The Harvard forum offers four responses, all by intelligent men, two of whom find the demand completely reasonable too: Walter Reich is a former director of the Holocaust memorial, and grim Robert Satloff of WINEP, a leading branch of the Israel lobby, spun off from AIPAC. But Adam Garfinkle (a former State Department official thru the Iraq disaster and author of Jewcentricity), is not as crazy about the idea. He quotes his friend Daniel Pipes, then says that Jews need to have a worldwide discussion about how they define the Jewish state. Alan Dowty, who I’m guessing is the only non-Jew to write here [update: I’m told Dowty is Jewish], is polite but uncomfortable. He says, "Israel will find little understanding or support in the international community" for this demand.
What is stunning about this dialogue is how little connection it has to Middle East reality. MESH describes itself as "a project of the National Security Studies Program at Harvard University." The community here looks to be one that is chiefly neoconservative (as Garfinkle has wisely described neoconservatism, as arising from parochial/secular/religious Jewish energies). And so Harvard is offering instruction on national security studies, but there is no Palestinian or non-Zionist voice here. No one who addresses the real conditions of Palestinian life right now in the Jewish state, as they are known throughout the Arab world and Europe too. No speaker to point out that Palestinians are being ethnically cleansed from Jerusalem, having their land confiscated in the occupied West Bank, seeing a touchstone of their political/cultural memory, the Nakba, erased from Israeli text books. No one at this Harvard forum can dare say what Naomi Chazan does in the Jerusalem Post, no less, that democracy is being uprooted inside the Jewish state by currents of anti-Palestinian intolerance.
My criticism involves definitions of community, consensus and reality. Do these Harvard guys have any connection to the post-Iraq reality? Would it help if there were more non-Jews and Arabs invited to comment? And yes, who funds this shop?
[P.S. More from Garfinkle’s piece in Foreign Affairs, and his sharp description of neoconservatism as an expression of the Jewish presence in society:
Whatever else neoconservatism may be, it is a parochial Jewish expression of the modern penchant for religious energies to attach to politics. Neoconservatives, who tend to be far more deeply read in politics and history than religion and are generally less than orthodox in their religious practice, have substituted democratic ideology for Jewish theology as the central core of their belief system. The intra-Marxist debates that [Jacob] Heilbrunn describes as having taken place among the children of Jewish immigrants in the 1930s, and the way Leo Strauss read ancient philosophical tomes to tease out their meaning, are nothing less than the application of the intensely moral, text-oriented methodology of Talmudism to different texts. Second-generation neoconservative idealists have in turn substituted the heroic and optimistic narratives of American and Israeli history for the far dourer, realism-inducing narrative of Jewish history.]
