Rashida Tlaib had sound reasons to call Israel an apartheid state, including Human Rights Watch’s report saying as much. But politicians and journalists don’t defend her because pro-Israel journalists like Bret Stephens have viciously attributed all criticism of Israel to its status as a Jewish state, and said the critics are motivated by antisemitism.
The pogroms against Palestinians that are a weekly occurrence, and the long reign of Netanyahu, have all been rendered “understandable” by a crew of hasbara culture journalists like Yair Rosenberg, Bret Stephens, David Frum, and Jeffrey Goldberg, who have purveyed a mythology of Jews as the sacred special victims of history. The ethnocentricity has laid waste to Jewish political culture.
Pro-Israel writers have dismissed all criticism, opposition and even enmity to Israel and its actions as springing from an ancient malady, antisemitism. They thereby erase the true history of the Israel-Palestine conflict, in a so-far successful effort to discredit the critics. Israel’s actions exist very much in history, and its supporters use very sharp elbows and knees to get its way.
Saying that the dehumanization of Palestinians is a cancer in the Jewish community, Peter Beinart is no longer showing deference to the Jewish guardians of the communal victimhood discourse. This is his cultural importance,” claiming Jewish authority for himself and discrediting Bari Weiss’s discourse of victimhood.
Bari Weiss’s rage over Peter Beinart’s role in a panel on antisemitism with Rashida Tlaib and Marc Lamont Hill next month shows that Weiss is in a battle with Beinart about who will represent American Jews. Weiss represents a tribal perspective of sacred victimhood; and Beinart’s universalism and openness to the Palestinian story is a threat to her.
Bari Weiss says antisemites convinced Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to back out of a Rabin memorial. AOC actually was concerned with Rabin’s human rights record. But she and her supporters now join the “three-headed dragon of modern anti-Semitism” living in Bari Weiss’s imagination. And in Weiss’s perspective of sacred Jewish victimhood, defamation and dishonesty are no vice when fighting the enemies of the Jews.
Peter Beinart is so important in Jewish culture because he insists on humanizing Palestinians, and refuses to use the Holocaust lens of perpetual victimhood when considering Palestinian resistance. Palestinians are not driven by Jew hatred, as so many pro-Israel leaders argue, but by a natural response to dispossession and occupation.
Jeffrey Goldberg, Jennifer Rubin, David Frum, Bret Stephens and the other American Bibi-ists went from All Netanyahu all the time to No Netanyahu ever, Yakov Hirsch explains. Because they can’t be leading the moral charge against Trump’s “evil plan to crush the press,” while offering obfuscation about Netanyahu’s actual evil plan to crush the press, as they once did, when they were empowering the now-run-amok prime minister.
The Jewish tribalist culture that sees Jews as heirs to a sacred macho victimhood and Israelis militarism as the answer was promoted by Jeffrey Goldberg, the leading American Jewish journalist. It created Netanyahu’s Israel, which Goldberg and his friends are now trying to flee as they try to take on Trump.
The real struggle in Israeli leadership is not Netanyahu cowering before settlers, but who can control a sacred ethnocentric discourse of Jewish persecution and innocence in the face of alleged Palestinian Jew-hatred. Jeffrey Goldberg has propagated that discourse in the U.S. The inevitable conviction of army medic Elor Azaria on manslaughter charges next month represents a crisis for that discourse at last.