Chris Hayes and Mustafa Barghouti
Sunday morning marked a historic day in the mainstream discourse: Chris Hayes devoted two hours of his MSNBC show “Up With Chris Hayes” to a discussion of the Israel/Palestine conflict, with a balanced roundtable. Let me repeat, with a balanced roundtable.
I’ve watched about half the show so far and I’m blown away by the fact that in the discourse Hayes established, two Zionists, Jeremy Ben-Ami at the center-left and Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi at the far right, must share the forum with Palestinians Rula Jebreal, the author of Miral, and Leila Hilal of the New America Foundation.
Jebreal repeatedly takes on Laszlo Mizrahi for distorting her views, once puts her head in her hands as Laszlo Mizrahi talks; while Laszlo Mizrahi looks like she has a stomach ache.
Some of the highlights: in segment 1, Jebreal says the whole debate over Iran is “irrational,” driven by Jewish fears; Hayes seems to endorse this view when he describes Netanyahu’s gift to Obama of the Purim chapter of the bible, and Netanyahu’s reported comment, “Even then they [Persians] wanted to wipe us out”; Hilal also says the bias in the U.S. debate is the contention that Iran won’t behave as a rational actor; Ben-Ami boldly chimes in that it doesn’t make any sense to contend that Iran will drop a bomb on Tel Aviv, because it would be destroyed if it did so…
In segment 3, Hayes insists on talking about the settlements. He brings on a surprisingly refreshing retired Israeli general, Shlomo Gazit, who says he thinks there is no likelihood of a two state solution. “I don’t see the possibility of an Israeli government capable of taking the decision of removing [60-80,000 settlers so as to achieve a] border that can allow the establishment of a viable Palestinian state… It will be literally a civil war in Israel.”
For his part, Hayes says that the political consensus for a two state solution has been “vastly eroded,” and Ben-Ami says that this is the right wing’s doing (ignoring the liberals and leftists who support a one state solution). And Gazit does little to promote the two-state solution when he says it is necessary to preserve a strong Jewish majority, of 80 percent Jews in Israel…
More to come tomorrow. Meantime, we really must applaud Hayes, who states in segment two that the debate over Israel and Palestine “is grounded within the special relationship” — which means, no Palestinians get to speak. He has done a ton to reverse that. Let’s hope his bravery is contagious.
(I guess this means I have to apologize to David Cohen of Comcast? No; I’m still waiting for the other Chris.)
Bravo to Chris Hayes- his intrinsic charm, journalistic integrity, and nimble intellect allowed him to carry off this amazing achievement (for American cable) though he seemed a little more tense than he usually does weekend mornings. His inclusion of the guest live from Ramallah was the pièce de résistance. Thank you Mr. Hayes!
“Up With Chris Hayes” is an excellent show so this is not surprising. Even though it is MSNBC, I am not sure about the MSM part. He is from the Nation and his show is what you might expect from that magazine if it had a television show like this.
I have to watch the rest of that online sometime, but the hour or so that I did see was great in just the way you described. Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi got in the usual claim that Israel gave up the Gazan settlements and the Palestinians returned the favor with rocket fire, but in this case, one of the Palestinians (I think Jebreal) later managed to get in the fact that Israel had placed Gaza under siege and shot at fishermen for the crime of going more than 3 miles offshore. If most of the MSM was this fair you could almost shut your blog down. Not quite, of course, but the media criticism aspect would fold up.
But not to worry–it’s hard to imagine the other Chris or Rachel or Ed or Lawrence (not sure about Al) doing anything of this sort.
I thought in the first half, Ms. Mizrahi had strong eyes and also she made a strong point when she said Egypt’s people only agreed to peace because they repeatedly tried to destroy Israel but couldn’t. This reminds me of the wars of 1948 and 1973, in which I think this happened. Offhand, a rebuttal doesn’t come to mind.
On the other hand, when Jubrea started talking about growing up and her family getting blankets at night for the casualties foreseen due to the bombings, it was like someone suddenly describing the 800 pound gorilla in the corner that the room isn’t discussing. Except that she was speaking from personal experience.
It’s stunning.
I saw the whole thing on Youtube. I was grasping for breath. This guy has courage!
I think the reason for this is because he has ignored the hasbara. He went to the actualy settlements and saw it all for himself. And he understands where Israel is heading if nothing is done. He’s doing Israel huge favours for brining back the spotlight to Palestine in this way, but I’m sure the ultra-Zionists are exploding.
He said a lot of true things. He plainly rejected the fantasy that there is some mythic left inside Israel that will save it from itself if Netanyahu is kicked out. The peacemovement is dead. The other side represents the status quo too, in some ways more so than Netanyahu.
He didn’t mention that Olmert killed far more people in Lebanon/Gaza than Netanyahu ever dreamed of. Nor did he mention that Labor was the party under which settlements increased the most and Mapai, Labor’s forerunner, was the party that initiatied the two rounds of ethnic cleansing (’48 and ’67) of Palestinians that we’ve seen so far.
Still, he flatly rejected the Hasbara of the woman from the Israel Project when she said that ‘settlement construction had stopped’. It was a partial freeze and construction continued within existing settlement blocs, and Hayes called her out on that.
Same with the whole ‘Iran tried to assassinate the Saudi ambassador’ meme which there is no proof of but a lot of MSM smoke and mirrors.
He also asked the Palestinians some pretty harsh questions, even one asking(he admitted it was provocative) that ‘what’s wrong with the status quo?’ which Mr. Barghouti demolished with ease.
I’m not sure if this is a breakthrough for the MSM yet, but it shows that the liberal firewall of uncondtional support for Israel is breaking down. And it’s being led by Gentiles. Just like Jews led the Civil Rights struggle back here at home, it seems an outsider is much more capable of brining justice to the situation than most(but far from all) insiders.
Another important thing that happened is the way the neocons have turned against The Forward for publishing balanced piece on Abuminah and a personal Op-Ed by JJ Goldberg on his friend, MJ Rosenberg. I think they have a point on the Rosenberg piece which was biased but it wasn’t a news article, it was an Op-Ed where Goldberg came clean right away and said Rosenberg had been his friend for a long time.
But Commentary, the highest neocon temple, devoted a long, angry post to the ‘limits of pro-Israel discourse’. He usually has denounced any opposition as ‘marginal’ and ‘extremist’ but this opposition within the Jewish community is gaining momentum and his privelege is melting away, and he fears it.
He lashes out against a ‘confused’ Jewish left which he says doesn’t know what it wants. But what he is facing for the first time in generations is a coherent response which isn’t on the margins anymore.
The neocons have radicalized us. The way they tracked down Goldstone all over the world and even crashed his son’s Bar Mitzah in South Africa to harass him and denigrate him in front of his closest family members and friends.
They broke him down and he finally did what they wanted. He went to the Op-Ed pages of NYT, was rejected when they saw what was going on, and then went to WaPo instead and did his whole ‘I was wrong on everything, everyone who disagrees with Israel is a suspect character’ piece.
As long as opposition to these right-wing ideologues is scarce they can pick us off one by one. What’s happening now is that you’re reaching a critical mass. Are they going to call all of us self-hating Jews?
Things are finally turning around.
Here’s Commentary’s attack on all left-wing Jews:
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2012/03/11/define-pro-israel-mj-rosenberg-forward-abunimah/