Monday, March 5, 2012

New Yorker's Remnick to Israel--Screw You

This one, by the New Yorker's David Remnick, is one of the bitchiest and most venomous little pieces of anti-Israel invective I have read in some time. Not only does Remnick equate Israel with the tyrannical non-democracies of Egypt and Syria--yes, Syria--but he has the unalloyed chutzpah to claim that Israel, a  democracy from the get-go, "is another state in the region that is embroiled in a crisis of democratic becoming."

Sorry, Dave. It is not "becoming" but has long since "become"--which, for progressive Jews of the Remnick ilk is precisely the problem, since Israel "as is" is unbecomingly anti-"progressive" and not the "social justice" utopia for which they pine. And don't even get him/them started on those "settlements"...:
The political corrosion begins, of course, with the occupation of the Palestinian territories—the subjugation of Palestinian men, women, and children—that has lasted for forty-five years. Peter Beinart, in a forthcoming and passionately argued polemic, “The Crisis of Zionism,” is just the latest critic to point out that a profoundly anti-democratic, even racist, political culture has become endemic among much of the Jewish population in the West Bank, and jeopardizes Israel proper. The explosion of settlements, encouraged and subsidized by both Labor and Likud governments, has led to a large and established ethnocracy that thinks of itself as a permanent frontier. In 1980, twelve thousand Jews lived in the West Bank, “east of democracy,” Beinart writes; now they number more than three hundred thousand, and include Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s wildly xenophobic Foreign Minister. Lieberman has advocated the execution of Arab members of parliament who dare to meet with leaders of Hamas. His McCarthyite allies call for citizens to swear loyalty oaths to the Jewish state; for restrictions on human-rights organizations, like the New Israel Fund; and for laws constricting freedom of expression.
The New Israel Fund yet? That pseudo-Zionist racket? The New Israel Fund is so "human rights-y" that it funds efforts, including Arab ones, that aim to undermine and/or destroy Israel. In that sense, it's like a vegan who invests money in a steak house (thereby acquiring a stake in steak), and who can't understand why all the other vegans are upset with him. As for that poseur Beinart, he's fast closing in on Noam Chomsky as the Jewish "progressive" whose  anti-Zionist caterwauling has done Israel the most harm.

1 comment:

Carlos Perera said...

He can't help himself, Scaramouche. Liberals just cannot bear to take their own side in a quarrel, as Robert Frost so incisively noted.