Mondoweiss

Is Olmert an Antisemite?

Today's Haaretz features an interview with Ehud Olmert datelined the U.S. in which the P.M. says that Israel must allow a two-state solution now or face a "South-African style struggle for equal voting rights" that will alienate American Jewish groups. (Don't worry, Prime Minister, mainstream American Jewish groups have signed off on everything else Israel has done to deny human and civil rights to the Palestinians, you have nothing to fear; they will rationalize anything...)

So Olmert is now making the apartheid analogy. When Jimmy Carter or anyone else has used the a-word, they are called anti-semites, and Joseph Lelyveld patiently explains why it is inaccurate in the New York Review of Books. Isn't it time to end the prevarication and parsing?

Myself, I prefer: the segregated south. A little closer to home.

Why the Left is Singin' Gospels...

Sometimes we don't see how much the world has changed. The left has changed the U.S. discourse in the last few months. It's happened before our eyes. Yes, Walt and Mearsheimer are marginalized, but last night in a packed church in New York, Norman Finkelstein called on the Jewish community in the U.S. to separate itself from Israel, and I think that is slowly happening. The soul-searching I've called for within the Jewish community re the neocons is taking place in a subterranean way. Now everyone knows that they are Israel-centric, and it's become kosher for journalists to say or hint as much. In a month, Doubleday will publish They Knew They Were Right, a book on the neocons by a fairly sympathetic writer, Jacob Heilbrunn, whose galley is promoted with the following boldfaced language on the back cover:

The neocons have become the most reviled and controversial intellectual movement in American history. Critics on both the left and right describe them as a tight-knit cabal that has ensnared the Bush administration in an unwinnable foreign war primarily on Israel's behalf.

Huh. Cabal. Israel. Unimaginable a year or two ago. Just six years ago the neocons and other Israel-supporters were successful in the claim that it was all one war, our war wasn't with Al Qaeda, it was with Syria and Hamas and Hezbollah. Now Iraq has shown what a grand delusion that was, and Condi Rice is said to be reminded of the deep south of the segregation years when she visits the West Bank. While a front-page analysis in yesterday's Times observed, re Annapolis:

Mr. Bush, for now, seems to have accepted the argument that the Palestinian cause is at the root of Islamic mistrust of the United States....

Got it! We have helped to do push him there. Give yourself a pat on the back.

Here, by the way, is the report I have on Finkelstein's appearance, from Hannah Rappleye of the New School:

Finkelstein ended by saying, it's "time for american jews to kiss israel goodbye" or
something like that. he began his speech with a brief history of
american zionism and then went off about how the way to solve the
problem is extremely simple: Israel's occupation of the territories is
illegal (cites U.N, Geneva Conventions, International Court of
Justice, etc) and peace will not come until that occupation is over.
Etc.

The question and answer part was interesting. After
comparing the numbers (civilian deaths), he said, "Hamas was a
terrorist organization, but the IDF is about 4.5 times more terrorist
than Hamas." Quoting roughly: When asked to discuss
his tenure issue at DePaul he started singing gospel songs like, "Were
You There When They Crucified My Lord?" and evaded the question. One
of the questions I asked was about discussing Isarel on campus, but
that got lumped together into the tenure issue by the moderator so I
got no answer, just gospel, unfortunately.

My Wife Invokes Sharia re Our Investments

My wife and I made some money off the sale of our house (I'm almost ashamed to admit, what with the sales crisis) and I was about to give a bunch to our investment guy when my wife invoked Sharia, or Islamic law. She knows a little about it from working at Newsweek International some years back. And she said that Sharia's ban on interest, or usury, springs from the idea that money shouldn't make money, your money should be active in the world. "I come from a world of coupon-clippers," she said, referring to her WASP roots, and that is offensive to her understanding of Sharia. You should be building the community with your money, not resting on your gilded laurels.

The personal finance issue aside, I found it amazing that my wife was invoking Sharia. She's a highly evolved type, and in New Age circles people describe religions as "wisdom traditions." It's just unusual to hear of Islam in that connection. Because Islam has been so slimed in the west, partly legitimately, because of the 72 virgins and the stoning of adulterers. Bad stuff (caricatured by Sam Harris in his anti-Islam books). But of course there's bad stuff in Jewish law too, like capital punishment for adulterers and covering a woman's hair. Also a lot of great stuff in Jewish law, like paying someone who works for you before a day passes, or feeding your animals before you feed yourself, or not eating an animal that was killed in fright.

I'm a Chinese-menu Jew, as they used to try and guilt us: one-from-column-a, one from column-b. Henceforth I know my wife and I are going to be thinking about Sharia when it comes to our money...

Are Pro-Israel Doves Part of the Lobby? Fleshler's Challenge

A couple weeks back, I criticized Americans for Peace Now for remaining on the executive board of AIPAC; and Dan Fleshler responded to me on his blog, in a post called "Are Pro-Israel doves part of the 'lobby'?"

Weiss does not understand what AIPAC’s “Executive Board” is. Calling APN a “member” of the Executive Board makes it seem like the group is part of a very important decision-making body. That is not accurate. What follows may seem like a pedantic riff on AIPAC’s structure, but the devil is in these details:

Every group in the 50-member Presidents Conference has a seat on the Executive Board, as Weiss notes. Besides APN, other dovish groups at that table include Ameinu, the Religious Action Center and the Union of Reform Judaism.

That sounds impressive, since in most not-for-profit groups, the “Executive Board” is a small, decision-making body, the people who oversee the staff. The “Board of Directors” is generally much larger and has less influence. But the reverse is true in AIPAC’s case: the “Board of Directors” is much smaller and, along with the staff, has the real power.

It didn’t used to be that way. In the 1980s, AIPAC became much more of an autonomous entity that didn’t answer to the American Jewish community. Its leaders wanted AIPAC to answer to AIPAC. As a result, the clout of AIPAC’s Executive Board –and the Jewish organizations on that board–was gradually and deliberately diminished. This was accomplished by expanding the Executive Board to include large numbers of individual, major donors to AIPAC. They now make up the majority of the Executive Board, not the Jewish groups.

The main function of the AIPAC Executive Board is to vote on general policy prescriptions during their policy conferences. Those broad policies sometimes do help to nudge AIPAC in one direction or another, but their impact is minimal on the day-to-day operations. Members of the Board also get briefings (at least twice a year, I believe) in Washington on AIPAC’s lobbying strategies and priorities.

So APN, as a group, has little say in what AIPAC does. But even if APN sits at only a few of the power tables, that at least gives it the opportunity to speak truth to power, and to know what our ideological adversaries are up to. Think of it as the Zionist equivalent of Log Cabin Republicans.

As Mearsheimer and Walt note, when AIPAC has pushed for legislation meant to impose Draconian restrictions on aid to the Palestinian Authority, APN and a few other groups have fought and sometimes succeeded in eliminating at least some of the most odious provisions. For that to happen, an organization needs to be plugged in. Membership on the Exec. Board does help in that regard. There are many other examples.

The only way for APN to “resign” from AIPAC’s Exec. Board is to leave the Conference of Presidents. There may come a time when it makes sense to leave both. That time has not come. There are a lot of reasons for maintaining at least some connections with the Jewish communal establishment.

I have a few responses to Fleshler. First, thanks for the info. Fleshler notes that I'm new to the issue, and he's right. There's a lot I don't know. And hats off to Fleshler, who has been working tirelessly and often on his own against the occupation for many years. Having said that, I disagree with him about "when it makes sense to leave." The bottom line for me in Israel policy is what I saw in the Occupied Territories. The separate roadway system, the religious girls stoning Arab girls who were going to school... the settlements are, as poet David Shulman writes, evil. The settlers are driving Palestinians off the land and getting the Israeli army and American political system to back them. I want no part of this, emphatically. Any other country that carried on such a policy would merit American sanctions. But Israel is immune to such considerations, partly because the "Jewish communal establishment" has stayed together against all outsiders. At some level, even APN is afraid to break the power of the lobby. Fleshler's insistence that we can do more good on the inside than the outside seems to me an effort to rationalize the fear of presenting a non-unified voice to the American political establishment--a fear about what non-Jews would do if we suddenly began squabbling. Consider that objectionable legislation Fleshler refers to. Why wouldn't APN's opposition be more meaningful or even effective if it set up its own camp?

I say, squabble. It would be a powerful blow against political support for the settlements if APN broke with the Conference of Presidents, saying it wanted nothing to do with a body that has supported such hateful activity.

My Sociological Thanksgiving (Intermarriage, Jewish Wealth, the Iraq War)

This Thanksgiving my wife and I went to her cousin's place in suburban

Philadelphia

, not all that far from my parents' house, and since my wife’s sister and her family from Connecticut were also coming, we made a plan for the four of them to spend the night at my parents’ house. This was emotionally loaded for me. My family and my inlaws have  basically not set eyes on one another since my wedding 16 years ago. We’re from two tribes. My wife is a Philadelphia WASP, and my family is very Jewish. My wife and I go in and out of each group, but unlike the marriages in which inlaws commingle, we never try to mix them.

Two Classes, Meritocrats and Their Servants. Recipe for Revolution?

I'm the general contractor and main laborer on renovations of my new house, and the job has  brought me into contact with working-class Americans. I enjoy this, and experience it as a privilege: it's part of the economy that my natural world, the upper-middle class media, shuts itself off from.

The experience has offered lessons about the meritocracy. First off, there's a certain type of personal freedom in the working class that simply doesn't exist in the elite. A lot of the guys I've worked with are wild characters. Full of strange opinion and personal eccentricity that wouldn't be tolerated in the professional world. Working class life has always been more colorful and alive, but these guys express political ideas that would be self-censored in good jobs, and they indulge odd habits that wouldn't work in professional life. A few years ago my wife noticed this trend and said the culture was dividing into "fuckups" and "suckups." The fuckups are more interesting, but they get nowhere. The suckups make a lot of money, but then they have to have meetings with other super-educated people to argue over one word in an article, or an ad campaign, or a press release. No freedom at all. (I just got a phone call from a well-paid publicist berating me for one phrase I used in an article in an important publication; there's just so much riding on elite media...)

All the working guys are living near the edge. The insulators have tattoos and an attitude. The taper lives in a trailer park and stutters. The movers were most of them missing teeth. The sheetrocker has a drug problem and has a brilliant-self-destructive gleam. None of them is making out. When I gave guys a $20 or $40 tip, they always accepted it quickly and gratefully, and sometimes brought it up before they left the job.

The large issue this speaks to is the widening divide between the rich and poor. There are more rich than ever, and they're ever more distant from the working class. There is no sense of a continuity of experience, let alone unity. The middle class is pulverized, and of course hardly any one who pushed for the Iraq war has a child serving there. Tony Judt has a fascinating review in NYRB of Robert Reich's new book on "Supercapitalism," headlined, the "Wrecking Ball of Innovation." Judt notes that Reich, like other meritocrats, is complacent about the effects of globalization. Hey, that's just the way technology and capitalism work. There's no human choice or culture in Reich's equation, there aren't even politics, Judt notes: for Reich, this is the natural order of things. Judt points out that "super-capitalism" tends to undermine "the noncommercial institutions and relations--of cohesion, trust, custom, restrain, obligation, morality, authority--that it inherited." Economic growth has little connection to democracy; look at China.

It's interesting that Alan Greenspan has shown more of a moral take on these issues than Reich. He has said that the loss of a common American experience, the division into two Americas, could lead to civil unrest. Judt hints at the same when he suggests that Reich's worldview points to "an incipient collapse of the core values and institutions of the republic....In Reich's many examples it is the modern international corporation, its overpaid executives, and its 'value-obsessed' shareholders who seem to incarnate the breakdown of civic values." Pat Buchanan is more alive to this than any hundred meritocrats.

Working on my house, I've seen this other America first-hand. I relish the culture; but then I have the freedom to do so. When I'm exhausted, I just step back into elite culture. Right now I'm staying at a friends' house in Garrison, New York, a fancy community, and the guys have arrived to blow the leaves, three guys in dingy uniforms. Look what the meritocracy has done: turned the other half of society into a servant class.

The 'Evil' of the Settlements: Destroying Palestinian Goats, and Traditional Lifestyle, in the Hebron Hills

First, an apology to readers. I'm moving, so my posts will be intermittent. Also: I'm aware of what a lousy job I've done of monitoring comments, reading them. Very unprofessional. It has in part to do with time/pay. I might be getting paid for some posts before long, who knows...

Everyone who follows the Middle East news should read the shocking review in the New York Review of Books of poet David Shulman's book Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel/Palestine. Shulman moved to Israel from America in 1967, when he was 18. He got dragged into politics almost against his will. "Mad Israel hurt him into politics," reviewer Avishai Margalit says, quoting Auden. But Shulman doesn't concentrate on the giant issues--Annapolis, Camp David, water rights--he performs nonviolent resistance against what he terms "evil" and I call the religious left: the support for the settlement policy, which for four decades, he writes, has granted a "haven" to "destructive individuals... to terrorize the local Palestinian population..."

One horrifying story leaps forth. Shulman has worked in the Hebron Hills, a remote area outside the second-largest West Bank city where Jewish religious settlers have built outposts with the army's protection, from a deed they found in the Bible. Crazies. Supported by the U.S. government. For hundreds or maybe thousands of years, Palestinians have moved through these hills and lived in caves, herding goats and sheep on the rocky terrain.

It began some two weeks ago when Palestinians from [the village of] Twaneh noticed a settler —almost certainly from Chavat Maon, the most virulent of the settlements in the area—walking deliberately through their fields in the early morning. Shortly afterward the animals got sick and the first sheep died. Then the shepherds found the poison scattered over the hills, tiny blue-green pellets of barley coated with... deadly rat poison from the fluoroacetate family.... The aim was clear: to kill the herds of goats and sheep, the backbone of the cave dwellers' subsistence economy in this harsh terrain, and thus to force them off the land.

Visiting the Arab settlement, Shulman writes:

After half an hour I start to wonder if we have come here for nothing. I stare hard at the rocky ground, the purple wildflowers, the thorns, the fresh sheep droppings. Still no poison. Then a surprise: bending low, with my face nearly touching the soil, I see two —no, three—of the blue-green grains of poisoned barley....

Five minutes later Judy [his companion] strikes gold—a huge cache of them....

Shulman then observed that all the while, on the hill opposite, directly under the settlement,

one of these settlers, with his gun, is watching us, advancing...as we move; he is dressed in black, an ominous presence, an Israeli Darth Vader. Farther up, a set of army jeeps is also in place. Maybe this time, at least, they'll keep the settlers from attacking us.

What a sick story. Shulman does not excuse Arabs in his book, per Margalit. They also have developed an exterminationist ideology. But where is the American responsibility to be fair? We are totally on the side of these nuts who are destroying the Arab ways of life, for the most tribalist reasons--because they are traditional, because they are not Jews, because they oppose Jewish expansion in this biblical realm. None of this would be happening if our country did not sign off, year after year, on this criminal, despicable behavior.

And you wonder whether these stories are not repeated across the Arab world (Yes). And you wonder if they are not poisoning the Arab world against us....Time was when a moral outcry like Shulman's commanded wide attention. His book came out in June, NYRB is the first I've heard of it.The story of the sheep should be on the front page of our national newspapers, as crimes underwritten by the U.S. Blindness. Self-inflicted.

The Bags at Barney Greengrass Are Too Thick

My wife and I are moving, and the buyer came to our old house three days before closing as we were clearing out. A little pushy; but it was O.K. She wanted her architect to look at the place, that was the only day the architect was around. And she brought a big bag of stuff from Barney Greengrass to smooth the way. Bagels, lox, you name it. Good food, too, but later I was noticing that the bagels were in a plastic bag that was probably 3 mills thick. That's too heavy, a waste of petroleum. A sign of luxury, I suppose. Shouldn't we be weaning ourselves from such piggishness?

'You're Glitz. You're Glam. You're Building on Palestinian Land!'

The NY Post covered the anti-settlement protests at the diamond store opening the other night as celeb gossip, noting that Susan Sarandon crossed the picket line (so much for the left's braintrust...) to go inside. Observers have commented on the protesters' great slogans, including the above...

'Dissent' Editor Smears Soul-Searching Over Jewish Identity and Foreign Policy as 'Anti-Semitic'

More than five years ago, Adam Shatz, then the Nation magazine's literary editor, wrote an important piece about the left's response to 9/11. One of Shatz's targets was Dissent magazine liberals who were pushing for war in Iraq. For them, Shatz wrote, "America's struggle against Al Qaeda and Israel's war with Palestinian suicide bombers are one and the same." Then citing one of those liberals, he said:

The implication of [Paul] Berman's argument is that no change in Middle East policy could stem the tide of Arab anger, directed as it is not against specific American or Israeli policies but against "our" way of life. Though rarely cited explicitly, Israel shapes and even defines the foreign policy views of a small but influential group of American liberals. It's one reason Berman and like-minded social democrats at the journal Dissent may support a war against Iraq. Saddam Hussein has not attacked us, but, as Ann Snitow, a member of the Dissent editorial board, reminded me, "Who is 'us'? Is it New York or Tel Aviv? The 'us' slides around."

 

The Forward picked up Shatz's comments in fall 2002--before our country so disastrously invaded Iraq--and Mitchell Cohen, Dissent's co-editor, called Shatz’s assertion “a type of insinuation that reeks of the worst of the left.” But the Forward reminded Cohen that "many" Dissent writers are staunch supporters of Israel. Cohen responded: “If you look down the list of the editorial board you’ll see a lot of Jewish names, but none of them came to Dissent with a Jewish agenda."

Now Cohen, who supported the Iraq war, has gone further, saying that anti-Zionism is antisemitism:

A determined offensive is underway. Its target is in the Middle East, and it is an old target: the legitimacy of Israel....The offensive comes from within parts of the liberal and left intelligentsia in the United States and Europe.

When is criticism of Israel anti-semitic? Cohen suggests a smell test that includes such criteria as "If you judge a Jewish state by standards that you apply to no one else..." And who are these antisemites? Cohen mentions only two intellectuals by name: Adam Shatz, now at LRB, and Tony Judt. Both Jews, by the way. So Cohen is following in the footsteps of the AJC, which smeared progressive Jews who criticize Israel as anti-semites.

This is reckless and sad. Sad because Shatz was initiating an important discussion five years ago that is still not happening, in great measure because of slurs like Cohen's. What Shatz said was plainly true. Paul Berman repeatedly cited Saddam's attacks on Israel as a reason for us to go to war. He conflated American and Israeli interests. The same error was made by war-supporter Thomas Friedman. Other liberal hawks, such as Kenneth Pollack, insisted that the Israeli occupation had nothing to do with our policy in Iraq, and that the Arab street would welcome our presence in Baghdad. Delusion.

One of my themes on this site is that Jewishness played a role in the prowar movement (just as Islam plays a role in jihadist radicalism). Jewish neocons were aggressive about using American power to preserve Israel's security, while liberal Jewish hawks asserted over and over that Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, and completely neglected the apartheid road system that is talked about across the Arab world. Until liberal Jews come to terms with this element of the war support, Jewish intellectual life will remain in denial/crisis, the left will be riven by unspoken suspicions on this score and will remain ineffective, the neocons will remain unchallenged intellectually, and our foreign policy will remain broken.

This is the conversation Shatz was initiating, notably with the beautiful Snitow quote to the effect that for liberal Jews, the definition of national interest and identity "slides around" between the U.S. and Israel. This is a crucial conversation, and more than 5 years later, even in the wake of the greatest foreign policy disaster since Vietnam, it is still not happening! American Jews who care about Iraq owe it to themselves and the country to clarify these identity issues, and their affinities. As it is, Cohen's shrill piece is a continuation of his defensive claim to the Forward that Jewishness played no role in Dissent contributors' views of the war. (The great thing about his co-editor, Michael Walzer, is that Walzer openly acknowledges his Jewishness in addressing such matters--and offers a Jewish identity I find problematic).   

Two other things about Cohen's piece. In dismissing Judt's view that Zionism is anachronistic and must yield to ideas of a binational state in Palestine, Cohen writes with typical bombast: "I suppose India can save itself from being an unfortunate anachronism by a reintegration with Pakistan..." The key error in this statement is that partition actually worked 60 years ago in India: Pakistan became a state. The Palestinians are stateless; the Israelis are expansionist. If the Palestinians had been given a state when real opportunity arose, there wouldn't now be a high concrete wall on their land, the hilltops wouldn't be colonized by religious settlers, and Muslims would have freedom to visit their holy sites.

Of course Cohen writes that he opposes the "settlements." He says this in passing as an example of legitimate criticism of Israel. The settlements. The issue here is how monstrous the Israeli policies in the West Bank are to you. One line about the settlements is like an American of 40 years ago saying, Of course I am opposed to those whites-only lunch-counters and bathrooms. The issue then was: segregation and the South were corrupting American society. We couldn't make any claim to real democracy in the eyes of the world so long as those conditions existed. This is Israel's situation today, and the reason that progressive intellectuals are attacking Zionist ideas.