Beinart
Today Haaretz has a good editorial on Israel’s self-destruction via the settlement project. You can see here that the Israeli government is subsidizing the colonization project body and soul. This is one reason why Peter Beinart’s recent call for boycotting settlement products, while an important blow in the US discourse, doesn’t really attack the heart of the issue– Israeli gov’t policy:
The Finance Ministry’s request to allocate NIS 61 million [about $16 million] to settlements over the Green Line, which the Knesset Finance Committee approved on Tuesday, is not only an economic decision. The state budget, like its planning and construction policy and support for the outposts, is key to implementing the government’s settlement policy and perpetuating the occupation.
By channeling special funds to the settlements, which already enjoy generous benefits – even as outlying areas of the country within the Green Line are in desperate need of assistance – the government has revealed it ideological, political and social priorities.
To get around various oversight mechanisms, the government channels funding for developing the settlements to the World Zionist Organization’s settlement department. A report on the outposts that Ariel Sharon’s government adopted in 2005 said the heads of this department helped establish the outposts without approval from the relevant government authorities.
Beinart’s critique is really mild and ultrahedged.
Yet it has been a remarkable sight basically seeing the entire Jewish establishment turn against him. Not just the neocons(who, it must now be official, basically run the entire discourse on Israel while everyone else has a simple choice of either complying or resisting) but the Jewish Federations of North America. The staff editor of the Foreign Affairs, the apex journal of the Foreign Policy establishment(http://www.jewishreviewofbooks.com/publications/detail/diaspora-divided), and now even the editor of one of the largest and most important communal newspapers that we have in America; Gary Rosenblatt at the New York Jewish Week(http://www.thejewishweek.com/editorial_opinion/gary_rosenblatt/pushing_morality_victim_myopia).
The attack on Beinart reaches far into both political spectrums.
This, if anything, tells you about how ‘liberal Zionism’, if even always at unease with itself, has now quickly reached it’s crossroads.
You can tell by Bradley Burston’s(senior editor at Haaretz.com) bizarre postings. One day he is attacking the left, then he is apologizing for it here at Mondoweiss. Then the other day he was attacked BDS for ‘being exposed as anti-Israel’. Then he was attacking the ZOA(the favourite target of the liberal Zionists who can pretend to be sanguine in the process of defending Apartheid).
I think Beinart’s hand will be forced sooner or later to accept the 1SS, but I think he will resist it until the very end. But the force of the Jewish (especially the liberal part) Establishment on him to retract and apologize has made it more than clear that ‘reform’ won’t come from the inside.
Now it basically hangs on Gentiles. Perhaps a younger generation of Jews can change this dynamic but we don’t have 10-20 years. And I think if you look at only the last 5 years you see a massive sea change. In 5 years more it will probably be official even to establishment pols that the 2SS is dead and it’s now either supporting Apartheid or work for change.
And in this extreme environment, expect to hear tons and tons of references to the Holocaust and the whole ‘the world is against us & they are all anti-Semities out to get us because we’re Jews’ meme. This is the scary part. Will Israel use it’s nukes once pushed into a corner?
I’m much less worried about Iran the next decade than a radicalized and vulnerable Israel which won’t give up the Apartheid it has created but can’t out and pretend to be liberal anymore.
This doesn’t end well. And the ‘liberal’ Zionists had chance to make a difference. Instead they all attacked Beinart, even if his initiative probably had low chances to succeed anyway, it speaks volumes of their corrupt priorities.
Attempting to BDS the settlements and not Israel is like trying to keep the water piled up on the shallow end of a pool; it’s impossible because it presupposes a separateness of identity which simply does not exist in reality.
GOI and WZO, yet another faith-based public-private partnership. The USA could learn a lot from Israel (or has it already?).
“Settlers aren’t freelancers”
Genius.