Is there really a debate over the question, “Is Zionism in Crisis?” Two staunch Zionists, Peter Beinart and Alan Dershowitz, debated this issue at the City University of New York last October, and are now back by someone’s demand. This feels very Potemkin village to me. The followup debate is at CUNY, May 9, but it’s already full:
Following their impassioned fall 2012 conversation, Peter Beinart of the Daily Beast reengages with famed jurist Alan Dershowitz over issues raised in Beinart’s book The Crisis of Zionism. Moderated by Ethan Bronner, former Jerusalem bureau chief for the New York Times.
Proshansky Auditorium
CUNY The Graduate Center
Are two staunch Zionists really the poles of the American conversation on a Jewish state? Where are the Palestinians? Where is anti-Zionist Ben Ehrenreich or Max Blumenthal? Don’t they count?
I see the hand of the powers here. Right wing Israel supporter Jeffrey Wiesenfeld is on the CUNY board, of course. And at the first debate last year, the moderator says at the beginning that it’s sponsored in part by the Hertog Foundation, which also funds the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute. Their summary:
In a lively and often raucous discussion, famed jurist Alan Dershowitz and political journalist Peter Beinart debate the topic of Beinart’s provocative new book, The Crisis of Zionism, and the role of Israelis in the creation of the Palestinian state. “Every time Israel subsidizes more Israelis to move to the West Bank we make those Palestinian leaders, who reluctantly accept Israel’s right to exist, look like fools,” said Beinart, an associate professor at the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, who also called for a boycott of Israeli products from beyond its 1967 eastern border. “Peter naively believes that if Israel resolves its problems with the Palestinians, the threat that Israel faces will go away,” said Dershowitz, to the audience at the Perspectives: Conversations on Policy and Place with Peter Beinart series at the Graduate Center. “But they won’t —- the problem is that the vast majority of Muslims don’t see the two-state solution as the answer.”
At this point, the main use of Beinart is to act as the ‘safe critic’ for scared old Jews like The Dersh who gets nervous whenever he sees a brown person who isn’t on a stage singing music or on a sports field.
Much like the white liberal Jewish establishment tolerates “The Gatekeepers” because the people coming forward are white old men who are all Zionists.
5 Broken cameras is the voice of the dispossessed brown people under the boot of the occupier, which is much more threatening. The same dynamic plays out here.
The Dersh cannot really sink any lower, so that’s not what I am that concerned with. What I am surprised by is the extent to which Beinart will sink to indulge in the racist fantasies of people like Dershowitz where no Palestinians (or for that matter anti-Zionist Jews or just plain gentile liberals) are allowed.
History is passing both of these gentlemen by.
“Are two staunch Zionists really the poles of the American conversation on a Jewish state? Where are the Palestinians? Where is anti-Zionist Ben Ehrenreich or Max Blumenthal? Don’t they count?”
This is NOT a question of American foreign policy, not a question about the propriety of this or that Jewish state, but of Zionism liking itself (or licking its wounds).
Wouldn’t it be a gas if [1] Zionism were in serious crisis, or dead, and also [2] the 2SS were dead, and a 1SS apartheid were inevitable, in place, and infinite?
The Palestinians are the victims of Zionism, the (other) anti-Zionists are its enemies, but the mere existence of enemies of Zionism was not the question.
The question was whether or not the strength of Zionism was being depleted: is the movement (O noble Zionism!) in crisis? Dost doubt thyself, O Zionism?
The enemies might seek to create or fuel a/the crisis, but the crisis itself (if any) lies inside the movement (or maybe in former Zionists who’ve jumped ship). So a convocation of Zionists to consider their own movement is exactly reasonable.
If that was the question, Is Zionism in Crisis?! Because, there are other more interesting questions for Americans, Jews, and others to consider.
Here’s the crisis, thanks to complicit media and governments in US & Israel, very few there know the reality of the Israeli daily occupation:
New member of Knesset visits Ramallah and is appalled, says “This is not normal!” Obviously she did not coordinate her visit to her friend there first with her own government of which she was a new component: http://972mag.com/new-knesset-member-visits-a-friend-in-ramallah-this-is-not-normal/69749/
Israel occupation: U have to see it, to believe it:
http://972mag.com/israeli-occupation-you-have-to-see-it-to-believe-it/69412/
The rest of the world is aware of what Zionism has wrought. They are just too weak to stand up to the lone super power USA. But time is not on the side of the USA, and, unless Israel can, as it’s custom reveals, find a new powerful big buddy rufus to replace the Uncle Sam, time is also not on side of Israel.
Well, if the Palestinians saw it as the answer and the problem was resolved in a good way, that would be the main thing.
On the other hand, if the problem was “resolved” in a bad way, naturally the other problems might not either.
As usual Derhsie avoids the point being made, which was that the acceptable (to Israel, hence the USA) Palestinian leaders look like fools because the outside world watches Israel gobble up more land while it says it has no partner for peace, yet it won’t agree to even pause its land-grabbing to sit at a negotiating table where the broker is its best buddy and financier and the Palestinians have no power. His hole card is Jewish fear, with nothing to quell it but status quo occupation and land-grabbing. Didn’t the Arab states just propose a peace plan, commencing at the green line, but giving Israel all its settlements except a handful of “hilltop” ones?