Neoconservative Eli Lake and Peter Beinart are shown here arguing about Israel at the NYT website. Lake looks to be in considerable pain. He wants to believe that Israel has not become a rightwing ethnocracy slouching toward fascism. Beinart says that Israeli democracy is in danger. He points out that Meir Kahane's party was banned in Israel (Kach) but that Avigdor Lieberman, who has endorsed expulsion of Arabs, is today the Foreign Minister.
The significance of the dialogue is that Lake feels himself being marginalized; indeed, former AIPAC'r Beinart's apostasy has in an instant created the new center and exposed people like Leon Wieseltier and Jeffrey Goldberg as rightwingers, made the neoconservatives look extinct. Lake's pain is not just his illusions about Israel being challenged, but about the center moving to the left.
Speaking of the left, a lot of their dialogue is about Whether Arabs are better or worse off now than they were in 1965. Some day we will get to hear Palestinians on the NYT website discussing this question. You'd think they might actually know about Palestinian conditions? Both these guys are at bottom Israel lobbyists, concerned about American support for the Jewish state. That's the new Establishment. Can't wait for a little air in the room.
this says it all phil, it’s so true…the center has now officially shifted. re arabs being ‘better off’. the legislation to withdraw citizenship from anyone being convicted of terrorism is a gruesome set up. torturing human rights activists and accusing them of spying e/hizbollah. it makes me sick..
“Can’t wait for a little air in the room.”
Step outside and breath, if you’re not afraid of being strangled.
Isn’t it interesting – one article suddenly opens so many eyes to what so many of us have been saying for years. Suddenly it’s sayable, thinkable. Obviously true.
beinart is standing on the shoulders of giants.
beinart is crouching on the shoulders of giants.
Having been over the age of thirteen when Beinart expressed himself on the War on Iraq, I can’t understand how he can ever be considered anything but standing on the shoulders of monsters.
And, dammit, he didn’t go, did he? A prime putz!
Or maybe Phil sees a model in the way Beinart has been treated after that?
It has to be said by someone who was in the mainstream and has earned the credibility that they value by being spectacularly wrong on the major issues of our time–Beinart was pro-Iraq war and so he’s got credibility. Same with Andrew Sullivan, who was ranting a few years ago about “fifth columns”, meaning lefties not completely on board with Bush’s wars.
Now on the other hand, if you’ve been a critic of American and Israeli insanity all along, clearly you can’t be trusted.
Greenwald and others have written about this.
Still, it’s good to see people like Sullivan and Beinart move as far as they have.
“It has to be said by someone who was in the mainstream and has earned the credibility…”
Yes, someone like Beinart has been on the radar, and what he says is “hearable” by the mainstream, but that’s why it’s so important that he write an article like that. I thought it was brilliant. We have to realize that discourse has been SO distorted by the MSM that the fact that someone that evens HINTS towards a little sanity and common sense will be seen as quite a shift, even if it wasn’t much.
Unfortunately, people like Greenwald are written off by many of the ignorant loudmouths and media pundits as being troublemakers, even though what they say is consistently right-on. Facts just don’t matter that much, and news in the US has really become show business – I can see that now, visiting the States after a long stay in Europe.
There is a long way to go.
RE: “…news in the US has really become show business…” – lareineblanche
MY COMMENT: I wish Dr. Nancy Snyderman (of NBC) would give us an update on “Baby Israel” (the Haitian one).
MSNBC Report on Israeli Field Hospital in Haiti [02:42] – link to msnbc.msn.com
Video: ‘Israel’ Born in Haiti after IDF Delivers Healthy Baby, by Arutz Sheva TV, 01/17/10
The IDF Field Hospital in Haiti has delivered its first baby, and the mother was so happy that she called him “Israel.” Mother and son are doing well.
Gynecologist Dr. Shrir Dor, an IDF Major General, said that after the birth, the person who accompanied her “came to bless her, and said he thought the baby should be named ‘Israel.’ The mother was really happy so they named him that, as a way to remember the first baby that was born in the IDF Field Hospital.” The hospital is the only one of its kind set up at the disaster area…
ENTIRE ARTICLE/VIDEO[00:56] – link to israelnationalnews.com
What a disgrace that was Dickerson – the country in ruins and Israel flies in a field hospital, gets glowing coverage on every network in the US and depart after just 11 days. It was a training exercise for the IDF, a cynical exploitation for hasbara purposes and trailing distant a distant third, a relief effort for Haiti.
“It has to be said by someone who was in the mainstream and has earned the credibility that they value by being spectacularly wrong on the major issues of our time”
That statement is completely nonsensical! And sadly, exactly correct.
At any rate, no one can doubt his (beinart’s) bravery! He courageously insisted that eeverybody else go fight the Iraqis. And this when Iraq’s military might was estimated to be much mightier than it turned out to be. Every generation only produces millions of Americans with that kind of courage.
A few people whose judgement I trust have described to me that Israel is in fact growing more and more suppressive of dissenting Jews, Arab citizens and certainly relative to the West Bank.
Lake’s point that the former Israeli far right has drifted towards the center is also true, but has not reached a necessary point of consent with Palestinian national aspirations.
Richard, you’re a big Talking Heads fan, aren’t you?
Still, you don’t have to take their album title quite so literally!
Are you talking about Stop Making Sense? Not an album, I believe, but a concert movie. Besides, “Stop” implies he was making sense before. Or am I missing the boat entirely? Another album?
There wasn’t an “album” by the same name? I guess I’m showing my age, maybe I meant CD.
But no, sense he is not making, and he manages to say three contradictory things in two sentences. But for Richard that is just about par.
So the NYT Magazine won’t run Beinart’s piece for “stylistic reasons,” but then they feature him debating it on their Web site? I guess Beinart did shift the debate. His ideas are suddenly in style.
Don’t get too hopeful. All we’ll get from Beinart is a stab in the back, which he will deliver while straddling a fence. Count on it. And after the stab he will just keep hacking away.
Yep, just like Saint Petreaus. In fact wasn’t he just sucking up to Midge Decter or Gertrude Himmlefarb or somebody.
If I remember what I read yesterday, Saint Petraeus is gung-ho and making preparations for the inevitable, unavoidable war with Iran.
“Don’t get too hopeful. All we’ll get from Beinart is a stab in the back, which he will deliver while straddling a fence. Count on it”
I said something like that last week. I’m slightly more optimistic about him now, based on his followup piece, but there’s still a very good chance you’re right. Thomas Friedman was at times outraged by Israel’s conduct in the 1982 Lebanon War, but in the long run that just gave him “credibility” to unfairly bash Palestinians later on, because he was perceived as sympathetic to them. So the Camp David disaster in 2000 was blamed entirely on Arafat with the help of people like Friedman.
I hope Beinart has changed, but it won’t be surprising if he does a Friedman somewhere down the road.