I have not seen a criticism yet of this piece by Kathleen Peratis in The Nation. It’s racist, offensive, mendacious, colonial, arrogant, not-even-fact-checked non-sense. Specific claims? Eyad al-Serraj is the head of a human rights organization (is the Gaza Community Mental Health Program a “human rights organization”? None of his children live in Gaza? Peratis can’t even get the bios straight and yet she goes on and on and on about how her delegation “rejected his claim to a Palestinian Right of Return, for example, because, we said, you rejected partition in 1947 and attacked us; you lost the war, and for that there are consequences.”
Kathleen should avoid going on war-safaris if she’s going to feel the need to pull strings to write about them in public. And the Nation magazine should refrain from embarrassing itself by printing Peratis. What were they thinking? And what is Peratis thinking? Ordering Hamas to condemn violence? Condescendingly commenting about how the man she was speaking to had a “deep mistrust of both Israel and the United States came up approximately once every minute”? Unimaginable, that. Is it even fathomable that a Palestinian living in the Gaza Strip would mistrust the government torturing his people or the government which funds the government that tortures his people?
Since Peratis parades her affiliation with J Street and feels the need to note that she is an American Jew, peppering the article with Yiddishisms and general imperial arrogance, I have a few notes of my own for Peratis. She should know that this is the type of talk that makes ignorant people think Jews drink Arab blood through straws. Actually what Peratis is doing is creating the cultural and moral atmosphere that makes inevitable a world in which Jews in Israeli airplanes bombard Palestinians with high explosives (Straws or white phosphorus; what’s worse?). Anyway, this proves that the Israel lobby’s most important ideological work, interfacing with political culture, also takes place on the liberal-left, and not just in the high chambers of the imperial murderer and mafioso, Barack Obama. Why have none of the people ostensibly interested in the lobby’s activities mentioned this article? Do they not care that Zionism infests the liberal-left? do they wish to build a left in this country? Or could they just be interested in covering up for empire or not coming to terms with what will have to be done to take it down? Or even just blaming … Zionists for imperial malfeasance? Take your pick.