Jerome Slater has an excellent piece up on his site about Peter Beinart’s book and its critics. Slater is devastating on the ideological choices by the New York Times and Washington Post on who would review Beinart’s book: rightwing critics Jonathan Rosen and Alana Newhouse, respectively, both of the Tablet family, both embracers of Israel’s foundational myths. (I do think that those reviews killed the book as a commercial stock; where is the full-page ad? Nowhere.)
Slater is outspoken on the role of the Israel lobby in forcing Obama to cave, and he is wicked, writing as a Christmas tree Jew, about Beinart’s communitarian call for reenergizing religious segregationist impulses in Jewish life to fight assimilation. Hasn’t Beinart noticed, Slater asks, that he is empowering the most intolerant political segment of the Jewish community when it comes to his chief cause, saving the two-state solution?
The piece concludes with this plainspoken statement of Jewish identity and call for sanctions. Slater remains a liberal Zionist but one with fewer and fewer illusions:
As an anti-religious Jew, my own self-identification with our community has been principally a function of a defiance of an anti-Semitism that has now essentially disappeared but was hardly uncommon in my youth, combined with pride in the Jewish tradition of rationalism and morality–at least as that has been previously understood, and not only by Jews. The enlightenment tradition has been betrayed by Israel, and it gets worse practically day-by-day. Consequently, there is no good reason to revere or love Israel; such feelings should be reserved for the unflinchingly honest and brave Israeli dissidents.
The Israeli left can be helped only by truly serious outside pressures, including making U.S. and other Western economic, military, and political support of Israel conditional upon an end to the Israeli occupation and repression of the Palestinians. That is the sine qua non for a genuine legitimization of Israel, whether as a full democracy with equal rights for all its citizens, or as a Jewish state which privileges its majority in certain limited ways but which can be legitimately characterized as a democracy in most essentials.
The likelihood of such sanctions being imposed on Israel by the American Jewish community, the U.S. government, and the West, is close to nonexistent. Yet, somehow, even if we believe the struggle is hopeless, we must act as if it isn’t.
RE: “Consequently, there is no good reason to revere or love Israel; such feelings should be reserved for the unflinchingly honest and brave Israeli dissidents.” ~ Slater
MY COMMENT: As hopeless as “the situation(s)” seem(s), I glean immeasurable inspiration from “the unflinchingly honest and brave Israeli dissidents”!
RE: “The likelihood of such sanctions being imposed on Israel by the American Jewish community, the U.S. government, and the West, is close to nonexistent. Yet, somehow, even if we believe the struggle is hopeless, we must act as if it isn’t.” ~ Slater
MY COMMENT: I wholeheartedly agree, but it is so much more easily said than done.
P.S. FROM Robert Naiman, Policy Director at Just Foreign Policy, 11/23/12: “Would It Make a Difference to Progressives if Norman Solomon Goes to Congress?”
MORE INFORMATION – https://mondoweiss.net/2012/05/iranian-talks-fail-as-obama-administration-official-rushes-to-reassure-tel-aviv.html#comment-456337
* I made a modest contribution via ActBlue and Paypal. – https://secure.actblue.com/contribute/page/solomonforcongress?refcode=site-front-button
“… or as a Jewish state which privileges its majority in certain limited ways but which can be legitimately characterized as a democracy in most essentials.”
The usual double think.
Whoa!
Is Slater finally evolving? Has reality started to affect his liberal zionism?
I also like he admits he and other Lib Zios “pull punches” in their writings on Israel:
“On the other hand, though, the primary target audience of the book is clearly the American Jewish community, so it is certainly possible that Beinart felt that if he fully and unflinchingly described the deliberate pain and suffering visited by Israel on the Palestinians, he would alienate even those who might be inclined to reassess their unthinking support of Israel.
If that was Beinart’s concern, it was a legitimate and perhaps necessary concession to the facts of life. In my own writing I have also pulled some punches, for fear of going further than the traffic will bear. Moreover, from private correspondence, I know that other well-known severe critics of Israel have done the same thing.”‘
Phil, thanks for this. Slater’s piece is simply brilliant and a “must-read!”
Even though I have no idea what “anti-religious Jew” or “Jewish tradition of rationality and morality” mean, I guess Slater is to be credited for his stance here.
Is it “anti-semitic” to mention that “The Jewish Tradition” began thousands of years ago, and is based on an invisible, omnipotent Man in the Sky? Is that a rational idea?
Or how about the Book which began the Jewish Tradition; it sanctions wholesale slaughter of “others,” slavery, animal sacrifice etc – is this moral? Joshua at Jericho was moral? Whatever else is true, its certainly part of the Jewish Tradition of Morality, if we arent being arbitrary and deciding which parts of what religion we like for ourselves.
The fact of the matter is, NO ONE can say, as a Jew I object to Israel’s policies – nor can a Christian nor can a Muslim. These religions didnt start yesterday, or during the Summer of Love – nope, they began THOUSANDS of years ago. So, when Slater says that his bronze age identity and the modern state that is based on the same betrays the enlightenment tradition – I say, No Shit. It was always going to be Israelistan.
Sometime soon, when Baruch Marzel and Co. have built the Third Temple and have started animal sacrifices, we should revisit this, and we will see if the exilic Phil and Jerry want to still self identify with a group of people who pay homage to their sky god by slitting animals throats.