Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: la crisi de che?

In coincidenza con la conferenza di J Street, Peter Beinart ha
pubblicato il suo libro. Non e' un granche'.
 
Beinart the Unwise
Sol Stern — April 2012
 
    Print
 
The Crisis of Zionism
By Peter Beinart
Times Books,
304 pages
 
 
 
At the heart of The Crisis of Zionism, the new book by Peter Beinart,
is a simple morality play. On one side there is the tradition of
“liberal Zionism” in which Beinart was nurtured. That tradition, in
his account, runs from Beinart’s hero, Stephen Wise, America’s leading
reform rabbi in the Depression era and leader of the Zionist cause,
through Israel’s socialist founders up to…Barack Obama. On the other
side is the revisionist Zionism of Vladimir Jabotinsky now represented
by Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and backed by a craven
Jewish establishment here in America. What’s at stake in this epic
struggle, Beinart would have us believe, is nothing less than the
future of Israel’s democracy.
 
The novelist Toni Morrison dubbed Bill Clinton the “first black
president.” Beinart, claiming the unique ability to read Barack
Obama’s mind, dubs the current occupant of the White House “the Jewish
president,” an idealistic liberal Zionist who began his term hoping to
secure Israel’s future in a peaceful Middle East only to find himself
blocked by a powerful political coalition consisting of the pro-Israel
lobby and Netanyahu’s right-wing allies in Congress. Beinart imagines
Stephen Wise showing up at a meeting in the Oval Office with the
president and representatives of today’s Jewish establishment. Wise
“would find only one person who espoused the liberal Zionism that he
championed in his own time,” Beinart says. “And it would be the black
man with the Muslim name: Barack Hussein Obama.”
 
In Beinart’s telling, Obama’s remarkable conversion to Zionism
occurred during the 1990s when the future president was “embedded in
the Jewish world” of Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood and came under
the influence of Rabbi Arnold Wolf and other progressive Jews. It was
these supposed “liberal Zionists” who guided Obama towards a
“specific, and subversive, vision of American Jewish identity and of
the Jewish state,” Beinart writes. No matter that during these same
years Obama also cultivated friendships with notorious haters of
Israel, such as Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the former Weather
Underground terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, and University
of Chicago professor and one-time PLO official Rashid Khalidi. Without
offering evidence based on anything President Obama has actually said
or written, Beinart just knows for sure that the influence of Obama’s
Jewish neighbors was decisive in turning him into a liberal Zionist.
 
Beinart’s magical mind-reading talents are vividly on display in his
chapter on Benjamin Netanyahu as well. Netanyahu’s blinkered,
oppressive policies toward the Palestinians and his rejection of
Obama’s good will are due to the malign influence of his 102-year-old
father, Benzion Netanyahu. The elder Netanyahu’s brutal anti-Arab
ideology was shaped in the 1930s by his political mentor, Vladimir
Jabotinsky, the leader of the Zionist revisionist movement. According
to Beinart, Jabotinsky and his followers admired the militarism of
European neofascist movements, and this “fascist” affinity was then
channeled through Benzion to his loyal son. And that explains why
“Netanyahu doesn’t trust Barack Obama, and probably never will,”
writes Beinart. “The reason is simple: Obama reminds Netanyahu of what
Netanyahu doesn’t like about Jews.”
 
Beinart says he decided to write The Crisis of Zionism primarily to
convince young American Jews to challenge the American Israeli Public
Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Jewish establishment and rally
behind Barack Obama. That way, the American president can continue
pressuring Israel’s government to end the occupation of the West Bank
and Gaza. (Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005, but Beinart still sees
the territory as essentially under occupation.) In a recent e-mail
blast, Beinart announced he would release The Crisis of Zionism at
this year’s conference of J Street, the self-styled “pro-Israel, pro-
peace” alternative to AIPAC. Beinart said that his book “offers an
agenda for what American Jews—especially young American Jews—must do
if we don’t want to be the generation that watches the dream of a
democratic Jewish state die,” and he asked recipients of the e-mail to
join him at the J Street meeting to get involved in “the struggle of
our lives.” That makes for a timely confluence of interests, since, as
Beinart notes in his book, J Street was created to “act as Barack
Obama’s ‘blocking back’ in Congress as he tried to relaunch the peace
process.”
 
Thus, Beinart explicitly acknowledges the fact that his book is
nothing more than a bald political tract designed to advance President
Obama’s agenda on the Middle East conflict, notwithstanding a
scholarly facade. The acknowledgments list the names of 24 young
researchers who assisted Beinart (why so few?) and helped produce the
book’s 74 pages of footnotes (about 800 total)—all in support of fewer
than 200 pages of actual text. Still, all the footnotes in the world
can’t disguise the fact that Beinart willfully ignores just about any
testimony or source that might undermine his uncomplicated narrative
of good liberal Zionism versus bad reactionary Zionism.
 
That elision is evident in Beinart’s assessment of Stephen Wise, whom
Beinart vaunts as the model of what a Jewish leader in America should
stand for: belief in the prophetic social-justice traditions of
Judaism, a commitment to a sane, peaceful Zionism, and a healthy
respect for dissenting opinions. And he contrasts Wise’s democratic
instincts with today’s Jewish leaders who not only march in lockstep
with the primitive Netanyahu, but also use their power to suppress
dissent within the Jewish community about Israel’s oppressive policies
towards the Palestinians. (Perhaps you’ve noticed how little-discussed
the Palestinian issue is.)
 
Certainly Wise was an admirable Jewish leader in the 1930s, when he
courageously spoke out against racism and anti-Semitism and fought to
pry open America’s doors for European Jews fleeing Hitler. But the
supreme test for American Zionism would come after the U.S. government
officially acknowledged in November 1942 that Hitler was implementing
a plan to exterminate European Jewry and that two million Jews had
already been murdered. There is no Zionism worthy of its name without
the priority of rescuing Jews in mortal danger and distress. Wise
failed this test, although you wouldn’t know anything about it from
Beinart’s book.
 
Starting with David S. Wyman’s breakthrough 1984 study, The
Abandonment of the Jews, a scholarly consensus has formed on the
Roosevelt administration’s morally inadequate response to the
Holocaust. President Roosevelt adamantly opposed special efforts by
the Allies to aid Jews threatened with annihilation. The Roosevelt
administration also worked to head off public agitation by Americans
(Jews or gentiles) for any special efforts for the European Jews. Wise
was a leader of a dozen Jewish or Zionist organizations at the time.
Contrary to Beinart, there was nothing very democratic about how he
ran those groups, which is why he was often called the “King of the
Jews.”
 
Still, he might have risen to the occasion and used his position to
press the administration to change its position on rescue. But the
Zionist leader was encumbered by his close personal relationship with
the president (his letters to Roosevelt usually bore the oleaginous
salutation “Dear Boss”). Despite Roosevelt’s public expressions of
friendship for Jews, the United States and the Allies remained
bystanders to the mass murder of the Jews in Europe.
 
One group in America, the Emergency Committee to Save the Jewish
People of Europe, took up the challenge and mounted a public lobbying
campaign to pressure the administration to change its policy on
rescue. The new organization was led by a small cadre of young Jews
who had originally come to the United States from Palestine to work
with Vladimir Jabotinsky. (The revisionist leader died in New York in
1940.) Also known as the Bergson Group, after its leader, Peter
Bergson, it was successful in pushing the administration to finally
create the War Refugee Board, which did manage to save thousands of
Jews, mainly in Hungary in the last months of the war. But that was no
thanks to Rabbi Wise. Instead of working together with Bergson to put
maximum pressure on the administration to change its policy, Wise
turned on the dissidents, trying to undermine their organization and
block their influence.
 
There is not a word about this unsavory chapter in American Jewish
history in Beinart’s book, only unrestrained praise for Wise’s
democratic Zionism. Even more astonishing, Beinart doesn’t mention A
New Voice for Israel, the book written last year by J Street’s
president, Jeremy Ben-Ami. As it happens, Ben-Ami’s father, Yitzhak,
was a leading figure in the Bergson Group, and Jeremy is not as
impressed by the value of Rabbi Wise’s “liberal Zionism” to the Jews
of Europe in the 1940s as Beinart is. Wise and the Jewish
establishment, Ben-Ami writes, “barred the door to American support
for the work [by the Bergson Group] that could have saved thousands or
more, with a smear campaign driven by a political agenda blind to the
larger interests at stake.” Apparently Beinart’s army of researchers
couldn’t find Ben-Ami’s book (as they couldn’t find Wyman’s), and it
goes unmentioned in the text and footnotes of The Crisis of Zionism.
 
What’s new in Beinart’s book—his psychohistories of Barack Obama and
Benjamin Netanyahu—isn’t serious. What is serious in Beinart’s book—
his argument about the dangerous consequences for Israel of continuing
its occupation and control of millions of Palestinians on the West Bank
—isn’t new. What is tedious in Beinart’s book is its false piety and
its unwarranted self-importance.
 
What is wrong with Beinart’s book is contained within its title, The
Crisis of Zionism. Zionism itself is not in crisis. The liberal
Zionism Beinart espouses is, because Beinart and others like him have
decided to condition their belief in a Jewish national homeland on its
pursuit of policies that make them feel good. They prefer an Israel of
social-democratic fantasy—an Israel that need not take account of the
behavior of its Palestinian interlocutors, that need not take account
of the safety and security of its own population, and an Israel that
need not take account of the views and wishes of its own electorate—to
the real thing. In locating the ideal form of Zionism in the
perspective of Stephen Wise, who died less than a year after the
founding of the Jewish state, Beinart wishes to return Israel to its
uncomplicated days of glory, circa 1949

 supposed “liberal Zionists”
 
uh, liberal tra virgolette. Nahum è un pirla (cit.)


in effetti e' da cretini supporre di avere il monopolio del
liberalesimo.