Susie Kneedler picked up on the amazing exchange between mean Marty Peretz and Jeremy Ben-Ami of J Street on NPR the other day and filled in some other moments in their dialogue:
43:40
Host Tom Ashbrook: "Is it time for a new generational view as Jeremy?… You’re..kind of speaking one generation to another with you [Peretz] and Jeremy on the air…."
Peretz interrupts: " I–I–I don’t appreciate being seen as an ‘elder.’"
Ashbrook: "It’s an august position, sir."
Peretz: "I’m .I’m I’m .. 70 years old.
Ashbrook.: "Okay, you’re a kid."
Peretz: "…but I think, pretty young.’
Ashbrook: "Is there a generational transition underway here or not?
Peretz: I believe there is not. J Street I think is an epiphenomenom….and that’s okay. There have been lots of J Streets before. Before the establishment of the state there was something called the American Council of Judaism and they wanted nothing to do with Zionism."
[This is nuts. ACJ were glorious anti-Zionists. J Street is progressive Zionist!!]
Programs end with no time saved for Ben-Ami to respond.
Peretz’s visceral rejection of the view that his dogma stems from his age–for yes, his "generation" is notoriously blinkered about Israel’s total virtue and victimization. Yet what is it about ageist indoctrination that’s so persuasive to its adherents? And we all know of "elders" who are more enlightened, like Jimmy Carter and Desmond Tutu on their trip to the West Bank.
What is Peretz’s agitation about his years but another symptom of his delusion that he’s eternally young–as his idolized country Israel is eternally correct and also abused? We perceive "projection" all the time: Peretz and Co demonizing Palestinians with Israel’s own violence, never granting Palestine with one percent of the right to self-defense they lavish on Israel.
And what about Ben-Ami’s collapse before Peretz’s views on history and Peretz’s execrable views of Arabs and [Palestinian–never named] culture? What about Ben-Ami’s concern for the fragmenting of the Jewish community? We non-Jews need to speak up. Does that mean that we need to ask about a thread of racism that seems to weave through the emphasis on too-much care for Jewish solidarity at the cost of forgetting human empathy for all?
Perhaps I’m warped, because I love being a skeptic and feel no allegiance to other Irish Catholic, Scottish Anglican, German combos of my "accidental" and perhaps unfortunate lineage–let alone "American" whatevers.
Another fragment: Peretz characterizes the effort to divest from Israel as little pinpricks that represent an emotional and a theological hostility to Jews and the Jewish state. And that still also exists in America….particularly among the left. But he doesn’t think it’s an important force…
