‘Commentary’ seeks to discredit charge that Gaza attack was ‘disproportionate’ without even citing casualty figures

I just got my March issue of Commentary. It's not online yet. It includes a long article by Yiddishist Ruth Wisse called "Now, About That 'Proportionality'" which of course says that Israel was right to destroy Gaza. There is something risible about the article. It goes on for four pages and not once states that more than 1300 Palestinians were killed, including over 350 children (per B'tselem's Maya Sabatello), and that 13 Israelis were killed. Even the Jerusalem Post gives the numbers. Charges of disproportionality from my side all cite these numbers: they are a glaring reflection of the difference in strength between the threat and the response.
Some other highlights: Wisse is angered by "involuntary anti-Semitism," by which she presumably means critics of Israel who don't understand that they are hurting the Jews. And in attacking Jewish critics of Israel, she asks if there's "ever been a comparable effort at national self-delegitimation on the part of Palestinian or Arab thinkers or scholars?" This is ethnocentrism talking. The answer is, Of course, yes. Read Ali Abunimah/Saeb Erekat calling for a democracy between the Jordan and the Mediterranean.
Also in the March Commentary: a feverish attack on Taghreed El-Khodary's reporting from the Gaza slaughter for the New York Times, by Rick Richman. A repugnant piece, it blasts her for being upset about the destruction to the city she lives in on a CNN interview.

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