Your Israel lobby at work. The New York Times Book Review gives liberal Zionist Peter Beinart’s book, The Crisis of Zionism, to a centrist Zionist to review, Jonathan Rosen of Nextbooks. And the result is predictable, a review that says nothing about the occupation but harps on “the brute realities of an unforgiving region”– hey, it’s a tough neighborhood. Also in this piece are assertions that the Israel lobby is the figment of anti-Semites, and that the Palestinians’ insistence on the right of return will “destroy” the Jewish state, with no reference to international law. (And I believe Jonathan Rosen lives and works happily in the U.S.)
This review is apparently the balancing act the Times must perform, having given space on the Op-Ed page to Beinart a month back to roll his book out: “To Save Israel, Boycott the Settlements.”
As in the days of reviewing Walt and Mearsheimer’s book: No goyim need apply. Also, note that the Times buries the review on page 11 of the Sunday Book Review. Doesn’t want this book to be a bestseller.
Excerpt:
But because [author Peter Beinart] minimizes the cataclysmic impact of the second Intifada; describes Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from Gaza not as a gut-wrenching act of desperation but as a cynical ploy to continue the occupation by other means; belittles those who harp on a Hamas charter that calls for the destruction of Israel and the murder of Jews the world over; and plays down the magnitude of the Palestinian demand for a right of return — not to a future Palestine but to Israel itself, which would destroy the Jewish state — he liberates his book from the practicalities of politics.
How you condense a thorny complexity into a short book says a great deal about your relationship to history — and to language. Beinart is especially good at invoking facts as a way of dismissing them. Thus Israel’s offer to withdraw from conquered land in 1967, and the Arab States’ declaration — “No peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it” — becomes literally a parenthetical aside in which the Arabs’ “apparent refusal” made Israeli settlement “easier.”
Jews, Beinart insists, are failing what he calls “the test of Jewish power.” He does not mean by this that after millenniums of statelessness, Jews are slow to acknowledge the exigencies of force but something quite the opposite, which allows him to employ several formulations favored by anti-Semites, from the notion of a White House-crushing Israel lobby, and the observation that “privately, American Jews revel in Jewish power,” to the grotesque idea that “in the 1970s, American Jewish organizations began hoarding the Holocaust.”
P.11. Says it all.
Khartoum Shmartoum. It’s the settlements, stupid. They shoot the whole Goldaesque “outstretched hand” nonsense to hell. But why engage Beinart where it really counts, when Rosen and his readers can sit down to a nice plate of red matjes herring (with extra onions)?
The New York Times has long been known for its policy (presumably informal) of farming out reviews to capture editors’ political positions. Conservative Sam Tanenhaus manages the Book Review. Whether he also oversees daily reviews I don’t know, but the Times position is clear. They handed off the first review of Jimmy Carter’s “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid” to Patricia Cohen who quoted only Alan Dershowitz for ‘balanced insight.’ Then the Book Review gave it to Ethan Bronner — big surprise. Steven Erlanger did Rashid Khalidi’s “The Iron Cage,” David Shipler did Edward Said’s “Politics of Dispossession” in 1994. The list goes on. There are some exceptions, but the pattern is clear. And this says nothing of all the work that the Times just consigns to its memory hole.
“The Crisis of Zionism” has a chapter on Bibi which begins this way:
Carrying moral messages was emasculating, Yech! NYT and Judaism Amalgamated, Inc., is not into either morality or emasculation. So that’s p.11 for you, Beinart, and no good words either.
Again, there’s no evidence, whatsoever, that the assignment of this review to Jonathan Rosen has anything to do with any lobby.
I just finished Beinart’s book, and I enjoyed it. Unfortunately, most reviews seem to duck the book’s main arguments, and few offer any of the answers to the questions Beinart asks.