Israel Matzav

Israel's Jewish online detractors

Ben Cohen reviews a rogue's gallery of Jewish anti-Semites who attack Israel online. They include MJ Rosenberg, Phillip Weiss, Max Blumenthal, Peter Beinart and the other usual suspects. Unlike those of us who make Israel's case online, they are well-funded and have highly trafficked platforms from which to spew their vile. And they are experts at whining as if they were the ones under attack and as if their views are in danger of repression.

Full-time antagonists of Israel such as M.J. Rosenberg, Max Blumenthal, Philip Weiss, and Peter Beinart have accumulated an influence that vastly exceeds their single-digit numbers. This is in part due to the financial sponsorship of successful and well-established media institutions. Until March 2012, Rosenberg was employed by Media Matters for America (MMfA) at a salary of some $130,000 per annum. Weiss was supported for years by the Nation magazine’s Nation Institute. Peter Beinart’s new Open Zion blog is hosted by the Daily Beast, an online publication jointly owned by the Harman family and the Internet media giant IAC.

But Rosenberg, Weiss, and Beinart take a different view of their place in the media conversation. They believe themselves to be fearless truth-tellers who actively resist a censorious tribal culture that bulldozes any hint of discord. Rosenberg offered a pithy insight into this in an April 2012 opinion piece for the website of Al Jazeera. After claiming that pro-Israel advocacy organizations were hindering efforts to secure a peaceful resolution of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, he concluded with an exhortation. “Being pro-Israel means caring about Israel,” wrote Rosenberg, whose career has been built on the fact that he briefly worked for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee three decades ago. “It does not mean using it as an excuse for power brokering and suppressing dissident voices.”

Dissident voices? Properly understood, the word dissident describes intellectuals and activists operating in oppressive societies. What they do frequently results in imprisonment, torture, and even death. The dissidents of whom Rosenberg speaks so modestly, since they include himself, are not silenced, but rather celebrated, by media establishments ranging from the Huffington Post to the BBC.

The persistent inclusion of these “dissident voices” in discussions of America, Jews, and Israel has proven very useful indeed, since their membership in the tribe is deemed to give them special standing in presenting their indictment of Israel—and, somewhat more subtly, inoculates Gentile critics of the Jewish state against the charge that their attacks on Israel might be anti-Semitic. How can they be if they are merely echoing the arguments made by such passionate, such moral, such fearless, such dissident Jews?

In an Internet age characterized by instant, rolling comment, they have helped to reactivate a set of ideas that many thought had perished with the grubby pamphlets published in the old Soviet Union, screeds that bore titles such as “Zionism: A Tool of Reaction.” Whereas the true dissidents of the Cold War era introduced words such as samizdat into the vocabulary of the West, the ersatz dissidents of the Jewish left have popularized a host of expressions—Judaization, Israel-firster, Zionist apartheid, and so forth—that were once relegated almost entirely to the openly anti-Semitic fringe.

What an accomplishment.

Everyone I know online who is pro-Israel is working a real job aside from their online activities. There are some conservative commentators who are paid to write who also happen to support Israel. But it's almost impossible to think of anyone whose sole focus is Israel who is being financed and platformed by organizations like those financing that crew.

Maybe one of these days a Sheldon Adelson or an Irving Moskowitz will come along and finance a few of us and let us work at Israel advocacy full time without having to work at other jobs. But for now, they have bigger fish to fry.

The difference between how an anti-Israel online advocate spends his time and how a pro-Israel online advocate spends his time is striking.

Read the whole thing.

Labels: Jewish anti-Semitism, online media

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 4:43 PM