Have you noticed that there is less and less room on the right as Egypt expands our leftwing discourse? The neoconservatives are suddenly crammed up against the liberal hawks, and J Street and Tom Friedman and Leon Wieseltier too are all pressed against one another pushing for a two-state solution in a hurry to save Israel.
Wieseltier has a good piece in the New Republic, praising the “valiant” revolutionaries of Tahrir Square and stating that everything has changed for Israel, and the settlements must stop. There is even some awareness of Israel’s reactionary character:
Israel’s wars with Hezbollah and Hamas were not wars of survival, which is not to say that they were lacking in justification, even if they were not always sterling examples of the ethically scrupulous use of military force.
As James North often says to me, the attack on the Mavi Marmara was as big as Gaza and the best thing that ever happened to the solidarity movement; Israel should have greeted the flotilla with flowers and escorted them into the coast. Instead they murdered 9 humanitarian activists! Idiots, what were they thinking. Even Wieseltier is waking up the fact that was wrong. James North says that if he was handling Israeli p.r., he could get Israel another ten years by making lots of humble concessions, admitting we were wrong, etc. etc. (They haven’t figured this out yet.)
Wieseltier’s column is called “With Our Eyes Wide Open.” That’s good. Though note his invocation below of Theodor Herzl as a visionary. This is actually an important part of the Zionist delusion. Herzl was a newspaper man turned statesman. He was never a political philosopher. A great statesman, I grant you. A great feature-writer for a leading newspaper– yes. But a visionary of politics? No. Even his correct vision of the coming storm of anti-semitism, yes, he was right. But his political ideas were very tired, born of 19th century nationalism. He wasn’t a big reader, and his true engagement in life was playing the great game of the colonial power struggle, which he did very well considering his hand. But today smart American Jews like Wieseltier labor under these now-completely outmoded ideas more than a century after Herzl’s death.
The best excerpts from Wieseltier:
Ground was broken last week for a massive new Israeli development in East Jerusalem as Tahrir Square was filling up with the evidence of a new Egypt. Do the Israelis have the right to build there? Let us say they have the right. But this is not a question of rights. It is a question of brains. Why in Herzl’s name would Netanyahu wish to alienate the Palestinians in the West Bank now? [By the way, Herzl repeatedly promised the Pope and the Sultan and the Kaiser that Jerusalem would be internationalized, so if you are going to cite Herzl, Wieseltier, why not bring this up?] The answer, of course, is that he [Netanyahu] wishes to alienate them always. “Israel Digs in On Peace Process With Egypt in Turmoil,” The New York Times reported last week. But Netanyahu was dug in on the peace process also before Egypt was in turmoil. Whatever he says, his history shows that in his view the time is never right….
there is no diplomatic imagination and there is no diplomatic progress. There is only a perverse surrender to the settlers, and a miasma of short-term (and self-interestedly political) thinking, and a general hunkering down. What Netanyahu has offered his country is a complacent immobilism, now followed by a mild panic. So with our eyes wide open, it is important to assert that Israel’s vision of its future cannot be premised upon an eternity of Arab authoritarianism and an eternity of Palestinian statelessness. Such a vision is wrong, and it will not work. It is painful, for someone who admires the Jewish state for its democratic character, to see it emerge as an enemy of democratization. Jews should not rely on Pharaohs.
