugene Terreblanches.
Your failure to see the need for a White South Africa makes you probably an appeaser and, at worst, an anti-French/Dutch Prostestant.
May 21, 2010 4:37 PM | Reply | Permalink
It's possible there's no need for a Jewish state and that Israel has no right to exist in the Arab/Muslim middle east. But there are much better reasons to believe that mythbuster has no right to exist anywhere.
May 21, 2010 5:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
All cryptic and childish fantasizing aside, Israel is not going to disappear in the foreseeable future and neither is Mr. Mythbuster.
May 21, 2010 7:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
That's right. I am eternal. I save all my posts in a book, which states in the preface (that I wrote) that God chose me to be His special poster. And those who bless my posts will be blessed, and those who curse my posts will be cursed.
Sounds, pretty dumb, right? Well, just wait 3,000 years. If you repeat a dumb idea long enough, it becomes conventional wisdom.
BTW, did I ever tell you this story about a guy from Ur who claims God gave him a country...and here is the amazing part: God forgot to tell the people already living there about the deal. I mean, God created the universe, he developed this great plan, but then he forgot to tell the Canaanites to scram?
May 21, 2010 7:48 PM | Reply | Permalink
In the beginning God created the single celled critters, but forgot to tell the oceans they had to share the planet with the new thing called life.
Looking forward to further non-eternal yet non-disappearing excerpts from the Book of Posts.
May 22, 2010 1:46 AM | Reply | Permalink
so in the case of Texas where you say you live and where the land to form the republic and later the state was all stolen and the indigenous population was either ethnically cleansed or killed or both or sold into slavery and the state's infrastructure was built on imported slave labor...
you as a champion of freedom and fairness...
advocate compensation for the decedents of the injured...
a right of return to those who had their land stolen...
and the dismantling of all structures in Texas that are on territory annexed and occupied by the war criminals of the US government...who have benefited from theft...
oh wait...
you only advocate that position when it involves Jews...
because Texas and America have dealt with their sordid imperial colonizing past and the legacy of those times has been washed clean in the glorious freedom-loving economically even socially desegregated un-corrupt politically diverse non-racist atmosphere that is...
the Lone Star State...
May 24, 2010 6:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
Beinart wrote some stuff about Israel and a bout American Zionist leaders. The things he said are either true or false. Why in the world do we need to know anything about Beinart's parentage and background to evaluate which of the things he said are true and which are false?
May 19, 2010 5:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
It's called grading on a curve Dan. If you are going to sell a two-tier vision of democracy, you need to dumb down your audience first.
May 19, 2010 5:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Why in the world do we need to know anything about Beinart's parentage and background to evaluate which of the things he said are true and which are false?"
Because, Dan, some of us are writers, not philosophers, and we cast our nets differently.
May 19, 2010 5:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
OK, fair enough, but listen: you give us (a) an interesting, compelling, generous but fair picture of Israeli civil society, followed by (b) a sprawling, pseudo-poetic, pop-psychological historical account of the vagaries of diaspora ideologies, and then you conclude that since Beinart's outrage has nothing to do with (a) its explanation must arise from (b). Nowhere do you consider (c) what's going on in the occupied territories.
I think some people in this thread are being very rude, but there's a legitimate question here about your analytical evasiveness.
May 19, 2010 5:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
Translation: "Truth is inconvenient, so I'll settle for gossip."
May 19, 2010 6:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
It has nothing to do with whether one is a philosopher or not, Jim. Beinart's personal background is simply not relevant to the truth or falsity of what he says.
May 19, 2010 6:31 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Beinart's personal background is simply not relevant to the truth or falsity of what he says."
Welcome to the goldstoning standard.
May 19, 2010 7:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
Let’s not divide "writers" and philosophers so drastically. I would hope we still have a common discourse: the written word perhaps, the truth? The idea that "writers" and philosophers inhabit incommensurable modes of communication is rather frightening. Even I, when I attempt to read Continental philosophers such as Jacques Marie Émile Lacan assume he is trying to get at the truth as all of us should want to be doing. I try my hardest, but with little success. After considerable consideration, I ultimately conclude that Lacan is muddleheaded as are most of the postmodernists over there. I cannot simply walk away and shrug it off as a matter of “casting a different net” without implicitly slipping into some kind of Pyrrhonian Skepticism which is a pretty heavy price to pay for the sake of tolerance.
May 20, 2010 10:29 PM | Reply | Permalink
Point taken, Andrew, and thanks for weighing in. You and Dan are among the only balanced voices on this particular thread, partly because Israel gets people's juices flowing way out of proportion to its government's destructive and criminal policies.
As for writers versus philosophers, you know very well that there's a difference, in that some serious writers are not philosophers and, in some cases, for better or worse, not to be comprehended in anyone's philosophy. That's just how it is, although philosophers are perfectly justified in trying to make it otherwise.
Beinart's background and biography are relevant on any number of scales, and one needn't be arguing ad hominem to say so. There really are some circumstances in which the "personal" is "political," although I admit that that slogan, as such, is empty of wisdom because no one knows what the words mean.
May 21, 2010 11:33 AM | Reply | Permalink
OK, Jim, I can accept there is sometimes a difference. But but let's put it this way: Suppose that you yourself, as a serious writer, had brought your argumentative powers and talents to bear to produce a serious thesis in the NYRB about the role of the leadership of the Zionist movement in America in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and about a possible generational shift in attitudes of American Jews toward Israel. (Or you can suppose it's some other topic near to your heart, like the relationship between liberals and the Congressional Black Caucus.) Would you hope that serious readers would respond by debating the issues you raised and the thesis and you put forward ... or by going into your personal and family background?
May 21, 2010 9:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
Dan, that might very well depend! It would certainly depend on how "personal" it gets(I never discuss people's psycho-sexual situations in public, unless they're dead or unless the subject has already overwhelmed the public discussion of them for reasons they've brought on themselves, as sinning and hypocritical Congressmen sometimes do), and, even on ethno-cultural stuff, it would depend on how reductive it gets. And if often does get reductive.
You and I are both (I presume) opposed to "critical race theory" in law, which, as I explained in Liberal Racism, tries to enrich the abstract liberalism of the law by letting highly racialized narratives trump what most people would regard as evidence of a defendant's motives, etc. And while we would be opposed to any racial discrimination in jury selections, we might be ambivalent about rules that say that a jury must have some blacks on it when the accused is a black person, on the assumption that only another black person could understand certain mitigating factors in weighing the evidence, knowing as he would that certain deep cultural tropes of perception and feeling are likely to have been in play.
Beinart's case is different, first, because he's not accused of anything and is in fact engaging in a perfectly-justified critique of other people's nationalist, ethno-cultural loyalties in politics. It's fair to turn that lens on him, as long as one doesn't pretend it's the whole thing. In an introductory remark to my post, I do flippantly say, in effect, "the whole story is that he came from Lithuania via South Africa," but I'm really only flagging a theme, not writing as a philosopher.
May 22, 2010 2:16 AM | Reply | Permalink
May 19, 2010 10:13 PM | Reply | Permalink
The constant sniping at each other on these threads is getting a little tiresome--petty.
The lack of fully fleshed out competing philosophical approaches, e.g., why Beinart's background counts or doesn't count, turns these discussions into snipe fests.
Gabe, you're a great thinker. Why settle for taking cheap potshots? All you do is piss of Sleeper and he spits back. No one learns anything.
May 19, 2010 11:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
You cannot have a conversation with Sleeper unless you accept both his ideological grid and his (imaginary) intellectual superiority. I tried. I'll have to admit patience is not my greatest virtue, but this article has been exposed by practically all the comments for what it is, a piece of narcissistic drek that whitewashes Israeli apartheid, blames it on Palestinians violence, and attacks a Washington hack who believes in a "separate but unequal" Israel for daring to be too critical of US support for Israel.
So I really don't know what you expect as a "competing philosophical approach". Beinart is a hack, a member of a group of pseudo-intellectuals, a group that includes Sleeper, that got to the top of the chattering class, (Beinart draws a six figure salary today), because they never think outside the conventions that butress US imperialism abroad and US domestic predatory capitalism within. It's not so much whether his background matters or not, but why should one care about him to begin with, except as a symptom of the deep rotteness of what counts as public discourse in the US.
Sleeper attacks Beinart for daring to put a finger outside the circle of wagons. And his thesis is that "truth-tellers" (whatever qualifies hacks like Beinart and himself to that term only God knows) are driven to their position by "dark currents" that are unknown to them. What is there as a philosophy I don't know. The idea that writers are not fully conscious of what drives them is old, but after so much has been written about it by real intellectuals (Lukacs for example), Sleepy's formulation of "dark currents" is rather pathetic in its vacuous generality (and notice how the arch-liberal Sleeper becomes a German romantic irrationalist the moment Israel is mentioned.) But the only person who escapes these "dark currents," who "exited the hall of mirrors" is Sleeper. Now different people who wrote about the problem of the unconscious came with ideas how one can reach the truth given that we are traversed by forces that are unknown to us. Some answers include the vantage point of a universal political subject, self-analysis and reflection, an intersubjective anchoring, an acceptance that one only writes from within a historical and partial perspective, and more. But Sleeper's solution, a trip to Tel-Aviv, is at least innovative in its simplicity. What can one seriously say about this level of drek? Honestly?
May 20, 2010 4:40 AM | Reply | Permalink
It's a fool's errand, Evildoer. De Tocqueville wrote in the 1840's that in America speech was free but limited to accepted bounds, i.e., acceptable so long as we don't question other people's motives. All Sleeper has done is extended the We Are Good People Zone to Zion. The Israelis don't actually abuse Palestinians, they just make mistakes; they don't steal land, they try to grow; they don't commit war crimes, they educate Palestinians with white phosphorus...well, you get the picture.
Sleeper is snippy because you and others have reject his premise: that Israel's policies are a defensive reaction to an unpleasant reality. Whatever. As I've said before, the more land the Zionists covet, the more "evil" the Palestinian become.
May 20, 2010 10:48 AM | Reply | Permalink
This might be the most pathetic ideological dreck I have ever seen. Sleeper, who I usually like on domestic policy, has written the most verbose yet vacuous piece, sentimentalizing Israel - a tall order amongst the ruthless and self important apologists that populate this genre.
But after navigating this thicket of high-minded nonsense - in which we are treated to a smattering of thoughts ranging from analyses of architecture, the Jewish diaspora and Beinert's heritage to the soul of Israel, with an added dash of Jewish exceptionalism (Marx, Einstein and Freud!) - we are left missing one key ingredient: the Palestinians.
While Sleeper moralizes about the fragile Israeli psyche, battered by the bombs of war (the 250 or so that drove Israel nearly crazy!) from the supposedly secureboulevards of Tel Aviv (you know, without the fear of crime coded in American's body language), he is able to uniformly gloss over the whole conflict.Or, at least in part.
He mentions the bombs of the Palestinians - to suggest the conflict and Israeli militarism has this as its root. But anyone with a rudimentary understanding of Zionism knows better. Despite the numerous developments since, the problem is simple: from its origins the Zionist enterprise was to create a Jewish State in an area that is overwhelmingly non-Jewish. And this requires you either move the natives out or, if this fails, subjugate them in a maze of bantustans. Well, we know how this worked out - a little of both, eh.
But what makes all this so pathetic, and seems to be a common theme of the Jews that struggle with the reality of Israel, is not so much the oversight of the Palestinians (It's natural to ignore the pain of acknowledging their plight) but the level of self indulgence.
So rather than looking at the horror of massacred children in Gaza or the daily indignities suffered in the West Bank, Sleeper writes a sociological treatise on Jewish identity and Israel's civic-republicanism. Whatever it takes to ignore the harder truths and opiate the senses, I guess. But if Sleeper had any guts, he would talk about why the country he so wishes to educate us on herds children into ghettos - malnourished and destroyed - as part of the world's longest current occupation. Maybe if he shut his laptop off and ventured to the occupied territories, he might just change his mind. But it's probably easier on the soul to stay warm in the genteel urbanity of Tel Aviv. Send a postcard!
May 20, 2010 12:07 AM | Reply | Permalink
Mr. Sleeper cautions us, again and again, that he is "not excusing anything."
Technically true, since he scrupulously avoids naming that "anything."
There are swift, dark currents swirling everywhere, he acknowledges, even in Israel. But let's focus for the moment on the ones driving Peter Beinart.
No, let's focus on what's happening on the ground, in Israel. And especially on what's happening in the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.
That's where Israeli sociryy's "easy elan" and those swift, dark currents meet in a toxic brew.
May 20, 2010 3:28 AM | Reply | Permalink
The phony Narrative is dying. It's no longer convincing the Goyim. Hence, the Goyim must be evil.
That syllogism is getting a lot of play nowadays. It reeks of desperation.
May 20, 2010 10:52 AM | Reply | Permalink
Should our universities have been boycotted by the rest of the world, our scholars disinvited by other countries, on account of our brutal foreign policies? Yes. That was easy.
May 20, 2010 12:44 AM | Reply | Permalink
Yeah, exactly.
I still can't get used to the way some defenders of Israel have adopted Noam Chomsky's position--that Israel might be guilty, but the US as a bigger country has committed larger crimes. True. Maybe that's what is meant when people talk about how we share common values.
May 20, 2010 8:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
Donald sanctions are only for the little people. When the White Nations are boycotted that is called a "threat" or "censorship."
May 21, 2010 9:55 AM | Reply | Permalink
This thread will look distinctly odd amongst the radioactive debris of next year, or next month ..
May 20, 2010 5:05 AM | Reply | Permalink
This is actually a great post, but the stew I've prepared it it is so rich and savory that, inevitably, it has attracted a frenzy of black flies.
I count about a dozen negative and indeed harsh criticisms of Israel in my post, but I say some very nice things about the country,too and some critical things about some of its critics, including Beinart.
This is all simply too much for Israel-haters who double so unctuously as champions of the oppressed, and in the comments above they exhibit their pain. They think that they are suffering for humanity, in this case Palestinians, but they don't care a whit more about Palestinians than do any of the Arab nations that assiduously prevented the nurture and creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank from 1948 to 1967, when Israel was doing nothing to prevent it.
What we have above is just pajama histrionics, and the remonstrants are too agitated to notice that now anti-capitalist my post and the linked BookForum review are. Moralism over materialism is the order of the day, or the moment.
The best thing for others to do is to sweep the flies aside, print out the post, and take your time with it, away from all the buzzing.
May 20, 2010 10:00 AM | Reply | Permalink
I am awesome because I say I am.
Jim: People normally don't praise themselves. They wait for others to do it. Frankly, it's a little needy.
On a serious note: To say some of us don't care about the Palestinians is a damn lie. And you know it.
May 20, 2010 10:37 AM | Reply | Permalink
This is actually a great post, but the stew I've prepared it it is so rich and savory that, inevitably, it has attracted a frenzy of black flies.
That, or it just plain stinks.
Sorry, Jim, but your personal vendettas are all too clear in far too many of your posts. I imagine when you were growing up in western Massachusetts some WASP boy made fun of your yarlmuke and you've never quite gotten over it. Then, David Brooks got the job you thought you deserved - - and now Tony Judt and Peter Beinart are creating a stir with widely discussed articles in the New York Review of Books while you're posting on TPMCafe from some park bench somewhere. The "dark, swift currents" are really a bunch of petty jealousies and personal insecurities that roll around half-digested in your gut and get coughed up periodically for our consumption. No wonder the flies swarm around this stuff. It's too bad, because you really are a smart guy and a talented writer. And you do have something --and even something important-- to say. But it seems like far too often the smart things get tainted by the petty things and the reaction you get is--quite understandably--the one you're getting now.
May 20, 2010 12:02 PM | Reply | Permalink
This is one of those classic comments not one of whose assertions is true. I've never worn a yarmulke outside of a Jewish institution, no WASP boy has ever made fun of me for being Jewish, and none of the other thoughts that has crossed Purple State's mind here ever crossed mine.
By the way, my TPM post links a review of Beinart's book that is coming out in the June-July issue but that I wrote well before his piece in The New York Review appeared, raising the Israel question. So, really, Purple State, NOTHING you say here is true. But trolls will troll!
May 20, 2010 4:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
Maybe Jim, but how are we to know that your assertions about Beinart's and Judt's motivations are any more reliable than mine about yours?
Why should we believe that Beinart's and Judt's ideas really arise from their having "internalized British stereotypes of themselves in their formative years"? Could it not be that they have simply grown weary of all those "conflicting [or in reality complementary] senses of belonging and danger much older and deeper than anything . . ." and have concluded that its time finally to move on?
May 20, 2010 5:50 PM | Reply | Permalink
It's realy simple. People are judged by their actions. They don't get a pass because they excel at naval gazing.
You know, you fire white phosphorus into civil areas, you are a war criminal. It's irrelevant what the czar did to your great grandparents.
May 20, 2010 6:50 PM | Reply | Permalink
What's lacking in all of these comments is any forthright explanation of what the writers believe the people around me in this Tel Aviv park should do, or what should be done to them.
Most of you live in America, and most of you expect to go on living there, posting your posts and living your lives, despite all you know about the way the country was settled (and conquered, by what you'd call genocide), the way its economy was built (heavily on slavery, and the numbers of innocent people abroad who've been slaughtered in its brutal misadventures. Yet you live there, and expect to go on living there.
What do you believe you should do, or should accept having to you? And how does that differ, if at all, from what you think Israeli Jews should do, or have done to them? Spell in out, please.
Peter Beinart was a loud supporter and promoter of the U.S.'s most recent bloody misadventure, and it seems to me that he is atoning for it partly via condemning Israel. His latest book, which I reviewed in Bookforum, does "atone" for the American side of his story, not by reprising much of his past war-mongering but by re-assessing American foreign-policy history. He is reorienting himself, and in the Bookforum review, I give him my measured applause but wonder whether something about his atonement isn't also a little too convenient.
The same reassessments are going on in Israel, where many things about Zionism are being reconsidered ("Zionism Reconsidered" was actually the title of one of Hannah Arendt's most prescient essays, which is in the collection of her Jewish Writings that I mention and link in my post.) But in Israel's case, unlike America's, reconsideration has existential dangers. It's not as if most Israelis can return to the warm and welcoming bosom of Eastern Europe of Russia, or to the Arab countries where, in fact, 40% of Israeli Jews come. I think that your comment about what the czar did to their grandparents trivializes this.
What I am asking is that you morally aroused people who are posting here think a little harder before you expect or demand more of average Israelis than you expect or demand of yourselves. Explain, please, how exactly you intend to pay for America's original and ongoing sins, and how you expect Israelis to pay for theirs.
May 20, 2010 11:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
Too many typos here. Sorry. I'll re-post this at the end of the thread.
May 20, 2010 11:18 PM | Reply | Permalink
What's lacking with your comments Mr. Sleeper is an appreciation that my wife's family had their property in Jerusalem stolen by Zionists and that other relatives today are forced to live under Israeli occupation. To them, Zionism isn't an ideal. It's a prison.
So, no, I don't really care about the difficulties faced by the Colonizers, the recent Russian arrivals, and th nutjobs from Brooklyn squatting on stolen land.
Final point: Your use of the word "flies" was very revealing. Zionists commonly use insect or animal terminology to refer to Arabs. You have learned something from your trip to Israel.
May 21, 2010 4:50 PM | Reply | Permalink
That is really unfortunate, MB. There was (and still is) a war that has caused immense suffering on both sides.
Among my wife's family. both maternal grandparents saw their entire families wiped out in the holocaust. After the war, with no country to go to, no family, no possessions, nothing, they fled to Stalin's Russia, and later to obtain passage to the one nation that would take them - the nascent state of Israel, where they have lived under constant threat from their 300 million Arab neighbors for the past 60 odd years.
On the paternal side, the family lived as second class citizens in ghettos in the "tolerant" land of Morocco. Following the establishment of Israel in 1948, they faced dispossession and pogroms. Finally, their property was confiscated as fled to Israel. Religious folk, this marked the fulfillment of a dream nurtured over centuries: a return to their spiritual homeland and the prospect of self-determination.
Today, my father in law is a renowned surgeon in Haifa where he treats both Jews and Arabs under Israel's national health care system. His wife retired from one of the world's leading technology university open to both Jews and Arabs. Like most Israelis (as confirmed by poll after poll), they would end the occupation in a heartbeat if they thought it would lead to real peace.
I wonder what they or their forebears would think reading the vitriolic comments here portraying them as imperialist overlords. Most likely, they would say it's only further proof of the necessity of Israel itself. And while I am disheartened by the rightward turn of Israel's polity myself, I'd be inclined to agree.
May 21, 2010 10:20 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Like most Israelis (as confirmed by poll after poll), they would end the occupation in a heartbeat if they thought it would lead to real peace."
That doesn't actually make any sense. Defending oneself from terrorist attacks is one thing--stealing land and violating human rights in arbitrary and petty ways is something else. It's certainly not self-defense.
May 22, 2010 12:53 AM | Reply | Permalink
excellent post...and now at least I understand where "mythbusters" animus comes from...and why...like reading a Darwish poem about orange groves and cans of oil in a market...yielding a bitter harvest...
but thanks form posting...context is always under assault...so it's good to read the back story...
May 22, 2010 5:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
My animus comes from being a human being. I don't expect you to understand.
May 23, 2010 4:10 PM | Reply | Permalink
Joshua Cooper Ramo...
whose "virtues" you extol...
who works for the Richelieu of our time...Henry Kissinger...
and you want to toss around accusations of hypocrisy and dead narratives...
Henry Kissinger...who (in full brown shirt mode) said: once the government has made its decision...the people owe their obedience to the government...Kissinger the mass murder...the war criminal...the pathological liar...
a man who (to borrow a phrase) is so crooked that he needs a team of moral hermaphrodites to screw him into his pants every morning...
Ramo works for the devil's bitch...and you think he's got great ideas and you condemn Sleeper and his "dead Zionist narrative" because Sleeper wrote it from Tel Aviv...and is according to you a proponent of "Israeli Exceptionalism"...
total unmitigated hypocritical bull shit...
and before you say yeah but Ramo is critical of Kissinger...let's just be clear...you are being critical of Sleeper because of what other people are doing or have done...
go ahead...bring up Goldestone...
tell us how man's connections and friends and who pays his salary has nothing to do with the veracity of his narrative...
unless he's a Jew...writing from Tel Aviv...
Ramo's criticism goes as far as it takes to cash a check from his boss...so his "new ideas" clearly don't include getting rid of his patron who gangrenous breath is all over the planet...
from the mass graves in Indonesia to the Middle East...
and Ramo's "ideas" are that everything is interconnected and that there's no singal route cause but a constant sliding scale of cause and interconnected effect which is exactly what I have been posting and which you keep ridiculing...
and as to the "originality" of Ramo's "new ideas"...
John Brockman said the same thing twenty years ago...
and before that it was Les Annalles...
Febvre...and Faoucault...and Bloch...
and before that it was Tolstoy and Checkov...
you're as much of a fraudulent hypocrite as "evildoer" and "PTroub"
go ahead squirm your way out of it with a "witty" morally outraged riposte...or ignore it...but here's the truth...
you like fascists and collaborators just fine...when they're your fascists and your collaborators...
Ramo and "mythbuster"
What a sick sad joke...
time to change that nome de cyber plume...to...
myth-busted...
May 23, 2010 10:10 AM | Reply | Permalink
You really are a child. And you clearly didn't understand the book. Ramo's book was about the magnitude of change occurring around the world right now.
I don't have to like people to learn from them. Most people learn this in elementary school.
May 23, 2010 4:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
the issue is not what if anything you have learned...
the issue is that you are a complete hypocrite whose attitude is summed up by FDR's cynical response to a question about America's support for a dictator...yes, he said, he's an SOB...but he's OUR SOB...
you condemn Sleeper and embrace a lackey of Kissinger who is a fascist mass murdering war criminal...you don't afford Sleeper the same intellectual generosity you give Ramo because you are a hypocrite...
and because they're only thugs if they aren't on your side...and if they are on your side...
then of course...they are "freedom fighters"
and no one stole a damn thing from your wife...
her side could have had the West Bank Gaza and Jerusalem but instead started a war...
and got their asses whupped...
started another war...
and got their asses whupped...
again...
and again...
and again...
The Arabs are indeed the only people in history who lose a war...
and issue demands...
it's your narrative myth-busted that is on its last legs...
hear that dripping sound...
that's the sound of the oil running out...
and when it's gone...
the Arabs will have lost their chance...
May 23, 2010 7:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
Memo: Marlow writing with e.e. cummings's punctuation and Jack Kerouac's stream of consciousness does not a persuasive argument make.
May 24, 2010 9:58 AM | Reply | Permalink
memo: myth busted
your ignorance is showing...
it's 19th century French literature not cummings...
and there's no stream of consciousness to it and it wasn't Kerouac's idea...
you would need to look at Dujardin first and then Bergson...
as to your inability to comprehend something that's a revealing statement about you and says nothing about the style...
as to the actual issue...
you're a hypocrite plain and simple...
you are all about identifying thugs and crimes and contradictions when it's about Jews...but when it comes to repeating the dead letter of Arab Exceptionalism...it's a different story...
The Arabs participated in the UN vote on the Partition of the British Mandate...
the vote was legal and binding...
when they didn't get their way the Arab pathology for violence based on their tribal sadomasochistic dialectic of shame and honor was activated with all of its hypocritical atavistic memes of conquest and redemption...
like Catholics right out of James Joyce's back pocket (sic!)
Having launched an illegal war and committed war crimes by attaching civilians they were defeated...
and protected by their patrons in England and America...
They then started another war and lost...
started another war...
and lost...
and again...
and within that context the utterly Faulknarian self-destructive self-serving meme of the "Nakba" was started...
with the end result being the state of utterly sclerotic cultural ossification that is now the sorry lot of the Arabs...who will have to wait for the oil to run out and for the assimilated ones to return from the West...
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n10/adam-shatz/mubaraks-last-breath
your cold dead narrative may be great fodder for pinheads here and it may be great table talk around the camp fire while eating tabuli or even Texas bbq...
but it is a dead narrative because the "Nakba" is a dead narrative by design...
that exists for the purpose of infantilizing the working poor of the Arab world so their masters in power in Cairo Damsscus Riyahd and Washington DC can continue to exploit them...and maintain their grip on power...
and promise them a return to the false Eden of 40 acres and a camel...
with its pre-industrial pre-modern template of servility in the service of benign despotism...
and repeating this warped caricature of the truth...
makes you...
a...
hypocrite...
who sounds like...
he...
doesn't...
like...
Jews...
May 24, 2010 10:35 AM | Reply | Permalink
Candide in Tel Aviv!
The guns are silent; the sun is smiling; and Sleeper writes Tafelmusik on his laptop.
May 20, 2010 12:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
well Cunegonde...nice to see how you are pure as the driven snow...
paid your taxes last year...
using a computer made by slave labor...
that runs on oil...
and how's life in America...the largest stretch of occupied territory on the planet...
well...that's very nice...but we must tend the garden...and listen to Voltaire blame the Jews...for everything...
May 23, 2010 10:23 AM | Reply | Permalink
This is actually a great post, but the stew I've prepared it it is so rich and savory that, inevitably, it has attracted a frenzy of black flies.
This must be Sleeper response to the charge of narcissism.
I count about a dozen negative and indeed harsh criticisms of Israel in my post
Let me count:
1. Israel has "brutal, devious nationalists."
Not a critique of Israel, just as criticizing the the tea party is not criticizing the US.
2. Israel's energetically slippery American strategists and its governing coalition in Jerusalem are further isolating and degrading the Jewish state.
Not a criticism of Israel. A criticism of one "government coalition" and its US allies.
3. Tel Aviv's has shabby Bauhaus buildings and cheaply built plazas...
And Pol Pot had unkempt hair. That's a new standard of harshness right there!
4. Israel has "growing inequalities," but a less frantic life.
The whole world over the last 30 years has "growing inequalities." So this is in fact praising by faint criticism.
5. The military is "too militarizing" but also contributes to a things that "are difficult to condemn"
Mild, almost euphemistic criticism of an institution that a) dominates Israel, b) is dedicated to brutal, daily oppression of over 2.5 million people, used to introduce praise for Israel.
6. "Israel's unpretentious, reliable public felicity and trust are fraying,"
i.e., whatever is wrong is recent. When did "public felicity" extend to non-jews? Mild criticism used to whitewash the past, like, "in 1936 the Stalinist regime's sunny disposition began fraying."
7. "The dark side of Zionism has several sources," inlcuding "suicide bombs,"
A negative, unspecified generality is introduced than excused by Palestinian violence (and the cause comes a full 100 years after the effect!)
8. "Israel has never seemed to me more sad and disgusting than when Ehud Olmert touted it as America's junior partner in George Bush's war on terror."
In contrast to the really happy days of "operation broomstick," "Plan Dalet," the Kufr Qasm massacre, and Qibia?
A really harsh criticism, of what? Are the antics of a PM and his rhetoric really the most disgusting aspects of Israel? More disgusting than the burnt flesh of phosphorous bombs? More sad than the birth deformities due to toxic waste intentionally used as a weapon against bedouins?
So did I miss two even more "harsh criticism"? Not a word about life under occupation, refugees, the abused civil rights, the siege of Gaza.
But Sleeper is sure that he is evan handed. The level of lack of self-awareness is just astounding.
This is all simply too much for Israel-haters
No Sleeper, you are just dense. Nobody has a problem with knowing that Israel has good aspects, or that life in Tel-Aviv has some charming aspects. The problem is with you using these facts to whitewash apartheid, as if the fact that decent Yankees lived and worked in New York in 1820 were a justification for dismissing abolitionists.
and the remonstrants are too agitated to notice that now anti-capitalist my post and the linked BookForum review are.
Pol Pot and Joseph de Maistre were also "anti-capitalist." Militarism and racism are not the way to restore the sense of community and civic engagement that capitalism destroys. At least, it is not mine, but I guess we disagree on that.
print out the post,
Can we nominate you for a Nobel? Or would that be misunderestimating your true greatness?
Moralism over materialism is the order of the day, or the moment.
Explaining US Jewish politics as a struggle between Britishness and Lituaniness is certainly a shining example of materialist analysis. How could I have missed that the first time around?
Keep blowing your horn. It is quite entertaining.
May 20, 2010 12:06 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Keep blowing your horn. It is quite entertaining. "
It is at first, but after one has seen a few posts like the black fly one it starts to look like Sleeper is trolling his own blog posts. There are things worth discussing and also worth criticizing in his original post, but he rather than engaging the criticism he pretends it's all beneath him. It's not--there are perfectly sound reasons for criticizing Israel more harshly than he does.
I was going to jump in on this comment--
"but one of the things you probably do have to do to understand it is to imagine what America would be like if it had had thousands of suicide bombings, proportionate to the 250 or so that drove Israel nearly crazy in the middle of the last decade but that Israel's critics never ponder"
You really don't have to imagine this--America is a settler state like Israel and in our past we had Native American "terrorists" who responded to white land thefty by committing really gruesome atrocities against white settlers, some of them innocent. And in response we committed acts of ethnic cleansing and in with some tribes, genocide. (The state of California was guilty of the latter--they put bounties on Indian body parts.) Israel is behaving somewhat less brutally than 19th century white America.
But not point in posting that, if I hope to get Sleeper's attention. I'm just another buzzing fly.
May 20, 2010 8:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
Sorry for the typos. I didn't see them until after posting.
May 20, 2010 8:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
What most if not all of the comments above lack is a forthright explanation of what the writers believe the people around me in this Tel Aviv park should do or what should be done to them.
Most of you live in America and expect to go on living there, posting your posts and living your lives, despite all that you know about the way the country was settled (and conquered, by something like genocide, but I won't quibble here about the word), about the way its economy was built (heavily on slavery), and about the numbers of innocent people who've been slaughtered in brutal American misadventures abroad. Yet you live there and expect to go on living there in a modicum of peace and well-being.
What do you believe you should do, or should accept having to you, in order to justify how you are living? And how does your answer differ, if at all, from what you think Israeli Jews should do or have done to them?
Peter Beinart was a loud supporter and promoter of the U.S.' most recent bloody misadventure. His latest book (which I reviewed in Bookforum and is linked in my post) atones for the American side of his misspent years at The New Republic, not by reprising much of his war-mongering there but by re-assessing American foreign policy itself. In the book, he said almost nothing about Israel, even though it had figured strongly in his magazine's foreign-policy calculations and in his own editorial positions. But now he is reorienting himself, and in the Bookforum review, I give him my measured approval but wonder whether something about his atonement isn't also a little too convenient.
In Israeli civil society and public discourse, many aspects of Zionism are being reconsidered, right down to its roots. ("Zionism Reconsidered" was actually the title of one of Hannah Arendt's most prescient essays, which is in the collection of her Jewish Writings that I mention, link, and quote from in my post.)
But in Israel's case, unlike America's, reconsideration has immediate physical as well as existential consequences. It's not as if most Israelis could or should return to the warm and welcoming bosom of Eastern Europe or Russia, or to the Arab countries from which, in fact, 40% of Israeli Jews come. What, then? One state? Two states? No state?
What I am asking is that those of you who are so morally aroused that you are posting so angrily here explain whether you are expecting more of average Israelis than you are expecting or demanding of yourselves. If you are going to be morally, philosophically, or politically consistent, shouldn't some of you leave the U.S. and find another place and way to live? Explain, please, how exactly you intend to pay for America's original and ongoing sins, and how you expect Israelis to pay for theirs.
May 20, 2010 11:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Existential?"
Are you playing the "drive them into the sea game." I don't think anyone is trying to expel the Jews of Israel. Rather, I think, consistent with the UN and the World Court, that Israel has no title to the West Bank and Gaza. Quite simple. However, if, by existential, you mean demographically killing the Jewish state's control over the occupied territories, then yes, I wish to end that.
"And how does your answer differ, if at all, from what you think Israeli Jews should do or have done to them?"
They should retreat from all settlements and end the occupation. Outside of the cult of America's friends of Israel, this is not too difficult.
Please point to one legal, security, or existential reason why Israelis must live in the West Bank or physically and nutrionally control the lives of Gazans?
The game you seem to be playing, with the invocation of the Native American genoicide, is incomplete. Although the destruction of the Native American's was and remains a filthy part of the American fabric, I'm not sure that we currently restrict their movement, citizenship or territorial status.
Please answer this: Do you think Israel has an ownership right to the West Bank? Yes or no. Is this occupied territory or not.
May 20, 2010 11:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
No, not only don't I think that Israel has rights to the West Bank, I don't think that most of its actions there or in Gaza have been excusable.
The problem is that no one who reads these posts ever remembers what the poster, in this case me, has already written here on the subject. During the Gaza War I wrote seven or eight columns that were posted here. Here is one of them, rebuking Michael Walzer for his argument that Israel was responding "proportionately" to the rockets from Gaza.
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/01/30/israels_only_way_out/index.php
And here is an interview I did with Brian Lehrer, of New York City's NPR station, on the situation in Gaza. (At that time I was in Berlin, so none of the people who've commented so nastily above were able to leap to the same silly conclusions about where I was coming from.)
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/bl/episodes/2009/01/15/segments/121047)
This leaves Blue Pearl's comment, below, just about where I noted above that his other comments are leaving him.
Readers who are interested in having some idea of what they're talking about (and what I'm talking about!) can look up my other TPM posts on Israel. They were almost all in January of 2009, during the Gaza war.
May 21, 2010 3:06 AM | Reply | Permalink
That NPR interview I did on Israel and Gaza is here:
http://beta.wnyc.org/shows/bl/2009/jan/15/gaza-latest/
May 21, 2010 4:58 AM | Reply | Permalink
sleeper is basically saying that we should cut israel some slack in the year 2010 because, after all, the USA did something much worse to the indians 200 years ago. isn't that hasbara 101, to spin the inexcusable?
isn't that israel's game - to create conditions where palestinians become a demoralized and defeated people willing to accept whatever is given to them or face the consequences?
colonialism and exceptionalism come from the same mentality no matter who practices it, whether the USA, israel, the french, or the spaniards. it is a mentality that has crystalized itself into the master-slave, owner-property, dichotomy. this is one of the lowest levels in human consciousness. it comes from an inability to accept the "other" as equal because the master's privileged superiority depends on the slave's inferiority and subservience.
what the US did to the indians is amoral. what israel is doing to the palestinians is amoral. don't use one to rationalize the other.
May 21, 2010 1:16 AM | Reply | Permalink
You don't read well or think well or remember anything. See my response to ktown just above.
May 21, 2010 3:08 AM | Reply | Permalink
see the time stamps on the posts.
your indian and america comparison post has a time stamp of
May 20, 2010 11:40 PM
i wrote my response to that post on
May 21, 2010 1:16 AM
you wrote your response to k-town, which you say i did not, read on
May 21, 2010 3:06 AM
who is not remembering or reading well or thinking well?
May 21, 2010 7:45 AM | Reply | Permalink
To begin with, Jim, neither Beinart's article nor yours is really about "what Israelis should do now" is it? Beinart it seems to me is simply asking American Zionists to be more critical of Israel's policies when those policies are illiberal. Honestly, I'm not sure what your article is advocating. To me it seems best described as an emotional reaction to Beinart's (I think reasonable) recommendation that American Zionists balance their support for Israel with support for liberalism. Your stew seems to boil down to this: Israeli Jews are nice ordinary people; their fears are justified; WASPs are condescending to Jews; Beinart and his family have spent a lot of time with WASPs. Beinart wants to make WASPs like him; because the Jews are nice people and because Beinart is trying to be accepted by WASPs, whatever Beinart wrote, even if it is right, isn't the right way to be right. And, oh, there are lots of dark, swift currents here.
So, if you can stop all your stewing for a just moment, where exactly do you stand on Beinart's main point: do you agree or not agree that American Zionism needs to change in the way Beinart suggests? Whatever Beinart's motives may or may not be for what he wrote, what do you think about what he actually said?
As far as what I believe the Jews in Israel (and, where relevant, Jews in America) should do, here's a quick summary (I'll let other posters speak for themselves):
All of the above, I think, are fairly consistent with what we in America have done with our Native and African-American populations. We can't right all past wrongs, but we can at least give people the right to vote.
Now if we want to explore those dark, deep currents I can also share how I think Zionism (and even Judaism) needs to change. But maybe that's outside the bounds since not only am I not Jewish, but my ancestors who weren't Italian were (gasp!). . . WASPs.
May 21, 2010 7:46 AM | Reply | Permalink
I think Jim's main point is that he doesn't trust Beinart's conversion for XYZ reasons.
He may also be saying that it's easy for Americans to hold one view then switch to another view on Israel because they won't suffer any of the consequences of their views or changes of heart. They don't have anything (really) at stake.
And in situations where they might have something at stake, such as in the treatment of NAs or blacks, they don't acquit themselves so well.
In the article, though, the American is Beinart, not American Jews in general.
Since everyone seems to agree that Beinart is a lightweight, I'm not sure why he deserves attention except that he has a louder megaphone, which might be reason enough.
But, in general, I agree with you: Any movement forward should be applauded rather than questioned (unless, I guess, there are real reasons to question it-:)
May 21, 2010 9:42 AM | Reply | Permalink
I know we all think metaphorically, but isn't the fixation on the Opinion Leaders identical to the culture of celebrity? Instead of thinking through an issue, we just follow the opinion currents of slected pundit. We have delegated right and wrong determinatin to the pundits. And by doing so, we have disempowered our public discourse.
If Beinart is finally starting to see the disconnect between liberalism and Contemporary Zionism, good for him. Maybe he can atone for his crappy book.
May 21, 2010 9:59 AM | Reply | Permalink
I think the Beinart article is a hopeful sign.
The whole thing made me wonder: How does one become "a Beinart"? You know, when people decide they're going to become a lawyer, the path is clear: they take the LSATs; they apply to law school; they find a job.
What is the route to becoming "a Beinart"?
I think it's a good job. It seems to pay reasonably enough. And, my god!, people listen to you and think what you have to say is IMPORTANT.
EYE want to be "a Beinart"! I spend a lot of time on these threads trying to think things through; debating the issues with myself and others. And yet, I only LOSE money here and feel guilty that I'm stealing time and money from my family. If I were "a Beinart," however, I'd be getting paid to do this.
I guess it really is like becoming a celebrity. Who knows how it happens or how one goes about it? And celebrity-hood can be so fleeting. Some people, like Madonna, catch the star and hold on. Others, like Sanjaya, sink without a trace.
May 21, 2010 10:34 AM | Reply | Permalink
It really is fleeting. Have you noticed that most "hot" pundits essentially mirror the conventional wisdom with a minor tweak? This is why our endless blather on TV always accomplishes nothing. We only advance those people who parrot what we (1) already believe; (2) want to believe; or (3) are willing to believe. But the world refuses to limit itself to those 3 options.
Real thinking means contemplating ideas beyond our own, limited experience. Joshua Cooper Ramo already wrote a book about this called "The Age of the Unthinkable."
This is why I am starting to believe that the collaborator PM Fayyad may just be the most "dangerous" Palestinian in the world today. He is consciously aping Ben-Gurion. He is building a virtual Palestinian state. Even more threatening: He is gutting the "no partner for peace" gibberish.
Ironically, Fayyad was imposed on the Palestinians. But he might just become the greatest Palestinian. At least I hope so. (I like truly secular politicians. And he's a Longhorn like me.)
Now for some real evidence of hope, please see this inspiring story: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8665674.stm
May 21, 2010 5:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
"What most if not all of the comments above lack is a forthright explanation of what the writers believe the people around me in this Tel Aviv park should do or what should be done to them."
Purple State answered this one for many of us. I'd add that I think a one state solution is the only truly fair one, but I wouldn't push it for fear of Lebanon style civil war. But in the long run, if the two sides can get along, unification seems like a logical next step. We have unification now, with apartheid as the form of government.
Of course it's interesting that you ask us to identify with the Israelis, presumably because as citizens of one settler state we should empathize with the citizens of another. I tend to think more in terms of what the Palestinians should ask for. Settling for anything less than "one man, one vote" is a very generous offer on their part, and I think everyone should keep that in mind when evaluating the negotiating stands of the two sides (if serious negotiations ever begin).
May 21, 2010 10:22 AM | Reply | Permalink
One of the things that makes this conversation difficult is that one is never sure whether the discussion is about the occupied territories and Gaza or, really, the whole of Israel and its character.
Zionism, after all, isn't just about the territories and Gaza--it's about the whole of Israel.
Defenders of Israel, of whatever stripe, are often left wondering which discussion they're having. Or if part one, the occupied territories and Gaza, once completed, will be swiftly followed by part two. And I actually think there IS reason to wonder.
The conversation moves easily from the OT...to Zionism...to colonialism...to these invaders have no right to be there in the first place...to what is it about those Jews...and how come there are three of them on the Supreme Court...and look at them bankers?
Check out the comments section on the highly esteemed Mondoweiss to see this happen with lightening speed. And Weiss, from what I've seen, seems happy to abet it or at least allow them drunken sailors to rough house down in the hold of the ship unsupervised.
One of my questions is, will "we" reform teeny tiny Israel and leave Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iran, Syria, Libya as is?
Are we focused on Israel because it's a "white" country and shares our values and is reformable, while these other countries are "dark" and don't and, in any case, are to be respected because of their chthonic cred?
Is this a matter of numbers? If Jews were the overwhelming majority would we pass over various injustices (e.g., who could marry whom) in relative silence?
If Israel were an island, like Japan, would we say that it was okay that a non-Israeli couldn't become a citizen because, after all, it is an island and those people have been there a long time and have the physical characteristics to prove it?
Do the Native Americans actually have the freedom of movement we think they do? They are free to be NA's and pursue their custom in the bantustan, but once they leave the reservation, they are required to be "American." Just like "everyone else," you say. Yes, but being "American," in effect, means you are "something" and that something most definitely is not Native American. So they are free to move around as long as they move around "as Americans."
Should the Palestinians be free to move around as long as they are "Israeli," which identity, I'd argue, is inherently "Jewish" in various respects?
In the end, I'd submit, this discussion isn't about principles--it's about numbers. He who's got the numbers calls the shots. The majority can be forced to give ground around the edges, but the inertial ground is moving everyone in their direction.
And principles seldom stay settled. Growing up, I assumed the Scopes Trial had "settled" a lot, but in fact, the opposition simply went "underground" --and not terribly far underground -- only to pop up when the moment was right.
I would have thought the Civil Rights Act had settled a lot. But here we have Rand Paul unsettling it with a LOT more support than most people would suspect. Fact is, I think Jefferson, Tom Paine, maybe even Madison might well be Rand supporters were they alive today. And they represent strong currents (dark currents?) in American thinking and feeling...
May 21, 2010 10:22 AM | Reply | Permalink
"The conversation moves easily from the OT...to Zionism...to colonialism...to these invaders have no right to be there in the first place...to what is it about those Jews...and how come there are three of them on the Supreme Court...and look at them bankers?"
The part about Zionism, colonialism and part of the invader comment is legitimate--the rest would be what Sleeper might call dark undercurrents. The OT discussions are simply silly, no matter who brings them up. Only an idiot bases his or her views of Israel now on what they think is true about King David or Moses or the Exodus event.
The invader comment goes rancid at the point where people say "what right do they have to be there in the first place?" The question should be "what right do they have to chase Palestinians out of their homeland".
I think it's good that people are dismissive of Israel's foundational myth--it stacks the deck against the Palestinians if anyone who advocates their right of return is accused of being a genocidal anti-semite. There might be practical reasons why it can't be implemented--namely, that it might turn into rerun of Lebanon 1975-1990. But if that's the case, it at least ought to be available to them as a gigantic bargaining chip.
May 21, 2010 2:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
Hi Tintin . . . a few thoughts
I think Jim's main point is that he doesn't trust Beinart's conversion for XYZ reasons.
I guess that's the point, but the article seems strangely personal to me--and I guess that's why it also feels like an ad hominem attack to me. I have no idea what motivates Beinart or caused his "conversion," but couldn't it just be that he's observed what's happened over the past few years and has honestly re-evaluated his positions based on what he's seen? I guess all the weird stuff about dark journeys from Lithuania to South Africa to Western Jewish Anglophilia seems a little more like Jim projecting his own personal history a bit . . .
He may also be saying that it's easy for Americans to hold one view then switch to another view on Israel because they won't suffer any of the consequences of their views or changes of heart. They don't have anything (really) at stake.
Israelis certainly have more quotidian things at stake--like whether their kids can take the bus to school safely or whether (if they are Arab) they can buy a house in a nice neighborhood. But clearly something--and something significant--is at stake here for Americans too. If nothing were at stake, there wouldn't be so much discussion--and so much money and political energy--devoted to Israel. It seems to me something very big is at stake for American Jews . . . and something's also maybe at stake for Americans who aren't Jews. What if Beinart's (and Judt's) conversions are the first sign of these particular American Jews moving to a more normalized position where what's at stake about Israel for them emotionally is more in line with how little is really at stake when it comes to their daily lives?
And in situations where they might have something at stake, such as in the treatment of NAs or blacks, they don't acquit themselves so well.
Yes and no. the United States has its failings, no doubt, but I'm not sure that any country (other than my soon to be new one, Canada) has done as good a job at integrating diverse populations and (after some fits and starts) treating those diverse populations as equals.
Since everyone seems to agree that Beinart is a lightweight, I'm not sure why he deserves attention except that he has a louder megaphone, which might be reason enough.
Or is he getting the attention because he, like Judt and Mearsheimer and Walt, strayed just a bit outside the bounds of orthodoxy?
But, in general, I agree with you: Any movement forward should be applauded rather than questioned (unless, I guess, there are real reasons to question it-:)
Yes, and this is what I don't quite understand about Jim--why is his first instinct to question in this case? I would have expected him to applaud, even if it was with an undercurrent of questioning.
May 21, 2010 10:59 AM | Reply | Permalink
First, my thanks to Purple State, Tintin, and others for lowering the vitriol in this thread and increasing the reason in it.
I do agree with Beinart's main point, and I did and do applaud it: American Jewish leadership has betrayed most Jews in America, as well as Israel. I would add, though, as I wish Beinart had done forcefully, that most Israelis, too, feel betrayed by Israeli leadership, and that no purpose is served by broad-brushing the country, turning its Jews into pariahs, as one can see several of the commenters on this thread just itching to do.
Here in TPM on Sunday, Bernie Avishai is going to post on this, and perhaps he'll agree with me about how Beinart's moralism got him carried away.
And what is that moralism about? As I've made clear, I don't trust it as solely a matter of conscience on his part. And this matters, not because Beinart is weak or bad but because he's representative of a certain way of approaching these questions, and that's why he makes money doing it.
If you have a megaphone (lightweight or not) and are going to make a big change, you have to frame your language carefully, so as not to hearten and aid people who are not at all on the same page. That's how it is in politics, and Beinart took too moralistic and abstract an approach for the good of anyone in the region. Again, the mere fact of his coming out against American Jewish leaders of the AIPAC variety is welcome, but not if, for what may be self-serving reasons, he sloppily lends aid and comfort to people who just want to extinguish Israel, or even any Jewish sovereignty, because they're so enraged at Jewish war crimes.
I'll stop there, but thank you, Blue Pearl, Tintin, and, earlier above, Andrew Strat, for taking this out of the mud bath where I, too, was starting to enjoy myself a little too much. I don't think that my post asked for what it was getting!
May 21, 2010 11:50 AM | Reply | Permalink
. . . taking this out of the mud bath where I, too, was starting to enjoy myself a little too much . . .
Nothing wrong with having a little fun, Jim . . . we all owe you a sincere thanks too for giving us the opportunity to wallow around with you. Enjoy your weekend in Tel Aviv. Hope the weather's as nice as it is here in Massachusetts.
May 21, 2010 3:19 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Sloppily lends aid and comfort to people who just want to extinguish Israel" sounds like a very good description of what Sharon and Netanyahu and their propaganda choir in AIPAC have done for ten years. Overall one might indeed say that they are not much worse but also not much better than Cheney, Bush, Rumsfeld, Rove, etc. These scoundrels and their well-paid apologists have fomented policies blowing thousands of civilians to bits while trampling both the principles on which their countries were created and their practical international strength and security.
Yet, we are supposed to instead be upset because one critic who stands up, where thousands have buried their hands in the sand for a decade, formulates his critique in a manner failing to reach some arcane standard of intellectual nuance? No doubt there ARE "better ways than Beinart's to be right." But we have 80+% of the US Congress flat out WRONG (not to mention lazy and craven), signing on to the prefab trickster crap statement of AIPAC berating President Obama for pursuing peace and not kissing up to Netanyahu's insults and kowtowing to the settler-nuts. When there is a fire to be put out (and if you don't consider the settlers dictacting policy to the US Congress to be a fire, it is time to start ignoring how supple and relaxed the body language is in Tel Aviv, and focus on a bigger picture) should we care about the ancestry of the firemen or who supplies their hose nozzles? If you don't like what you've been "getting" here, then write your description of Israeli society without interspersing roughly once per paragraph a silly shooting of the messenger on how a once idealistic and brave refuge for Jews has become a barbaric hypocritical pariah for, i.a., the way it's been needlessly brutalizing the West Bank (in order to not have to abandon politically convenient "settler"-extremists).
May 21, 2010 7:03 PM | Reply | Permalink
I seem to recall Thomas Jefferson saying something similar about what to do with slavery...and deciding to punt...and compromise...
but of course when it comes to the Jews...
all problems are the result of corruption hypocrisy and deceit...
and all FINAL SOLUTIONS must be implemented right now...
consequences be damned...
because PTroub...
is getting his...
panties...
in...
a...
bunch...
May 24, 2010 12:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
Your Warsaw Ghetto paranoia is getting the upper hand again, Marlow. This is a fight between Jews with a conscience versus Jews without; when the anti-Semites show up to slime their way into the conversation, as they no doubt will eventually, they will either have to side with the conscientious, or tone down their anti-Semitism in order to not look even more ridiculous than they usually do. No jackbooted Nazis are coming to drag off any American Jews to concentration camps near term, and if they do in the longer term, it will certainly not be because Jews in the meantime woke up and chopped off off their lunatic fringe wagging tail. Nor, thankfully, will it be because of paranoia leading to incessant FALSE accusations of anti-Semitism. Any new powerful anti-Semitism current, e.g. as part of some new neo-fascism, is most likely to develop unexpectedly from strange new sources (as fascism itself did in the 1920s). Our best defense against it is to put our house in order, and that is what Mr. Beinart's piece, WHATEVER his background or nuanced or unnuanced observations, stands for.
May 24, 2010 3:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
oh right...fascism developed out of "nowhere in the 1920s..."
sorry but that's flat out wrong and is just another typical example of how your lack of erudition makes you sound like a bigot...even if you are not one...
because fascism in Europe goes back to Plato and Isocrates...Demaistre...and the anti-encyclopedists...(and if you're a leftist gets into fourth gear with Thermidor and the reaction)and begins to really gain steam when the Prussians remember Luther...and start hating the French more than they hate the other Germanic tribes...
here's the book you'll want to read but wont...
http://www.librarything.com/work/45771
so...your entire post as per usual falls to pieces...
now since you have probably never heard of Mosse let alone read him it's not exactly fair of me to point out that you don't know what you're talking about...
on the other hand...
since you clearly don't know what you're talking about...
and you keep decontextualizating the issue spouting hysteria distortions and outright fabrications...
I really have little choice except to say...
that once again...
you sound...
like a...
bigot...
May 24, 2010 6:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
"oh right...fascism developed out of "nowhere in the 1920s..."
sorry but that's flat out wrong and is just another typical example of how your lack of erudition makes you sound like a bigot...even if you are not one."
Of course "this is flat out wrong," like most of your chronic lies. I DID NOT SAY IT, YOU DISGUSTING LIAR! I am sick of your lying about me incessantly and dumping your psychological problems all over these discussions. Why don't you take your medication and go back to your day job? Maybe your amoral intelligence can be of use there.
May 25, 2010 1:19 AM | Reply | Permalink
"is most likely to develop unexpectedly from strange new sources (as fascism itself did in the 1920s). "
--- PTroub
hmmm...the lady doth protest too much, me thinks...
which part of YOUR OWN post do you not understand?
"...is most likely to develop unexpectedly from strange new sources (AS FASCISM ITSELF DID IN THE 1920S...)"
those are your words sweetpea...
your saying fascism developed UNEXPECTEDLY from STRANGE NEW SOURCES...in the 1920s...
hmmm...bit of a porblem eh...
because not only does Mosse disagree with you...
so does Isaiah Berlin...he pins the jackboot and whip on deMaistre...and pins deMaistre on the church...and links that back...
well you know...
long before the 1920s...
Now I know being publicly exposed as an ignoramus with an axe to grind against Jews is a dilemma...
which is what's provoked this vitriolic dejecta on your part...
but it is a fact that fascism predates Mussolini and Hitler and Franco and Stalin and Moseley and Petain etc etc etc by a few thousand years...
and that German fascism gets its wings under Luther and picks up steam as part of the reaction against the perception of French cultural imperialism in the run up to the revolutions of 1789 and later the wars and the restoration of the Bourbons...(I mean to we really even have to talk about Metternich and his assault on civil liberties in the empire)...
and there was nothing mysterious about it per se...it was all out in the open...
for example...there's our old friend Heinrich Heine...he was referring to the Volk movement in the Germanies in the period after 1815...
when they started to burn books...that would you know...corrupt pure Aryans with...ideas...and knowledge...and the thing you fear...
context...
as to going somewhere else sweetpea...
not any time soon...
I'll be right here to showcase you as a poster-boy for antisemitism and a perverse obsession with Israel backed up by the way your posts are like someone with bad eyesight pitching the ball right down the middle of the plate...
have a great day
god knows you've made mine;-)
May 25, 2010 4:22 PM | Reply | Permalink
you know sweetpea...you're right...
I was paraphrasing you...
your point was that fascism developed out of strange new sources in the 1920s...
and I made it sound as if the mystery you imply lays at the root of fascism's rise came from nowhere...
where as you are saying it is mysterious and came about from unexpected sources in the 1920s...
which is wrong...
non-contextual...
a-historical...
bullshit...
used by neo-fascists...
in a sorry attempt to absolve themselves of blame...and responsibility...
and thus recontextulize Zionism...
as a racist fascist imperialist ideology...
but...facisim's roots are well documented and your contention is demonstrably false...
it did not...rise from unexpected mysterious sources...in the 1920s...
and "nowhere" is an accurate paraphrase of the intellectually...
morally...
historically...
bankrupt...
discrddited neo-fascist idea that fascism sprang up from mysterious sources in the 1920s...
so...
you're still wrong...
you're still ignorant...
and you still sound...
like..
a...
bigot...
who is in over his head...
and getting in deeper...
by the post...
May 25, 2010 4:34 PM | Reply | Permalink
I never said "mysterious". You can write. Can you read too? It is a long way from Avanti to Auschwitz. If you prefer to dwell on some other examples within the myriad of associated historical trajectories be my guest. Just find a way to stop the gratuitous, baseless, irrelevant and offensive ad hominems.
May 26, 2010 4:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
in your corner of the universe "strange new sources" is somehow NOT synonymous with mysterious...
so...they were strange because people were used to them? Or they were strange and new but their origin was not mysterious even though they were strange and new...
or they were strange and new but everyone knew where they came from so there was no mystery at all...even though they were strange...and new...
I guess you mean they were strange because they came from sources that were different from all of the regular sources of fascism...
and they caught everyone by surprise because they were expecting the fascists to send them an invitation and instead they woke up one morning and voila...there were fascists everywhere...who had sprung upon them out of whole cloth or perhaps out of the head of some Volkeist like a goddess from Zeus' head...
yes that must be it...
except that it's still wrong...and still pure idiocy...
and it's still a relic from the neo-fascist hit parade...that tries to peddle the illusion of how fascism was a surprise or came from somewhere out of the blue and no one saw it coming so they don't have any responsibility for it...
so you still sound...
like...
a bigot...
who has...
a...
problem...
with...
Jews...
May 26, 2010 6:04 PM | Reply | Permalink
For the sake of optical improvement, my reply is at the far left (current) bottom, PT.
May 26, 2010 8:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Yes and no. the United States has its failings, no doubt, but I'm not sure that any country (other than my soon to be new one, Canada) has done as good a job at integrating diverse populations and (after some fits and starts) treating those diverse populations as equals."
Yes and no, also I guess. Those "fits and starts," in some cases, took more than a century. I mean the exception for slavery was made consciously by people who knew it was morally wrong and wrong-headed in every way.
It's a hard question in SOME respects because the US is clearly on the other side of the mountain and has achieved much. (I guess if Rand Paul is a harbinger we may be in danger of sliding back, but I can't bring myself to believe anything other than that he's a passing fancy--a phenomenon that will morph into something better or disappear.)
And when one looks at the 70% unemployment rates on some Indian reservations, one has to wonder...
That said, it's not valid, really, to say, "Well, the US took 200 years, why don't you give us 200 years." No, we have to live in the present time and confront present challenges head-on. Play 'em as they lay and not look over at the other guy who happens to have a better position. However long it's going to take Israel there's no excuse for not getting started right away and making progress as quickly as they "can."
I'm babbling a bit...
May 21, 2010 1:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
One thing to consider here, Peter, is that the conventions about what's acceptable among liberal democratic nations have been continually evolving in a generally (though not completely) progressive direction. To be accepted into the community of liberal democracies, you have to meet the current standards. And just because 200 years ago the rules were different for liberal democracies, doesn't mean that a newly formed country has 200 years to learn to comply with the current standards. If you don't allow women to vote nowadays, you're not a liberal democracy--even though just 90 years ago (when my late grandmother was nearing age of majority) women couldn't vote in the US.
I used the term "community of liberal democracies" above. There is, of course, no such community formally defined or established. But I think it's fair to say that there are a number of countries that recognize themselves--and each other--as belonging to a group of liberal democracies that share similar values when it comes to human rights. I think Israel sees itself as a member of this community and is also accepted as a member of this community by the other members. I think it is fair to say that members of this community do apply a double standard when judging the human rights records of countries within the community and without. I'm not sure this is hypocritical--in part, because I think any country that wants to join the community and adhere to the higher standards is welcome to do so. So the liberal democracies do hold Israel to a higher standard than they apply to countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran. But if Saudi Arabia wanted to become a liberal democracy, the standards applied to it would be raised too.
Out of time . . . maybe I'll continue later.
May 22, 2010 6:56 AM | Reply | Permalink
The Anxiety of Influence
What is the route to becoming "a Beinart"? Tintin
Peter Beinart is a Gen-Xer (b. 1971) on the cusp of middle age. He went from being a student (chair of the Liberal Party of the Yale Political Union and Rhodes scholar) directly to editorship of a Zionist magazine (The New Republic -- 1995-2007).
All creative writers must overcome the influence of the fathers -- else, they have nothing original to say.
Beinart's tactic (and that of many others of his generation) is to deploy a "reinterpretation" of the history of Zionism as played out in Israel/Palestine -- for example, contradicting the claim that Israel is a "land without people for a people without a land" or the claim that there are no such thing as Palestinians.
If Beinart (and those of his generation) are successful, there will be a new interpretation of Israel's foundational myth and that interpretation will become the conventional view.
The "fathers" are in retreat and are right to fear that among younger, liberal, cosmopolitan Jews kneejerk support of Israeli policies is vanishing.
May 21, 2010 1:28 PM | Reply | Permalink
Why, Ellen, what a pleasant surprise -- a substantive, analytical comment from you, not to mention one that I made myself in the Bookforum review that's linked in the post. (It requires a subscription beyond the first couple of paragraphs, but the magazine is well worth it.)
http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/017_02/5732
The point we are both making is the one about "fathers," but in the review I go on to say, as I'm sure you'd agree, that history as therapy doesn't solve foreign-policy problems in ways one can rely on -- to the extent that one can rely on any solution in history or, indeed, philosophy. My larger point is that there's a consequential difference between the way Beinart does it -- to my mind, he has always been a very competent writer of term papers, interrupted by occasional shrieks -- from the way a serious political person would do it. And others here are saying that, too.
May 21, 2010 1:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
The limitations of "history as therapy" is one quite applicable way of describing the fatal flaws of Israel's founding myths. In the 1930s, Jews needed an Israel to escape to because the right to asylum from a "well-founded fear of persecution" was very limited in places such as the US and Britain. Thanks to the Holocaust, that right has become a cornerstone of nearly every one of a wide range of western democracies. Never in thousands of years of Jewish history is there less need for a state of Israel than now.
In no way does this mean that Israel will not or ought not to continue as a fully independent sovereign state which Jews anywhere are welcome to become part of. It DOES however mean that as the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto falls further and further into the past, fewer and fewer young cosmopolitan Jews are willing to accept a therapeutic rationale for Holocaust-escaping ends justifying means that include slaughtering children in Gaza for no good reason whatever, and decades of disgraceful trickery fearmongering and character assassination in the halls with respect to the US Congress. From the point of view of an American, it is high time people such as Mr. Beinart spoke out, and the ambiance of Tel Aviv street life will not and should not distract from the moral imperative of cleaning house in Zion.
May 21, 2010 3:27 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Never in thousands of years of Jewish history is there less need for a state of Israel than now.
In no way does this mean that Israel will not or ought not to continue as a fully independent sovereign state which Jews anywhere are welcome to become part of."
how white of you to say so...
as to Warsaw and such things fading...
who the hell knows...
I don't know...
but I sure as hell know that you don't know either...
as History has shown over and over again...
anyone can resurrect a trope and run with it...
and then there's the question of whether or not History repeats...or progresses...
"...there's no such thing as the future and no such thing as the present; only the past happening over and over again right now..."
--- Eugene O'Niel
as to cleaning house in Zion...
look in the mirror...
you piad your taxes last year didn't you...
you use a computer...
you use a thousand products made from oil...
and slave labor...
just like me...
"Brother hypocrite, I salute you"
--- Baudelaire
May 21, 2010 5:11 PM | Reply | Permalink
Another Sleepy quote that humanity will be the less for it if it isn't preserved for posterity.
In the future, I propose following the scale below to guarantee proportionate response:
Miscarriage at checkpoint...........67 Db
House demolished in Jeruslaem.......74 Db
Rapper sings "death to the Arabs"...81 Db
New settlement expansion............83 Db
Soldier kills seven year old girl...96 Db
Bomb falls on building, 20 dead....110 Db
Hospital set on fire...............125 Db
Jewish writer criticizes Israel....131 Db
WASP criticizes Israel.............151 Db
Inappropriate response, out of
proportions to Israel's crimes.....Full volume!!!
May 21, 2010 8:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
Well, I disagree with Sleeper about Tel Aviv's architecture, which I find quite stunningly beautiful.
May 21, 2010 10:23 PM | Reply | Permalink
In Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem, she makes the point that what was peculiar about Eichmann was his ordinariness, his lack of any real "evil core". She calls this the banality of evil by which she means that the caricature of the Evil Person we have is inaccurate.
Take the German people. A highly civilized and moral people turned into accomplices to mass murder just by some clever media massage by the likes of Goebbels. How is that possible? Arendt concludes that what such people lack is a sufficient amount of thought. In particular thought constituting an internal dialogue within themselves. They simply are not reflective. They are superficial like most people. And because it is a superficial phenomenon that is not amenable to reason it can easily spread like a fungus.
When asking how it is possible that a people who contributed Moses, Spinoza, Marx, and Einstein to the world could not see that what they are doing to Palestinians is evil, you need to merely reflect on Arendt's analysis. No I'm not equating the holocaust with Israeli expansionist occupation. I'm merely pointing out that we would think that both should have evoked outrage amongst their respective people but they did not; at least not for the most part.
Given that that's the way it is in the modern world, the idea that political power must be fused with MORAL judgment (something that neoconservatives advocate, except that one suspects their understanding of "moral" amounts to not much more than obfuscating pabulum aimed at assuaging the masses in order to pursue imperial aims).
Here is where I am disturbed by Arendt's insistence that the political must be divorced from the moral; something which apparently Jim Sleeper goes along with. On the contrary! Since we cannot expect the Israeli people to stop their government from their present course, it behooves us--as a force majeure --to make them see the light.
May 22, 2010 1:37 AM | Reply | Permalink
Why, Andrew! What is there in your last sentence that is either true or advisable? There is quite a debate going on in Israel, whose governing coalitions fall every 18 months on the average. By way of analogy, in the US just after the 2004 election, I'm sure that many of us felt that Rove had triumphed in some irreversible way and that the country would forever move to the right until it self-destructed -- as it seemed to be doing by 2008. Well, maybe it's still doing it, but surely more is in play than we thought in, say, 2005.
I think that something similar is happening in Israel, but it has many dimensions, so we'll see.
And what on earth (or in the starry heavens above) is your philosophical justification for what you say it behooves us to do? Are you abandoning philosophy to be "political"?
May 22, 2010 2:40 AM | Reply | Permalink
That is a severely myopic take of Israeli politics. One example, in the second week of January 2009, polls showed about 95% of Israeli Jews supporting the massacre of Gaza, not a war, but a punitive expedition inside a prison. As happened during every single Israeli war, the most important "peace" intellectuals, including David Grossman and Amoz Oz, supported the war. In the Knesset, only the Arab parties condemned it. Meretz supported it.
The most radical government Israel ever had, Rabin's second cabinet, responded to the mass murder of Baruch Goldstein by imposing a curfew on the victims, killing another 19 of them. No actions were taken against the extreme fanatic settlement in the heart of Hebron which produced Goldberg. It is still there. This is the history of the Israeli "left."
I don't think that there is a single MP from Meretz on who supports a Palestinian state with full water rights, and control of borders, and including the Jordan Valley. Remember the Geneva accord? Read it carefully and you will see it. Here's an overview I wrote http://www.arabmediawatch.com/amw/Articles/Analysis/tabid/75/newsid395/792/The-15-state-solution/Default.aspx
Talking about MPs is anyway irrelevant because the dominant institution in Israel is the army. The army simply ignores the handful of supreme court decisions that put limits on what it can do, with no consequence. No general has ever been held in contempt of court, and no MP has called for firing a general for contempt of court.
To the extent that these is debate, it is only driven by external criticism and fear of losing public and even more so official support in the West. There is a debate about whether the current government is harming the state by endangering US and European support. There is NO debate, except on the far out margins, about whether the current government is harming Palestinians.
The only politics that matter is putting pressure on Israel from outside, which you are diligently opposing, because that would be "hypocritical". That is the difference between empty moralism, which asks Americans to be pure at heart before they dare put pressure on Israel (i.e., it asks them to effectively shut up), and ethics. The measure of politics is action. And the action you recommend is to do nothing.
May 22, 2010 6:07 AM | Reply | Permalink
Jim
I'm not orthodox in my thinking. Philosophy for me is both a tool to be applied to non philosophical situations as well as a discipline in its own right. I picked up your thread on Hannah Arendt and drew the conclusion that since sometimes a people cannot effect a needed sea change on their own perhaps the sole surviving superpower can come in handy and make itself useful by imposing that needed sea change on them. I don’t think my thinking is all that political as much as it is pragmatic. But then again pragmatism is at the heart of the political.
Of course this might require supererogatory action (from a realist perspective), but so be it.
May 23, 2010 11:08 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think you are disturbed by a misconception about what "moral" means. If it means the public commemoration of abstract principles of right and wrong, than of course it has to be separated. Because politics is the domain of exercising power, and exercising power requires more often than not choosing between options that are all in breach of such principles.
If "moral" means "virtuous", that is the capacity to act in relation to the Good, then of course politics shouldn't be separated from morality. But the challenge is not to condemn politics in the name of morality but to discern which courses of action within available options are the best.
May 22, 2010 4:56 AM | Reply | Permalink
Notice that I prefaced my post with a reference to Arendt's piece in the New Yorker "Eichmann in Jerusalem". Both of you seem to ignore in what context I was writing. In that piece Arendt specifically attributes the compliance of Germans to Nazi atrocities and even Eichmann's own role in those atrocities not to any kind of radical evil deep in the German's souls but a sort of bureaucratic focus on performing the task at hand at the expense of a frightening indifference to what exactly the task is (in the case of Eichmann being the logistics guy of the Holocaust).
That's Arendt's view of things, not necessarily mine.
But her analysis that great evil can arise from the common thoughtlessness of people is a good one. It is perfectly applicable to the idyllic picture Sleeper describes of the citizen's of Tel Aviv apparently indifferent to the evils of their government.
It is Arendt herself who elsewhere insists that the political must be divorced from the moral opting instead for what Sleeper refers to as a civic republican status quo.
I am certainly NOT confused about what morality is. I have to wince when both Sleeper and evildoer talk of "moralism" (in the sense of cheap pieties thrown out by televangelist on mega churches) as if to talk of morality at all is to engage in moralism.
I find it a moral duty of the United States to force a change in policy in Israel simply because that change of policy is NOT going to come from within, just as the German people did not stop the Nazi killing machine. That would, in my mind legitimize to some extent American exceptionalism.
With exceptionalism comes the moral duty to act to right wrongs in the world, in my view. If all exceptionalism means is that with our superior might we can do what we want, that smacks of the same old tired imperialism.
May 22, 2010 4:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Since we cannot expect the Israeli people to stop their government from their present course, it behooves us--as a force majeure --to make them see the light."
ah yes...Pax Americana...
like the scene at the opening of Heart of Darkness where the French gunboat fires shell after shell into the jungle...
May 22, 2010 4:54 PM | Reply | Permalink
Fascinating how your own version of anti-imperialism only manifests itself here in criticisms of Americans who criticize Israel. You don't seem to have anything to say about Americans who "support" Israel, which as Chomsky says usually means Americans who support the moral degeneration of Israel.
On this blog, you could argue that some Americans are too critical of Israel.
Out there in the real world, American imperialism manifests itself in part by supporting Israel's worst actions.
May 23, 2010 11:54 AM | Reply | Permalink
on the contrary pumkin...take a stroll over the Rosenberg's blogs from the last two weeks...The Pax Americana is a disaster...immoral corrupt and utterly toxic...which is what I've posted repeatedly...
the adjunct issue is the blatant Jew hatred manifested by the sloppy contradictory hypocritical posts made on Rosenberg's blogs and here...
as to a recent examination of how American Imperialism works take a look at the article below...Obama is a hypocrite...
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n10/adam-shatz/mubaraks-last-breath
and as Gary Wills makes clear...he is a prisoner of the Military Industrial Complex...
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2009/oct/08/entangled-giant/
and despite Said's sophomoric critique...Conrad is as applicable to American imperialism as to everyone else's...
so your point is factually challenged...
but feel free to disagree as no doubt you will
May 24, 2010 12:10 AM | Reply | Permalink
and your comment still does not address the point at hand...where does this guy get off saying America should invade and control and structure the world...where is your criticism of that...
May 24, 2010 11:33 AM | Reply | Permalink
On morality and politics -- Right, but this opens a door, as it must, to a way of thinking that I don't see in Beinart's NYRB piece, and that's part of what provokes me. Because once we have a chance to "discern which courses of action within available options are best," we may wind up listening hard to people like Oz and Grossman if they come out in support of something like the Gaza War.
Oz, of course, has written very powerfully in the NY Review of Books against much that Israel has been doing, not only in East Jerusalem but in the rest of the West Bank and Gaza. And Grossman, who has lost a son, in Lebanon, I believe, has been remonstrating very movingly against the Israeli governing coalition since even before his son's death.
I haven't looked into this, but if Oz and Grossman came out in support of the Gaza War I would want to know at what point they did (possibly early, to their regret somewhat later?) and, most of all, for what reasons. Do they still defend it as having been a necessity? I don't know. But even if they don't, the fact that they supported it for some time gives us a perfect example how discerning what's moral among limited political options plays out. And there may be something for you and all of us to learn here about how that works and how it it applied for these men in Gaza. Others, like Abraham Burg, opposed the war from the beginning, I believe, and I quoted them extensively in a TPM column here during the war.
May 22, 2010 1:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
" Because once we have a chance to "discern which courses of action within available options are best," we may wind up listening hard to people like Oz and Grossman if they come out in support of something like the Gaza War."
Well, we probably shouldn't have to listen for very long. In the period leading up to the war, the Israelis with the Egyptians had put Gaza under a blockade and everyone seems to agree that this blockade was meant to hurt 1.5 million Gazan civilians and establish a contrast between the WB under the PA and Gaza under Hamas. That's collective punishment and it's a war crime. As for the rockets, they were also a war crime, but there again Israel had killed more Gazan civilians before the war then the rockets had killed in southern Israel.
The way the issue is usually presented in the US, Israel pulled out of Gaza and they got rockets in return, so they had to do something and that's why the war was justified. Well, that version of events leaves out so much it is fundamentally dishonest.
There is no rationale for Israel's violence against Gaza that wouldn't be a stronger justification for Palestinian violence against Israel. To be clear, I don't think violence in either direction is justified, except in the very narrowest self-defense terms. If Israel is to use violence against occupied people, they should take as much care as they would if a group of terrorists were holed up in some building in Tel Aviv.
As for the people you mention, there are some Palestinians who are critical of Hamas, the PA, and Israel--for instance, those at the Palestinian Center for Human Rights. I don't think one should only listen to Israelis when discussing whether or not it is acceptable to bomb Palestinians. We don't generally allow our discussions of Palestinian terrorism to be confined to what Palestinians have said about it.
May 22, 2010 4:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
Here they are, by the way. The Palestinian Center for Human Rights. It might be nice to hear more from them, and not just from Israelis or Americans--
link
May 22, 2010 4:45 PM | Reply | Permalink
Yes, and one of the ways that those of you who were fair-minded and paying attention heard more from The Palestinian Center for Human Rights was from me, here at TPM, during the Gaza War:
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/01/04/can_there_be_politics_in_trage/index.php
I devoted one of my longest posts to giving the floor to Darryl Li, who works with them and B'tselem. The post is devoted to airing his indictment of Israel's policies toward Gaza.
The center is quite balanced and fair, in taking human rights so seriously that, when I clicked on the link that DonaldJ provides, here were the first three headlines on the right of the website:
20 Families Displaced as Palestinian Land Authority Demolishes Homes in Rafah
19 May 2010
Read more
110 Types of Medication and 123 Types of Medical Supplies Out of Stock at Health Facilities in the Gaza Strip
19 May 2010
Read more
PCHR Condemns Gaza Government’s Execution of Three Palestinians
18 May 2010
I am not citing these to be coy. I am citing these to be real.
May 22, 2010 6:00 PM | Reply | Permalink
That's why I cited them, Jim. They are fair and they criticize their own society under difficult conditions--I'd put them on a higher plane than some liberal Israeli who initially supported the Gaza War. You apparently imagined I was going to object to your citations of what they have on the link that I posted--apparently you must think you are the only person capable of moral consistency on this issue and if I criticize you, I must object to what appears on the very link that I posted. This is more of that black fly thinking of yours. You can't conceive that someone might criticize something that you post and not have bad intentions. I agree with much of what you say on this subject--there are some lefties who get too romantic about "liberation movements" and end up as apologists for the crimes of their chosen brand of "freedom fighter". But that doesn't mean I agree with everything you say--you're a little too prone to lump everyone to your left into that camp of apologists.
I mentioned the PCHR because you said we'd have to take liberal Zionists seriously when they initially supported the Gaza War and you compared them to Israelis who didn't. So I thought it would be helpful to list Palestinians who have a clear consistent view on human rights issues--if you're going to talk about who favored dropping bombs on Gaza, it's helpful, I think, to examine the views of Gazans who are critical of Hamas.
As for the liberal Zionists who were initially pro-war,
I can't conceive how anyone could, in late 2008, look at how Israel had treated Gaza and pretend that Israel was in any sort of moral position to use violence. Israel and Egypt should have lifted the blockade entirely, imposed a ceasefire, started removing settlements and in general ceased all activity that wasn't legitimate self-defense. Under those conditions, if rocket fire continued, they would then have had the right to respond with carefully targeted military strikes, but they had not come close to exhausting the peaceful alternatives. In fact, the blockade is collective punishment, an act of war, and cause for violence in itself. So Oz and the others just show the limits of their liberal Zionism on this issue.
Which is not to say that all liberal Zionists are like them.
May 23, 2010 12:14 PM | Reply | Permalink
Donald?... Uh, Donald?....
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/01/04/can_there_be_politics_in_trage/index.php
May 23, 2010 12:36 PM | Reply | Permalink
Jim, uh Jim--
http://tpmcafe.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/01/04/can_there_be_politics_in_trage/index.php#comment-3330221
You really don't seem to reply to criticism except with cryptic dismissals.
May 23, 2010 1:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
That reply was to Bradthedad, but to some degree it applies to you too.
I explicitly say I agree with some of what you say about lefty romanticizing of Hamas but still disagree with the notion that we have to take seriously the apologetics of some liberal Zionists for the Gaza War and you reply with a link. I just said I agreed with parts of your position, some of the very parts mentioned in that link, and explained where I don't--for about the third or fourth time now, I don't think the Israelis had the right to hit Gaza in late 2008 because not only had they not exhausted the peaceful alternatives, the blockade they imposed with Egypt was a war crime in itself. Therefore I don't think the liberal Zionists who initially supported the hit on Gaza need to be taken seriously and I'd much rather listen to people, Israelis and Palestinians alike, who take a consistent stand on human rights. I have no idea what you are replying about. You make it difficult to have any sort of discussion. Maybe that's the point.
As for the wall that you mention in that earlier post, here's a link about its supposed effectiveness as an anti-suicide bombing measure--
http://lawrenceofcyberia.blogs.com/news/2007/09/one-thousand-tw.html
May 23, 2010 1:56 PM | Reply | Permalink
"Israel and Egypt should have lifted the blockade entirely, imposed a ceasefire, started removing settlements and in general ceased all activity that wasn't legitimate self-defense."
Um, Israel and Egypt should have lifted the blockade. The rest of that was what Israel should have done. Even when I preview I miss this sort of mistake.
May 23, 2010 12:16 PM | Reply | Permalink
Looking back over this thread, I am reminded that what matters in discussions of this sort isn't whether people sometimes agree with certain parts of a post and disagree with other parts; that's almost inevitable. What matters is how the person who's posting and the people who are adding comments handle the also-inevitable confusion that arises from such a mixture of opinions.
One thing that happened here, I think, is that some people saw that I was posting from Tel Aviv, leapt to conclusions about what I was saying, and never really brought themselves to acknowledge that I see some good things and some bad things in Israel (and in Peter Beinart), and that both the good and the bad might be true. We all know taht life is like that - see Keats's "negative capability," the capability of holding two seemingly incompatible truths in mind as active possibilities -- but not everyone's thinking is like that. People have conclusions they want to reach, sides they have decided to join, and that's part of life, too, and certainly of politics.
My complaint about Beinart is that he's being just as much a partisan now as he was when he was on the other side, and what this suggests to me is not only a necessary and salutary change of mind and heart but a kind of opportunism I have seen before.
Again, in politics, there are indeed times when people have to join and rally one another with what Reinhold Niebuhr called "emotionally potent over-simplifications" if they want to get anything done. But a public intellectual's obligation is to keep the discussion open and nuanced, even when doing so enrages those who are sure they are right. Beinart may be using a pose of moral passion to cover a more calculated shift.
That does NOT make him wrong on the facts or about Israel's misdeeds, but if one is going to remain a trustworthy source of insights in a public discussion, one has to do more than say, as he does to Jeffrey Goldberg, that he began to turn when, as the father of young children, he saw that children had been murdered by the Israeli army in Gaza. People in the Israeli army have young children, too, People in Hamas have young children, too. Many of the AIPAC and other American Jewish "establishment" leaders have children, too. Alas, having them has had no salutary effect on people's moral clarity before.
Enough for here and now. The post just doesn't justify the accusations and the vitriol that many people hurled at it.
May 25, 2010 2:59 AM | Reply | Permalink
As the one who brought up Tel Aviv, I would like to say that you are misconstruing the criticism, mine and others. You also misconstrue a certain lack of niceties with "vitriol." People have reacted to a lot of specific problems with what you wrote and especially with the tone. It is true that most of the criticism was not about your main argument. Well, it so happens that this isn't what tickles many of us. But that doesn't mean the criticism came out of wrong assumptions. What is the basic issue, as many have pointed out, is the way you used softball criticism to defend Israel from criticism. It seems that you are having an imaginary conversation with someone who wants to throw the residents of Tel-Aviv into the sea, and you are providing evidence why that it would be grossly unfair. True, but that someone is imaginary. The people who are being thrown out of their homes are not in Tel Aviv. And Israel is not under attack. It is the US's most favored foreign country by any standard, and its crimes are not in the past or in the future. a few days ago, just as one example, settlers burnt 200 fruit trees (http://www.paltelegraph.com/palestine/west-bank/6105-israeli-settlers-burn-200-fruit-trees-in-hebron). This is the daily life of apartheid, and it calls for a different kind of intellectual engagement than splitting hair.
As for Tel Aviv, it is you who rhetorically posited the place as a source of privileged understanding. It isn't. This is what I reacted to. I didn't "infer your views" from your being in Tel Aviv. In fact I will be in Tel-Aviv in two days, but that is hardly a reason to trust my commentary. Being in Tel Aviv is not a privileged place from which to see the truth, no more so than Nablus, Haifa, Jebalia or Wadi al-na'am. The assumption that seeing things from Tel-Aviv clarifies more than it obscures is also tinged with the kind of self-regard, both racist and classist, with which Tel-Aviv residents, on average the richest in Israel and among the greatest beneficiaries of apartheid, tend to disregard the point of view of zionism's victims.
I want the people of Tel Aviv to give up--and because they won't, to be pressured to give up-- their privilege. I know that it hurts and that it sucks, because privilege is fun and pleasant, and the idea of losing it is really scary. But I will continue to insist on it.
May 25, 2010 12:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
And Israel is not under attack. It is the US's most favored foreign country by any standard,
not under attack...
right...
and most favored...
right...
vs the trillions coughed up to the Gulf states...and the dead American military who fought and died to protect their corrupt racist misogynistic regimes...
the trillions spent supporting coddling and protecting the Europeans...
as to your being TA...
what irony...
free to travel there...free to go to a bookstore...read a paper...post on the internet...criticise the government...score with the babes...smoke and drink in public and listen to any music you want and watch anything you want on your computer ot cable...
good luck trying that a few miles north south or west of TA...
but it's the people there you want to give up...
not Damascus...not Cairo...not Riyahd...
just the Jews...
and as to benefiting from Apartheid sweetpea...
you pay your taxes don't you...
of course you do...
"I know that it hurts and that it sucks, because privilege is fun and pleasant, and the idea of losing it is really scary."
spoken like a racist patronizing Jew hater...full of smug arrogant condescension...dripping hypocrisy from every word...and from every corner of hiss utterly privileged American life...
whose outrage makes him sound like a hypocrite with an axe to grind against Jews...
and we want you to give up too...
but you wont because people who set up the Jews to be different from themselves are eternal...
like cockroaches...
May 25, 2010 3:58 PM | Reply | Permalink
If stupidity were painful you would be drinking morphine by the gallons.
May 25, 2010 5:41 PM | Reply | Permalink
from an illiterate clown who admits he's a hypocrite...
this is funny stuff...
sort of the Marvel comics version of...
argumentum ad ignorantiam...
then I saw this...
"You know, it's a funny thing, every one of the bastards that are out for legalizing marijuana are Jewish. What the Christ is the matter with the Jews, Bob? What is the matter with them? I suppose it is because most of them are psychiatrists."
and it made me think of you...
have fun in TA...it's almost summer...the babes will be out in droves...
May 25, 2010 6:25 PM | Reply | Permalink
The problem we face in these threads is exemplified by these last few comments: No sooner does Evildoer draw himself up and make some serious criticisms than he gets drawn into trading insults with Marlow. These threads are not conversations, because they lack both the contexts and the mutual respect that might come from presenting ourselves to one another as recognizable people with actual names and identities.
For the person who writes the post (in this case, me), these obstacles are not self-imposed. My identity, and therefore my record, are out there for scrutiny. (At one point in this thread, Evildoer did link something of his own work and record.) But I was wrong to assume when I wrote this post that even regular TPM readers would know of or recall my previous posts on Israel. Had they done so, some of their criticisms of the post above might still have been made, but some of them would have been made differently, and some wouldn't have been made at all.
Yes, each post has to stand on its own, but on a blogsite that is also part of an ongoing conversation, not every post can reprise its assumptions and background from the beginning. The most it can do is link to past pieces, as I should have done.
Go to www.jimsleeper.com, and, at the top of the screen click "Latest Work" and scroll down there just a few lines until you get to a group of columns called, "Israel's Tragedy, America's Folly." Had some of the people who shot off the most angry and insulting post above been able to do this, they might have responded differently.
This truly is a problem of the internet: We have context-less conversations going on among people most of whom don't identify themselves. I still believe that all blogsites like this should require those who post to identify themselves, as citizens in a democracy should do when they get up in a public meeting and address a question or comment to the speaker.
Doing that sometimes requires a bit of courage (Hello? I thought that democracies and republics always did require it!), but it also constrains everyone to remember that if this really is a democratic conversation, they have to treat each participant with some respect; and this tends to improve the conversation. That we don't do this is a drag on both the conversation and the political culture.
May 26, 2010 3:44 AM | Reply | Permalink
I have no intention of being polite to people who casually and habitually blame Jews for their problems...
reason is not an answer...but ultimately and sadly in the end it will as always come down to the scene from Manhattan and bricks and baseball bats vs a withering piece of satire...(and yes obviously invoking that scene is ironic as it was itself a piece of withering satire)
perhaps Gandhi was right and it will leave the world blind...
but these people are howling for blood...
yours...and those of your ethnic heritage...and they are as immune to logic as a man whose had his anti-malarial pills is to malaria...
and I always start with reasonable points but fights are part of the political culture and not to be shunned...
in fact one can make the case that they are useful...why hide the fact that one has utter contempt for people one views as bigots...trying to stir up a lynch mob...
if that's what one truly believes as I truly believe about many of the posters here...
as to the argument (about which reasonable people may disagree) that one should not be anonymous I am of two minds...
on the one hand your point makes sense...it's a valid idea...the internet is democracy without citizenship...and might benefit from self identification...
on the other Historicus comes to memory...the tradition of anonymous commentary is a long one and often useful...even in the American "republic"...
and I suspect that "Publius" had their reasons for writing the Federalist Papers under a pen name...
thus we see that anonymous has a well established and important role to play in civic discourse however coarse one may find the tone...
after all one man's pornography is another art...
and forcing people to say who they are may just be Maoist enough to raise someone else's hackles...
as to insults in public to make a point...
"He was so crooked he needed to be screwed into his pants every morning..."
http://www.counterpunch.org/thompson02212005.html
now you may say that's Thompson identified himself and was standing by his polemic...
and you'd be right...
except for when he was Raoul Duke etc...
etc etc etc...
so on this point we must disagree...
cheers
"Marlow"
ps
and just to flog a dead horse...I find the anti Israel people here to be as vile crooked dishonest unreasonable and dangerous as Thompson found Dick and his a gang of gangrenous morally rancid political felatrices...the war has not ended...it's just halftime...
May 26, 2010 10:43 AM | Reply | Permalink
I have no intention of being polite to people who casually and habitually blame Jews for their problems...
You are a lying, deluded, insanity case, so you can not possibly insult anybody. Keep trying. All you can do is establish your DSM-III diagnostics. But facts and truth are not matter of opinion. I never expressed the ideas you claim I did. That is easy for any human being endowed with reason (I choose my words here) to see just by reading. FIY, I don't even blame my Jewish mother for my problems.
but these people are howling for blood...
yours...and those of your ethnic heritage...and they are as immune to logic as a man whose had his anti-malarial pills is to malaria...
You see, although I have an Israeli passport, which means probably I won't get the Chomsky treatment at the airport, I don't have an "ethnic heritage." I merely inherited a certain apartheid legacy that I'm keen on fixing. Neither do you, by the way. Your "heritage" comes from white European protestant colonial and antisemitic notions that you have made your own, and are now claiming as your "ethnic heritage," including the right to dispossess indigenous people and take their land in the name of European enlightenment. I also don't want your blood. You can donate it at the nearest hospital, unless they screen for rabies.
May 26, 2010 6:53 PM | Reply | Permalink
This is an extension, for optical reasons, of the thread that spans
from
Purple State May 21, 2010 10:59 AM
to
Marlow May 26, 2010 6:04 PM
Marlow: This is one final chance here for you to behave reasonably.
1. Can you read?
2. If so, read the title of this page. Does it say, come send your tired, your poor, your masses of long one–word-per-line posts on Eugen Weber's "Varieties of Fascism"? Does it say, lie down on the psychiatric couch and tell us about your feelings?
3. Or does it perhaps refer to Jim Sleeper's comments on Peter Beinart's opinions about the attitudes and actions of a certain set of American Jews towards a certain set of Israeli policies?
4. Now read your first interjection into the (above referenced) particular thread, at May 24, 2010 12:54 PM above, where you say, without any comment on Beinart's or Sleeper's remarks, or on the substance of my statements on THEIR SAME subject (and minus your dog-territory-marking triple dots): "when it comes to the Jews all problems are the result of corruption hypocrisy and deceit and all FINAL SOLUTIONS must be implemented right now consequences be damned because PTroub is getting his panties in a bunch."
5. The subsequent discussion in this thread relating to fascism is not about Everything Marlow Knows Based on Reading a few Books on it. On the contrary, fascism was brought up by me, for the sole reason of suggesting that this foul lie, in point 4 above, about me advocating a second holocaust is not only outrageously false but an absurd fear to boot because there is nothing like 1930s fascism in sight today. Lots of nasty stuff, yes, some of it potentially as bad as the '30s, and some of it stuff that Israelis, Jews, Americans, Greeks, Tamils, Koreans and many many others should be rightly worried about, more worried than they already are, in many cases. But the dark clouds of today are no more likely portents of a repeat of Auschwitz in 1942 than Auschwitz was likely to be a repeat of Odessa in 1905. The main difference between the two being rather important to the circa 997.5 thousand Jews NOT killed in that Odessa massacre.
6. You can choose now: (a) Compose yet another string of sometimes related one-line pot shots and tidbits from your literary meanderings or (b) Apologize, not for any of your many other outbursts on the page -few of us here are completely innocent of that general sort of misconduct- but simply for this particular instance of falsely attributing anti-Semitism. It is NOT anti-Semitic to make a critical statement about someone who is Jewish or about group consisting of a small unrepresentative minority of Jews. That is closest I have EVER come to anything anti-Semitic and none of your dozens of nasty insinuations to that effect have any foundation, but you are invited to retract just this one particularly uncalled-for false accusation.
7. If you must quote the god-like Tom Lehrer, kindly have the courtesy to spell Dr. Von Braun's first name properly.
May 26, 2010 8:17 PM | Reply | Permalink
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February 19, 2011 6:47 AM | Reply | Permalink
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March 15, 2011 2:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
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March 19, 2011 4:09 AM | Reply | Permalink
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March 22, 2011 10:53 AM | Reply | Permalink
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March 23, 2011 5:52 AM | Reply | Permalink
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March 23, 2011 5:53 AM | Reply | Permalink
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