Brooklyn College political scientist Corey Robin has overcome his reluctance to criticize a colleague and slammed Eric Alterman for his attack on Max Blumenthal’s book Goliath in The Nation.
Where Alterman finds only “juvenile faux-cleverness,” a “case against the Jewish state” that is “carelessly constructed”… [and] arguments that are “simplistic and one-sided”…. I found a trove of patient and persuasive on-the-ground reporting (Blumenthal spent a year in Israel and Palestine and several additional months in the region), almost all of which Alterman ignores. Had he allotted less space to those adjectives and more to an engagement with the book, Alterman might have come up with a credible critique.
Robin then singles out Alterman’s take on Max Blumenthal’s meeting with David Grossman to suggest how distorted Alterman’s view is. And Robin reviews that episode (you can go to the link to read it) before saying:
Readers can judge for themselves whether or not I get Blumenthal right, but I hope it’s clear just how small Alterman has made things. Not only for himself but also his readers. An opportunity for deep moral reflection—about the abyss between Jews in Israel and in the Diaspora, about the power and status Jews have attained throughout the world, about violence and vision—has been missed. We can now return to our regularly scheduled programming.
This is a critical point. Alterman and The Nation have served as a gatekeeper; they are increasing the likelihood that the mainstream will fail to engage a serious argument. That failure is dangerous to our foreign policy– and, inside Jewish life, a great moral hazard. Robin is Jewish. He knows: The breakup of Zionism will be a huge crisis in Jewish life. And it is essential that Jews understand the difference between Max Blumenthal and David Grossman.
Jews need to be talking about Zionism.We need to be talking about whether it is possible to subscribe to an ideology of Jewish unsafety in the west when we have such “power and status,” as Robin observes. (And power that justifies my posts in that vein.)
A well- deserved slam indeed.
kerpow! Hope Robin’s is the first of many more.
Robin points to an interesting passage- Blumenthal’s talk with Grossman. Blumenthal points out that the right-wing supporter of Greater Israel speaks Arabic, and it raises a question of which is really more progressive.
A left-wing vision of a divided State that practically lacks Palestinians or a right-wing vision of a Greater State where the Palestinians are ruled over. In the second variant, at least the native Palestinians are allowed in the picture, albeit as the underclass. This goes back to the heady days of the socialist Kibbutzes, where the left wing ones excluded Palestinians from employment on the supposed basis that employing them would be exploitive.
Come on the media etc have never allowed the people around the world to not know about the power and status that Jews have attained throughout the world.” In fact this tribal promotion has been persistent, often exaggerated and in many ways gross. NPR andTerri Gross being a few of the big promoters.
Robin”Blumenthal spent a year on the ground in Israel and Palestine” and digs deep. How much time has Alterman researched and interviewed on the ground in Israel and Palestine.
The MSM has failed to report about the history of the ongoing conflict for decades but that has not stopped many mostly non Jews from lobbying their legislators, setting up discussion panels, distributing factual information, living with Palestinians, seeing what is happening on the ground for decades. The majority of Jews and others have been complicit through their silence about this horrific situations for decades many knowing what was going on. The US MSM has been complicit through their silence about the crimes committed against the Palestinians.
The Nation, Blumenthal, Weiss and now Robin have over the last five or so years been doing a remarkable job in finally admitting to what has been going on for decades.
And Alterman’s inflammatory title “The Israel Hater’s Handbook” demonstrates just where he learned his tactics from
Whenever one points out the power & status of Jewish Americans in America, the Zionist rejoinder is to point to Jewish Germans in culturally elite Germany, the most highly civilized country in the 19th Century up through the Weimar Era, when every German Jew was 110% German–until Hitler rose to power. They rest their Zionist case on this possibility happening again, in America. Nobody ever seems to take the time to parse this argument, as if the significant different history and nature of the compared states and their institutions have never existed, do not exist.
Differences and similarities between Weimar Germany and contemporary America: http://web.ceu.hu/jewishstudies/pdf/02_brenner.pdf
Another look, in 2010: http://louisproyect.org/2010/04/20/weimar-germany-and-contemporary-america-any-parallels/