I love the New York Times. It has a dialogue about the "Zionist project" between John McWhorter of the Manhattan Institute and Glenn Loury of Brown, formerly of the Reagan administration, and I have not listened to the whole thing, but Loury is on fire. He does what any honest thinking intellectual does, he questions the Israeli mantra of We-need-security and examines the conditions of the Palestinians, and how they got to Gaza in the first place.
Loury (not verbatim): I reject the Israeli counterfactual, of missiles coming in from Tijuana to California and what would we do? Because I wouldn’t have put 1 million people there who were forced out of their homes!
McWhorter: You’re saying it’s "maybe not the best of ideas for Israel to be founded on that piece of land."
No, Loury says. That’s an "idle" argument. Verbatim:
"Given that it has been founded and that has created certain consequences, comes with that responsibilities of the people who are principals, to reckon with those consequences in a way that’s consistent with humane standards of decency and morality, and they’re not doing that….and the notion that ‘we’re the victim here because there are rockets coming in from Gaza,’ that’s absurd.
"It’s not morally acceptable for the project to continue if the price of that is the oppression of millions of people by the actions that… we’ve been criticizing."
Wow, it’s happening. The genie is out of the bottle. American intellectuals who are not directly implicated in Zionism are being invited to examine it. Zionism is up for grabs. When will American Jews join this conversation? When will Palestinians who for some unfathomable reason believe in the right of return and were granted a state by the U.N. 63 years ago, a promise that was never fulfilled as their land has been gobbled and gobbled, be invited to explain this belief on the Times site?
