‘Israel Firster’ debate is an American argument, not a Jewish argument

Once Lee Smith joined the Hitler orgy over the Israel Firster debate naturally it occurred to me, with gentiles joining, the conversation was wiiiiide open. (Unless you’re Israeli, they’ve been ordered to ” stay out of it” by gatekeeper Eli Lake) Everyone in the know knows this is an American conversation now, thank heavens!

Freddie deBoer, has a must read blogpost ‘because policing the discourse is punk rock‘. He weighs in on the the Firster crowd and he’s scalding hot. Listen to him chew out Jeffrey Goldberg psychoanalyzing Glen Greenwald:

Once he knows a writer is Jewish, he feels that he has total authority to discuss that writer’s character, beliefs, and psychology. That this is the elementary logic of bigotry– the notion that one can know all of this intimate knowledge about someone thanks to his or her ethnic character– seems not to bother Goldberg in the least. Perhaps I’ll publish a piece psychoanalyzing Goldberg, each observation derived solely from his status as a Jew, and see how long I remain in polite society.

Freddie say Ackerman is a man obsessed and his “social positioning overwhelms his moral and philosophical understanding”. There’s so much more where that came from.

He skewers:

All of this happens for a purpose: to make it clear to anyone who might have a moral conviction about Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians scared to talk about it. I know many people who have political stances on everything, and voice them without regard or fear, on questions of race, abortion, poverty, Afghanistan, gay rights, health care…. But about Israel, they won’t speak. It has simply been drummed into their heads, by people like Spencer Ackerman, that this is no-go territory for them. They are mostly gentiles, as I am, and they know that speaking on this issue could easily result in accusations of anti-Semitism. So they shut up. And here comes Spencer Ackerman, and his red-baiting essay, and the predictable Hitler graphic. And so the task of pressuring “a recalcitrant Israel to come to its senses, especially about the insanity of attacking Iran” just becomes harder.

………..

 Ackerman’s piece is one written by someone who has become completely unmoored from the actual, physical, material reality that he is purportedly writing about. I assure you: Ackerman, in the context of the conflict, has already won. The losers are the people who live in cities subject to 24 hour curfew, whose communities are illegally encroached on by settlers, whose homes are bulldozed without due process or review, who are intermittently subject to the horrible bloodletting of another Israeli incursion, as they have been for over 40 years. There’s none of them in Ackerman’s piece. None of them at all.

This is a killer must read contribution in the Israel Firster debate.

Hat tip Joseph Dana