Ari Shavit got home to Israel from his triumphant U.S. book tour and reported that the American Jewish community is still Zionist, even if the young people don’t find Israel that relevant:
The American Jewish community opened its heart…. Even the Jewish left longs to see a reincarnation of the old Labor Zionism that it so loved to love.
So Shavit ignores all the criticism of his book from leftwing Jews like Jerry Slater and Ira Glunts (and me too). We simply don’t count as Jewish left. Maybe we’re too fringe, or maybe we’re too deracinated in Shavit’s view?
Peter Beinart performed the same magic trick in The New York Review of Books when he said the American Jewish community was inside a “cocoon” and it did not listen to Palestinians. He left out all the grassroots: Max Blumenthal and Rebecca Vilkomerson and Donna Nevel, who have spent a lot of time listening to Palestinians. They’re simply not members of the American Jewish community, or too fringe to reach Beinart’s attention, let alone the ears of the New York intelligentsia. Jonathan Chait performed the same magic trick a few years ago at J Street when he said it was fine to include anti-occupation voices, but the Jewish conversation must not include Phil Weiss (I was then in the audience).
How long can these “liberal” voices continue to marginalize an important movement? At Swarthmore young Jews have stated that they want to hear anti-Zionists at the Hillel there. Max Blumenthal’s book on an Israel gone rightwing amok is getting a second printing at Nation Books. The American Studies Association’s landslide vote for boycott surely included many Jews.
Today I gave money to Vilkomerson’s non-Zionist group, Jewish Voice for Peace because of a stirring appeal from Noam Chomsky:
These days, there are really only a handful of Jewish organizations that honor the traditions of universal equality that inspired me to be an activist so many years ago. Jewish Voice for Peace is one of them.
Is Chomsky chopped liver? I’d note that Beinart’s website, Open Zion, which resolved to create a groundswell for the two-state solution, has closed after less than two years— in some measure because the political/generational energy is to the left of him, and speaking a language of equality. (Compare Chomsky’s words to Beinart’s defense of second-class citizenship for Israeli Palestinians: “I’m not even asking it to allow full, equal citizenship to Arab Israelis, since that would require Israel no longer being a Jewish state.”)
Shavit and Beinart ignore us because we represent the most important challenge to their project inside the Jewish community in a generation or so. In doing so, they are practicing a form of intellectual dishonesty. The readers of the New York Review of Books and Haaretz deserve a more accurate picture.
And they are both arguing implicitly that Jewish voices should matter more than others. That may be our biggest error. We think everyone has a right to be in this tent.
Predictable and terrible. What they don’t realize is that your pov and exposure of ills and crimes of Israel (and Max’s and, Rebecca Vilkomerson’s and Donna Nevel’s, Mearsheimer’s and Walt’s, and President Carter’s, etc. is the one true thing/conversation that will actually bring peace and justice.)
Your voice means so much, Phil. Many of us are so grateful for the truth that you and all of the gracious contributors to MW bring.
Happy New Year.
There is no left left in Israel . It was marginalised out of existence. They now want to do the same in the US. They cannot turn back . They know that if people listen to those who speak about justice it will expose all of the jewish leaders who have given their tacit approval to the Zionism of Danon and the settlers . They are trying to hold back the tide and they are holding Judaism hostage . Such a mess . So intellectually dishonest . So morally bankrupt . The longer they hold out the greater the damage to their own tribe .
Beinart, Shavit et al are afraid of American Jewish critics of Zionism because those critics break apart their best lines of defense against outsiders:
Anti-semite
Holocaust denier
Israel speaks for all Jews
Truth really hearts, as there is NO Anti Zionist movement.
and especially A Jewish Anti Zionist movement.
A few individuals don’t count as a Movement.
Hard to accept, but that reality.
People like Beinart and Shavits are concerned about “the company you keep”. In other words, anti-Zionists, they will say, play into the hands of the anti-Semites. That is also their objection to Max Blumenthal. As an objective observer of the I/P debate, however, the real threat is the other way round. Believers in the Jewish State “warts-and-all” play into the hands of the anti-Semites. Only a non-Zionist Israel can survive in the long run. The debate is no longer about the existance of Israel since Israel now exists. The Zionist won that battle. Now it is about the continued existance. Other countries have changed their stripes. Read Lawrence davidson: http://consortiumnews.com/2013/12/10/embracing-israels-atrocities/ for a clear expression of this idea. The main flaws of Zionism is that it needs anti-Semitism for its survival, since without anti-Semitism there would be no need for Zionism.