Friends have said I was too hard on Peter Beinart and the New York Review of Books yesterday. I don’t recant a word; but I think I was too narrowly focused (not the first time). Friends point out that the New York Review has run Hussein Agha and Robert Malley and Tony Judt’s great piece on imagining a binational state, also Judt’s recent stuff on Jewish identity that is non-Zionist. Yes, I should have mentioned all that. Also they have lately published Eyal Press’s fine reporting from Israel. Apologies to the Review’s editors and readers. Still I would say that the NYRB on this issue is at bottom liberal Zionist, tied to the idea of a Jewish state and thus in some considerable journalistic denial of the Jim Crow conditions on the West Bank that would have animated it to good fervor at another time, and in almost complete denial of Gaza. Beinart lately worked for AIPAC. Yes he criticizes refractory Jewish leadership in the piece, including AIPAC, but it’s as a lobby-reformer, unable to call this central force in our discourse what it is, a lobby.
Such is the condition of Jewish liberalism, tied in a knot, but yes, calling for more open discussion. Now are Palestinians allowed to speak, who (out of longing and loss that Jews might relate to) support the right of return? Hell no. (Zionists in media, I think you would be amazed if you only let them speak, what healing power their words would have, and what good action it might lead to.)
Here is a great interview of Beinart at Tablet which is in some ways better than the New York Review piece. It says that the New York Times Magazine killed the piece, and it says what Beinart does not say in the piece, that he had an epiphany around Gaza and the al Samouni family story, in which they found children with the corpses of their parents days later, and as a father he did not wish to rationalize it. The call on him to do so "sickened" him. Good man; hat’s off to Beinart. I wish he had written about that war crime in the piece. Remember it was about ambulances, which were repeatedly prevented from attending the wounded by the Israelis. I wish he would support Goldstone. A bridge too far for this Zionist to go, even in the New York Review of Books.
I also like it that he is honest about, I am a Zionist; and it animates his engagement politically. Remember, the piece was an appeal to reinvigorate Zionism for the young. I wish in a spirit of transparency he would now tell us how much this Zionism played into his decision to support the disastrous Iraq war. That shoe will drop, readers, some day. But this baby’s a millipede.
