Keep meaning to pick this up. On C-Span's Washington Journal last Saturday, journalist Robert Kuttner of The avowedly-liberal American Prospect, author of Obama's Challenge, was on talking about, well, Obama's challenge, and saying how smart the next president is. Agreed. A caller asked about AIPAC and the "Jewish" lobby and Rahm Emanuel, whose parents were "Jewish terrorists."
Kuttner said he is Jewish, and then did the usual, and said that he hears a lot of people trotting out this idea about Zionists. But he doesn't care if it's the Jewish lobby or the Christian Zionists, he wants an evenhanded policy in the Middle East and we have to make Israel make hard choices. Good for him. But that old dodge: Christian Zionists. I guess they're the ones who cut off Howard Dean's head when he wanted an evenhanded policy, or cut Obama off at the knees when he said Palestinians are suffering the most.
Anyway, Kuttner also said that terrorism is sort of in the eye of the beholder, and Emanuel's father was fighting to "liberate" the British colony of Palestine, and by that token George Washington was an American terrorist. Pretty close to verbatim. Can't listen to it again. But he used the word colony to describe Palestine. Actually it was the League of Nations mandate. The Brits didn't love the job. That was one error. The other is that a lot of the Irgun activity was post-British control and aimed at ethnic cleansing of Palestine. The U.N. called for Jaffa to be an Arab city, the queen of the sea, 70,000 people. When the Irgun got done, there were just a couple thousand. Too close to Tel Aviv. Too many great old houses.
What's stupendous about this, as Charles Keating, who pointed it out to me noted, is the truly stupendous double standard: the glorification of Israeli history, by a good liberal American Jew–hey it's in our mythology–and when Palestinians rise up against tyranny they are to be denied all rights of self-determination. Arab liberation just doesn't count for anything, for 60 festering years. And we are recruited in this delusory doubleness by upstanding liberal journalists.
"I've noticed more and more Washington Journal call-ins are angry about AIPAC," Keating says, and no wonder. Keating also says, wisely: "Kuttner's views are usually pitted against the likes of William Kristol. But here the vision seems identical."
