A real debate is happening in our country. Despite all the efforts to railroad John Mearsheimer, an intellectual leader who was once a regular in the Times Op-Ed page till he made the mistake of opposing the Iraq war, he is on TPM today attacking the occupation and, by implication, Jewish ethnocentrism:
[Avraham Burg] maintains that the principal cause of Israel's problems is the
legacy of the Holocaust, which has become omnipresent in Israeli life… The result is that Israelis (and most American Jews for that matter) cannot think
straight about the world around them. They think that everyone is out
to get them, and that the Palestinians are hardly any different than
the Nazis. Given this despairing perspective, Israelis believe that
almost any means is justified to counter their enemies. The implication
of Burg's argument is that if there was less emphasis on the Holocaust,
Israelis would change their thinking about "others" in fundamental ways
and this would allow them to reach a settlement with the Palestinians
and lead a more peaceful and decent life.
legacy of the Holocaust, which has become omnipresent in Israeli life… The result is that Israelis (and most American Jews for that matter) cannot think
straight about the world around them. They think that everyone is out
to get them, and that the Palestinians are hardly any different than
the Nazis. Given this despairing perspective, Israelis believe that
almost any means is justified to counter their enemies. The implication
of Burg's argument is that if there was less emphasis on the Holocaust,
Israelis would change their thinking about "others" in fundamental ways
and this would allow them to reach a settlement with the Palestinians
and lead a more peaceful and decent life.
Bernard Avishai has a great post this morning saying the issues preceded the occupation:
Virtually all of the questionable features of the current
state–discriminatory land policy privileging Jewish settlement, the
fudged line between religion and state, the seduction of American Jews
with the cult of Jerusalem, the ward-of-the-state support for
ultraOrthodoxy, the constitutional muddle over citizenship and national
identity occasioned by the Law of Return, and even the reliance on the
holocaust to rally world support–were fully there in the country
Burg's mother built… The point is, these features made a kind of awful
sense in 1951, which were revolutionary times. They do not make sense
today, now that Israel is a plural, globalized society. And they should
not be tolerated by people in America–or Israel, for that matter–who
purport to care about Israel's and the region's well-being.
state–discriminatory land policy privileging Jewish settlement, the
fudged line between religion and state, the seduction of American Jews
with the cult of Jerusalem, the ward-of-the-state support for
ultraOrthodoxy, the constitutional muddle over citizenship and national
identity occasioned by the Law of Return, and even the reliance on the
holocaust to rally world support–were fully there in the country
Burg's mother built… The point is, these features made a kind of awful
sense in 1951, which were revolutionary times. They do not make sense
today, now that Israel is a plural, globalized society. And they should
not be tolerated by people in America–or Israel, for that matter–who
purport to care about Israel's and the region's well-being.
