Monday, June 04, 2012

Is It To Be 'By-bye Beinart?

I entered a Steimatzky book store off of Zion Square (the real, live, Zionist-pulsating one in Jerusalem) to leaf through Peter Beinart's "Crisis of Zionism" - which I have previously noted is actually Beinart's and American liberal Jews' crisis with themselves.

I searched for the pages on Jabotinsky and found them repulsive, factually incorrect, lacking any attempt to contextualize and downright plain ignorant of the subject.  In a word, Jabotinsky was a racist.

And this morning I read this by Jason Zengerle and understood:

...But while Beinart’s Army still exists, its future recruits may be more likely to come from the anti-Zionist wing of the American Jewish intellectual world. The hub of that world is the website Mondoweiss, which is run by Philip Weiss, a veteran journalist (and occasional New York contributor who has largely put aside his career as a generalist writer to become an intellectual godfather to a coterie of younger anti-Zionist Jewish intellectuals, who don’t believe Israel must remain a Jewish state. In some ways, Weiss admires Beinart. “There’s a kind of nobility, or a romance anyway, in what he’s doing,” Weiss says. Though their current projects are of course incompatible—“My belief is we have to save Jews from Zionism,” Weiss says; “he thinks you can save Zionism”—Weiss holds out hope that one day they might not be. “The interesting question to me is, What is the crisis of Peter Beinart? Those of us in the anti-Zionist camp wonder if this rude reception, this bum’s rush he’s getting, is going to send him into our arms.”

Bye-bye Beinart?

Is it to be the ultimate slide into a spasm of self-denial and the 'cross over to the other side'?

P.S.  I left this comment there:

The observation that what we witness is Beinart's crisis is almost there. Better, it is the crisis of American Jewish liberal/progressives who seek to define Zionism not on the basis of what the Jewish people have defined their national feeling for the past 3000 years (nor what the League of Nations decided teritorially and denial of Arab political rights), not on what the political-military experience vis a vis the Arabs over the past 9 decades has been, not the record of faithless peace negotiations, not the reality on ongoing Arab terror (from Mufti to fedayeen to Fatah to Hamas), not the incitement of the Palestinian Authority nor even the simple fact that before 1967 there was no "occupation" nor any "settlements" and yet there was no peace and just the opposite - but on what they need: the feel goodness of self-righteousness and favor in the eyes of the non-Jewish beholder. They care for themselves not for the future of Israel, its citizens and its vision based of the Biblical prophetic morality of Jewish humanism (see J. Klausner, and also Jabotinsky although the latter is derided by Beinart based on a misreading, misrepresentation and inability or unwillingness to understand). In the name of democracy and liberalism they would have established another dictatorship that oppresses its own population and seeks to kill Jews. That is what Beinart is facilitating by weakening Israel's support.

Oh, and you've read Martin Sherman's Part I?
^

1 comment:

Alan said...

>> the feel goodness of self-righteousness and favor in the eyes of the non-Jewish beholder


It's not really the non-Jews. The non-Jews don't really care about the Hebrew-Arabic conflict any more than they care about the Bangalee-Rohingya conflict. You never heard of it? What does that tell us?!?

It's all the Jew-In-Galut bigmouths who run their mouths. To make up for the fact that they can't understand Kindergarden-level Hebrew. Which they are secretly deeply ashamed of. This is their weakness and you should aim at the chink in their armor.

But anyway.... who cares?!? These clowns don't influence any Secretary of State, much less a Commandant of the US Marines. Remember the old truism: The people who think they're running the USA read the Washington Post; the people who think their grandparents had done an EXCELLENT job running the USA read the Boston Globe; the people who WOULD LOVE to run the USA if the District of Columbia would just get a Medical Marijuana Law, read the Los Angeles Times; the people who think they DESERVE to run the USA read the NY Times; but the people who DO run the USA read the Wall Street Journal.