Israel’s next great crisis may come not with the Palestinians or Iran but with young American Jews...
A perfect match of opposing views was the focus of two book reviews of Peter Beinhart’s The Crisis of Zionism.
by Paul J Balles
Rubbish! Someone characterized the arguments we made as college debaters.
We knew better. The hours we spent at night gathering evidence we would use against our opponents made us more than just debaters. We were different.
We were the informed public who read the major newspapers and political magazines. We knew how to use libraries to prove our opponents wrong.
Just as importantly, we could argue for or against the same thing. One day affirmative, the next negative on any topic.
We knew in our hearts and minds that we were superior to those who didn’t read and keep up with what was going on in the world.
We were even convinced that we knew more than the writers we quoted: they could only argue one side of a question, and therefore lacked the knowledge needed to convince an audience that what they believed was undeniable.
We took our gigantic trophies, mounted them in glass cages in the university, graduated and took our skills and large egos with us to convince others of whatever arguments we were trained to win.
This evening, I couldn’t help remembering that early training as I scanned through arguments on a topic which a friend suggested.
A perfect match of opposing views was the focus of two book reviews of Peter Beinhart’s The Crisis of Zionism.
Cohen wins this round...
One of the reviews, the negative one by Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal, on March 26 in Tablet, is headlined “Peter Beinart’s False Prophecy”. http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/94872/peter-beinarts-false-prophecy/
Stephens denigrates ‘The Crisis of Zionism’ from the outset, arguing that “the Israeli occupation alienates young American Jews, is sloppy with facts and emotionally contrived.”
The other, Roger Cohen’s “The Dilemmas of Israeli Power” in the New York Times, is positive from beginning to end. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/14/opinion/cohen-the-dilemmas-of-jewish-power.html?_r=2&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
Cohen praises “… Beinart’s The Crisis of Zionism as an important new book that rejects the manipulation of Jewish victimhood in the name of Israel’s domination of the Palestinians and asserts that the real issue for Jews today is not the challenge of weakness but the demands of power.”
There you have the ideal topical debate. The debate itself, however, is less than ideal. Concluding his review, Stephens dismisses Beinhart’s book as “an act of moral solipsism.”
“It doesn’t seem to occur to him that his idea amounts to another squeaky note in the blasting chorus that is modern-day Israel bashing.”
Thus, Stephens gives himself away as the defender of Israel, no matter what Israelis do; and any criticism can be ignored as Israel bashing.
After reading the same book, Cohen was able to look at Reinhard’s topic with fresh eyes from outside of the box.
“This is not 1938 revisited, or even 1967. Israel is strong today, a vibrant economy and the Middle East’s only nuclear-armed state,” writes Cohen.
Cohen doesn’t forget what it looked like inside the box. He argues “Threats persist, of course. The annihilationist strain in Palestinian ideology, present since 1948, has not disappeared.”
Both writers are debaters who argue only one side of a question. To take more than one side is to earn the epithet “a flip-flopper” as Mitt Romney has.
Stephens and Cohen are both Jewish, which gives their arguments an aura of authenticity. In reviewing a book on Zionism, both have an innate familiarity with their topic.
While both have the advantage of familiarity with their topic, how is the casual reader to accept or reject arguments?
In any debate, the most credible argument comes from one whose own interests are sacrificed for the sake of truth. Cohen wins this round.
Editing: Debbie Menon
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Posted by GPD on April 10, 2012, With 1591 Reads Filed under Americas, Middle East, World. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
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4 Responses to "Both Sides of an Argument : The Crisis of Zionism"
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None of the “debates” about Israel and the one-way politics of chutzpah, ever establish the proper baseline, which is the apartheid, racist foundation of the ancient law governing the crummy little subsidized state. There is nothing moral nor even ethical in “Heads I win, tails you lose.” After acknowledging the ground rules, what’s to debate? Ooos, forgot, G-d is on their side!
Beinart advocates for Zionism+, created in actuality by Cyrus the Great, eh? He argues that there are two segments of Israel. A democratic portion (majority of Israel) and a non-democratic portion (settlements in West Bank, spectre of Gaza). When he speaks of Israel, he does not speak to it as a land of people in it (or a nation), but an idea that needs to capture land to take shape. He is not referring to Palestinians in the non-democratic portions. He prefers the two-state solution.
So allow me to change my moniker and play the devil’s advocate for a second. If Israel’s plan since 1948 and before was to capture land for what is basically a foreign financed colony exclusive of the indigenous people, then that is not Zionism+. Cyrus the Great created one land, autonomous so that people could pray how they wanted, tolerant so they could do it together – AND he got a Temple built.
If I wanted to do what Israel’s founders/planners did/are doing, I would have ceased fighting 20 or so years ago to start building inroads so that by now we would be building skyscrapers for new businesses in what is commonly acknowledged as the “Jewish” part of the Middle East. You see, the graciousness of technology and innovation becomes a useful tool for the party causing grievance. The 43 years before that were ample time for settling in.
Yet Israel was not gracious and arms remains Israel’s number one export besides pain, terror, grief, horror, hatred, violence, and trouble stopping any of the above while they insist they are the world’s love child. Humanity has never seen such psychological abuse.
And I am pretty sure that this “idea” of Israel already exists all throughout the world in the form of Jewish people. And the land exists too in the form of the whole state of Palestine.
Yet Swiss-cheese Israel sits alone.
The Wall Street Journal doesnt like it because its not shamelessly pro-Israel enough. The NY Times likes it because its(and Beinart himself) obviously shamelessly pro-Israel. Seriously. God I hate “our” media and these contrived, phony “debates”.
No kidding. I just read both reviews (thanks for the references) and found them to be the standard zionist tactic of moving the goalposts outside the stadium or changing the topic every 30 seconds, so that no valid water-tight debate on a finite point of contention ever happens. These guys (the reviewers) show their biases in every sentence, to the point that an accurate deconstruction of all their assumptions, manipulations and logical curve-balls would take a book in itself.
To be fair, I haven’t read the book, so this is merely a review of the reviews, not the book itself. Still, it smells really funny but somehow very familiar……