Media Analysis

The real significance of Bari Weiss’s resignation from the New York Times

Change is in the air and the Israel lobby can no longer stamp it out by using its gatekeepers to censor and malign opposing voices.

Bari Weiss’s letter of July 14 announcing her resignation as an editor of the New York Times opinion page has received considerable publicity and has won praise from prominent right-wing spokespersons, including Donald Trump, Jr., political commentators Ben Shapiro and Bill Maher, and U.S. Republican senators Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and Kelly Loeffler.   In that letter, posted on her website, Weiss accuses her colleagues of “bullying” her and silencing writers whose views clash with the Times’s “orthodoxy.”  “Intellectual curiosity,” she claims, “is now a liability at The Times.”  These claims are breathtakingly dishonest, coming as they do from an editor who has herself engaged in systematically barring from the Times any op-ed or letter to the editor contrary to the orthodoxy of the pro-Israel establishment she represents.  

Although Weiss emphasizes the “necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society”—principles I fully support—nothing could better illustrate “tribalism” than the censorship of voices criticizing Israel or pointing out the inherently undemocratic nature of a state that privileges Jews over non-Jews.  A flagrant example of the tribalism that the Times opinion page exhibited under Weiss’s editorship is its publication of an op-ed titled “On the Frontlines of Progressive Anti-Semitism” by Blake Flayton, a sophomore at George Washington University, and its failure to publish a single one of the letters that poured in from Jewish students at George Washington and other universities contradicting Flayton’s allegations about both antisemitism among progressives and about quasi-universal support for Israel among young Jews.  Frankly, the Times is much better off without Bari Weiss.  Perhaps now the Op-Ed and letters to the editor page can finally begin reflecting the remarkable shift that has been occurring in Jewish attitudes toward Israel and Palestinians, as indicated by Peter Beinart’s two articles, “I No Longer Believe in a Jewish State”, and “Yavne: A Jewish Case for Equality in Israel-Palestine” and by Eric Alterman’s “In New York, Zionism and Liberalism Faced Off—And Liberalism Won.”

Both Beinart and Alterman describe a long process of grappling with the contradictions between their ideal of Israel as a haven for Jews that could also be a democracy for its Palestinian citizens and their growing awareness of the brutal repression Palestinians endure under Israeli rule.  Confronted by more and more evidence that “With each new election, irrespective of which parties enter the government, Israel has continued subsidizing Jewish settlement in a territory in which Palestinians lack citizenship, due process, free movement, and the right to vote for the government that dominates their lives,” Beinart concludes: “The painful truth is that the project to which liberal Zionists like myself have devoted ourselves for decades—a state for Palestinians separated from a state for Jews—has failed. . . .  It is time for liberal Zionists to abandon the goal of Jewish-Palestinian separation and embrace the goal of Jewish-Palestinian equality.”  Similarly, Alterman acknowledges: “As Israel grows increasingly illiberal—embracing not only annexation but also official racism, theocratic governance, and increasingly anti-democratic restrictions on the freedoms of its Arab minority . . . Liberal Zionism—a cause to which I have committed myself for my entire adult life—has come to look like a contradiction.” 

Alterman’s article actually comments on another example of what his subtitle calls “a sea change for American Jews”: the defeat of Eliot Engel, the powerful chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, by Jamaal Bowman, an African American former middle school principal.  As Alterman notes, Engel used his position to deliver “one hundred percent support for Israel” in lockstep with AIPAC and the ultra-conservative Zionist Organization of America, while neglecting the needs of his constituents, nearly 60 percent of whom are Black and Latino.  Bowman, in contrast, balanced his commitment to “the right of Israelis to live in safety and peace” with an affirmation that “Palestinians are entitled to the same human rights, safety from violence and self-determination in a state of their own.”  Instead of his stand’s costing him the election, as it probably would have in years past, however, “Bowman won in a landslide,” and Engel did not even carry the district’s Jewish voters.  As Alterman explains, the result showed that “Israel had lost its centrality” among constituents who were “reeling under the threat of the pandemic and inspired by the politics of racial reawakening.”  They also showed that whereas in the past, liberals “chose just to make an exception for Israel while sticking with the rest of their left-leaning agenda,” this time liberalism had clearly won out over Zionism.

In short, change is in the air, and the pro-Israel lobby can no longer stamp it out by using its henchpersons to censor and malign opposing voices.  This is the real significance of Bari Weiss’s resignation from the New York Times.

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https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20200709-fifteen-years-of-bds-has-united-all-palestinians-and-their-supporters/

“Fifteen years of BDS has united all Palestinians and their supporters”Middle East Monitor, July 9/20, by Asa Winstanley

EXCERPT:
Today marks 15 years since the official foundation of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement in Palestine. The movement against Israeli apartheid has a long history and deep roots, but it was on 9 July 2005 that it was established formally with the publication of the “Palestinian Civil Society Call for BDS”.

“Endorsed by essentially all of Palestinian civil society – unions, political parties, professional associations, women’s groups, human rights organizations and religious and cultural associations – the document called for a global BDS movement against Israeli’s violations of Palestinian rights. It is modelled on the successful movement to boycott apartheid South Africa, and is entirely peaceful.

“The document is a key part of the history of the Palestinian liberation struggle. It is most notable for its clarity and principles, for making a set of three clear demands and for its unifying effect on the Palestinian body politic.

“‘Fifty seven years after the state of Israel was built mainly on land ethnically cleansed of its Palestinian owners,’ it stated, ‘a majority of Palestinians are refugees, most of whom are stateless. Moreover, Israel’s entrenched system of racial discrimination against its own Arab-Palestinian citizens remains intact.’

“In this way, BDS raised global consciousness of the fact that the Palestinians are, and have been since 1948, a diasporic people.” (cont’d)

.

(cont’d)

“The settler-colonial Zionist movement’s expulsion of about 800,000 Palestinians in and around 1948 marked a stark break in Palestinian history. The expulsion and dispersion of the Palestinian people endures to this day, maintained by the racist state of Israel and its apartheid regime.

“Despite their legitimate right to do so, the refugees expelled by Zionist militias since 1947 have never been allowed to return. This is the central fact, and the core injustice, which the Palestinian liberation struggle seeks to end.”

Right ON, Carolyn!

Bill Maher is a fellow zionist, who invites her to his show to spew her zionist propaganda and does not challenge her narrative that poor Israel is the victim of unarmed civilians. He agrees to all her BS, making him look uninformed sometimes. She keeps whining how Israelis have to live in fear (despite their brutal IDF and sophisticated weapons), while those aggressive Palestinians with their home made rockets and stones are so menacing, and a constant threat.

She never mentions the occupation, land grabs, annexations, and the poor kids being killed by snipers as they protest their suffering.

Soon we will be hearing ad nauseam about the book she will write, claiming she is a victim (that victim card again) of anti-semites.

I never knew Bari was an editor with veto power. What an atrocity! NYTimes is intolerable! I am ashamed to subscribe to it, but I am very poor and it is cheap. I will see if I can manager to afford FT instead.

I guess I have to admit it is nice that she resigned. I have the impression that if she hadn’t jumped she would have been pushed, after Bennet left.

BTW I see The Forward is now firmly Zionist.