Jon Chait in the New Republic: "the Gaza incursion was a moral and strategic disaster." I have no desire to read the piece. As Dan Luban, my tipster, writes, "With Walzer, Wieseltier, and now Chait, seems like this is becoming the conventional wisdom
among the TNR crowd (too little, too late, of course, but it;s
something.) Chait's admission comes in the midst of a long post
basically blaming the Palestinians for the lack of a two state solution."
I'd add this. The New York Review of Books has now published Walzer and Margalit, who wrote in Hebrew in Haaretz last week or so, saying that Gaza was an unjust war, a piece concluding with the beautiful, obvious and important declaration that you must treat the Other's civilians as you treat your own. But:
It's April, honey. The war was in December and January.
Any Palestinian could have told you this was an unjust war in December.
This is something like the process of the New Historians. The New Historians were Israeli Jews, writing in the 80s about the Nakba. The Palestinians had written about the Nakba 20 years earlier.
This sort of literary color bar is insupportable in the global multicultural community we are building.
Until the American Jewish community begins to assimilate the views of Palestinians, it is journalistically a day late and a dollar short, morally and strategically. (Yes my website needs more of that teaching!)
By the way, The New York Review of Books first came out against the Gaza war in a piece in February by Roger Cohen, a great journalist. Again: too late to do anything about it, to try and save lives. The American Conservative was all over Gaza without needing to hold its finger to the wind.
And I am getting to this in a post soon: I believe The New Yorker has had not a critical word to say about Gaza. (Help me, reader.) The most important periodical in the United States, and most Establishment in its mindset, was paralyzed about a moral disaster that was obvious to anyone four months ago. The New Yorker was a leader during Vietnam. This too is about Jewish identity, and the paralysis/catalysis of Jewish identity over Israel. Gaza has cracked Jewish identity open like a cask of honey. Some good stuff is coming out.
