Caroline Glick on Martin Peretz
For anyone who wishes to understand how the American Left - from which Barack Hussein Obama emerged - became anti-Israel,
Caroline Glick's appreciation of Martin Peretz is a must.
The reason I entitled this post "Martin Peretz, an appreciation,"
is not for what he wrote in 1967, but because of what has happened to
the Left, the Jewish Left and to Peretz in the 46 years that have passed
since he wrote that article.
In the late
1960s, Peretz wasn't alone in defending Israel against the radical Left -
white and black. In 1967, even Jewish Communists were willing to break
ranks to support Israel. And as the 1968 New York Teachers Strike
showed, at the time, liberal Jews in general were willing to defend
themselves from attacks by black anti-Semites.
But
in the intervening years, fewer and fewer voices on the Left, and
specifically on the Jewish Left were willing to take such positions and
pit themselves against their movement. And so as the decades passed,
what were the positions of the radical Left in the 1960s became
increasingly the positions of the mainstream Left, until by last summer,
they became the positions of the majority of delegates at the
Democratic National Convention.
When I was growing up in Chicago, the local Jewish establishment's
refusal to support Israel in the 1982 Lebanon War is what made me decide
to make aliyah. By the time I arrived at Columbia in 1987, and the
Palestinian uprising broke out, it was hard to find Jewish leaders who
were willing to stand up for Israel without stuttering.
Today
the situation has become simply untenable. Suffice it to say that Bill
Ayres's political protégé Barack Obama's success in garnering 70 percent
of the Jewish vote is not an aberration.
Yet
through it all, Martin Peretz has rarely wavered. Despite his attempts
to support the Palestinians, he has not allowed his desire to see the
Arab conflict with Israel resolved diminish his support for Israel. He
has remained a staunch, loyal defender of Israel. When I was growing up,
I relied on his New Republic for its reporting on Israel and the Middle
East. Peretz was one of my intellectual heroes.
In
recent years, I've felt more bemused by than respectful of Peretz. A
colleague of mine quipped some years back that Peretz and Allan
Dershowitz live in an intellectual universe populated only by Peretz and
Dershowitz and they refuse to acknowledge that they are alone. That
quip has probably anchored my thinking on both men ever since.
But even if my colleague's remark was more true than false, reading
the FBI report, I decided I should discard its snide diminution of
Peretz. The fact is, he has been fighting this fight for nearly fifty
years. As a man of the Left, he has fought the fight for Israel and
Jewish rights, increasingly alone for nearly fifty years, and has done
so despite what must have been enormous personal costs as his comrades
all jumped ship, and in many cases, joined the cause of Israel's
enemies.
Read the whole thing.
As someone who grew up half a generation ahead of Caroline (I arrived at Bir Zeit on the Hudson in 1974, decided to make aliya while in yeshiva in 1980, and actually spent the summer of 1982 in Chicago watching Ted Koppel and Bibi Netanyahu every night), what bothers me is why so many American Jews were so swept up by the civil rights movement that they failed to notice or care when it turned against their Jewishness. One could place the blame for that on a lack of Jewish education.
Quite simply, 40-50 years ago. there were much fewer Jewish schools and a much smaller percentage of Jews were educated to care about our people. That wasn't done intentionally. It was just assumed by our parents' generation that we would stick together, even if we didn't have strong Jewish upbringings. We were in the goldener medina and therefore there was no need for that 'old' Jewish education to keep us in the fold (many Zionists made a similar mistake in Israel in the 50's and 60's), and we didn't want to do anything that would harm our college or job prospects. There was also a feeling that Jewish schools weren't 'good enough' academically, partly because of the quota systems that were in effect at the elite universities in the 50's and 60's.
As to how this influenced President Obama (a story to which Caroline only alludes), I discussed that at very great length
here.
Labels: American Left, Barack Hussein Obama, Leftist Jews, Martin Peretz
Marty Peretz's epiphany: Jordan is Palestine
The New Republic's editor emeritus, Martin Peretz, has written a lengthy journal which, but for his assertion that Israel should not keep Judea and Samaria, and should instead 'allow' them to confederate with Jordan, includes many
awakenings to reality.
The thick-with-ads, oh-so gracefully written weekly [The New Yorker. CiJ] is a model of fashionable views on Israel. David Remnick, its editor, whose work on Russia I do really greatly admire, recently published a spate of his own articles about Israel, which I read. My judgment is that he knows squat about Israel, maybe because the only reportage he seems to read about the Jewish state is from Ha’aretz, which is to Israel what PM used to be for the United States. Well, you don’t know what PM was? All I can say is that it was not quite the Daily Worker. But let me confess: Ha’aretz is my home page. I am a masochist, and I like to see how far journalists can stray from the facts. Very far. Every day, actually.
...
He quotes Netanyahu as saying in his speech to Congress that, in any agreement, “Israel will be ‘required to give up parts of the ancestral Jewish homeland.’” So Rick responds on behalf of Mahmoud Abbas, “Yes, but the Palestinians have already been required to give up parts of an ancestral Arab homeland.” Actually, the greatest part of Palestine is Jordan, where most Palestinians live. So, in a very real sense, they already have a country, except that it is ruled by an authoritarian monarchy that was imposed on them by the British. That the Arabs of eastern Palestine don’t live under democratic rule is the fault of neither David Ben-Gurion nor Netanyahu. It is a result of a deeply ingrained, political and social structure that, across the huge swath of land from Morocco to Iraq, has been imposed, without a single exception, by dictators. Don’t get me wrong: I don’t want Israel to operate or control or, for heaven’s sake, absorb the West Bank. Let the Arabs on the east and west banks of the Jordan River team up and see what they can make of their soon-to-be one country. I don’t think it will be pretty. You do? Good luck.
I also don’t believe that the Arabs of Palestine want to retire this conflict and certainly not in a reasonable way. A reasonable way means no right of return, and it also means that Israel needs, for its own elementary security, for its densest population strip to be wider than ten miles. So it demands with the insistent backing of the citizenry—except some (and only some) of the local Arabs and Remnick’s coterie of friends at Ha’aretz—that border adjustments in its favor be made. Please do remember that Israel also won two wars to turn back invasions of its tiny turf, which many, most Palestinians would deny it. With the Arab world in tumultuous flux, and the tumult now spreading and intensifying in Jordan, it is possible, even likely that the kingdom will be no longer. And then, you will have perhaps 75 percent to 80 percent of historic Palestine under Palestinian control. A civil society it will not be.
...
Let me go back to those senators and congressmen who so offended Hertzberg. And how dare they so offend Obama! One conclusion I draw is that J-Street is a flop, a complete flop. It has spent millions of dollars—much of it George Soros’s, I presume—and can’t get more than a handful of politicians to sit on their hands as all of their other colleagues rise to enthusiasm and applause.
But there is this persistent coterie, influential among the elites, and especially the smart-ass Jewish elites, who do not rise and are not enthusiastic. And so, despite all the true evil in the world, the designated target of the chic progressives, including alienated Jews, is the Jewish state. There are many predecessors of the type in history.
Read it all. Can you believe that Martin Peretz - once an icon of the Left - now admits that Jordan is 'Palestine'?
Labels: Jordan is Palestine, Martin Peretz, two-state solution
Israel shouldn't make peace with failed states says...
If Martin Peretz had any credibility remaining with the Obami Left, he's just blown it. But
what a sweet job he's done of blowing it away.
It is as if we have suddenly decided that a regime that tries to capture another country and loses territory in the process has the right to have it repatriated as if nothing had ever happened. Try, try, and try again, so to speak.
This is especially the case in the Levant where the diplomacy of boundaries going back to the fall of the Ottoman Empire—whose power had been wielded at a time from Vienna to Central Asia—was so scrawly and shifting that no one could know from one day to the next where this scepter held sway and that one did not. A propos these vagaries, in the diplomatic talks between France and England following the signing of the Sykes-Picot agreement in 1916 up to 1923 the biblical phrase “from Dan to Beer-Sheva” was the template of any map. But, of course, the words were more evocative than determinate, metaphoric than concrete. And so the cartographic war, from then and now, continues. What are Syria’s real claims to the Golan Heights? There were Syrian Arabs in the Golan prior to 1967. But no one actually thought of himself as ethnically or nationally Syrian. Instead, they replicated the diversity of hate, the permanent schismatics of difference. Moreover, the resident Alawite contingent—surprise! surprise!—is quite loyal to Israel. And there are Druze whose affinities are hard to judge since they are neither Arab nor Jew. In any case, what is Syria? It is certainly not a coherent or cohesive nation, what with its constant incitement of sectarian strife. And then there is the hydrostrategics of its geography, a permanent temptation for anyone governing from Damascus.
Spotted around Israel are failed states. I doubt that the states to the north, Lebanon and Syria, can be mended. Their essence was always difference. But certainly not as democracies where the rights of diverse groups are honored. Nobody sang hymns to variety and diversification in the lands of the Arabs. Have we already forgotten Iraq where the colonials established Sunni rule over a vast preponderance of Shia? In Syria, 10 percent of the population governs. The majoritarian rest, the Sunnis and their Muslim Brotherhood vanguard, have been cowering since 1982 ... until they had just cowered too much. Pity the Alawites when the Sunnis will strike for revenge. On the other hand, how much can you pity the Alawites who have been plundering and imprisoning and also murdering for four decades?
What had Obama in his head when he tried to jumpstart Israeli negotiations with Syria? Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights, what else? The answer is simple and transparent: Israel’s retreat from territories it had captured while they were being used by enemies trying to vitiate Israel itself. But this is the president’s steady trope. Israel should withdraw from the West Bank and ancient Jerusalem and East Jerusalem and, yes, the Golan Heights, too, without a shred of evidence that it would be protected, could be protected from attack by armed soldiers, armed aircraft and armed terrorists, by a deadly admixture of regular troops with guerrillas somehow coddled by human rights organizations which define the latter virtually as civilians. Do you believe that the Arabs truly want peace? Does President Obama? Well, I don’t. There is always the ministration that NATO could force the keeping of a peace. But Obama has blown that alternative, too, by virtually opting out of its venture against Qaddafi and leaving the leadership to Great Britain and France, whose bona fides are suspect.
Why am I not a believer? Because the only unifying strand in the disparate state systems of the Arabs is their struggle against the Jews, the Zionists, the Israelis. Nothing else motivates them so doggedly. The Christians also are targets of the various Muslim governments under which they live, and their numbers are falling in every country of the region—except Israel where those who kneel at the cross are experiencing what one might even call a revival. This is especially so in Jerusalem where, quietly but decisively, the communicants of Jesus are hitching their future to Zion. Ironic, no?
Read the whole thing. Peretz seems to finally get why the entire 'peace process' - with all of the Arabs - is nothing but an attempt to destroy Israel.
Obama won't be happy he's figured that out. Heh.
Labels: Barack Obama, Bashar al-Assad, Golan Heights, Martin Peretz, Syrian uprising
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
Why Martin Peretz attacked Jonathan Pollard
In two
articles on his own
blog, the New Republic's Martin Peretz attacked former Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard. Phyllis Chesler rips Peretz some new body parts, summarizing his attacks and tearing them apart
here. But what I find most interesting is Chesler's description of Peretz's motivation.
Peretz stands alone. What can explain this? In my view, there is only one explanation.
Recently, Peretz himself was accused of being a “racist rat”—and at Harvard, on the very day Peretz’s many former students had chosen to honor him. I actually defended Peretz from his attackers. Now, in retrospect, I must reconsider that defense. While campus public shaming tactics are neo-fascist in style and intent, it is clear that Peretz’s unexpected attack upon Pollard is, indeed, a racist attack. It reeks of pure anti-Semitism.
This is Peretz’s bid to gain favor with the politically correct anti-racist left. How does a liberal Zionist Jew do this? He attacks, nay, he sacrifices and scapegoats the most vulnerable Jew, the Jew already accused of being a Jewish “traitor.” Pollard is guilty of dual loyalty—not Peretz. Pollard-the-dastardly-Jew chose Israel above America. No one should mistake him for Peretz-the-good-Jew.
While Peretz has, in the past, defended Israel among his left colleagues, (it is the only democracy in the Middle East, its Arab citizens will not renounce their Israeli citizenship to live under the authority of Hamas or Fatah and Peretz says so himself) and yet, at the end of the day, (which has now come), Peretz will not choose a right wing, nationalist religious Israel over and above his loyalty to the secular anti-Zionist “left.” His wild accusation against Pollard is meant to prove that once and for all. Yes, Peretz has struggled with his own dual loyalties, but he is now, publicly and emphatically choosing the liberal left which has rejected him—and he is doing so on the near-corpse of a Jew who has already been punished more than enough.
Peretz is part of a class of American Jews that is paranoid about its own position in American society. It's the same symptom that leads some American Jews to be so paranoid about expressions of religion in American public life that they oppose the public expression of their own religion to avoid seeing the public expression of other religions. It's the same symptom that leads some American Jews to attempt to hide the fact that they are Jewish - whether by changing their name or by abandoning Jewish observance - so that they will be 'safe' the next time the anti-Semites come around (a method that was proven not to work in Nazi Germany). And it's the same symptom that leads some American Jews to be willing to abandon their brethren in Israel and elsewhere in the World in the false belief that doing so will somehow protect them.
Martin Peretz has shown that his Judaism is not something of which one should be proud, but something from which one should hide in shame. Would that no other Jews catch any of his symptoms. Jonathan Pollard certainly didn't catch them.
Read the whole thing.
Labels: Jonathan Pollard, Martin Peretz, Phyllis Chesler
What about 43 years?
From Martin Peretz's
takedown of Martin Indyk:
You cannot ignore 63 years of history. And you should not. The Partition Plan was not frustrated by the Israelis. It was rejected and waged war upon by Jordan, Egypt and Syria all of which wanted Palestine for themselves.
Can you ignore 43 years of history and the 'Palestinians' continued intransigence since?
Read the whole thing.
Labels: Martin Indyk, Martin Peretz, Middle East peace process
