Israel Matzav

NY Sun rips Jeffrey Goldberg's attack on Bachmann

Jeffrey Goldberg wrote a column the other day - which I did not pass along to you - suggesting that Michele Bachmann be fit to be tied by placing her in the middle of Tel Aviv's gay pride parade. Goldberg is another of those Jewish Leftists who is a paranoid critic of the Christian Right.

The New York Sun comes up with this brilliant retort on its editorial pages.

Mr. Goldberg has written copiously about the Christian right and the Jewish state. He worries about the “fetish” he reckons the Christian Right has been making of Israel. Should President Obama turn out to be right in his view that Jewish settlement in the West Bank poses a problem for those who believe in a Jewish state based on a Jewish majority, this he feels would come back to haunt Israel. “How,” he asks, “will the Christian right feel if Israel does, in fact, make compromises for the sake of peace by ‘betraying’ its biblical birthright?”

It’s a terrific question, and one many on the Jewish right have wondered about as well. The editors of these columns wrestled with this after, to name but one memorable moment of some years ago, a war-hero who became prime minister, Ehud Barak, forsook the promises on which he campaigned for office and instead advanced a plan for dividing Jerusalem. The question was answered by Israel's voters, who ejected Mr. Barak in the next election,* and the rightists in Israel haven’t yet heard the end of it from the leftists. In any event, our guess is that Mrs. Bachmann would be more generous toward Israel than the Christian left— or the Jewish left, for that matter — has been when Israel has chosen not to make for the sake of peace the compromises Mr. Obama and others on the left have been seeking.

More broadly, the point that Mr. Goldberg’s question illuminates is not that the right is threatening Israel’s democratic foundations but that the Obama administration is unwilling to respect the democratic decisions of Israel’s democracy. The view seems to be that Israel's democracy hasn't thought things through. It strikes us as an odd position. Prime Minister Netanyahu is not a Middle East strongman, after all, but the elected leader of the only Middle East democracy in the negotiations. At the moment, it seems, the only parties prepared to credit the decisions of that democracy are Mrs. Bachmann and others on the right, Christian or Jewish.

Indeed.

Labels: Jeffrey Goldberg, Michele Bachmann

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 5:34 PM