A couple months back the New York Review of Books published an important, but pursy, piece on the Gaza war by Michael Walzer and Avishai Margalit (pictured) saying that the force used in Gaza was unjustified because Israel would never have used such force in civilian neighborhoods in Israel. I say pursy because there was no outrage. The tone of the piece was legalistic, and did not reflect what must be a dramatic internal struggle in Walzer’s soul, the soul of a Zionist. (Indeed, the strongest condemnation of Gaza in NYRB has come from Roger Cohen, who said some months ago he was "shamed" by it.)
Subsequently the NY Review ran a letter objecting to Walzer and Margalit’s analysis, written by a professor, Asa Kacher, and a Major General, Amos Yadlin. They are both Israelis.
Then in the latest issue, the NY Review follows up with two letters. From Shlomo Avineri, and the great Zeev Sternhell. Only Sternhell approves of the analysis, and takes it further, with appropriate outrage, at last.
Margalit is an Israeli. So are Sternhell, Avineri, Kasher and Yadlin. Michael Walzer spends a great deal of time in Israel. Where are the non-Israeli voices on the question of the Gaza slaughter? Where are the non-Jewish Americans? Where are the Palestinians? Can you imagine the New York Review of Books, our most important intellectual journal, publishing a forum on Tibet written by the Chinese? Never. But on this issue the great leftleaning NYRB is tortured (and PEP, and captive to the Israel lobby). Do you understand how significant Zionism is in American Jewish life, and therefore in U.S. intellectual culture? Let us change that, you and I, now that the discourse is laid out upon the sky like a patient etherized on a table.
(P.S. Note that the NYRB ran an excellent piece on journalism in the blogosphere by Michael Massing!)
