Jim Sleeper at TPM doesn’t like what I wrote earlier about Looking for Gandhi in Palestine:
The blogger Phil Weiss, for
example, has barricaded himself into an intellectual Masada that leaves
no option I can find short of massive dispossession of Israelis for the
sake of his own tortured ethno-moral equilibrium….Weiss accuses advocates of coercive non-violence of drawing facile
analogies between what it took to remove the British in India and what
it will take to remove Israelis from….. where? I’m not sure if he
means all of the Palestine…
Sleeper sees a lot else wrong with me, and drops some big names and concepts along the way. The point is simple, Jim (we were friends a long time ago): If you think that what Israel is doing to the Palestinians is wrong, then before lecturing the Palestinians what to do about it–go, find your Mahatma– the first thing we should do is look at our own complicity in that wrongness. And it is substantial.
I have some support here from scholar Jerry Slater:
What needs emphasizing is that (a) the Israelis
have repeatedly crushed nonviolent Palestinian protests and marches
(often supported by Israelis); (b) have invariably responded to periods
of relative Palestinian nonviolence by expanding the settlements and
other components of occupation, and (c) have often abandoned previous
intransigent positions (occupation of Sinai,southern Lebanon) ONLY when they are, literally, under the gun. Remarkably, Shlomo Ben-Ami, the Israeli foreign minister under Barak, admitted as much.>I find it particularly depressing when people on the Israeli “left,” like Gorenberg, Oz, Meretz at the outset of the Gaza war, even David Grossman, also seem to have such a hard time remembering that their country occupies and represses the Palestinians.
