I'm just back from a tremendous evening at Yale University, where the undergraduate debating society, the Yale Political Union, held a long discussion of the resolution, The U.S. Should End Its Special Relationship With Israel, featuring a stemwinder from John Mearsheimer calling for Israel to become a "normal" country in our policymaking; and the resolution passed by a lopsided margin, 44 to 25 (with four abstentions).
Really an incrediblet evening for a few reasons: that a conversation that none of our media can have is led by our children; that the prestige wall continues to crack–that Mearsheimer is given an Ivy platform and accorded the respect of having his ideas debated, something that the Council on Foreign Relations, the Washington think tanks, Lester Crown's Global Affairs Council, and Yivo Institute have all found themselves incapable of extending. That our children are ahead of us, that the invitation to Mearsheimer came from a Yale Political Union exec named Laura Marcus, who has hopes of going to rabbinical school and who disagreed with many things he said but had the grace and self-possession to withstand his words somehow when so many of her elders cannot. That the argument rarely mentioned the factor I just did, religion. That there was no rancor or name-calling, over several hours, with fabulous speeches from Conservative Michael Pomeranz (against Mearsheimer), the Party of the Right's Will Wilson for Mearsheimer, and my fave, Brit ringer Joyce Arnold of the Independent Party thundering that the U.S. had lost its ability to press Arab countries about women's freedoms because our relationship with them is so "poisoned" by the special U.S.-Israel one. That no one ran out of the hall yelling about pogroms….
Our children will lead us. I'm going to keep repeating that line till I'm blue in the face. And later today I'll give a full report, including the moment when the bearded Wilson, in a 1776 tie, whipped out his passport to read the fine print and decry the idea of dual loyalty. For now: sweet dreams!
