Bari Weiss’s rage over Peter Beinart’s role in a panel on antisemitism with Rashida Tlaib and Marc Lamont Hill next month shows that Weiss is in a battle with Beinart about who will represent American Jews. Weiss represents a tribal perspective of sacred victimhood; and Beinart’s universalism and openness to the Palestinian story is a threat to her.
Bari Weiss says antisemites convinced Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to back out of a Rabin memorial. AOC actually was concerned with Rabin’s human rights record. But she and her supporters now join the “three-headed dragon of modern anti-Semitism” living in Bari Weiss’s imagination. And in Weiss’s perspective of sacred Jewish victimhood, defamation and dishonesty are no vice when fighting the enemies of the Jews.
Peter Beinart is so important in Jewish culture because he insists on humanizing Palestinians, and refuses to use the Holocaust lens of perpetual victimhood when considering Palestinian resistance. Palestinians are not driven by Jew hatred, as so many pro-Israel leaders argue, but by a natural response to dispossession and occupation.
Jeffrey Goldberg, Jennifer Rubin, David Frum, Bret Stephens and the other American Bibi-ists went from All Netanyahu all the time to No Netanyahu ever, Yakov Hirsch explains. Because they can’t be leading the moral charge against Trump’s “evil plan to crush the press,” while offering obfuscation about Netanyahu’s actual evil plan to crush the press, as they once did, when they were empowering the now-run-amok prime minister.
The Jewish tribalist culture that sees Jews as heirs to a sacred macho victimhood and Israelis militarism as the answer was promoted by Jeffrey Goldberg, the leading American Jewish journalist. It created Netanyahu’s Israel, which Goldberg and his friends are now trying to flee as they try to take on Trump.
Netanyahu’s most impressive achievement is that he has associated his politics and even himself personally with sacred Jewish history and its hallowed lessons. That is why Jimmy Carter and now John Kerry must be vilified for pointing out the apartheid treatment of Palestinians. Netanyahu’s sacred construction is about to crash to the ground. Jeffrey Goldberg has already jumped ship.
The real struggle in Israeli leadership is not Netanyahu cowering before settlers, but who can control a sacred ethnocentric discourse of Jewish persecution and innocence in the face of alleged Palestinian Jew-hatred. Jeffrey Goldberg has propagated that discourse in the U.S. The inevitable conviction of army medic Elor Azaria on manslaughter charges next month represents a crisis for that discourse at last.
Yakov Hirsch writes that if Jonathan Greenblatt of the Anti Defamation League is really concerned about Keith Ellison ‘implying” stereotypes about Jewish power, why is he exercising the most intrusive cultural, moral, and political power against Ellison? Hirsch explains it is because he is more concerned with maintaining a social construction of reality that serves Israel: Hasbara culture.
Here’s the juice from Yakov Hirsch: Six years ago Peter Beinart came to realizations about Israel and the US Jewish community that Jeffrey Goldberg tried to suppress but that he is now expressing himself. For this reason Beinart is about to replace Goldberg as most important Jewish journalist and leader of the Trump opposition.
One of Bernie Sanders’s greatest foes in the presidential primary was hasbara culture, an aggressive and proselytizing construction of reality from a minority of the Jewish community that Sanders threatened with statements that changed the political discourse on Israel. Hasbara culture helped to undermine the insurgent senator.