Americans for Peace Now has blasted Rep. Anthony Weiner for his statement (at a debate we helped to organize 11 days ago in New York) that Israel is not occupying the West Bank, that its eastern border is the Jordan. Here is another response to the debate. –Editor.
Last September, I went down to NYU to hear Peter Beinart deliver his lecture on “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment”. The lecture was hosted by NYU’s Israel Studies program, and the overwhelming majority of the people in attendance appeared to be students affiliated with the school. The head of the program, introducing Beinart, said that with his essay in the NYRB Beinart had helped to ignite a debate he had been hoping to see for years; he said something to the effect (if I remember correctly) that he always wondered why the discourse in the American Jewish community surrounding Israel was much narrower than that within Israel itself. Beinart was warmly received by the audience; afterwards, during the Q and A, I distinctly remember not being able to detect a trace of hostility in any of the questions. Indeed, the students seemed reluctant to be perceived as coarsening the talk in any way. When Noam Chomsky spoke at Brandeis University last November, he mentioned that he rarely encounters the kind of vitriol that used to be commonplace in his talks on US/ Israeli policy. For a thinker like Chomsky, who thrives on intellectual exchange, I thought I could sense a faint hint of nostalgia for the more combative days.
In many respects, Anthony Weiner’s performance last Thursday can be taken as a case-study in Beinart’s thesis about the “Failure of the American Jewish Establishment.” I have no desire to dissect Weiner’s “arguments”, which (as everyone who saw the debate knows) lapsed between outright fabrications and plain factual errors. And I did not expect Weiner to be source of any sort of profundity on the topic anyway. Yet what I did find striking was the absolute contempt Weiner showed for the audience—not for those who booed him, which was to be expected, but those who came to support him.
Beinart, for example, has, however belatedly, taken it upon himself to tell the American Jewish community some hard truths—particularly in terms of the inevitable defection of younger Jews away from Zionism. Weiner, on the other hand, seemed more than happy to blatantly lie to the same kind of audience, one that—by the looks of it at the New School— included both younger and older American Jews. Many dutifully clapped after he made his points, of course, but I suspect they must have secretly found Weiner’s obvious dissembling to be insulting—as if he could just simply wish the problem of settlements or the occupation away. Presumably, they came to hear an articulate spokesman for Israel, a grand apologist that they could cheer on. Yet what they got was far less Abba Eban at the UN than a man trying to play the intellectual equivalent of three-card monte.
If Weiner did not succeed rhetorically, however, he did certainly drive home Beinart’s argument about the moral decline of American, especially liberal American, Zionism. Yet what Beinart didn’t mention, and what Weiner helped to confirm, is that this decline is as much intellectual as moral. Consider the prominent American Zionists of the past century, those who were tasked with explaining their understanding of Israel to fellow Jews. From men as different in orientation as Louis Brandeis to Arthur Hertzberg, these men—whatever one might think of their views—were often deeply learned, approached Zionism seriously, and were informed in their understanding of Israel by some very broad, liberal values. Who are their most visible heirs today? Democrats like Anthony Weiner, Joe Lieberman and Alan Dershowitz? All three are not merely dishonest but dishonest in an easily demonstrable and clumsy way. More that, none, I would venture, are sincerely interested in Zionism, or concerned with the fate of the Israeli people—in fact, their careerism shines through everything they say; they have clearly played up their Zionist leanings for the sake of their constituents or their reputation. Of course, times have changed, and as Israel’s behavior in the world has gotten cruder its more sophisticated backers are perhaps no longer up to the task. But it really does not bode well for Israel that, as the Baird-Wiener “debate” further revealed, the historically important task of protecting Israel’s image in the U.S. has now fallen almost exclusively into the hands of careless and vulgar propagandists.
