MONDOWEISS ONLINE NEWSLETTER

Photo is apparently of Israeli settlers, and accompanies a report from IMEMC, on another attack on a Palestinian woman in East Jerusalem.

Peter Beinart once published a pro-Iraq war book called The Good Fight: Why Liberals–and Only Liberals–Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again. Well there is a lien on Beinart’s liberalism. Here he is reflecting on his late splash, his piece on American Jews and Zionism, to Jeffrey Goldberg:

I’m not asking Israel to be Utopian….I’m not even asking it to allow full, equal citizenship to Arab Israelis, since that would require Israel no longer being a Jewish state. I’m actually pretty willing to compromise my liberalism for Israel’s security and for its status as a Jewish state. 

This statement is frank and helpful; it allows all readers, Jewish and not, to declare where they stand. Remember that 20 percent of Israel’s population is Palestinian, far more than blacks in the U.S. (and I’m not counting 4 million under occupation). Also, reflect that Beinart’s watershed piece (in the culture of the Jewish community) was published in the New York Review of Books, a great edifice of the American left that once put a Molotov cocktail on its cover. (Thanks to Ilene Cohen.)

The Jewish revolution is over. The Jewish social miracle that transformed the American Establishment a generation ago– it’s over. The good fun energy is over. A copy of a copy of a copy excites no one. Saul Bellow has petered out into Nathan Englander, and Allard Lowenstein has petered out into Joe Lieberman. Jews used to be William Kunstler and Jerry Rubin and Mark Rudd and Barney Frank and Noam Chomsky. They turned the known world on its side. Now Jews are Goldman Sachs and Larry Summers. Howard Berman the antiwar insurgent became Chairman Howard Berman who crushes any criticism of Israel. Our Chicago streetsmart political geniuses, Saul Alinsky and Studs Terkel, turned into Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, in the offices closest to the president. No wonder they play their cards close to their chests.
Worse, we’re Arlen Specter who represented nothing but a worn out Establishment and Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut who claimed a Vietnam record when he wouldn’t have been caught dead there and Elena Kagan who has conducted her whole career without a misstep for this moment and as a result is as interesting as American cheese. Kagan once clerked for Thurgood Marshall, back when Jews stood for something. Now she represents a generation of calculating achievers and hacks.
When I was a kid we were outsiders and had that fierce energy. My mother praised the Rosenbergs to me. Izzy Stone changed his name but he was a Communist too. Norman Podhoretz studied English literature like the talmud and brought his ethnic fury into the discourse; but his successor for intelligence is Adam Kirsch, who steps into the New Yorker and all the other magazines with an air of entitlement, and who can blame him, Jews run the important magazines, with all the passion of printing a train timetable. (Back when, Robert Gottlieb was weird and loved Doris Lessing and discovered Haruki Murakami and didn’t gaze into the mirror of his success.)
Alan Dershowitz was filled with fury at Derek Bok, when Bok ran Harvard Law School, and called him an anti-semite; Dershowitz also was a poor boy from Brooklyn with the element of surprise. But that was a long time before Martha’s Vineyard; and now Elena Kagan is followed as Harvard Law Dean by another Jewish woman and I don’t know what these people stand for, oh Kagan stands for gay rights and her successor Martha Minow stands for rationalizing Israel’s blight on Palestinian civil rights.
Yes the demands of the Israel lobby have done a number on the famous Jewish intelligence and values. That’s what Peter Beinart is saying in the New York Review of Books, Beinart whose princely professorial salary is on the internet, and the Nation.
The journalists all make too much money, that’s part of our problem. Tom Friedman married a gazillionaire and has a house with the biggest carbon footprint in his congregation; Andrea Mitchell did the same and seemed to tremble in fear of the tea partiers last night on MSNBC; and Ira Glass in a fundraising pitch on NPR this morning warns that the blogosphere is a threat to good “oldfashioned” journalism. Protecting his status against the hordes.
Kagan is the ultimate sign that our brand is finished. She is the best of breed, as they say at Westminster. According to this Times profile, she comes out of the same hothouse I came out of, in her case the Upper West Side. Achievement, liberalism, and no partying. Arguing at the dinner table. Presumably no physical life. My favorite part is when her father, a liberal synagogue communitarian and Yale Law School grad, “was said to have been crushed when his daughter chose Harvard Law though she also had been accepted at Yale.”
Blueblood Protestants don’t care about this kind of thing– but there are no Protestants on the Supreme Court. 
Kagan’s world is the Jewish success world, she stepped into it like Kirsch did. She loved the hothouse. She emulated Felix Frankfurter, who didn’t stand for much either, and is pals with Sarah Walzer, daughter of Michael Walzer, the political theorist and Jewish parochialist. She went to Jeffrey Toobin’s wedding, she was picked by Larry Summers at Harvard around the time he was saying that divestment was anti-semitic. Eliot Spitzer, Ted Weiss and Elizabeth Holtzman were among her backers. She clerked for Abner Mikva, a Chicago macher who backed Obama.
Oh and Kagan did very little to promote racial or even gender diversity while dean of Harvard Law School (as Duke law prof Guy-Uriel Charles points out). It’s her brother Marc who was drawn to radical causes, and I bet he’s interesting, he has something to say, he has values.
But he’s a throwback. He’s the school teacher and Kagan is best of breed, another meritocratic cipher on the make, worth $1.6 million. We’re in the decadent last phase, the dying fall of a generation. Wake me when it’s over. 

From the Washington Post, on a Washington Jewish theater house that had an exhibit at J Street’s conference last year:

Bowing to objections from Elie Wiesel, the author, human rights activist and Holocaust survivor, Theater J has canceled its first production of the coming season — a play in which Wiesel is a character.
“Imagining Madoff” by Deb Margolin was to be a world premiere for the Washington troupe, running from Aug. 28 to Oct. 3, with actor Rick Foucheux portraying convicted Ponzi schemer Bernard L. Madoff.
In the fictional play, Madoff in his prison cell recalls a long-ago, all-night discussion with Wiesel in the author’s study….
The Elie Wiesel Foundation for Humanity had all its assets, $15.2 million, invested with Madoff and lost them when the Ponzi scheme unraveled. In addition, Wiesel personally lost several million dollars to Madoff.
Theater J Artistic Director Ari Roth said the Wiesel Foundation was uncomfortable with having its founder’s name used in the play, but early on Wiesel had not objected. “It wasn’t until Wiesel read the play and found it to be exactly as Deb purported, a work of fiction . . . [that] Wiesel didn’t consent to it,” Roth says.
[Theater artistic director Ari] Roth offered to have Margolin revise the play, replacing Wiesel with a fictional character. She began to work on it, he says, but finally rejected the idea. Says Margolin, “Unfortunately, I didn’t really feel . . . I could do all those things. And I asked my agent to withdraw the play.”

Ali Abunimah shows that a year ago Chomsky took a very hard line on the Palestinian Authority, the same folks he’s now praising:

In the West Bank by now there’s very little resistance, because of Israeli violence which has indeed subdued the population. And by now because of collaborationist Palestinian forces…. As I’m sure you know Israel, the United States, with its allies, the Arab dictatorships — Jordan, Egypt — have trained security forces, Fatah security forces, whose main task is to subdue the population. If they have a demonstration, you know, against the atrocities in Gaza, instead of the Israeli army going in, they’ll do it. That’s a typical colonial pattern. The whole history of colonialism works like that. I won’t run through the details but it’s absolutely common, very common. Like, say, India, the population was mostly kept under control by Indian soldiers under British command. It’s just a typical and natural procedure.

Beautiful beautiful piece by Deb Reich in the Baltimore Chronicle, about her 50 years in Israel. Gosh I wish I could write with this much openness and grace and maturity and understanding. Guess you had to be there, huh?

while I am more or less the same person I was when I first got here, except older: still clinging stubbornly to the basic worldview I acquired as a child in the public schools of suburban Westchester County, New York. One person, one vote; equality under the law for all; due process; habeas corpus; no taxation without representation—all that good old revolutionary stuff, however imperfectly implemented. Meanwhile, too many Jews who immigrated here from Western democracies, subsequently traumatized by the seeming intractability of “the situation,” have been pushed or pulled in the Israeli context away from that worldview, toward a hard-edged Jewish supremacist mentality that to me feels—I can’t help it—completely un-American. Few of them, I would guess, stop to ponder how far they have strayed from the pluralist credo they once lived by…
Back in my college years in Manhattan circa 1970, the progressives’ push for “one secular democratic state in all of Palestine” struck me as a cynical strategy dreamed up by “the Arabs” to take back, from the brave pioneering embattled Jews of Israel, the new homeland they’d won for themselves at such great cost. The post-1948 “Arab boycott” of Israel seemed viciously unfair and prejudiced and cruel. How dare they try to steal back what we won fair and square in a good old-fashioned war? Today all that looks very different to me. Astonishingly different….
Unlike most of my old friends here or abroad, I found ways to get to know ordinary Palestinians personally, face to face: by living among Palestinian folks in Palestinian towns in Israel, first as a community service volunteer on assignment, and more recently as just an ordinary tenant renting an apartment in a Muslim village; by engaging socially with Palestinian friends and neighbors and inviting them to my home and being welcomed into their homes, where I have played with their children and watched TV with them and cooked and baked with them and broken bread with them; by working with Palestinian professionals as equals, in joint Jewish-Palestinian social-change organizations and in Palestinian Arab civic organizations; by exchanging jokes and book reviews and birthday cards with Palestinian friends by email; by informally “adopting” a few forty-something Palestinian friends from the West Bank and Gaza who are the age my biological children would be today if I hadn’t waited so long to have kids; by listening as my Palestinian friends share their hopes and dreams and troubles and aspirations and frustrations.
That’s the difference. I learned soon enough that Palestinians are not the faceless, anonymous, scary “Arabs” I was led to fear in my youth. I know they are not the enemy. I know they are not dispensable. They are us, and we are them. I will go to jail, if necessary, rather than sit here passively while their lives are further blighted and more generations of children are cheated, on both sides. I know that our basic civic, economic and environmental burdens must be shared and that there is no way to shoulder them alone. We will prosper together or we will sink together—not driven by philosophy or ideology, but because nothing else works.

I failed to mention the other day that I had banned a voluble commenter, though he did not violate our rules re obscenity, hate speech. No, what he was doing was hasbara thread-hijacking: He would jump on a post with several comments that had nothing to do with the post but were pure hasbara. Trying to hijack the thread and use our readership for his pro-Israel forum. Yes I know, some folks on my side sometimes do the same, but generally it’s after the comments have moved along. This felt like abuse, a blight on the discussion, and Adam and I are paying for the microphone. To be clear: I don’t mind hasbara folks; I welcome them. I welcome their efforts to justify Israel’s actions, I welcome the whetstone of their ideas. I recognize that my ideas will go nowhere if I’m not engaged at some level with that community. But I’m not down with the hijackers. Thanks to Annie.

From an Israeli Defense Forces website:

Gidi Mark, CEO of birthright-Taglit Israel:
“We set a goal for ourselves that within the next 7-10 years, half of Jewish youth living in the Diaspora will visit Israel through our program. They will become alumni who will represent the foremost strategic asset of the State of Israel.” 

Photographer: Ahmad Gharabli/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images, from the Wall Street Journal‘s “pictures of the week” for the past week. Reports the Journal: “FACING A CROWD: A Palestinian woman whose house has been occupied by Jewish settlers argued with Israelis who came to celebrate Jerusalem Day in the mainly Arab neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem, Wednesday.” Remember that these evictions are underwritten by the Israeli gov’t.
Peter Beinart in the NY Review of Books: “In the American Jewish establishment today, the language of liberal Zionism—with its idioms of human rights, equal citizenship, and territorial compromise—has been drained of meaning.”
Why? Because the territorialist-nationalists have won, and from Deir Yassin to Al-Atatra to Sheikh Jarrah, they have uprooted and humiliated Palestinian women. (h/t Annie)

The “lobby’s” crusade against Iran continues. Here, Jonathan Schanzer, “a former terrorism intelligence analyst at the U.S. Treasury Department, vice president of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies,” a potent neoconservative thinktank that emerged after 9-11, wants to give the job to fellow Israel-supporter, Treasury Undersecretary Stuart Levey. As we pointed out earlier on this site, Levey is a carryover at Treasury from the Bush years. Here he is, crafting a hard line for George Bush! He’s got some political staying power.
Writes Schanzer: “Doggedly determined to thwart Iran’s nuclear ambitions, Levey has traveled the world in recent years to convince foreign financial institutions to cut ties with Iran. More than 80 financial institutions have done so. And though Levey alone cannot halt the Iranian nuclear drive, his example makes clear how useful the Treasury Department’s work can be.”
These folks are shameless.