Today on NPR's morning show, Daniel Schorr had more to say about the miracle on the Hudson than he did about Gaza, and not much about Gaza at all. So Schorr is mute before the horror while his contemporary Bill Moyers, using the eyes in his head, says it's Dante's inferno. Schorr's mother lit candles for Palestine. And so the flame of Zionism still flickers in the liberal American Jewish heart.
The American Jewish lib/left tradition will never be the same. It has been AWOL on Gaza. Reform Judaism has cheered the massacres ahead, the American Conservative has taken the high ground, and bold new worldly voices have emerged at the periphery of Jewish life amid respectable denunciation, from JATO to J Street to Daniel Levy to Adam Horowitz.
The leftlib abdication can be seen all around us. The New York Review of Books has been unpardonably silent on Gaza; at last it runs Roger Cohen's piece. Pretty good, but it is too little, too late for the leading journal of the left. Cohen says the Gaza attack is "wrong" and that the Israeli narrative has "run its course," true and helpful, yes, but altogether the tone is "despondent." Cohen is not enraged but engaged with Israel's myth of itself.
Oh come on, man, share the Holocaust a little as the daughters of that howling Palestinian doctor are destroyed in the twinkling of an eye in the barb-wire hellground no one can escape. Cohen uses the word "gyre." That strikes me as too literary, when you have the burned bodies of children everywhere. While my progressive friend the writer Elizabeth Wurtzel brings in college Frenchies Derrida and Jean Renoir, in arguing that all the criticism of Israel is just anti-semitism. Look at what the Chinese are doing to the Tibetans, Wurtzel says, but
May or may not be doing wrong. Abdication (answered, helpfully, by Seth Freedman.)
Jack Ross adds:
The current issue of TAC is nothing less then a watershed moment - Mearsheimer and Daniel Levy in the same pages, on the same side of the barricade. It's an important discussion as to why the liberals are AWOL, and I've always insisted that in most cases the culprit is "liberalism" rather than the Jewish angle, but clearly the progressive-realist marriage is taking place. (Insert Weissian jive prose about Obama getting on board here).
As always, I love your blog, Phil, but I pity you if Elizabeth Wurtzel is your friend. From intimating in a recent obituary for David Foster Wallace that she had had a fling with him to her most recent calamity in the Guardian (to which you linked), she must be the most self-obsessed, narcissistic person on the planet– not the stuff on which good friends are made on.
Look, I think some of the commenters here are antisemites, so yeah, some people do use Israel's crimes as something to feed their own bigotry, BUT–I just read Ms. Wurtzel's piece and it was despicable. A fairly common reaction, but still despicable. South African whites and their supporters used to say the same sort of thing. Madrid is right–she's a narcissist.
You know, there are many, many issues that Americans whether right wing (GOP) or centre-right (Democrats) can agree on, that Jews and Goyim can agree on
One is, of course, the judgement of 'W' presidency.
The other should be Israel.
"Look at what the Chinese are doing to the Tibetans?" The last time I looked the 95% of slaves and serfs that the Chinese emancipated in 1959 were living in their own homes, working their own land, and attending schools. I would say that what Israel has done to the Palestinians is just the opposite of what the Chinese have done woth the "Tibetans."
just more hasbara. whatever the chinese are doing to the tibetans is not being done with american aid and weapons and political support so the us is not aiding and abetting. as far as i know chinese americans are not cheering on china's violence in tibet and are not lobbying washington to support it. of course the palestinian minority in israel was the majority before israel's genocidal ethnic cleansing.
but i like the fact that phil keeps doors open to all, even folks that i don't think much of. that may help him navigate through these dangerous waters.
look at tibet. look at darfur. look at the slave trade taking place (manufactured) in sudan. look anywhere but what jews are doing to palestinians.
i stopped listening to npr at first gulf assault pushed by jews. all jews at npr were wringing hands and cackling like a barnyard full of chickens why bush not already slaughtering saddam and the world's 4th largest army. shorr was clucking about "we" meaning shorr and israel. i called (i think the philadelphia or boston studios. not sure). all in a tizzy. hilarious and they should have been sent to the future guantanamo as a warm up for being traitors. they still are.
"Israel remains a small island of relatively liberal democracy in a repressive Arab sea."
Err…..No.
No to Israel being a liberal democracy.
No to it 'swimming'in "a repressive Arab sea."
For me the jews can keep 'The Holocaust'.
It is only they, including anti-zionists apparently who find it unthinkable that they could be like their former genocidal, racist imperialist enemy.
In reality, it takes some serious effort not to see the glaring similarities between Nazim and Zionism. It's not nice to have to say it but it must be said.
We're supposed to be learning from history, after all.
I predict we'll be seeing more and more of Wurzel's "antisemitism" ploy, not less. It's threadbare but it's all the Zionists have left (and they're going to fight back with all the power they have).
It's still a very powerful weapon out in the real world (as opposed to here in Mondoweiss) where most Americans still feel vaguely uncomfortable just saying the word Jew. And it's very easily manipulated — an anonymous poster can quickly make any comments section look like … (wait for it) … The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Madrid, I'm not close to Elizabeth W, just met her once or twice, and she friended me on facebook. Phil
Someone who can should nominate Phil Weiss for a Nobel Peace Prize by the time this dialogue is over and as a condition of nomination Weiss must haul Jack Ross along.
Phil, this is the only place on the web that I can find where touchy truths and hidden lies are getting an airing.
I just discovered Elizabeth Wurzel's commentary in the guardian.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/16/elizabeth-wurtzel-antisemitism-israel-gaza
Yep, we are all anti-Semitic, because we gang up on Israel and there is only one of them (don't even ask).
This comment is just too convoluted for me . I guess Elizabeth went to the same school as Richard Witty. I am settling on my sofa to enjoy reading the readers responses (over 1000 at the latest count).
Guardian readers don't suffer fools gladly.