One of the biggest problems in the discourse of Israel/Palestine in this country is the literacy test that is applied to anyone who is not pro-Zionist who wants to speak out and that leaves us with Jeffrey Goldberg, Ethan Bronner, Tom Friedman and Gershom Gorenberg as America’s informants. No Rashid Khalidi, no Rob Malley, no Ali Abunimah is allowed. Jimmy Carter? Too ill-informed on the subject to express an opinion. Sean Lee reads the Peter Beinart essay in the New York Review of Books and sees a religious bar. He asks "why this topic is always framed as a typically Jewish debate."
In other words, why is this an internal tribal discussion? And, as I’ve asked before, why are we so rarely privy to the opinions of, say, Palestinians or other Arabs? As it stands, Beinart’s piece will be discussed and taken seriously, but would it have even been published if it had been written by an Arab? Maybe, but certainly not in the NYRB, for even Hussein Agha apparently needs a Rob Malley to talk about Palestine and Israel in The New York Review of Books. Arabs don’t really get much of a say in the American conversation, because … well I guess because we don’t think they’re capable of saying anything for themselves, or we immediately discount what they say as biased, since they’re Arabs. Why is it that many of the best known partisans of the Palestinian cause in the US aren’t Arabs? (Think Norman Finkelstein and Noam Chomsky, for example.) It’s not for a dearth of Arab voices.
Great question. It’s amazing to me that the New York Review, a truly great publication and an edifice of the left, seems to exercise a religious bar on this conversation. Who has it published on this matter? Amos Elon, Tony Judt, Michael Walzer, Avishai Margalit, Tom Segev, Eyal Press, Gershom Gorenberg. I’m sure I’m forgetting some names but with the exception of Agha, above, everyone is Jewish. A couple years ago they commissioned a review of Walt and Mearsheimer’s book by Andrew Bacevich and did not use it. Bacevich isn’t Jewish. Neither are W&M. As I wrote back when W&M were getting paddled for opening their mouths, Do the goyim get to register an opinion?
The point is that we need more diversity on this subject (including as Lee points out, in my crowd). More diversity inevitably includes two verboten points of view: the realist take on Partition expressed so articulately by Loy Henderson of the State Department in 1947, in this great book, that establishing Israel in defiance of the American principle of self-determination would alienate the Arab and Muslim world for years and years to come (how we doing?), and the pro-Palestinian take that international law grants Palestinians a right of return. I’ve noticed that almost all Palestinians believe in the right of return. No wonder we never hear from them.
