A little later today I will be posting about Yoav Shamir's documentary, Defamation, which had its American premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival last night. I wuz there. Beautiful movie. Wrenching, important, altogether engaged with Jewish identity/Israeli brutality. And due for a theatrical release. Before I post about the film I want to get to the news.
Halfway through the film Walt and Mearsheimer take their trip to Israel at the behest of Gush Shalom. They lecture here and there. And the Anti-Defamation League sends along Arieh O’Sullivan, a Hebrew speaker, to monitor Walt and Mearsheimer. O’Sullivan counts all the bad things that are said about the ADL– for use in the ADL's attacks on Walt and Mearsheimer.
O'Sullivan is on his cellphone in a room in Israel, following one such event, when historian Teddy Katz, a Gush Shalom member, comes back into the room to collect various posters and such, and O’Sullivan asks him in Hebrew why a little group like Gush Shalom is spending money on Walt and Mearsheimer.
Katz booms at him, per the subtitle: “We think what these people are doing is blessed.”
Katz goes on to explain, we have never learned to live with our neighbors, and powerful
Jews in America are sustaining us in this delusion. It needs to be corrected, we need to seek conciliation with the Arabs, or we are
all doomed. But the quote is: "We think what these people are doing is blessed."
I have said something like that, but never gone quite that far. And of course such a statement has never been uttered in the U.S., which is locked down against Walt and Mearsheimer's teaching. But I know where Katz is coming from. He and I are engaged in the same spiritual/religious struggle; and these scholars at great risk to their reputations/careers have joined us.
