Here is a clever but repellent variation of hasbara, or propaganda for Israel: New York Times columnist Bret Stephens equates Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP) with white nationalists.
In “Steve Bannon Is Bad for the Jews,” Stephens sets out to condemn the Zionist Organization of America for welcoming Steve Bannon to its gala the other night. Why? Because Bannon is an anti-Semite… just like JVP. Here’s Stephens’s logic:
[W]hen a far-left group such as Jewish Voice for Peace makes common cause with someone like Linda Sarsour — the Palestinian-American activist who advocates the elimination of Israel as a Jewish state and publicly praised a convicted terrorist — it disqualifies itself as an advocate of any Jewish interest save its own. To deny Israel’s right to exist, as U.N. Secretary General António Guterres noted in April, is “a form of modern anti-Semitism.”
It also means that when a right-wing Jewish group such as the ZOA chooses to overlook Bannon’s well-documented links to anti-Semitic white nationalists, it puts itself on a moral par with JVP
Notice the sequence. Stephens says that JVP’s support for Sarsour is the same as Steve Bannon’s support for white nationalist Richard Spencer. So if you think Palestinians are human beings with equal rights to live in their own homeland, you are the same as neo-Nazis. That is racist.
It is also brilliant, PR-wise. You frame JVP as so bad that when you say white nationalists are bad, you say they are as bad as JVP. So JVP becomes the standard of badness against which to measure just how bad neo-Nazis are. While many commenters at the Times criticize Israel in the comments, nobody mentions this unfair jab at JVP.
And Bret Stephens gets away with it. Why? Because he is in the New York Times op-ed stable (along with many other Zionists, some of them liberal). The Times would never dream of publishing an anti-Zionist, say Ali Abunimah, or Marc Ellis, or Jonathan Ofir, on a regular basis, to point out how badly Zionism has worked out for non-Jews in Palestine.
Sadly, Stephens has good company in his assertion that denying “Israel’s right to exist” is anti-Semitic. This claim is repeated everywhere in mainstream forums. It would be OK if people meant it the way that Norman Finkelstein does: Israel has the same legal right to exist as any other state. But the phrase elides the question of its right to exist as a Jewish state, which is what Israel supporters mean when they say, “deny Israel’s right to exist.” And what that entails is that Israel had the right to expel the Palestinians, and has a right to maintain a Jewish majority today by limiting the freedom of Palestinians.
We probably need a social revolution for people to recognize the nakedly-racist claptrap they are echoing when they use the phrase “Israel’s right to exist.” This includes well-intentioned people who really don’t mean something evil by asserting the rightness of “Israel’s right to exist”, but have never given two seconds of thought to its implications.
Stephens’s aim here is to maintain establishment support for Israel. This is getting to be a hard job. He has to discredit the greatest threat to that bipartisanship, the surging view inside the Democratic Party that Zionism is a problematic ideology– which has gained currency in part because of Richard Spencer’s assertion that white nationalists only want what Zionists achieved for the Jews. Stephens warns:
If Israel is going to retain mainstream political support, it cannot allow itself to become the pet cause of right-wing bigots and conspiracy theorists.
So he needs to take out two threats to that mainstream support: “the woke-left” and “the alt-right.” This is a new twist on classic hasbara, explaining Israel to the U.S. But it is the same old story in the end: Palestinians don’t deserve equal rights.
This is amusing seeing as how it comes from a Zionist who – by making common cause with people who advocate Jewish supremacism, colonialism and “necessary evil” – disqualifies himself as an advocate of any Jewish interest save his own.
Anyway, Ms. Sarsour is right: Religion-supremacist “Jewish State” has no right to exist. No state has a right to exist as a supremacist state of any kind.
Denying Israel’s “right to exist” would at most be a form of anti-Israelism.
Fascinating to watch these American Israeli Firsters twisting themselves in Hasbara knots in their “defences” of their ancient , current and forever homeland. BDS must be giving them sleepless nights and, in the case of the likes of Decrepit Dersh`s new found buddy Bannon, severe headaches.
The fact of the matter is white nationalism is Zionism for (white people).
Did you see that sequence?
good god. such brilliance. the enemy of my friend’s enemy’s friend is . . . bad.
And Stephens gets away with it. Why?
because no one pays attention to brett bleepin’ stephens. he’s on a soap box preaching to hundreds, if not an even thousand. and see the equally dim and myopic mediocrity beinart working the other side of a narrow aisle, on the self-love that dare not speak its name.
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/11/reflections-of-an-affirmative-action-baby/545774/
White men from fancy schools advanced quickly at The New Republic because that’s who the owner and editor in chief, Marty Peretz, liked surrounding himself with. He ignored women almost entirely.
oh, pete, what a hoot. but all that changed when he arrived, right?
I’d like to say that when I became editor, I fundamentally changed all this. But I did not. Yes, I hired women, including for senior editing jobs. Yes, I made some effort to cultivate writers of color. But, for the most part—like all the white, male, Ivy League editors who preceded and succeeded me—I perpetuated the culture in which I had thrived. That culture was both subtle and pervasive: The absence of women and people of color in senior editorial jobs was intertwined with the magazine’s long-standing, jaundiced view of the African American and feminist left. Had I challenged that culture more emphatically, I would probably not have become editor in the first place.
those dastardly white men. anyway, good for you, you aren’t qualified for much, if qualified is to mean anything, i agree, so why don’t you shut the f*ck up and let someone else have the floor?
Phil, what is your opinion? Do the Jews have a right to their own state in their indigenous homeland?