JJ Goldberg has a very good piece up at the Forward describing Peter Beinart as the liberal Zionist who kicked the MSM hornet’s nest. Goldberg marvels at the attacks on Beinart, and links them to the hounding of MJ Rosenberg, and concludes that it has to do with a dark period of Jewish panic.
Much of what’s been said about the book in the nation’s leading journals hasn’t been reasoned critique or analysis so much as vituperation. Something about this book has caused The New York Times, The Washington Post and some other normally high-minded publications to come unhinged. More precisely, to assign the book to reviewers who proceed, one by one, to come unglued…
The reviews, meanwhile, consist largely of, well, knee-jerk apologetics. They all seem to intone the shopworn catechism that absolves Israel of any responsibility for its own difficulties…
…[To] explain the attacks’ venomous, ad hominem intensity…. we must look to the general mood of panicked rage sweeping some segments of Israeli and American Jewry: the McCarthyite attacks in Israel on human rights organizations and the New Israel Fund, the attempts to keep J-Street speakers out of synagogues and to defund or shut down Israeli film festivals screening the wrong Israeli films. The legal threats against campus Arab student groups. The hounding of M.J. Rosenberg. It’s hard to remember such a dark mood of repression since the days of the enemies’ lists circulating in the community in the early 1980s….
Long ago, John Mearsheimer explained this dark primordial spirit to me. “It’s called nationalism.” And Jewish nationalists are right to think that their vision is now at risk. Goldberg again:
As for explaining the participation of The New York Times and The Washington Post in this anger-fest, I’m stumped.
This is an important question. I believe the New York Times and Washington Post’s eager participation in this rightwing frenzy can be explained by two trends: the large Jewish presence in the establishment, and the rightwing Zionist character of the Jewish establishment. C.f., the Iraq wardrums in the media. Some day, Jewish and American historians will marvel at this. The Zionist Captivity. (Thanks to Paul Mutter)
Have any gentiles been allowed to speak on the book, anywhere? (Not that there’s many who would dare.)
Looks like we’ve just got to keep waiting for the Jewish-American awakening. Now I know Phil assures us this is just around the corner, but I do wish it would hurry up.
JJG has written a marvelous review of the reviews.
One of the things that Beinart writes a whole chapter about is the way that the Jewish pro-human-rights organizations, which were earlier (1950s?) pro-ALL-H/R, lost so many contributing members to more broadly American (and hence non-Jewish) pro-H/R groups (e.g., ACLU, NAACP) that the only people still contributing to them were defensively-pro-Israel folks, so that organizations lost their universal character (so as to keep the $$ coming in from the defensively-pro-Israel crowd, mostly oldsters now) and became megaphones for Greater-Israel (and ready ignorers and suppressors of pro-Palestinian communication).
The same concentration of big pro-Greater-Israel money (in AIPAC et al, but also in most MSM) is likely the reason why all these negative reviews were published (and hence the reason they were written by the mouthpieces who wrote them).
Thanks, JJG.
“Some day, Jewish and American historians will marvel at this. The Zionist Captivity.”
Yes, but they will probably be joined in their marveling, by archeologists…in 10,000 years or 100,000 years.
“Why did Washington Post and NYT lend themselves to ‘unglued’ ‘angerfest’ directed at Beinart?”
Because it is their job to defend the status quo and support the power structure.
Why did the NYT print anything by Judith Miller 2002 ?
i like goldberg (as opposed to the spurious goldenberg, spiritual medium and unalloyed dope), but i’m stumped as to why he is stumped about the NYT and the Post. how is this surprising? chomsky, finkelstein and others have been kicking through the kabuki theatre of the labor versus likud dichotomy in israeli politics, and its american variation among diaspora zionists. all beinart is doing is picking a bit at a scab, albeit in public, the response to his bad manners (what happens in zion, stays in zion) being an equally public display of the uniformity of thought on this topic.