Earlier today I commented on the common ground of realists and lefties on foreign policy. Well I just read Steve Walt’s very favorable review of Peter Beinart’s book, The Crisis of Zionism, and I’m struck by the extent to which Walt, a coldblooded realist, espouses lib-left ideas in the three criticisms he offers of the book: an ethnocracy cannot be a democracy, non-Jews have to be involved in the debate over our foreign policy, and Beinart’s call for segregated Jewish schooling would undermine an American tradition of “tolerance” through assimilation.
The fact that the New York Times and the likes of Eric Alterman– avowed liberals– are not publishing these criticisms and Steve Walt at Foreign Policy is shows a, the aphasia of the mainstream liberal discourse when it comes to Israel, and b, these liberal ideas are lowhanging fruit, rich political material; and a coalition can be forged of human-rights leftwingers and national-interest realists. Note that Austin Branion made several of these points in his review for us.
Here are Walt’s three criticisms:
Although I believe one can learn a great deal from The Crisis of Zionism, and think that it will be widely read over time, it has three problems worth noting. First, and most importantly, I think Beinart understates the tensions between liberalism and Zionism. At its core, liberalism privileges the individual and believes that all humans enjoy the same political rights regardless of ethnic, religious or other characteristics. But Zionism, like all nationalisms, privileges a particular group over all others. Israel is hardly the only country where this tension exists, and Beinart is correct to say that an end to the occupation would reduce the contradictions between liberal values and Israeli practices. But that tension will not disappear even if two states were created, if only because Israel will still have a sizeable Arab minority which is almost certain to continue being treated as a group of second-class citizens. It is hard to see how Israel could remain an avowedly “Jewish” state while according all Israeli citizens equal rights and opportunities both de jure and de facto. Could an Israel Arab ever become head of the IDF or Prime Minister in a “Jewish state?” The question answers itself.
Second, I think it is unfortunate that Beinart chose to direct his book almost entirely toward the American Jewish community. That is his privilege, and it’s possible that the best way to get a smarter U.S. policy would be to convince American Jewry to embrace a different approach. Yet Beinart’s focus also reinforces the idea that U.S. Middle East policy — and especially its policy towards the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — is a subject that is only of legitimate concern to Jewish-Americans (and Arab-Americans) and can only be legitimately discussed by these groups. In fact, U.S. Middle East policy affects all of us in countless ways and it ought to be a subject that anyone can discuss openly and calmly without inviting the usual accusations of bigotry or bias. I’m sure Beinart would agree, yet his book as written sends a subtly different message.
Third, Beinart’s proposal to use public monies (such as school vouchers) to subsidize full-time Jewish schools strikes me as wrong-headed. I have no problem with any groups setting up private schools that emphasize particular religious values. What bothers me is the idea that the rest of society ought to subsidize these private enterprises whose avowed purpose is to sustain a particular group’s identity. I’d say the same thing, by the way, if a Catholic, Episcopal, Muslim, Sikh, Mormon, or Zoroastrian commentator were advocating similar public backing for schools catering to his or her group. Assimilation has been the key to ethnic tolerance here in the United States, and critical to our long-term success as a melting-pot society. Public education that brings students from different backgrounds together has been a key element in that process, and that’s where public funds should go.
Walt is certainly right about the first; that is tensions between nationalisms and liberalism. The second entirely so imo; US foreign policy belongs to all Americans. The third issue I don’t share with him as long as all groups have equal access to funds and are equally regulated/ignored by the government.
“But that tension will not disappear even if two states were created, if only because Israel will still have a sizeable Arab minority which is almost certain to continue being treated as a group of second-class citizens. ”
My question for Walt and for Phil and others who are passionate about One State solution is why “…. and Palestine will still would Jews who want to live there…” is not either insisted on, or at least remarked on when so clearly absent in Walt’s thinking as it is here from his prose. The Jews of Hebron, for example, have lived in Palestine through all of its iterations and should be able to/expected to want to reside there safely and equally in a post-Zionist, 2 state or 1 state solution.
I think we are seeing an excellent example of the tension between liberalism and Zionism in the recent court ruling on circumcision from Cologne. The Zionist line is that Hitler is just around the corner. There appears to be no understanding of what this ruling is about, and why it occurred. It is as if, rather than just tensions between liberalism and Zionism, Zionism has a hard time understanding what liberalism is.
Walt is 100% right as usual.
But I am fed up the use of ‘liberal” in this issue…liberal Jews, liberal zionist, liberal, liberals, blah,blah….using these labels is just another way to add more yada,yada nonsense to the conversation and debate about a so called ‘democratic’ Israel.
You cannot be a ‘liberal’ or democratic, as those descriptions are understood, if you are a Jewish exceptionalist or any kind of racial, religious, ethnic or even victim hood supremist. Which is what zionism is and what anyone is who believes that Jewish or Israeli desires come ahead of all others needs and that others are somehow ‘obligated’ to accomdate and pay for their desires.
Anyone reading what Beinart has written can see the absolutely glaring and bizarre contridictions, convolutions and mental twists to morals and logic of the misnamed ‘liberal’ zionist mind. Taxpayer money should be allocated by the government and used to pay for ‘Jewish’ Schools to keep Jews indentified with their religion or ethnic (or Israel)…really?
Just hopeless.
A liberal Zionist is an oxymoron.
I started Walt’s review and my eyes glazed over. I thought he’d been snookered, and stopped reading. Glad to hear he wasn’t.
Yes there is or ought to be a basis for cooperation betw the realists and the left on Zionism. The struggle betw the realists and the ultras over foreign policy is like the clash betw Nazis and non-Nazi German conservatives in the 1930s. The realists aren’t necessarily allies in the class struggle, but they are allies in the medieval-modern struggle. Zionism is taking western relations with the region back to the Crusades, with catastrophic effects on western societies as well, e.g. 9/11 and the police state it consummated.
However, the “left” doesn’t really want to confront AIPAC, and organized Jewry, which is its chief component, because of “progressive Jewish” opinion. The Code Pink MoveOver/Occupy AIPAC has been crippled 2 yrs running by this aversion. Last year the people who actually know something about AIPAC were put in the basement at a “workshop”, not on the plenary session, and other speaker suggestions from that quarter were rejected. Mears/Walt did speak, to but their critique is somewhat truncated, as I noted in a piece on the event.
http://questionofpalestine.net/2011/06/19/move-over-aipac/
This year it was worse; the anti-AIPAC workshop was taken off the event altogether. The knowledgeable AIPAC critics were allowed to have an unaffiliated event in the same hall after the main event. Before they were allowed to set up, all banners, posters, and other material identifying the OccupyAIPAC event were removed. The plenary events were bland, anodyne affairs, with no insight on Zionism’s special destruction in the Middle East or the US, at least as far as I could tell from the descriptions; I didn’t go.
My impression, from various contacts, is that the younger CodePinkers haven’t the experience or knowledge to stand up to the older people, or person in particular, a strategic asset devotee for decades, who advises them. The strategic asset crowd, mostly the senior Jewish left, is as ruthless in running the left as AIPAC is with the mainstream. Thus we can’t talk about AIPAC or the damage to the US of the US-Israel relationship, at an anti-AIPAC event.
There will be no rapport betw the “left”, such as it is, with whatever it has to offer, and the “realists” until the left gets real about Zionism and the Israel lobby. The conventional left wisdom for decades has been “solutions” discourse/strategic asset/anti-occupation/ahistorical law and rights. This has served very effectively to conceal Jewish agency and Zionism. Avraham Burg can say that “world Jewry is a superpower” but not the left in the US.
The antipode to the superpower is not “strategic asset” dogma, but universalist values, including the Jewish approaches to universalism, which categorically rejected Zionism. The staggering fact is that the values descended from Enlightenment and emancipation, from Spinoza, Marx, Luxemburg, Arendt, Deutscher, Rodinson, Shahak et al have been swapped for “progressive Jewish” identity politics. These limits have been imposed on dissent in the US, as effectively as AIPAC etc has imposed on the mainstream, and are only gradually beginning to yield.
Gabriel Piterberg discussed “liberal Zionism” in “The Returns of Zionism”. In this view
Zionism refers to a progressively liberal or moderately social democrat national liberation movement, which sought a national home for the Jews with the peaceful consent of its neighbors, and which still holds the key for peace and for the perfectly feasible existence of a state that is simultaneously Jewish and democratic. All other forms are deviations from, and corruptions of, that true Zionism\ldots I believe, however, that the goal of founding an exclusively Jewish state in Palestine by European Jews is a more or less continuous concept and praxis from Herzl’s foundational Zionism, through the settler movement in the Occupied Territories,
to Sharon’s wall\ldots From the perspective of Zionism’s victims, who have been dispossessed and cleansed by all Zionist varieties, this continuity outweighs the differences.\footif{\piterbergrzbib, p. 30.}