Mondoweiss

Oy My People Are Too Rich, Part 25

Here's Newsweek's piece on the rich holding back on ostentatious spending because it's not cool right now. Almost all the magazine's examples of rich guys would seem to be Jewish: Richard Fuld, somebody Koch, Ron Perelman, Steven Schwarzman, after whom the NY Public library is about to be renamed, he can't still be going thru with that plan-- and Michael Hirtenstein.

I wonder when someone is going to do the Jewish story here. What fabulous wealth has done to Jewish values, what Jewish wealth has done to Democratic Party giving, and Republican Party giving, what this era says about Jewish entrepreneurialism and/or cronyism, and... voila, what it says about the Israel lobby. Guess I'll have to write about it myself.

Between Father and Son: The Shaving Covenant

Dialogue--or Private Atonement?

The Australian anti-Zionist, and Jewish atheist Antony Loewenstein, is visiting the States. He talked at Harvard last week. Told this anecdote:

I met a group of influential left-oriented Jews in Melbourne last year. They wanted to engage with me and discuss privately my ideas. It was a depressing affair, however, as one after the other detailed their “pain” and “trauma” over the occupation, expressed dedication to a two-state solution and pledged to work towards its implementation. Publicly, with a few notable exceptions, they refused to condemn Israel’s gross violations of human rights. It was simply a bridge too far. Talking passionately amongst themselves may have made them feel good but the situation in the Middle East requires more than hand-wringing. A fear of societal exclusion held these people back while the Palestinians suffered in silence.

Loewenstein is reflecting the problem that I have with the idea of dialogue. How much information do people need? They get the information again and again, about Palestinian human rights abuses, and they do nothing; still, they want to have dialogue about it. Zach Wales, a former Columbia student, once explained this to me--that these people seek a private means of atoning, and doing nothing, even as they gather "more information." (In the information age, that's what we always need!)

It is for a similar reason that I said the other day that I do not think that progressives on this issue should truck with the Jewish community. Richard Witty promptly said it was like shunning the U.S. government. The U.S. government is powerful, and official. The Jewish community tends to be locked into denial. It's just not very useful to be spending a lot of time working with that community when you could be building bridges elsewhere. Though I'm not for shunning; I feel engaged with the Jewish community. But I don't particularly wish to talk about this stuff with my Jewish friends and relations.

Conscious Pariahs

My wife and I went to a family gathering yesterday in the neighborhood she grew up in, Chestnut Hill. The Nebraska game was on and a few of us talked about international politics. We talked about human rights in China, the oppression of the Muslim minority in the west and the crushing of the Tibetans in 1950. We moved on to the Middle East. I said, "Well Obama scared people when he said that Jerusalem should be undivided." My wife's cousin said, "I don't think it should be divided. It's one city." He has spent more time in Israel than I have, three weeks to my 10 days, and he was expressing impatience with the idea of partition. Why should we encourage ethnic and religious separation? "They have lived together in centuries past," my wife's cousin said. "It will happen again."

Middle East politics shadow my life. They come up in every social setting I'm in, quietly or not. Yesterday my wife and I saw a friend who's dating a Palestinian who is related to a leading figure of Palestinian resistance. None of our conversation was about politics or The Issue. But it was a shadow to the conversation.

Assimilationist Thanksgiving

Don't Mumbai Savageries Mean We Should Take Pakistan's State Away From Them?

Imagine if Palestinians took over the King David Hotel and killed a bunch of people. I'm sure there are some Palestinians who would like to do that. It would be further proof that there is no one to deal with on the Palestinian side, and they are not a true partner, as Rahm Emanuel put it.

Of course the Pakistanis--or apparently, now, their allies--do this kind of thing all the time. And they still have a state. No one has deprived them of self-government because, in their ongoing border dispute with the Indians, they have done horrible horrible things.

The Pakistanis recognize the existence of India, but not its right to exist on Kashmiri territory. Yet despite this nonrecognition, the Pakistanis have all the equipment of the modern nation state, including nukes. While Hamas is deprived of any international standing because it does not recognize Israel's right to exist.

The other major difference between India/Pakistan and Israel/Palestine is that the Pakistanis are not attacking American buildings. Their border dispute has not become internationalized in anything like the way that the Palestinian right to self-government has become an international issue. We try to stay evenhanded in the India/Pakistan dispute.

While in the Israel/Palestine one, we are firmly on one side, and have helped to deprive the other side of statehood and territory for the last 61 years. And you wonder why the World Trade Center doesn't exist any more. And why sage intellectuals say that the great threat to world peace is from non-state actors. State actors are more stable. And we have deprived the Palestinians of statehood forever.

'J Street' Cannot Take on AIPAC and the Neocons Frontally

I said earlier this week that I was going to get to Jeremy Ben-Ami's comments at the Jewish antiwar conference of last Sunday. Ben-Ami is the brains of J Street, the alternative Jewish lobby; and he was introduced with genuine excitement, by Rokhl Kafrissen, a young Jewish editor, who declared: "What Jeremy Ben-Ami did was organize a response to the neoconservative domination of the Israel lobby. I don't think you can over-exaggerate how important that is to people of my generation."

Yes: Don't we all despise the neocons! But in Ben-Ami's shrewd comments, it was clear that neoconservatism is not going away in the Jewish leadership, and in fact, that it reflects strong currents inside the Jewish community.

Jerome Slater: Tom Friedman Glibly Promotes 'Mythology' that Israel Is Fair, Palestinians Violent

For a year I've thought that the best analysis of the peace process is Henry Siegman's fabulous piece in LRB last year saying it has been a "scam" aimed at covering Israel's accession of more territory. Now here is a rival: a piece on Tom Friedman in the latest Tikkun, by Jerry Slater.

The heart of Slater's piece is the idea that Friedman is given to "glib" and derisive commentary about Arafat at Camp David and in the subsequent intifada when an actual and patient scrutiny of the best accounts of Camp David show decisively that Arafat was right not to accept Barak's vague deal. Slater wrote last year about how Times coverage of the situation has hurt American policymaking by depriving our leaders of any sense of what is really going on there. And the importance to Slater of Friedman is that he has done more than anyone else to bolster a mythology: that the Palestinians don't want peace, that they want to destroy the Jewish state, that they walked away from a good offer. This mythology is now absorbed by the educated and influential in the U.S., and it is hobbling statecraft. Friedman has to know better. And so he is guilty of a "moral" irresponsibility.

Frum: Nakba Was Bad Because It Fell Below Israelis' High Standards of Behavior

Does it surprise you that liberal internationalists wish to provide neocons political cover unto the last day? Not really. George Packer wants David Frum to replace Bill Kristol as a columnist at the Times. Frum is a smart guy and he writes well, but he did say "victory or holocaust," a hideous creed, when he was promoting the Iraq war, and his wife said he wrote "axis of evil," thereby taking the lead in the giant IQ-drop known as the Bush administration. I guess the intellectuals who underwrote the Iraq disaster will continue to flourish so long as the editors who underwrote it are still needing to cover their fannies.

Here is Frum, writing lately on the Nakba and the new historians, Benny Morris's book:

'Shocked, Shocked that Zionism Is Going on in the Next Administration...'

JSF notes that Samantha Power, Rob Malley and Zbig Brzezinski are absent from Obama's national security transition team while James Steinberg, who helped write Obama's AIPAC pander last June, and Dennis Ross are there. As well as a former AIPAC staffer. Egad. We've all been warned about who the assistant and deputy secretaries of state will be--that will tell us where the Obama is going. Steinberg has "close relations with the pro-Israel lobby," JSF says. Oh my. At least Dan Kurtzer is here. If Samantha Power is iced, I hope she comes out on this issue at last, with all her passion. Though she once called Leon Wieseltier the wisest man in Washington. (That was before Samuel A. Alito Jr. got to town...)