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We often note the news that Democratic rank-and-file support for Israel is fading. Well, the California State Democratic Convention yesterday endorsed Congresswoman Jane Harman for reelection from a district around Los Angeles, but before it did so, Harman and her opponent, Marcy Winograd, both appeared before a progressive caucus at the convention, and argued Israel.
The Fresno Bee calls the fight the “flashpoint” of the convention. Peggy McCormack, a delegate to the convention, says that the story will be covered today on Pacifica radio, KPFA, 10 am PST. Meantime, her report:

Jane Harman and Marcy Winograd managed to squeeze in a debate of sorts before a couple hundred Progressive Caucus delegates at the Democratic Convention. Marcy herself brought up Israel in order to distance herself from Harman. I never thought I’d hear a candidate talk about brutal occupation, lack of water, unnecessary continuous deaths and lack of democracy.
Harman in response called Marcy an extremist who wants to get rid of Israel, and Marcy shot back with a democratic state from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River. This got a standing ovation. And, Harman stood up and said she did not go to the caucus to debate and strode out. Unbelievable.
We collected enough signatures to get Marcy’s signature to the floor of the convention, whereupon the vote was done in a strange but legal way with party workers counting the people holding up cards, and of course Harman won. When we called for a recorded vote, John Burton, the party chair, snarled something or other about Marcy should organize better.
Clearly Marcy won the standing vote (we all waved our delegate badges) but we had not done our homework to jump at the mike and call for a recorded vote. Doesn’t matter, the point will not be lost on the lobby.

Related posts:

1. One-state solution is debated in California congressional race
2. Opponent says Jane Harman represents Israel, not California
3. Harman primary opponent: ‘Let us remind Harman and the rest of Congress that they represent the people of the United States of America.’

Update: As can be expected Muzzlewatch has been all over this story. Check out their great in-depth report here.
The Toronto Star reports that the city of Toronto is considering withdrawing funding from the Toronto Pride march next year if the organization Queers Against Israeli Apartheid is allowed to march this year. The city evidently received complaints after last year’s parade and is looking into whether the term “Israeli apartheid” violates the city’s anti-discrimination policy. From the article:

“We have no legal grounds to ban the word apartheid,” [Pride executive director Tracey] Sandilands said. “While I understand there are a lot of people who don’t like the wording, there’s got to be more than just the name of the organization (to justify taking action).”
But, she said, the city has told them that Toronto Pride had contravened its anti-discrimination policy on the grounds that “those words make certain participants feel uncomfortable.”
All funding issues aside, Pride has no wish to violate the city’s anti-discrimination policy, she said. “That would be crazy.”
Asked how Pride could both avoid banning QuAIA and satisfy the policy, given that even its name makes some uncomfortable, she said: “It’s a good question, and it’s not one I’m sure we have an answer for as yet.”

The campaigh against QuAIA seems to be led by lawyer Martin Gladstone, who previously advocated for an “ethics committee” to review parade signs in an attempt to disqualify the group. From the article:

Gladstone produced and circulated a film, called Reclaiming Our Pride, which shows one marcher wearing a shirt with a crossed-out swastika and features fuzzy audio of others chanting words Gladstone interprets as “fist by fist, blow by blow, apartheid state has got to go.”
QuAIA says the chant was actually “brick by brick, wall by wall, Israeli apartheid is going to fall.”
The group also says the marcher sporting the crossed-out swastika was not a QuAIA member.

QuAIA member Elle Flanders is quotes as saying the city’s stance is “shameful.” She continues:

“They’re trying to compare it to hate speech, and I find it deeply offensive, as somebody who’s been fighting human rights battles for a really long time, to hear that criticism of the state of Israel is somehow hate speech. No way,” said Flanders, one of several Jewish QuAIA members.
“I’m a big Jew-lover. And my Judaism taught me to stand up for what is right. This has nothing to do with anything other than criticism of Israel … Political difference need not be censored.”

Related posts:

1. Naomi Klein, David Byrne, Jane Fonda, Danny Glover, Ken Loach, Wallace Shawn and many others support protest of Toronto Film Festival
2. The Toronto Declaration hits Canadian airwaves, continuing the debate
3. Bay area Jews say they’ve experienced professional and personal ’sanctions’ for expressing pro-Palestinian views at gay pride parade

Yesterday Ali Gharib reported a statement on West Jerusalem last week by Michael Ratner (from a presentation on the Mamilla cemetery):

“What you have to conclude is that they want to take this spot,” Ratner said, “then the next spot. It’s clear they want to eradicate any presence of Muslims in Jerusalem.”

Ratner was referring to Muslim artifacts, not even living Muslims. Now a few days ago in the New York Times, Isabel Kershner reported on the corruption scandal that still envelops Ehud Olmert long after he left the Jerusalem mayoralty. Emphasis mine:

At the heart of the latest inquiry is a residential project known as Holyland, regarded by many of the city’s residents as an eyesore. Located on a ridge in the predominantly Jewish southwest of Jerusalem, it consists of several multistory apartment buildings and a central tower.

I am curious: Are there any non-Jews in that neighborhood? Gosh you know how quick I am to condemn the Times; is this an example of (un)consciously trying to situate Jerusalem neighborhoods in a familiar American multicultural mental space–a predominantly white section of Philadelphia, say–when the reality is that no such place exists? I’m just asking.
Related posts:

1. Weekly Sheikh Jarrah protest greeted with hostility in West Jerusalem, cheers in East Jerusalem
2. Wait, Bibi– Palestinians can’t go buy property in West Jerusalem
3. Loewenstein: Looking for God in a West Bank colony, Jews shoot me death stares

Great letter in the Harvard Crimson today on the Martin Kramer scandal, keeping it alive, from scholars Lori Allen, Vincent A. Brown and Ajantha Subramanian. Smart analysis of Kramer’s ideas. And interesting that these lefties quote Steve Walt, who was once pilloried at Harvard.

The speech in question was made at the 10th annual Herzliya conference, the single most important gathering of influential policymakers and commentators in Israel. Kramer’s talk was part of a panel held on Feb. 3, 2010 entitled “Rising to the Challenge of Radical Indoctrination;” his Harvard affiliation was clearly identified in the conference program in connection with the talk.
In Kramer’s presentation, he suggested that Israel’s current economic blockade of Gaza, now in its fourth year, represents a successful effort to “break Gaza’s runaway population growth.” He therefore argued against what he called “pro-natal subsidies” of food, medicine, and humanitarian aid that help to reproduce the “constant supply of superfluous young men” demanded by a so-called “culture of martyrdom” in Gaza.
His argument has little scholarly merit. In the name of state security, it validates demographic strategies of population control that date at least back to Thomas Malthus and have been repeatedly found wanting both intellectually and morally for over two centuries. Also, by attributing to culture what is a political and social phenomenon, Kramer misrepresents the dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
A willingness to sacrifice oneself is not a desire for martyrdom rooted in Palestinian culture. Rather, as has been shown by scholars of the conflict, Palestinian youth turn to violent means to oppose the dehumanizing effects of the Israeli occupation. In short, Kramer’s remarks are not informed by current scholarship, but are animated by the spirit of early 20th century eugenics.
Even if the Weatherhead Center were to overlook these scholarly shortcomings, it should at least consider the ethics of Kramer’s interventions. His characterization of young Palestinians as a superfluous population culturally predisposed to violence can only be described as racist. Indeed, his statements are rooted in a polemic that would have been unacceptable in reference to any other population.
To quote Weatherhead Center executive committee member Stephen Walt, “What if a prominent academic at Harvard declared that the United States had to make food scarcer for Hispanics so that they would have fewer children? Or what if someone at a prominent think tank noted that black Americans have higher crime rates than some other groups, and therefore it made good sense to put an end to Temporary Assistance for Needy Families and other welfare programs, because that would discourage African-Americans from reproducing and thus constitute an effective anti-crime program?”

Related posts:

1. At Harvard, Kramer is merely ‘controversial’
2. I was wrong about the Weatherhead Center
3. Kramer gave Harvard a black eye

Here is an important exchange. Recently Jerry Muller, a Jewish professor of history at the Catholic University in D.C., published a splendid book called Capitalism and the Jews. Muller argues that Jews are great at commerce because of cultural training, family habits and dedication to texts, as well as from the tradition of filling a marginalized role in Europe, as usurers. Then capitalism became the defining order of European society in the 19th century, Muller says, and nationalism rose hand in hand with capitalism, because capitalism required literacy and education and nations could provide the structure for such development; and Jews became elevated within those nations as the professionals, and anti-Semitism was the response of people who lost status or who were in competition with Jews.
It is a vital argument because it understands anti-Semitism as a real if hateful response to real sociological shifts, including the role of Jews as intermediaries between landowners and peasants in Eastern Europe (a hobbyhorse of mine) and follows along in the work of Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century, and Albert Lindemann–Esau’s Tears, which also “explained” anti-Semitism in terms of the rise of the Jews.
Now what is the exchange I began by referring to? At Amazon, the book was reviewed positively by Ira Stoll, the neoconservative former editor of the New York Sun. (I think this is the sage who said that those of us who demonstrated against the Iraq war in February 2003 should be investigated for “treason.”) But Stoll takes exception to some of Muller’s analysis: 

Mr. Muller gets out onto the thinnest ice when he blames Jewish involvement in revolutionary activity and communism for inflaming European anti-Semitism. Sometimes, he frames this claim cautiously: “To be sure, in much of eastern Europe anti-Semitism long antedated the Bolshevik Revolution, and would have been a substantial factor in interwar politics even without the prominence of Jews in the Communist movement.”
Other times he is more assertive: “In Germany, where political anti-Semitism had been on the wane before 1914, the role of the Jews in the postwar revolutions was the key element in the revival of anti-Semitism on the right.”
That the Jews were being denounced as greedy capitalists at just the same time as they were being denounced as dangerous Communists suggests to me that the denunciations were, at bottom, more about hating Jews than about hating either capitalists or communists.

I.e., they hate us because we are who we are, they hate us no matter what we do. When actually Muller shows that Jews were drawn both to capitalism and anti-capitalism, and that revolutionary ideology clearly played a role in the Nazi stigmatization of Jews in the 30s. But no, any theory that seeks to associate anti-Jewish hatred and crime with an actual grievance must be expunged.
This is in the end a war over Jewish identity right now. If nothing we do has anything to do with the resentment against us, we can continue to run the Israel lobby in American foreign affairs and colonize and ethnically-cleanse Palestinian lands and, when Obama demurs, insist on having out the disagreement behind closed doors, because the goyim will hate us anyway and the lobby is the only power we have.
But if we actually have an effect on our own reputation we can be mindful of our presence in a multicultural world. And I would state, as Muller does historically, that we have tended to be a privileged group. He says that the Jewish response to that privileged status has been revolutionary anti-capitalist fervor (Marx and Emma Goldman) and even American Jewish liberalism– borne of guilt, he says, and providing an ersatz form of religious identity.
I quarrel with Muller there. I sense that he is religious. But why is a spirited liberal political engagement out of a sense of guilt, or awareness of entitlement, ersatz, any more than studying ancient scripture and commentary that have little real bearing on our actual lives is ersatz? It’s a judgment on his part, and a bad one. In the next few days I am going to celebrate Muller’s historical achievement here, but also show how his book stops abruptly short of any present-day analysis.
Related posts:

1. Tariq Ramadan and American Jewish identity
2. Jews Take Credit for Manhattan Project, Why Not Baghdad Project?
3. Jews Are More Moral Than Others, So Jewish Critics of Israel Must Hate Themselves

From a Washington Post report on the militia movement bringing guns to a rally in Virginia:

A member of several heretofore little-known groups, including Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership and Oath Keepers — former and active military and law enforcement officials who have vowed to resist laws they deem unconstitutional — [Daniel] Almond, 31, considers packing heat on the doorstep of the federal government within the mainstream of political speech.
Others consider it an alarming escalation of paranoia and anger in the age of Obama.

Update: sorry to all. Here’s the outfit. Been around for a while.
Related posts:

1. I heard all this at AIPAC
2. Apparently, Bono’s never heard of Jamal Juma’
3. 200 of us demonstrated outside the courthouse all night long, shouting to be heard by the 17 in the lockup

Before going to Rashid Khalidi and Michael Ratner’s talk on the Mamilla Cemetery at Columbia University last week, I had a drink with a friend who is completely ignorant about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — not even on his radar.
I gave him the elevator pitch on the situation: “It’s an ancient Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem that an American Jewish group is building a ‘Museum of Tolerance’ on top of.”
The irony was not lost on my friend. He was shocked. “Really?” he asked, and turned to a friend to repeat it.
Khalidi emphasized the absurdity at the lecture: “Just the facts: They are building a ‘Museum of Tolerance’ on the oldest Muslim cemetery in Jerusalem. You say that enough times, it should stop them.”
Lots of people are trying, but it doesn’t work. Where’s the disconnect?
Khalidi said that the government of Israel is notoriously deaf to international public opinion, but the government of Israel isn’t building the museum. Rather the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center, a 501(c)(3) organization, is the one subverting international law — remember UN resolutions place Jerusalem as an international city, and protect sites of interest — with tax-exempt U.S. dollars.
As noted in an earlier post,, Khalidi put the affair within the context of the whole of Jerusalem. So did Center for Constitutional Rights head Michael Ratner. CCR is spearheading a petition to block further desecration on behalf of families like the Khalidis, whose ancestors are buried in Mamilla.
“What you have to conclude is that they want to take this spot,” Ratner said, “then the next spot. It’s clear they want to eradicate any presence of Muslims in Jerusalem.”
The Wiesenthal Center and its Israeli allies seem indeed to have nefarious intentions here, evidenced by the exploitation of the “everybody knows” meme on final status issues of a peace agreement. Those in the U.S. — from where dollars fund, as Ratner put it, “huge bulldozers and earth moving machines just destroying the ground” (the graves, that is) — who don’t see the patent absurdity are willfully blind.
But thanks to Ratner, Khalidi and other activists, more and more people are seeing what’s right in front of them. I told my friend, he told his. And Khalidi says it’s bringing other things to the fore: the disproportionate Israeli protection of antiquities (all 137 sites Israel has designated are Jewish) and the destruction of mosques and churches in Arab villages whose occupants were driven out in 1948. Most importantly, it raises issues about all of Jerusalem.
“Israel has done more than just damage this cemetery,” Khalidi said. “Israel has opened up a can of worms by allowing this to happen.”
It’s a can of elephants. They’re in the room. Let’s see who notices.
Related posts:

1. Khalidi on Mamilla: ‘this grotesque project must be stopped!’
2. Red herring in Mamilla case
3. Frank Gehry can’t be found on controversial J’lem project’s website

The Times covered the Goldstone bar mitzvah controversy on its front page Saturday. See second paragraph; what does reporter Barry Bearak mean by “countrymen”?

“That grandfather is Richard Goldstone, one of this nation’s most eminent jurists and head of a United Nations investigation that said it found evidence of war crimes during Israel’s invasion of Gaza. Many of his countrymen not only took issue with the findings, they called the judge a traitor who had sold out his Jewish brethren.”

In fact, many South African countrymen agreed with him. I would guess a fair-sized majority. Or is the journalist referring to a different definition of “countrymen” connected to Jews anywhere in the world and Israel? What’s happening here? Poor word choice by the journalist, right?
And toward the end of the piece, I object to this:

Here in the judge’s home country, many Jews suddenly viewed him as a heretic. He was accused of faulty reasoning. He was accused of being co-opted. He was accused of being the worst kind of anti-Semite, a self-hating Jew.
But does that justify keeping him from the bar mitzvah?

It’s as if the journalist accepts the viewpoint. Barry Bearak should have written, “But does such reasoning justify keeping him from the bar mitzvah?”
Related posts:

1. Is Zionism racist? Foxman: ‘You bet it is. Every nationalism is’
2. Nationalism is racist–and some nations grow out of it
3. Nationalism as a ‘Blinding Force’ in Jewish Identity

Last night my father and I went out to a small theater in the Philadelphia suburbs to see Greenberg, the new film by Noah Baumbach. Because of the title and the lead actor, Ben Stiller, I was afraid that the film would be Jew-centric. I don’t like things that proclaim their Jewishness, not when Jews are supposed to be opening their eyes to the rest of the world. Still I went. My dad’s 84. He’s Jew-centric, it felt like an opportunity. 
My antenna started quivering at the start with the introduction of the rich materialistic Greenberg family in Hollywood and their smarmily-patronizing treatment of their personal assistant, Florence, played by Greta Gerwig (in a breakout performance, but I’ll leave the film criticism of this fine film to the connoisseurs). It’s everything I hate about smug Jewish materialistic existence, I thought I was in for it.
Then the film declared its values. The rich family goes off on vacation and Greenberg’s brother shows up, Ben Stiller, to housesit. Stiller’s a carpenter/musician who’s just gotten out of a mental hospital after a breakdown, and he’s avowedly non-Jewish. His mother is a gentile, he tells a friend in Hollywood, and none of his mannerisms are Jewish (a self-delusion on the character’s part).
And in that same conversation, the old friend, Beller, a former band partner now super-rich, says something scatological about someone else’s grandmother, and another character says of Beller, He plants trees in Israel.
I suddenly loved the movie. I realized that Beller is a dick—as opposed to the other former bandmate, a Brit–and one way Baumbach establishes his obtuseness for his arthouse audience is by having him plant trees in Israel. Case closed.
Later on in the film, the Stiller character, whose craziness is manifested by the countless letters he writes to merchants, air lines, pet taxi companies, and others to complain about their conduct, sends a letter to the New York Times. We just see the addressee, the New York Times, and this is odd, because every other letter he writes we hear out loud, with Stiller obsessing over the tiny thing the company did wrong. I guess his criticism of the Times is on the cutting room floor, politics being too big a leap for a movie with ambitions about psychology and manners. The reason I know it’s political is that a few scenes later Stiller opens the Times and declares, they printed my letter about Pakistan.
So it’s Pakistan? This tetchy crazy conflicted half-Jew is upset about Pakistan? Somehow I doubt it. After I drove home with my dad (who had hated it from the start, doesn’t like psychological movies), I wondered if the movie producers hadn’t interceded and made Baumbach change Palestine, which would have been psychologically appropriate for a déclassé conflicted half-Jew in the modern age, to Pakistan, just as in another era, Van Morrison’s Brown-Skinned Girl became Brown-Eyed Girl. The Israel lobby never sleeps.
Related posts:

1. I’m Wrong About Greenberg Working for Mofaz
2. Pollster Greenberg Cuts Left in U.S., Right in Israel
3. Major U.S. Power Figures–Tisch, Greenberg, Milken–Linked to Charity that Funds Settlers’ Militias