Israel Matzav

Marty Peretz rips Haaretz

Marty Peretz rips Haaretz for its objections to the publication of photos of the murdered Fogel family by the Israeli government (Peretz put the pictures in his post - my readership is probably to the Right of Peretz's and therefore I assume that most of you have seen the photos already, but if you haven't, then by all means click over).

If you read Ha’aretz, the newspaper which the editor of The New Yorker, David Remnick, thinks is the last honest daily in Israel, you will find that the release of the pictures is thought by many of its writers to be a more heinous crime than the murders themselves.

(I have a different view of Ha’aretz than Remnick. In fact, I think that many of its columnists are intellectual psychopaths. From this cohort you have to exclude Aluf Benn and Ari Shavit. [I wouldn't exclude either of them. CiJ] But if you like grim fantasies all you have to do is read Amira Hass, Akiva Elder, or Gideon Levy, now doing honest reporting from Tokyo, or Amos Harel. If you want one reason for why the international press is so hostile to Israel, it is because the only paper foreign journalists read is Ha’aretz in English. It is an exemplar of Jewish self-hate, full of ridicule, righteousness, and loathing. Its circulation is going down, down, down. It would have already gone broke if it hadn’t invested in a spiffy new printing press on which it produces Israel Hayom, a free right-wing daily owned by Sheldon Adelson who, from the casino business, was said by Forbes this year to be worth $23.3 billion, which makes him the sixteenth richest man in the world.)

Peretz goes on to rip David Remnick as well.

In the last sentence of his proclamation of complete disgust with the Jewish state, “A Man, A Plan,” one out of three articles he’s written recently on this subject, Remnick puts a particularly onerous burden on Israel and the world. They “owe justice—and a nation—to the Palestinians.” I am sorry to say this. But, alas, it is a stupid sentence. It is difficult to keep many nations together. And Israel did near-magic in reconstituting its nation from the ends of the earth, forgive the cliché. Yes, there are sundering forces in Jewish life and in Israeli life. But no one can say—I suppose some people actually do say—that the Jewish nation is nonexistent or that the nation of Israel is nonexistent.

It’s a sad fact to have admit, as Remnick does, that the Palestinians are not a nation. One of the great acts of Zionist statesmanship was when the Jewish Agency for Palestine accepted the parsimonious cartography of their future state. Chaim Weizman, who later became the first president of Israel, said it with heavy heart: The Jews would take a state even if it were the size of a tablecloth. If the Palestinians were constituted as a real nation they would have long ago come to a similar conclusion and not go whining into the seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth decade of Jewish state-building.

Peretz got that much right anyway....

Labels: David Remnick, Haaretz, Martin Peretz

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 12:28 PM