Today the Forward publishes an incisive piece by JJ Goldberg implicitly defending MJ Rosenberg’s use of the term “Israel Firster,” because Rosenberg is a firebrand but he has always been an Israel lover.
He’s doing what he’s done for 43 years, mounting the barricades for the Jewish cause of a safe, peaceful Israel and damn what others think. The ground around him has moved, but he hasn’t.
Goldberg’s defense is very much in the vein of Connie Bruck’s defense at the New Yorker this week as “someone who is profoundly devoted to Israel and, at the same time, abhors the Israeli occupation.”
Goldberg is right when he says that the ground has moved. The Likudniks have won, here and in Israel. Both Bruck and Goldberg’s pieces are efforts at political restoration, anticipating the Peter Beinart moment that is coming soon, the Jewish spring, when liberal Zionists will seek to drive a political wedge issue inside the Establishment: Are you for an attack on Iran? Are you for the settlements? Are you for Israel committing political suicide? Then go to the Republicans.
Excerpt of Goldberg’s bio of MJ Rosenberg:
In February 1969, New York’s weekly Village Voice published a scorching attack by an upstate college student on “self-abnegating Jewish leftists” who defended black militants and the Viet Cong but not the cause of Israel. “Moral cowards,” he called them, “trapped by your Long Island split-level childhood,” rejecting “the one element that gave you your goddamn social consciousness: your Jewish social idealism.”
“From this point on,” he wrote, whenever Israel’s rights were threatened, “I shall always choose the Jewish cause. Not blindly, not arbitrarily, but with always full knowledge of who I am and where I must be. If the barricades are erected, I will fight as a Jew. ”
The essay, “To Uncle Tom and Other Such Jews,” caused a sensation. Reprinted in the tens of thousands, passed from hand to hand on campuses nationwide, it became the manifesto of Jewish anti-war and civil rights activists left stranded after 1967, when the New Left turned against Israel. They formed groups with names like Jewish Liberation Project and Radical Zionist Caucus, protesting assimilation and Palestinian terrorism in the same breath as capitalism, the Vietnam War and the “bourgeois Jewish Establishment.” Today, a generation later, many of them lead that establishment.
The author was a junior at the State University of New York at Albany named M.J. Rosenberg.
Not that he’s changed.
When they drive this political wedge this year– during the Romney-Obama debates, or when my nephew goes to J Street’s conference later this month, or when Peter Beinart’s book is on the front page of the NYT Book Review– my mother will say to me, What’s wrong with what Obama and your nephew and this Beinart are saying, isn’t that a good thing? And I’ll say, Yes. And I will be on these folks’ side (as I expect that Jodi Rudoren of the Times will be, too) because I want the mainstream discourse to change.
But on the $64,000 historical question, as Karl Marx might say, I don’t see all this activity saving the Jewish state via partition. I might endorse such a project, because I’m a moderate. But it all feels like the temporizing that occurred before the Civil War. The status quo was unsustainable then as it is now for a simple reason: Nearly half the population has no rights, on a racial basis. They have had no rights for 45 years, and they’re impatient, and nonviolent, god bless them. We’re Americans, this is a no-brainer. Let’s figure this out without bloodshed.
“… the Jewish spring …”
Beautiful phrase.
“Nearly half the population has no rights, on a racial basis. They have had no rights for 45 years, and they’re impatient, and nonviolent, god bless them.”
Maybe someone can explain why Israel decided to occupy the remnants of Palestine back in 1967 and why they continued to do so for 2 generations. What was the point?
I’m agnostic on all these defences.
Max Blumenthal has spoken well about liberal Zionists. Sure, they do good work(I’m speaking of genuine liberal Zionists like Beinart, not Jeff Goldberg/Alan Dershowitz/Spencer Ackerman and others), but what’s the point of attacking right-wing Zionism from a ‘moderate’ Zionist perspective.
This fits into the comfortable narrative that all that’s bad with today’s Israel – that a progressive Jewish élite crowd can’t defend – is somehow Likud’s fault and their enablers in the U.S.
Sure, they’ve pushed this direction the hardest. But it pays to be diligent: Who increased settlements the most? Likud or Labor?
Where is Labor picking up votes these days? The settlers.
Under which party did the bulk of the ethnic cleansing occur? Mapai(forerunner to Labor).
And shouldn’t we talk about Ben-Gurion’s letter to his son in 1931 where he openly and calmly stated that the Arabs had to be at least partially removed/transfered to make room for Jews? Before the rise of Hitler and ergo nullifying the whole ‘Holocaust made us do it, we were psychologically vulnerable’ hasbara cover that is pulled up whenever the Nakba is coming up for discussion.
So let’s pretend.
Let’s pretend that Netanyahu is defeated and the Likudniks(both in America and in Israel) lose relative power over the next few years.
Let’s even pretend that the war that Netanyahu and his allies(both the neocons and the Israel lobby) with Iran doesn’t come to fruition.
What’s different? Did the J14 protests even touch on the Occupation? It’s poison in Israel now. And will Labor, now openly courting settlers, do anything to advance peace, considering that Labor and it’s forerunner Mapai stood for most of the settlement activity and ethnic cleansing?
Half of Kadima could easily be placed in Likud.
But the Liberal Zionists have nothing on this. They don’t want to discuss it. It breaks the bubble. So they blame Bibi and his allies. And they do it from the ‘liberal Zionist’ perspective.
But from someone who isn’t emotionally attached to Zionism, someone looking from the outside of that debate, what concrete difference will their preferred policies do given the history of liberal Zionism, often a fig-leaf for the same practices but with far softer language. Shouldn’t these people remind themselves what the current Kadima party leader said after Cast Lead, gloating that she had demanded that ‘the IDF would act like real hooligans‘.
For me, this entire debate is filled with fraud.
Because even J Street has said that it won’t even debate Palestinians on these topics, only Jews. Why? Because Palestinians can’t be argued with. Their words are too powerful and sear through any propaganda effort.
I don’t want to be too harsh, J Street and the others do good work. But ultimately, they have no answers to the larger questions. They simply don’t want to stare into the abyss and see that what is happening now has been brewing for many decades and it’s not an ‘extremist fringe’ responsible for it, it’s been mainstream policy across the political spectrum for generations.
But that would shatter the illusions and would deprive them of the moral indignation they so desperately crave, so they blame it all on Bibi and his allies.
But I ask; who are the bigger frauds here?
MJ Rosenberg and Peter Beinart and Phil Weiss have a hard row to hoe. Hardest for those who are (in almost any sense) Zionists. Not easy to be a Zionist (of almost any current flavor of Zionism) and a humane person. One thing you’ve gotta do is tell it like it is. You must “speak truth to power” (to USA, to Israel, to American Jews, to the EU, to the world).
It’s not only the Arab folks living in the OPTs who suffer. The Arabs of Israel are losing (by the increasing hostility and fearfulness of the Jewish conquerors) whatever rights they may once have had by the “grace” of the Jewish conquerors.
The Jews of Palestine before 1948 were in many political/philosophical camps and had many opinions. Not all believed in a STATE, and not all wanted to get a state by use of bombs and bayonets — as Judah Magnes more or less wrote.
But the Statists prevailed, Jewish terrorism ensued, to eject the British, and then Jewish-initiated war ensued. How else would the majority indigenes of Palestine (then called Arabs) (now generally called Palestinians) have ceded political power after the British left?
The war (and the preceding terrorism) were unnecessary if a ONE DEMOCRATIC STATE were the goal. But they were definitely necessary if the goal of carving out a Jewish State were the goal. Be clear on it. The GOAL was not necessary! Not necessary! But, given the goal, the means were necessary.
OK, it’s today, now what? The goal has SHIFTED. Now the militants want all the territory (well, they always did, but said other things from time to time), and are not ready to return to the pre-1967-line. This unreadiness to return to pre-1967 IS NOT NECESSARY! Not Necessary! But if you adopt the goal of greater Israel — which secures to Israel the water resources of OPTs and southern Lebanon and the Golan Heights — then (given that goal) — the MEANS ARE NECESSARY: violation of international law, violation of international rules of war, constant opposition to all neighbors, constant irremediable enemies as far as the eye can see, and even farther (in Iran), in short, A SMALL COUNTRY SURROUNDED BY (self-made, unnecessary: unnecessary) ENEMIES.
No-one ever remembers that there is a difference between people who are your enemies because of your crimes and illegal aspirations and those who are your enemies without such reason, perhaps because they want what you legitimately hold.
Peace on pre-1967 now seems possible (pre-67 Israel nowadays seems legitimate in almost all eyes), even if it may not have seemed possible in 1966. Times change. But Israeli militants are hard-wired for perpetual war, a dangerous thing due to their highly effective military (thanks, Uncle Sam!).
So, good luck MJRoesnberg. Good luck Peter Beinart. Good luck Phil Weiss. To stay the course is to stay humane. And: illegitimi non carborumdum!
I remember mentioning to a very active Trotskyist in 1967 that their criticism of Israel’s seizure of the West Bank was kind of lame. They had many many Jewish members and supporters at the time.