The core condition of Zionism is the understanding that Jews are unsafe in western societies. Theodor Herzl invented Zionism two centuries ago for this good reason, and that belief underlies Prisoners, by Jeffrey Goldberg, about his decision to move from the U.S. to Israel. "[T]he fear of anti-Semitism is the forge on which many American Jews build their identities. This is how I built mine. I learned about the inevitability of anti-Semitism early on…" Having grown up on Long Island in an ethnocentric household like mine, he studied the Russian pogroms, he studied the Holocaust. He became a Jewish nationalist.The diaspora was the disease, he says, and Israel was the cure. He moved to Israel as a young man and served in the Israeli army.
Goldberg came back to the States before too long, and as I have said before, today he is the most important Jewish journalist in America. He is the touchstone for Establishment opinion. People say, What does Goldberg think? Goldberg knows this situation. He has been the expert on the Middle East at the New Yorker in the runup to the Iraq war, which didn't work out that well, if memory serves, and now at the Atlantic. David Gregory waved the book Prisoners in the air on Meet the Press a couple weeks ago when introducing Goldberg. The New York Times Op-Ed page has three times turned to him in recent months to explain the situation.
Notwithstanding great success, Goldberg's baseline "fear of anti-Semitism" has never gone away. There's a pattern:
–When Jimmy Carter came out with his bestselling book saying that Israel had installed apartheid in the West Bank, Goldberg wrote in 2006 in the Washington Post that Carter was a classic antisemite: he believed Israel was "a lineal descendant of the [anti-Christian] Pharisees" in the 1st century and that "the [Israeli] security fence itself is a crime against
Christianity."
–When Walt and Mearsheimer published their book on the Israel lobby in 2007, he said on the stage at Yivo, "I’m
going to tell you that this book is anti-semitic, and he [Daniel Goldhagen] is
going to tell you that it’s really, really anti-semitic." Laughter.
–Two days ago, the Times again gave Goldberg a ton of space on the op-ed page to publish this piece, an amalgam of old reporting about Hamas, that basically argues they're jihadists who are gripped by antisemitism. They believe that Jews are pigs and apes. So: Israel can never deal with Hamas. No wonder they're torching Gaza.
The essence of Zionism was a justifiable Jewish paranoia. But how rational is that feeling today, when we are so powerful in American society, and mighty Jewish nationalism has turned another Arab society into a slaughterhouse?
