Wonderful news. Michael Walzer has condemned the Gaza war as an unjust war, in the Hebrew version of Haaretz. So reports Jerry Haber. Remember that Walzer welcomed the Gaza war back in January at Dissent and said it wasn't disproportionate (I'm having trouble getting the link now). That after more than 10 days of horror.
Then more recently in Dissent, Walzer nobly cried out against its "awfulness."
Now Jerry Haber reports that Walzer and Avishai Margalit have condemned the war, but carefully. Excellent. This is the stirring of a fine conscience. Thus Walzer joins J Street. He will bring his friend Leon Wieseltier with him (and leave the belligerent Jeffrey Goldberg and Marty Peretz more and more isolated in their neocon swamps). He will build a tabernacle of resistance to Israel's policy in the Democratic lib-left. He will find John Mearsheimer and Steve Walt there, puffing on a hookah.
And Walzer will empower others, weaker spirits, to come forward. Let's honor the great Walzer.
Some questions of my former professor:
–When will you publish this important piece in English?
–How do you explain your own failure to recognize the patent horror of this war at the time, when your voice would have made more of a difference to Palestinian children running from white phosphorus bombs? How much more information did a body need?
–What does the naked and brutal indifference to Palestinian lives say about Zionism and the Jewish idea of chosenness?
A statement of Walzer's is one of the inspirations of this site: that Jews governed themselves without territory and sovereignty for 2000 years. We haven't done so well at governing others. This is the heart of it. Understanding the ways in which the Jewish idea of exceptionalism is unfit for a modern multicultural globalized world.
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