Ami has two roundups of the responses generated by Peter Beinart’s take on what’s wrong with the Jewish establishment and what he says is its unquestioning support for Israel.
We neglected to mention that Peter has replied twice to his responders (I wouldn’t quite say critics — there’s a lotta bromance going on here.)
Here’s the first, called Love Israel? Criticize it.
The second, Why Israel has to do better, has a killer kicker. Beinart takes on his ex-The New Republic colleague, Leon Wieseltier, who chided Beinart for not paying attention enough to Palestinian recalcitrance and violence.
I do not see that the depredations of the settlers and their political sponsors relieve one of the obligation to include Palestinian behavior prominently among the causes of the conflict.
One last point. Leon, Jeff, Jon, Jamie, David and I are all Jews. In some sense, therefore, Israel’s crimes—unlike those of Hamas or Ahmedinejad—are committed in our name. We have a special obligation to expose and confront them. And we have a special obligation not to use the crimes of Israel’s enemies to excuse behavior that dishonors a Jewish state, and the Jewish ethical tradition that we all consider precious. In 1994, after settler fanatic Baruch Goldstein massacred 29 Palestinians in Hebron, a man I once looked to for guidance on these matters expressed it better than I ever could. “When the comparative impulse becomes primary, accounting becomes apologetics. The really striking thing about the ethical texts of the Jews in exile is the extent to which they are silent about the adversity that the writers of these texts were regularly experiencing. For most of two millennia, the Jews had the standing alibi of anti-Semitism, if they wanted to take it up; but they did not want to take it up. They held themselves to the highest standards of conduct and then proceeded to the business of safety. One is not better merely because others are bad. And the better is not the same as the good.” The man who wrote those words is Leon Wieseltier. We could sure use him today.
Also, our roundups — and my story today — focus perhaps a little inordinately on Peter’s critics. He has his defenders too:
This was an essay about Israel and America’s Jewish leadership, not about Hamas. It was about whom the American Jewish Establishment could influence, but have chosen not to. It was about a Rubicon in Israel’s increasingly fundamentalist politics. It is not a valid criticism of an essay to say that it should have dealt with another subject instead.
If we agree that most important thing in the world is peace and two states and a democratic Israel, then that is what we have to focus on arguing, with everything else the comparative subordinate clauses that the situation demands. I don’t give a shit, personally, that there are obnoxious polemicists out there who give Israel no quarter, because they’re just writers and the preservation of a Jewish democratic Israel is too important to get wrapped up in distractions.
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