I don't like the Where's the Palestinian Gandhi? talk in part because it's so disingenuous, in a highminded Monty-Pythonish way. If the analogy holds, and Israel is India under the Raj, well darling, this must be England, and then why don't we just take our boot off their neck, or beat down the doors of our representatives, rather than discussing in our august journals how the wogs ought to behave to compel us to get our boot off their neck?
But here's a take on the journalism angle in Gershom Gorenberg's Where's the Palestinian Gandhi piece in the Weekly Standard, from Jim Sleeper in Talking Points:
Israeli author of The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the
Settlements, 1967-1977 and contributor to The American Prospect and the dovish
Israeli Ha'aretz, published "The Missing Mahatma" in the neo-conservative
Weekly Standard. Was this some pacification gambit? But an hour ago Gorenberg
told me how the piece wound up where it did.
"The piece was originally commissioned by The Atlantic," he
wrote me. "They accepted it – and then, for reasons having nothing to do
with politics, sat on it for a long time. Meanwhile, an editor from The Atlantic
who likes my work moved to the Standard…
When at last The Atlantic decided not to publish it, he offered to."
This is not utterly persuasive. Editors always tell you that politics has nothing to do with it. Politics always has something to do with it. Maybe good politics, in this case! Maybe the Atlantic made the right call. I bet they told Walt and Mearsheimer politics had nothing to do with it.
