This photograph, which appeared in the New York Times and Haaretz yesterday, is why Peter Beinart is closing Open Zion.
Because liberal Zionism is screwed.
Because Yair Lapid– whom the liberal Zionists embraced as their great rising star in the elections last January– is pinching the cheek of a nascent/latent/patent fascist (who was disgraced but has bounced back).
Because this is what Zionism has produced, and any smart intellectual knows that this is where the road goes.
Because the wind is at the back of the anti-Zionists, just as Jeffrey Goldberg said.
Because Goldberg and Beinart have found, just as I found, and many thousands of privileged Israelis have too, that life and career mean a lot more here in the liberal diverse US, than the unseemly prospect of being teamed with religious nationalist idiots, including Yair Lapid who sees Arabs as an “internal threat”.
PS. Here’s what Jeffrey Goldberg wrote 2-1/2 years ago, decrying the settlements as a corruption of Zionism’s nature, but fearing that my side, which sees expansion and ethnic cleansing as inherent to Zionism, was winning the argument. He was right then, and of course my side has only gained strength:
The official position of this blog (yes, we have official positions here) is that the settlements should be fought as if there was no such thing as anti-Zionism, and anti-Zionism should be fought as if there were no such thing as the settlements. This, I think, reflects the centrist position. A centrist on the question of Israel believes that the settlements represent a corruption of Jewish ideals, but that Israel remains the physical manifestation of a righteous cause. The right, of course, believes that settlements are an expression, not a corruption, of that cause. The left, on the other hand, believes that settlements are a manifestation of Zionism’s true nature. I disagree with that argument strenuously. But I will say this, though: The left position on this question has the wind at its back.
P.S. Here is Ethan Bronner of the NYT, who I’m told is/was a liberal Zionist, saying last month that the Israeli government began sending out settlers within seconds of the end of the ’67 war and that there are now 600,000 Jews east of the Green Line, and “I dont see any government in Israel being willing to move them from their homes… If the Zionist movement means anything, it means you build.”
Perhaps this is your logic, Phil
Nationalism X believes that it has a right to its homeland and statehood for itself, so it will naturally go in that direction, rather than naturally abandoning its general claim to both halves of the homeland.
Only an alternate belief or outside force of comparable strength would change this natural result of Nationalism X so that it accommodated Nationality Y.
That outside force could be:
Nationality X’s equally strong beliefs in universalism: that Nationality Y has an equal right to statehood in its homeland.
Equal material, economic, and political force of Nationality Y.
International forces for equality no less powerful and committed to the issue than Nationalism X.
What do you think?
Jerusalem scene is the newsletter of St John of Jerusalem Eye Hospital Group who run a Hospital in East Jerusalem. This season’s newsletter contains the following:
“on one visit I met a mother who had arrived carrying her little boy. Her journey to the Hospital took 2 days on foot. Eventually she found a way through the desert hills and around the blocklades and arrived exhausted and desperate. Her child had all the characteristics of a potentially lethal and rapidly growing tumour behind the eyeball”.
The Palestinians are the jews now. In a parallel universe the ADL would fight for them and liberal zionism would not be an oxymoron .
”This, I think, reflects the centrist position. A centrist on the question of Israel believes that the settlements represent a corruption of Jewish ideals, but that Israel remains the physical manifestation of a righteous cause”
I dont know what a centrist position on Israel could be unless it’s a “compromised position’ that says anti semitism or the Jewish holocaust makes the stealing of another’s land and their disposession a ‘righteous’ deal.
There might be a ‘realist position’ that now that Israel is there it is impractical to dismantle it and create an upheaval of 6 million people. Thats basically been my past position.
But a righteous cause it wasnt and aint. A ”delusional’ cause is whats it been.
Whatever Herzl’s original idea of zionism was–and he was slightly daft if you ask me—‘misguided’ is the best you can say for it.
It’s hasnt and isnt working out for anyone except the zionist cultist.
And it gets crazier every day.
Sometimes a picture does say more than a thousand words.
But here’s my chief complaint: this was predicted from a long distance from the very onset by people like us. When you launch your campaign at Ariel, cutting 16 miles into the West Bank – in effect bisecting it into bantustans which was the purpose of the settlement – and then say it can never be overturned, ever, you’re not a liberal.
Yair Lapid worked as a slightly neurotic psychadelic drug for people like Alterman, JJ Goldberg and other Zionists who want to believe almost anything to sustain their fantasy of a liberal Israel. The question is not how Lapid is now essentially a fraud – he always was – but how to prevent the ongoing discussion from taking on the shape of this discourse but in the context of the general conflict. Namely, that we, once again, know what matters but that we don’t have to wait years, probably decades, before we get to this kind of moment. In other words, to speed up the process of the corpse of ‘liberal Zionism’ and bury it once and for all as the delusion simply cannot be sustained anymore.
>> Jewish self determination would have been righteous if they had had any land.
If they had the land AND it was already Gentile-free so that no-one had to be expelled in order for a pure and “Jewish State” to be created, sure.