Once you open the door and question the monolithic ethnic-solidarity of Jews behind Zionism, I don't know where it leads. Well, for one thing, you smash the lobby, a process I believe is underway. Also, you question the neocon fools that led so much of the Jewish community leadership to support the Iraq war.
And most of all, you stand up for Palestinian human rights. Which brings me to the eloquence of octagenarian historian Howard M. Sachar's piece at Foreign Affairs. (try this link: link to www.foreignaffairs.com). He is calling for an imposed solution, just as Partition was imposed (except that it wasn't!).
And notice his sly references to the Israel lobby. "The so-called Jewish vote." It's not just a vote, my dear. Note the effort to wean Jews from their generational "insecurities"--fears of anti-Semitism trumping any concern for minority rights. Note the reference to Kosovo, which got a Muslim state in a timely manner, even as Palestine has waited for decades.
Note his implicit admission that the Jewish community granted political power to the crazy Revisionist Jews, with their apocalyptic vision of the holy land. This means Leon Wieseltier and Charles Krauthammer and Bill Kristol.
And finally, note the nobility that Sachar grants to pro-Palestinian Jews. A beautiful statement indeed. And a benediction. As I say, I don't know where this leads, except to.. democratic visions:
Without great-power diplomatic benediction and financial life support, would there ever have been a State of Israel or an embryonic Palestinian state in the making? Similarly, without the application of an unrelenting great-power agenda, could the Israelis or the Palestinians accept a formula that each side until now has rejected as politically unpalatable?
Finally, another issue may be added to Washington's list of diplomatic and political challenges. Will a U.S. president risk alienating the so-called Jewish vote by adopting a policy of firm evenhandedness in the Middle East -- one that confronts Israeli territorial aggressiveness no less than Arab guerrilla terrorism? Actually, during the past 30 years, a verifiable shift in perspective toward Israel's West Bank settlements has been developing not only within the liberal West but also within the American Jewish community. The executives of mainstream American Jewish organizations, who tend to pander to their constituencies' reflexive insecurities, remain oblivious to the mounting evidence that those constituencies -- younger and more sophisticated than their forebears -- have moved on.
With the exception of a small (if clamorous) minority of Revisionist Zionists, whose version of the Holy Land is apocalyptic, American Jewry has been wedded to the principle of religious and ethnic freedom, participated in the vanguard of the civil rights movement, and has pleaded the overseas causes of such minorities as the Kosovar Muslims -- and, increasingly, the Palestinians -- with all the urgency characteristic of a minority people uneasy at the palpable international isolation of its much-loved surrogate homeland and ethnic status symbol. Any president or legislator who ignores the depth of this unease -- the visceral yearning of both the Israeli and the American Jewish "silent majority" for an evenhanded settlement imposed by Israel's greatest Western supporter -- could justly be characterized as a political Rip Van Winkle.
thanks for this excellent post phil and thanks for hauling that blockquote out of the firewall for us. wish i could read the whole article.
we sure have been hearing more about an imposed solution lately.
If the Palestinians opposed the partition of their land in 1948, how could it be other than imposed?
Sachar!!!
A great writer. Read his histories.
They are consistent with his views expressed here, an advocacy of “enough Zionism”.
* The Course of Modern Jewish History (Updated 1990)
* Aliyah: The Peoples of Israel
* From the Ends of the Earth: The Peoples of Israel
* The Emergence of the Middle East
* Europe Leaves the Middle East
* The Man on the Camel
* Egypt and Israel
* Diaspora
* A History of Israel from the Aftermath of the Yom Kippur War
* A History of the Jews in America
* Farewell Espana: The World of the Sephardim Remembered
* Israel and Europe: An Appraisal in History
***** A History of Israel: From the Rise of Zionism to Our Time (Third Edition, revised and updated) 2007 ISBN 978-0394485645*****
* Dreamland: Europeans and Jews in the Aftermath of the Great War
* A History of the Jews in the Modern World (2005)
* The Rise Of Israel : A Documentary Record from the Nineteenth Century To 1948; A Facsimile Series Reproducing Over 1,900 Documents in 39 Volumes (1987) ISBN 978-0824049263
I’ve glanced at Sachar’s histories–as I recall, they seemed honest in some spots about Israeli crimes and less than honest in other places, but I don’t remember details. The fact that you are wildly enthusiastic about him (you were pushing him last year) suggests that my memory is probably correct, as you don’t get this enthusiastic about any human rights report or any of the revisionist histories.
What’s happening now is that the Israeli far right is so crude and arrogant it has the more rational Israel supporters in America deeply worried. I’m not as sure as Phil that this is good news. Israel won’t necessarily start acting in a rational manner just because Tom Friedman and Howard Sachar are losing patience with them. And from past experience, all Israel has to do to win someone like Friedman back is play the game a little better. Offer the Palestinians something inadequate, they reject it, and everyone in America goes back to blaming the Palestinians. Problem solved, as far as Israel is concerned.
I don’t get enthusiastic about one-dimensional condemnations.
History is so much more nuanced in fact, containing multiple rational narratives.
He’s candid, substantively complete (unlike Pappe who is so selective to the extent of propaganda), mutually respectful, human more than ideological.
The loss of US Jewish sympathy for Israeli policies and practices will make change there, possibly a change in administration. That will make peace possible, though also threaten internal Israeli civil war.
Maybe we’re looking at a four-state solution.
“I don’t get enthusiastic about one-dimensional condemnations.”
That might explain some of it, but you also don’t get enthusiastic about human rights reports which are scrupulously fair in describing violations by all sides. And you do enjoy one dimensional condemnations aimed at Arabs.
I’m sure Leon Weiseltier doesn’t mind being maligned on this web site, nonetheless…
Despite Weiseltier’s support for the wars on Lebanon and Gaza and Iraq and despite whatever brand of Zionism he imbibed in his father’s synagogue as a youth, Weiseltier has been firmly opposed to the West Bank settlement enterprise (since the beginning I believe) and thus it is patently inaccurate to label him as a Revisionist apocalyptic.
PHIL- “Note the reference to Kosovo, which got a Muslim state in a timely manner….”
So, you think that the US/German dismemberment of Yugoslavia was a good thing? Yes, this massive, illegal, immoral “humanitarian intervention” had overwhelming liberal Jewish support. The same folks who support the Democrats and the Israeli Labor party showed Bill Clinton that they could deliver the propaganda goods much better than the Likud Jews. The end result? The Balkans re-Balkanized, Kosovo a NATO colony, its economy consisting primarily of foreign aid, Mafia type crime, and the jobs working at Camp Bondsteel. Serbia a shattered country, its infrastructure destroyed and the countryside littered with depleted uranium. Germany acquires a de facto Mitte Europa. The US gets Camp Bondsteel and force projection. NATO is transformed from a nominally defensive alliance into a US controlled out-of-area strike force. And liberal Jews get to say “See, we aren’t anti-Muslim, we helped create a Muslim state in a timely manner!” Terrific.