A little later today I will be posting about Yoav Shamir's documentary, Defamation, which had its American premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival last night. I wuz there. Beautiful movie. Wrenching, important, altogether engaged with Jewish identity/Israeli brutality. And due for a theatrical release. Before I post about the film I want to get to the news.
Halfway through the film Walt and Mearsheimer take their trip to Israel at the behest of Gush Shalom. They lecture here and there. And the Anti-Defamation League sends along Arieh O’Sullivan, a Hebrew speaker, to monitor Walt and Mearsheimer. O’Sullivan counts all the bad things that are said about the ADL– for use in the ADL's attacks on Walt and Mearsheimer.
O'Sullivan is on his cellphone in a room in Israel, following one such event, when historian Teddy Katz, a Gush Shalom member, comes back into the room to collect various posters and such, and O’Sullivan asks him in Hebrew why a little group like Gush Shalom is spending money on Walt and Mearsheimer.
Katz booms at him, per the subtitle: “We think what these people are doing is blessed.”
Katz goes on to explain, we have never learned to live with our neighbors, and powerful
Jews in America are sustaining us in this delusion. It needs to be corrected, we need to seek conciliation with the Arabs, or we are
all doomed. But the quote is: "We think what these people are doing is blessed."
I have said something like that, but never gone quite that far. And of course such a statement has never been uttered in the U.S., which is locked down against Walt and Mearsheimer's teaching. But I know where Katz is coming from. He and I are engaged in the same spiritual/religious struggle; and these scholars at great risk to their reputations/careers have joined us.
Maybe sometimes the problem is not thinking the right way, sooner or later, but doing it in due course.
"Katz goes on to explain, we have never learned to live with our neighbors, and powerful Jews in America are sustaining us in this delusion. It needs to be corrected, we need to seek conciliation with the Arabs, or we are all doomed. But the quote is: "We think what these people are doing is blessed.""
Is that the sum total of Walt/Mearsheimer's thesis. "LIVE and LET LIVE". Or, is it a suggestion of political analysis of realist assessment of US defense, economic, and political interests.
Conciliation is the important word.
A word condemned here.
http://images.thesamba.com/vw/classifieds/pix/2600873.jpg
Is there any way we can watch this online? Would love to see it.
Witty, what's the difference? Live & let live, versus realist approach? In context of USA foreign policy?
Is that the sum total of Walt/Mearsheimer's thesis. "LIVE and LET LIVE"?
You're thinking of Ariel Sharon. "Live and let live" was his plan (also known as "facts on the ground").
This MUST be the same Teddy Katz (student of Ilan Pappe) that was hung out to dry at University of Haifa because he unearthed evidence of Israeli atrocities in 1948…
Laleh it is the same Teddy Katz, however, you have two serious errors. First, he was not a student of Ilan Pappe's (i.e. Ilan Pappe did not have any form of oversight over his work). Second, Katz's work was seriously flawed, in that he relied solely on oral histories from one side as "evidence" of the "atrocities" that supposedly occurred at Tantara. He never presented any substantiating evidence – either physical or in the form of testimonies of the Palmach fighters who had supposedly carried out the "attrocities". Further, he settled out of court and agreed to revise his work when sued by a group of elderly Palmach veterans for defamation of character.
BTW, when Mearsheimer and Walt were here (in Israel) they were extremely well received. I saw them on television, and it was very clear that they did not espouse anything near the McCarthyism that we see on this blog.