This week TPM is having a bookclub about Avraham Burg's great new book. I'm in the conversation, which I find too highminded. Here's my first post, titled The Jewish conversation, and the American one:
Avraham Burg's book is great and important, no doubt. His idea that Israel pardoned Germany too quickly and shifted the rage to Arabs is significant. His identification of the neocons as powerful Jewish proponents of the Iraq war is one that American Jews resist. His impatience with Jewish ethnocentrism and his tolerance of intermarriage will also resonate. Jews will discuss this book for a long time. That's mostly a Jewish conversation.
Here's the American one. Last week in NY, Burg said that American Jews compose a "semi-autonomous" structure of Zionism, giving support to the Jewish state. I don't want that role, never had. Richard Perle and Elliott Abrams did, and look where our foreign policy is in the Middle East. Today Richard Falk, the special rapporteur for the UN in Gaza, states that the U.S. is complicit in Israel's "massive" violations of the Geneva Conventions that threaten wide famine and disease in the Palestinian population and that breed extremism. The international outrage over these conditions, Falk says, recall the outrage over apartheid 20 years back. This is the true context for Burg's revelations, and yes the Obama train is leaving the station–which is to say that my country will be paying more attention, at last, to Israel's grievous treatment of a minority.
