Courage, Peter Beinart

I don't have anything particularly insightful to say about Peter Beinart's call for a boycott of products from Israeli settlements on the West Bank, but as he gets attacked from various factions of the Israel-right-or-wrong bloc I just want to express my support.  Beinart draws his own red line on the green line, rhetorically quarantining "nondemocratic Israel" (the colonial power on the West Bank) from a still-loved still-democratic Israel proper. Here's his call to action:

The case for Obama's weakness that the GOP won't use

As count-the-accomplishments plaudits for President Obama mount in this election year, it's disturbing to read Peter Beinert's account of Obama knuckling under to Netanyahu (adapted from his forthcoming The Crisis of Zionism).

The outlines were clear enough in contemporary accounts. The administration called for a settlement freeze and settled for the semblance of one. As the "freeze's" short term approached its end, the administration tried desperately to bribe the Israelis into an extension, and failed.  The never-really-started peace talks ended, and an Israeli-Palestinian settlement effectively disappeared from the agenda.  Now Israel's got the U.S. and the world riveted on the alleged "existential" threat from Iran.

At this point, Obama is hemmed in, thanks in large part to the disloyal opposition screaming at every juncture that can be no daylight between Israeli interests as defined by the Netanyahu government and American interests (as defined by the Netanyahu government).  Beinert's point is that it was not always that way.  At the outset, the Obama administration had the leverage to make its conditions stick. Or at least to have made a good-faith effort, which they failed to do:

Jeffrey Goldberg gets Beinertized

I had to check what blog I was on this morning as it sunk in that Jeffrey Goldberg seems to have fully internalized Peter Beinert's fears regarding the rightward drift of Israeli society:

I've had a couple of conversations this week with people, in Jerusalem and out of Jerusalem, that suggest to me that democracy is something less than a religious value for wide swaths of Israeli Jewish society. I'm speaking here of four groups, each ascendant to varying degrees:The haredim, the ultra-Orthodox Jews, whose community continues to grow at a rapid clip; the working-class religious Sephardim -- Jews from Arab countries, mainly -- whose interests are represented in the Knesset by the obscurantist rabbis of the Shas Party; the settler movement, which still seems to get whatever it needs in order to grow; and the million or so recent immigrants from Russia, who support, in distressing numbers, the Putin-like Avigdor Lieberman, Israel's foreign minister and leader of the "Israel is Our Home" party.

This (apparently unconscious, i.e., unacknowledged) Beinertization of Goldblog extends to fears about the likely reaction of American Jewry (my emphasis):

"The conservative equivalent of the Che Guevara T-shirt"

Traditional conservatives and Republicans,  just coming to grips with what's hit them in the form of the Tea Party, are trying on various analogies to Democrats' past relations with the old-guard communist left and the new left of the sixties.

Thus David Frum, guest-blogging this week on the Dish, tells of a FrumForum blogger  who was savaged and sabotaged on the NewsRealBlog and cites an attempt by the FrumForum's pseudonymous "Eugene Debs" to explain this vicious internecine warfare:

You’re like some mainstream liberal, circa 1969, having dialogues with the Bill Ayers of that day–in which Ayers is telling you that if you don’t agree with him that “we” should all “off the pigs”, and lead an armed revolution, then it is you who is betraying the “true” left.  Except for one thing–Ayers, Dohrn, etc. were kids then, in their early 20s.  But, in this case, you have mature, middle aged people as the heart of the crazy movement–it’s kids like Alex Knepper who are your only hope.  This is both good and bad–good in that youth has time on its side, bad in that the middle aged Tea Party/love Palin/call-Obama-a-socialist-Nazi lunatics are already in positions of influence throughout the media and, to some extent, political office, too (the Pauls come to mind). ... I don’t know how you create a sane movement, but I guess it happens one day at a time.

And the Washington Post's Michael Gerson , grappling with cracked Teapot Sharron Angle's invocation of "Second Amendment remedies" to deal with the "tyrannical government" of Barack Obama, warns:

But mainstream conservatives have been strangely disoriented by Tea Party excess, unable to distinguish the injudicious from the outrageous. Some rose to Angle's defense or attacked her critics. Just to be clear: A Republican Senate candidate has identified the United States Congress with tyranny and contemplated the recourse to political violence. This is disqualifying for public office. It lacks, of course, the seriousness of genuine sedition. It is the conservative equivalent of the Che Guevara T-shirt -- a fashion, a gesture, a toying with ideas the wearer only dimly comprehends. The rhetoric of "Second Amendment remedies" is a light-weight Lexington, a cut-rate Concord. It is so far from the moral weightiness of the Founders that it mocks their memory.

"The conservative equivalent of the Che Guevara T-shirt" -- that nicely captures the faux rage of these office-seeking and office-holding mountebanks who take their cues from Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck. 

While a radical right (faux or no) that's more than fringe may be worrisome, Peter Beinert argues that a mainstream party needs to be pushed from a far-out fringe:

No one believes that today. There are vibrant progressive organizations, from Moveon.org to SEIU, but they are part of the Democratic Party; there is no powerful grassroots movement that stands outside the two-party system calling for revolutionary change. No one believes, as many did in the mid-1930s and mid-1960s, that if presidential reform fails, blood will spill in the streets. From Theodore Roosevelt to Franklin Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson, American progressivism has historically occupied what Arthur Schlesinger famously called “the vital center,” a bulwark against the anti-democratic ideologies of both left and right. Except that today, powerful left-wing ideologies barely exist, and so large numbers of Americans can genuinely believe that Barack Obama is a socialist, if not a totalitarian. Luckily for them, and unluckily for progressives who want dramatic change, America no longer features the real thing.

Obama's whole two-year campaign was a bid to move the center to the left.  With unemployment stuck in the high single digits for the foreseeable future, it's going to take a very long game indeed for that bid to succeed.

Beinert gestures toward "the liberal forces in Israel"

One of the most common criticisms of Peter Beinert's seismic essay taking the United States Jewish community to task for unconditional support of all Israeli government actions was that Beinert selectively surveyed recent Israeli history to present a portrait of the country that overemphasized its rightward swing and alleged growing rejection of liberal democratic values.  Jonathan Chait, for example, wrote:

In the same vein, Peter now paints Israel as falling almost inexorably into the grip of the far right. “The Netanyahu coalition,” he writes, “is the product of frightening, long-term trends in Israeli society.” There is certainly some truth to this – Russian immigration and the higher Orthodox birthrate have altered the face of the Israeli electorate. On the other hand, it was not that long ago that left-of-center parties governed Israel. Demography does not work that rapidly. Though he concedes that Israeli government can move in and out of power quickly, the tone of his essay has the same two-minutes-to-midnight urgency.

I myself wrote, "Beinert overemphasizes the repressive and aggressive elements in Israeli society," adding, "But the one-sidedness of Beinart's characterization of Israel does not negate his argument. His purpose is to warn; his argument is not that Israel is wholly given over to repression and oppression but that it is trending the wrong way, and that the American Jewish establishment is enabling its worst tendencies and so alienating young American Jews...In short, Beinert's is a family argument."

In an interview with Haaretz published today, Beinert seems to acknowledge the point -- that his purpose was, as Chait put it, "to grab the American Jewish leadership by the lapels and shake some sense into it," and that the seizure required a certain selectivity:

Peter Beinert's shock therapy for American Jewry

Sometimes an article on a fraught subject, rather than stepping on a proverbial third rail, leaps onto that rail with both feet and so avoids the fatal shock.

Such may be the case with Peter Beinert's The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment, which documents the growing divide between liberalism and Zionism among (and within) American Jews, and the failure of  American Jewish leadership to grapple with with that divide.

That leadership is known, Beinert asserts, to "patrol public discourse, scolding people who contradict their vision of Israel as a state in which all leaders cherish democracy and yearn for peace." Presumably he will be fiercely "scolded."  Yet I suspect that this is one piece of criticism that, rather than simply provoking furious denunciation, will lead to some real soul-searching, and perhaps to less poisonous dialogue between Israel's unconditional defenders and its critics within American Jewry.