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There is an unavoidable conflict between being a Jewish state and a democratic state.
– Joseph Levine, “On Questioning the Jewish State,” The New York Times, March 9
There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.
— George Orwell
Last week I cautioned that a crucial intellectual battle has been launched to strip the Jews of their political independence and national sovereignty. As promised, in this week’s column I will elaborate on the inanity and iniquity of this Judeophobic initiative.
Pernicious, perverse, paradoxical
The Times – together with several other major mainstream media entities – has chosen to throw its weight decisively behind this patently pernicious, perverse and paradoxical endeavor.
But over the last fortnight, the so-called “paper of record” has ratcheted up its bias and bile a notch or two. This prompted the following comment from Commentary’s Seth Mandel in his “A New Low for the Times” (March 18): “The bias against Israel in the press, and especially the New York Times, has become so steady and predictable that it can be difficult to muster outrage.
Since the paper flaunts, rather than attempts to disguise, its hostility to Israel, it can be easy to miss when the Times crosses yet another line. And the paper and its editors have done so again this weekend.”
I have not designated this drive to denigrate, delegitimize and demonize the conduct of the Jewish state — and of late, the very idea of a Jewish state – “pernicious,” “perverse” and “paradoxical” without reason.
Should this unholy crusade achieve its declared objectives, it will precipitate a reality that reflects a total negation of the very values invoked for its promotion, and the antithesis of those allegedly cherished by its propagators.
Escalating enmity
Until relatively recently, the bulk of the Times’s censure of Israel’s actions focused on its policy regarding the status of the territories beyond the pre-1967 Green Line, and the fate of the Palestinian Arabs resident there.
But with the emerging realization — indeed, perhaps resignation — that the previously preferred outcome of establishing a Palestinian state in these territories, is becoming increasingly unworkable, emphasis has shifted and enmity escalated. It now seems that the paper has begun to channel condemnation less against what the Jewish state does, and more against what it is — i.e. Jewish.
This is a line that it is apparently pursuing with increasing virulence, frequency and prominence on its pages, last week touting it on both the front page of its Sunday edition and the cover of its weekly magazine.
Barely a week previously, a lengthy opinion piece by University of Massachusetts professor of philosophy Joseph Levine appeared, advancing contrived and contorted claims disputing the conceptual validity of the Jewish people’s right to national self-determination and political sovereignty, now even within the Green Line.
To recap
Readers will recall that in my column last week, I pointed out the conceptual fallacies and faults in Levine’s approach to statehood, which seems to postulate that no state can be considered “democratic” if the conduct of its public life reflects the sociocultural dominance of the major ethnic group — even if it comprises a “vast majority.”
Accordingly, we are asked to believe that majority rule is an intolerable moral anathema for democratic governance. Indeed, unless the majority surrenders — or, at least, substantially dilutes – the expression of its identity, while the minority is allowed full expression of its identity — no matter how incompatible or adversarial it might be with that of the majority — the resulting sociopolitical reality is allegedly so disastrously impaired that its continued existence cannot be countenanced.
Thus, in Levine’s eyes, a “people” only merit the right to self-determination if they comprise a segment of humanity whose members are bound together by nothing more substantive than their equality before the law of the land and the accident of their physical location within the borders of that land. This is, as I showed, a position severely at odds with those of leading philosophers of liberal political theory over the past two centuries. It is one which fails to capture the most elemental essence that drives aspirations for national self-determination and that comprises the primal conditions for stable democratic governance: A sentiment of political allegiance born of a spiritual compatibility — which may arise because of ethnic homogeneity, or despite ethnic heterogeneity.
Silly or sinister?
In the absence of such communal cohesiveness, as John Stuart Mill tells us, “Free institutions are next to impossible.” Indeed, “in a country made up of a people without fellow-feeling the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government, cannot exist.”
Recent history bears eloquent, if tragic, testimony to the enduring validity of this perceptive insight. Wherever attempts have been made to weld inimical ethnicities together in a single political entity, if it is not bound by the iron grip of tyranny, the results have almost invariably been reminiscent of a Hobbesian nightmare of anarchy, chaos and bloodshed — as the examples of Lebanon and the Balkans starkly underscore.
Clearly, then, proposing policy prescriptions that not only disregard, but directly contravene, both the theoretical rationale and the empirical evidence regarding the attainment of the purported goal of sustainable democracy is either silly or sinister.
But whether dumb or deceptive, it is an approach that harbors huge hazards for Jews and Arabs – and for the hopes of liberal democracy — in the Holy Land.
“Israel was a mistake”
Yet despite its clearly calamitous consequences, it appears that this is the approach the Times has opted to adopt and advance both by publications of explicit endorsement (such as Levine’s opinion piece) and by implicit insinuations (such as last week’s 8,000-word magazine cover story by one Ben Ehrenreich, warmly embracing the Palestinian “resistance”).
Thus for example, flying in the face of facts, the latter misinforms Times readers by implying that the recent Operation Pillar of Defense was an unprovoked Israeli initiative that began when “in mid-November, Israeli rockets began falling on Gaza,” conspicuously omitting any mention of the fact that it was hundreds of Palestinian rockets falling on Israel that precipitated the fighting.
But, perhaps more significant — and revealing — than the blatantly biased and manifestly misleading content of the Times cover story, was the choice of its author. For as veteran pundit Jonathan Tobin tersely remarks: “Ehrenreich’s bias is so deeply embedded in the piece that it is pointless to criticize anything but the decision to employ him to write it.”
And that is precisely the point. For it is more than implausible to assume the Times was unaware of Ehrenreich’s strong anti- Zionist predilections. Indeed, these were unambiguously laid out in a Los Angeles Times op-ed titled, “Zionism is the problem” (March 15, 2009). In it Ehrenreich unfavorably compares the Jewish state to apartheid South Africa, stating: “If two decades ago comparisons to the South African apartheid system felt like hyperbole, they now feel charitable.”
He goes on to advocate what in effect is the abolition of the nation-state of the Jews, pontificating: “The Zionist ideal of a Jewish state is keeping Israelis and Palestinians from living in peace. Establishing a secular, pluralist, democratic government in Israel and Palestine would of course mean the abandonment of the Zionist dream. It might also mean the only salvation for the Jewish ideals of justice.”
This appears then to be the kind of journalist/ journalism that the New York Times is promoting.
As to the public sentiment it is liable to arouse, this might be gauged by the tenor of one of the talkbacks to Ehrenreich’s cover story — rerun in abbreviated form as an interview with him posted on the New York Times site today (March 21) — from Molly in Costa Rica: “Israel was a mistake, and they must leave.
Israel is a transplanted organ that the Middle East is rejecting. It will never fly.”
Perilous, preposterous prescription
The New York Times-propagated prescription, that in effect promotes the dismantling of the Jewish nation-state and replacing it with an un-Jewish secular state-of-all-its- citizens, is preposterous and perilous — in both principle and practice. Supporting it puts you firmly on the wrong side of history — and for self-respecting New York Times readers, what could be worse? For the concept of “multiculturalism,” once so fashionable, that underpins the rationale of the state-of-all-its-citizens idea, is rapidly being discredited. It has been tried — and has failed.
As I pointed out in an earlier column, “Nakba nonsense,” May 17, 2012, harsh and explicit declarations have come from the leaders of nearly all major European countries – including France, UK and Germany – acknowledging its disappointing failure. For example, Angela Merkel lamented: “The tendency had been to say, ‘Let’s adopt the multicultural concept and live happily side by side.’ But this concept has failed, and failed utterly.” Moreover in democracies as far-flung as Australia and Canada, the media have begun to publish expressions of exasperation and frustration at the deleterious effects of trying to absorb cultures incompatible with the host culture.
Even against a far less adversarial national- political background, incompatible social-cultural and religious disparities are causing increasingly unacceptable societal consequences for the host societies.
It is thus entirely unclear why anyone — unless motivated by malice — could possibly propose the application of such a failed formula in the far more daunting circumstances prevailing in Israel.
Anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism
Despite the protestations of anti-Zionists, such as Levine and Ehrenreich, that opposing Zionism “does not manifest anti-Semitism,” it does.
No amount of academic acrobatics or intellectual sophistry can blur the truth in the words, widely attributed to Martin Luther King Jr.: “When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews, you are talking anti-Semitism. And what is anti-Zionist? It is the denial to the Jewish people of a fundamental right that we justly and freely accord all other nations of the globe. It is discrimination against Jews because they are Jews. In short, it is anti-Semitism.”
It is anti-Semitic (i.e. Judeophobic) to denigrate every coercive action undertaken by Israel — whether military or administrative, proactive or reactive, preemptive or punitive — intended to protect Jews from attacks merely because they are Jewish, as racially motivated, disproportionate crimes against humanity.
It is anti-Semitic to peddle dangerous delusions, designed to deprive the Jews of their national independence and political sovereignty, and the purveyors of such poisonous merchandise must be forced to bear the burden of shame that plying their ignominious trade so richly deserves.
Fatal flaw in post-Zionist logic
I realize I have not fulfilled all my promises made last week, and several issues I undertook to deal with have been left unaddressed, particularly the significance for the non-Jewish minorities living in a Zionist Jewish nation-state. Regrettably, I have let my indignation at the New York Times distract me and that – together with new editorial constraints – preclude further discussion.
However, as my credibility is everything, I P-R-O-M-I-S-E to take up these topics soon in a forthcoming article – which I can already inform you will be titled, “The fatal flaw in post-Zionist logic”.
Until then, “Happy Passover.”
Martin Sherman (www.martinsherman.net) is the founder and executive director of the Israel Institute for Strategic Studies.
Honey Bee Said:
If you are quoting from a posters comments then you use your cursor to highlight the words bieng quoted and then click on the “Highlight and quote” button under the posters name and this will put the quote at the end of the text typed so far in the comments box. If you are quoting from the article or something offsite you highlight and copy the intended text, you then click on the “quote” button just above the comments box , then you paste the text and then you click again on the “quote” button which will now have changed to a “/quote” button; this will place the quote at the location of where your cursor last was.
@ Laura:
You asked [I don’t know how to highlite and quote] what the Costa Rican was advocating**** and I Death to Jews. I think I may have misunderstood you on post *8. Please forgive your lettle Honey Bee for stinging.
@ Honey Bee:
I’m not sure what you are disagreeing with in my comment. No, Jews were not able to live in peace in those countries either at that time. But the issue being dealt with in this article was about the dismantling of the Jewish state in favor of a binational state which the NY slimes advocates. So therefore I commented on how Jews and other non-muslims have been persecuted under islamic rule. I’m sure you would not disagree with that.
Many of U miss the point. Most American Jews are or are becoming universalist!!! and give a damn of IL!
@ Bert:
Really Bert Jews just can’t just “claim the land”. We must have historical references, academic studies, conforences with large congreations of Rabbis, intellectuals, gentile symmpathiser and liberal politicians. And of course endess meetings at prestigious unversities. The words “JUST DO IT” or “GET HER DONE” does not fit the East Coast Jewish soul.
Nice to hear from you too, Honeybee.
@ David Sternlight:
Smart idea,
It is useless to direct anger at the NYT. Far more effective would be to send a copy of this article to the CEO of every large advertiser in the NYT, with a polite request to pull their ads.
Metropolitan New York readers take note.
@ Laura:
DEATH
@ Bert:
You are soooooooo correct.
@ Dean:
I keep on saying this. As I suggested the other day, where are the (retired – they must have substantial free time) Jewish lawyers who will step up to the legal/financial dismantling of the NYT. Defamation has its limits, and the newspaper crossed that limit a long time ago.
As for Freedman, I once met him, just after he completed his term as the Delhi correspondent of the NYT; at which point he appeared to be sane. From an Indian standpoint it’s a good job he left, or by now he would be supporting a group by the name of “Pakistan is India” or some such bunk.
In all this noise there are no Jewish leaders willing to claim that the land of Israel belongs entirely to the Jewish People and to NO other. The Arabs have no problem falsely claiming their rights to the land with gusto and conviction. Meanwhile pathetic Jews stutter and stammer and stupidly offer to share their country with mortal enemies. No wonder that more and more people, including the NY Times, is encouraged to treat Jews as inferior underlings who lack even minimal self respect.
I have come to expect lies from the New York Crimes. The kind of information that Yamit has quoted is well known to them and yet they persist in drilling a false history into their readers about the Middle East. What I cannot accept is the fact that Jewish writers, like Tom Friedman, are eternally ignorant and always several years behind in their thinking. They take delight in framing Jews like them as reasonable people who support the “Saudi Plan” versus those terrible Zionists who actually believe in defending Israel and her territorial integrity. In so doing they agitate the good Arab people who at heart really want peace but their leaders need to be brought along – Tom really knows because he has visited the Saudis and they have given him treats. If they can be nice to Tom, according to his juvenile understanding, then peace IS possible! Tom and the other Jewish writers and leftists in general either cannot process the reality of the bloody terror that Islamists engage in over the generations that is targeted at the Jews and “infidels” or they choose to ignore the reality. Their psychological makeup has no room for empathy for their own people. Their personal friendships (yes, he has a Muslim friend and therefore all Muslims are friendly) override their concern for millions of other people. I would classify the leftists who libel Israel in their “crusade” as soft terrorists and propagandists for the promotion of ignorance. It is safe to demonize and excoriate Israel, presenting a naive understanding and falsifying history, taking everything out of context and making the refugee Arabs the Christ figures of our times because Jews have not fought back. Our institutions are filled with Tom Friedmans and at home we have people in the community who regularly confer with a group that promotes BDS and brings in the worst hatemongers and yet silence and politeness are the order of the day and people refuse to challenge hate, are not informed or are totally apathetic, preferring to withdraw into their own little worlds.
There needs to be a very large law suit along the lines of “The Jewish people vs. The New York Crimes.” With such a suit the truth has a chance to emerge and the Times will be exposed and held accountable for its crimes against the Jewish people.
The NYT the spoke person for a “fabricated” people. I am not surprised nor would Kafka. Goebbels would love it.
@ Michael Devolin:
You have returned,Sugar glad your back
@ Laura:
Like my murdred relatives lived in peace with Poles and Russians?
“There are some ideas so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them.”
— George Orwell
Reminds me of Kim Philby’s “A great education and no intellect.”
If anyone believes that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism, they should take a look at the personages attempting to exculpate themselves from the label of “anti-Semite.” Most of them fly Hamas flags at pro-Palestinian rallies. Anti-Semitism is on the rise, big time.
@ Laura:
Laura, that telling it like it is.
I would not wrap dead fish in the NY Slime, I have more respect for dead fish.
These knuckleheads want to rewrite history selectively.
This person is advocating the ethnic cleansing of Jews from the Middle East. If this isn’t racism, apartheid and antisemitic, what is?
What’s preventing peace is islam. What prevents peace is the islamic belief that there is no right of self-determination for Jews or any non-muslims. They are to be subjugated.
The dismantling of the Jewish state would lead to an islamic sharia state in which Jews would be the victims of genocide. Where on earth do muslims live peacefully with others? Where on earth exists a secular, pluralistic and democratic muslim nation?
No, in fact someone should inform that Costa Rican letter writer that Israel is the ancient homeland of the Jewish people, that Jews are the only indigenous people of Israel. Furthermore, it is in fact ALL of the Arab countries that are transplanted organs which were carved out by Britain and France after WW1.
The NY slimes is an abominable, filthy antisemitic rag.
One can be a “professor” and simultaneously an antisemitic IDIOT. No laws of the universe prevents that. He is one of many.
The Palestinian HOAX needs to be deflated like a hot air balloon filed with Western & Muslim hate.
The only Muslim interest in the Temple mount is the attempt to destroy the principal physical symbol of Judaism.
The NYT is drifting more and more towards being more German than the German: espousing/defending Nazi theories.
@ yamit82:
True that,1984 was a bit overdue,but its here now.
Honey Bee Said:
Try this: ” The past was erased, the erasure was forgotten, the lies became truth.” Orwell
Love that George Orwell quote.
Bibi is a duplicit skunk.
Hopefully, when this career soon to be obese as Sharon politico weasel meets his brave brother, he will beat the holy crap out of him.
Remember, before the latest Gaza so called invasion that this soon to be as obese as Sharon politico weasel aborted, Bibi said “Quiet breeds quiet”.
I pity the Israelis who have no choice but to hold their nose and elect these “conservatives” who are closet libs.
I can only imagine what little goodies Obama “promised” to put in Bibi’s bank account.
To place Sherman’s contentions in some historical context:
There is no such a thing like a Palestinian people, or a Palestinian culture, or a Palestinian language, or a Palestinian history. There has never been any Palestinian state, neither any Palestinian archaeological find nor coinage. The present-day “Palestinians” are an Arab people, with Arab culture, Arabic language and Arab history. They have their own Arab states from where they came into the Land of Israel about one century ago to contrast the Jewish immigration. That is the historical truth. They were Jordanians (another recent British invention, as there has never been any people known as “Jordanians”), and after the Six-Day War in which Israel utterly defeated the coalition of Arab states and took legitimate possession of Judea and Samaria, the Arab dwellers in those regions underwent a kind of anthropological miracle and discovered that they were Palestinians – something they did not know the day before. Of course, these people having a new identity had to build themselves a history, namely, had to steal some others’ history, and the only way that the victims of the theft would not complain is if those victims do no longer exist. Therefore, the Palestinian leaders claimed two contradictory lineages from ancient peoples that inhabited in the Land of Israel: the Canaanites and the Philistines. Both peoples extinct
The ancient Philistines and modern Palestinians have something in common: both are invaders from other lands! That is precisely the meaning of their name, that is not an ethnic denomination but an adjective applied to them: Peleshet, from the verb “pelesh”, “dividers”, “penetrators” or “invaders”. The Philistines were a confederation of non-Semitic peoples coming from Crete, the Aegean Islands and Asia Minor, also known as “Sea Peoples”. The main tribes were Tzekelesh, Shardana, Akhaiusha, Danauna, Tzakara, Masa or Meshuesh, Uashesh, Teresh or Tursha, Keshesh or Karkisha, Lukka and Labu. The original homeland of the group that ruled the Philistine federation, namely the “Pelesati”, was the island of Crete. There is not one single person in the world who may be able to prove Philistine lineage, yet, if Palestinians insist, they have to recognize themselves as invaders in Israel, and then they must ask Greece to return them back the Isle of Crete!
“There is no such country as Palestine. ‘Palestine’ is a term the Zionists invented. There is no Palestine in the Bible. Our country was for centuries part of Syria. ‘Palestine’ is alien to us. It is the Zionists who introduced it”. – Auni Bey Abdul-Hadi, Syrian Arab leader to British Peel Commission, 1937 –
“There is no such thing as Palestine in history, absolutely not”. – Professor Philip Hitti, Arab historian, 1946 –
“It is common knowledge that Palestine is nothing but Southern Syria“. – Representative of Saudi Arabia at the United Nations, 1956.
Paradoxically, during the British Mandate, it was not any Arab group but the Jews that were known as “Palestinians”!
“The present Arabic name of Jerusalem is “Al-Quds”… but “Al-Quds” is an abbreviation for “The Jewish Temple”!
by Rabbi Joseph Katz?
“The Arabic name for Jerusalem is “Al-QuDS” (The Holy), which is abbreviation for another Arabic name used for Jerusalem until the last century, “Bayt al-MaQDeS” (The Holy House), since the 10th century c.e. The name “Bayt al-MaQDeS” is a translation of the Hebrew “Beyt ha-MiKDaSH”, which means “House of Holiness”, “Temple”. But Islam has no Temple, only the Jews did. Thus the Arabic name for Jerusalem makes no reference to Muhammad’s alleged trip to Heaven, but rather refers to the Jewish Temple!
In fact, it can be seen that significant Islamic interest in the Temple Mount does not precede the Six-Day War in 1967.”
After fighting costly wars with the Jews for over 100 year Hadrian came to the conclusion that the only way to defeat and destroy the Jews was to destroy Judaism and her Symbols. Today that is exactly what the Christian West is attempting to do. The use of lies myths and historical revisionism are the tools and the Muslim hatred of Jews is their weapon of choice after Hitler failed in his global mission of destroying all Jews.
“They [Children of Israel] provoked Me with a non-god, angered Me with their vanities; so shall I provoke them with a non-people, with a vile nation shall I anger them.” (Deuteronomy 32:21)
More interesting than the article is what new editorial constraints did Sherman precipitate?
Once there is a realization of an anti semitic agenda, argumentation becomes secondary and even superfluous. The disingenuous tend to lie when convenient. The Times like Friedman is probably saudi bought. Anything that destroys the Times is welcome. They are daily losing subscribers, perhaps they are cursed 🙂