One of the gratifying things about being on my side of the Israel/Palestine issue–the Let Us Be Fair to Palestinians side–is the strong impression that the arrow, as they say in basketball, is going our way. Check out this recent visit of Dennis Ross to Colgate U. A student who is "inspired" by Ross interviews him and promptly asks about the "Jewish lobby." Ross says "that he never made a decision based on what lobbyists wanted or told him to do." (No he didn't have to; he is the lobby personified.) In the audience, Ira Glunts, a former IDF soldier, rose to challenge Ross about the difference between America's interest and Israel's. Today there will be demonstrations outside AIPAC's conference in Chicago. An international anti-Zionist group has been chartered. The neocons are about to be swept into the dustbin of history. The arrow, I repeat, is on our side.
That said, it's interesting to listen to John Mearsheimer, who helped start this political moment 2-1/2 years ago, in his presentation at the Oak Park Public Library a week back. I've heard Mearsheimer a lot, so I have a sense of what he really thinks on a number of subjects, and those themes show up in this freewheeling talk (or the half of it I've listened to). And a good number of those themes are pro-Zionist: It's a good thing there's a Jewish state. There are states all over the world that discriminate on the basis of ethnicity, including Japan and Germany. Israel is a flawed democracy, but so what, tons of them are flawed. I'm for a Jewish state because of the Holocaust and Jews need to feel safe. And I'm for a Palestinian state for the same reason: so they can feel safe. The Clinton parameters are the only basis for a peaceful settlement, the two-state solution. The right of the return is a non-starter. Smart Palestinian leaders know that the right of return has to be "finessed." Arafat knew it. So do the Palestinian PM and the Foreign Minister, whom I met when I went there earlier this year. (I'm paraphrasing Mearsheimer…)
What's interesting about all this is that Mearsheimer, a realist, shows his conservative stripe here. He respects ethnic states. He loves America the melting pot, but that's just our way. He even tolerates dual loyalty (though he doesn't want Dennis Ross, "Israel's lawyer," anywhere near Mideast policy). He's against the right of return (almost as much as Hank Greenberg in The New Yorker is, or my friend Steve F.)
Though Mearsheimer adds that it is essential that the "terrible" crimes against the Palestinians, which the Yishuv understood to be necessary to create the Jewish state, be recognized. He says, "I think it's necessary to admit that and have some kind of symbolic right of return, to put that problem to bed." Bedtime, after 60 years of tossing and turning.
I relate Mearsheimer's rap for 2 reasons. One, I reflect that in my community–the pro-Palestinian left, where there are lots of folks for a one-state solution– we are highly sensitive to issues of narrative. We know that a persuasive narrative of persecution and liberation drove the establishment of the state of Israel (The novel Exodus is on my desk). And so in turn we are motivated by a strong sense of the Palestinian narrative. And that 60-year-old narrative of injustice, more compelling for its suppression, is being imbibed and repeated all over the left and all over progressive America, and Jews like Anna Baltzer, Adam Shapiro and Hannah Mermelstein are leading the way. The Nakba revelation is a lot like the way the Holocaust was discovered by Americans in the 70s, after the 1973 war. And it is being discovered now by non-Palestinians only because of horrifying contemporary conditions: apartheid on the West Bank, and the use of the peace process to cover endless expansion by jihadi Jews, who are licensed by dysfunctional Israel.
I am saying that the storytelling here is enormously important; and my
side is winning because our story is just much more plausible right
now. And it has the weight of history.
The second lesson is that This is still a leftwing narrative, the realists with whom we are allied are not idealists; and while powerful and marginalized, that narrative might vanish if there were some real motions of justice on the part of Israel and the U.S. If they honored that narrative, they could also extinguish it. Put it to bed, as Mearsheimer says.
It amazes me that John Mearsheimer has been as smeared as much as he has. His position isn't that much different from a lot of realist centrists on Israel Palestine. He's really pro-Zionist. His argument is not as morally based as Jimmy Carter's. Carter is actually an Arabist, I believe this reflects his agrarian roots; Mearsheimer's no Arabist. He's closer to Clinton, and Aaron David Miller and Dan Kurtzer. Jeffrey Goldberg probably doesn't disagree with Mearsheimer at all on the solution; and as I say often on this site, Goldberg and Mearsheimer will have to join forces one day if the lobby is going to sever the Congress from Sheldon Adelson, and Livni from Shas. It reminds me that Mearsheimer's error was to say, There is a lobby. Like Cynthia McKinney saying, There's a lobby. He was attacking Jewish influence in the U.S., and that's verboten. His other ideas, after 2 years, are more alive than ever. And meanwhile our discourse is hurtling slowly toward balance.
