Jack Ross responds to my post of yesterday about the left being claimed by the Israel lobby:
When I read Dailykos regularly they seemed to be just
finishing off the last prominent defender of Israel,
a poor soul who was an old college friend of my father. HuffPo still seems to me to have its eye on the
ball about AIPAC and all the rest, even if it's idiosyncratic.
The Nation is a piece of work. Eric Alterman
was the foremost champion on the left of Walt and Mearsheimer, and they had
an abrupt change in the magazine by the time the book came out. Alterman subsequently published his outstanding article on Marty
Peretz in The American Prospect.
The Nation may also be haunted by its history, having been a vehement
advocate for Israel's founding in a period when they were still at
least somewhat Stalinist.
With a
few odd exceptions, the trouble with the left is not really about
Jewish identity, though surely some leftist Jews cling to silly
Kaplanist (Reconstructionist) ideas about the nature of Jewish
identity. For the vast majority, I don't think its about lingering
attachments to anachronistic lefty idealism about Israel or even in the
need for "Jewish unity" or whatever.
Honestly, I think the
problem of the leftists is that they believe too much in modernity on
the march, in the two front battle against "Islamists" and
"Christianists", the former being only slightly less fictitious than
the latter. The Left knows deep down that, however distasteful they
find Israel and Zionism today, to truly come to terms with the
wrongness of Zionism is to expose the whole hypocrisy of "democratic"
imperialism, which, whether in Kosovo or Georgia or God knows what
miserable part of Africa, the Left has at least as much to lose as
anyone else.
