Jack Ross is irritated by Weiss’s use of the PEP acronym, Progressive Except Palestine, in writing about Huffington Post yesterday. Ross attacks the idea, and Weiss responds.
Where exactly does the "progressive" part come in? The fact that they’re from Hollywood and are therefore in favor of everything (else) the big bad religious right is against?
Much as I detest your PEP construct, it can aptly describe someone like Russ Feingold, who for whatever odd reason plays footsie with McCain and Lieberman on Iran while he is more than sound on civil liberties and Afghanistan, or even, up to a point, The Forward insofar as its pro-labor conceit is somewhat sincere.
But it is paying far too high a compliment to HuffPo or the leadership of the Reform movement to describe them as "PEP" just because of the idiosyncracy that they support Israel because it is to them a symbol of all the things like abortion, feminism, and gay marriage that they embrace only because the dreaded Christian right opposes them.
You also seem to be trying to undermine my critique of your PEP template, by making it just about other historical grievances from the World War II era, rather than also about why it is certain liberals can embrace Israel with no cognitive dissonance whatsoever as a haven of feminism, gay liberation, and just plain contempt for the unwashed Islamic wogs. Or have you become so enamored of the liberal upper class that you’ve lost sight of the underlying racism of its worldview, that is, how exclusively white the white left is? I have not lost sight of that, I just keep it in perspective.
I agree that with Israel/Palestine it’s all falling apart, but to me that’s just the beginning. What you and the hard left completely fail to appreciate is that South Africa, to say nothing and Rhodesia, were rogues to the international system right from the beginning; whereas Israel, that is, the Jewish restoration, is its greatest triumph.
No other country so openly rests its "right to exist" on the authority of international law, and indeed it was willed into being by the UN at a time when it honestly thought it could govern the world. As for America, so also for the UN, Israel is the ultimate symbol of itself as a force for good in the world, representing the salvation of the Jews as the heroic outcome of "the good war" that defines their whole existence and purpose. To indict Israel, in other words, is to indict the whole world order, the whole 20th century.
Weiss: Jack, the ending of your response goes into deep water that I’m not going to follow you into. I sense you’re a libertarian and isolationist. I’m a good postwar American liberal, and I believe that the UN is a good thing by and large. I like the idea of world government, I think we’re headed there ultimately, unless we burn to a crisp first. And no, I’m not an interventionist.
As to the liberal upper class, or upper-middle-class if I can adjust your epithet, guilty as charged! The upper-middle-class had a great number of social achievements, maybe springing from self-interest and affluence; but feminism and gay rights and environmentalism and the anti-Vietnam war movement, all good. Civil rights, great! Even to the extent that Jews used blacks as proxies in a war for Jewish inclusion in American society–wonderful.
This is simply haut-bourgeois history in the blue states of the U.S. And that whole liberal legacy stopped short when it came to Palestine.
But let’s get to the word progressive. I’m not the intellectual you are– I’ve seen your bookshelves, which if they fell over would crush me in an instant–but in my progressive experience, as a sort of political guy all these years, the issues we engaged on were: Vietnam, South Africa, Central America… As for our whiteness, yes; but we were animated politically by people who looked different from us.
That progressive strain goes through Upper West Side NY politics, not just Russ Feingold. But Feingold and Nadler epitomize it. Mark Green. Barack Obama. Bienpensant liberal values, liberals who congratulate themselves on opposing the Vietnam war and supporting civil rights– and the whole enterprise stops dead when it comes to Israel/Palestine.
You’re not conventional. You have to think like a conventional person for a moment to understand the significance of identifying PEP. It’s an accusation of an important hypocritical component of the contemporary discussion; and pointing it out is effective because it isolates the problem, and hopefully will win more liberals to our side.
