How Israel Broke Our Hearts

I am of "Exodus" generation: we who read Leon Uris' book as teenagers in the '70s and fell like a ton of bricks for the heroic story of Israel's founding. We loved and defended Uris' Israel unconditionally, which is why the Socialist Utopia's recent sharp right turn to savage and brutal colonialism cuts so deeply.

From the Herald:

Most of the people who gathered in protest at the Robert F. Stephens Courthouse Plaza in downtown Lexington on Tuesday had not even been born 64 years ago, when Israel became an independent state.

Still, they said they long for the return of the land to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who were forced to leave or flee in the wake of the declaration.

The rally, attended by more than 50 people, was one of many held throughout the world Tuesday, which has become known as Nakba Day, or "Catastrophe Day," for Palestinian supporters.

I still have very little sympathy for the hard-liners demanding full "right of return," but I do know that today, Israel's brutal Occupation is handing Palestinians the moral high ground.

Eric Alterman at The Nation:

Those in the market for conspiracy theories might be pleased by the mainstream media reaction to Peter Beinart’s The Crisis of Zionism. Not only has the book been widely attacked but so too have its author’s motives for writing it. Beinart’s book is essentially a call for American Jews to challenge the professional Jewish establishment that has failed to stand up for the liberal values of the community it professes to represent and acts instead as an apologist for Israel’s rightward, anti-democratic drift toward permanent occupation. With an impressive uniformity of opinion, Beinart’s reviewers have by and large ignored the details of his critique. Jewish liberals, centrists, neocons and far-right chauvinists all apparently agree that Beinart has written the wrong book. Instead of focusing his attention on the shortcomings of Israeli and American Jewish institutions, he should be complaining about Palestinian rejectionism and suicide-bombing (as might be expected of former protégés of Marty Peretz), as it is obviously their behavior, rather than any action that Israel may have been forced to take in self-defense, that lies at the root of the conflict.

Even were one to grant the substance of the anti-Beinart attacks, one would still be left with Lenin’s age-old question: What is to be done? Where are the alternatives to an all-out effort — risks and all — to end the occupation? While some of the reviewers profess distaste for the policies of the Israeli government, none propose a solution that involves anything much more than Palestinian surrender. And since that is not going to happen — indeed the political weakness of Palestinian “moderates” is often cited as yet another roadblock to a sustainable peace agreement—then what we are left with is the passive acceptance of Israel’s slow-motion destruction of its democracy coupled with an apparently endless (and brutal) military occupation.

As is always the case when Israel is criticized, discussion in that country has been far more open and self-confident in its press than in our own. Writing in the invaluable +972 webzine, Mairav Zonszein observes, “Beinart’s writing does not shed new light on the situation, but the fact that he is making such waves reflects just how hard it is for American Jews to figure out their identity vis-à-vis Israel—and how, after 64 years trying to figure it out, it continues to be the mainstay of American Jewish discourse.” Her colleague Noam Sheizaf writes, “The panic with which the ‘Crisis of Zionism’ was met had nothing to do with the book’s not-so-new political message…but rather from the thought that Beinart does represent something real, that the Jewish establishment is indeed failing, not in terms of political effectiveness, but on a much deeper level that has to do with the moral values and the self-perception of the people it claims to represent.”

SNIP

American Jews could play a useful role in aiding our Israeli cousins to see that they are destroying what was noble and admirable in the creation of a democratic and egalitarian Jewish homeland over fears that are in some significant respects (albeit not entirely) driven by psychological rather than real-world factors. But as the ferocious reaction to Beinart’s book, coupled with the nonreaction to the PRIME project, demonstrates, the opposite is unfortunately going to be the case. As Sheizaf observes, the project of “Jewish establishment and members of the Jewish media—the manufacturers of ideology” is to do whatever is necessary “to relieve the pain of their community by blurring the existence of a problem. It is an ungrateful task, which will last as long as the occupation does.”

So again, the alternative? Kiddushin 39b in the Babylonian Talmud tells us, “And wherever the potential for harm is ever present we do not rely on miracles.” Yet that is exactly what the American Jewish establishment and its media apologists do when it comes to the preservation of a Jewish and democratic Israel. And therein lies the true “crisis” of Zionism.

The neo-con wingnuts and freakazoids who foam at the mouth about "defending Israel" at all costs are Israel's true enemies; a true ally would demand it return to its founding values.