Saturday, May 22, 2010

The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment | The New York Review of Books

Peter Beinhart is not exactly my favorite liberal, but this piece -- in which he predicts an increasing rightward and racist drift by the Israeli body politic and the American Jewish establishment -- is worth reading.

The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment The New York Review of Books

2 comments:

Roy said...

I think he's not so much predicting it as he is describing something that already exists, and has in fact existed for quite some time now. And he brings up a particularly good point - non-Orthodox Jews outside of Israel, and especially the youth, are very, very unhappy with (a) Israeli policy toward the Palestinians, and (b) the very existence of an exclusively Jewish state at the expense of the indigenous population. I've heard more than one young American Jew, one of whom is a Reform rabbi, compare the situation to the Europeans coming to the New World and uprooting and decimating the Native American peoples to create a home for themselves. I can't help but agree.

K. said...

A young non-Zionist Jewish friend is in a Middle Eastern studies program in a major university. The department has a number of Jews on the faculty. It's also under constant pressure from Zionists on the university faculty and administration over what amounts to its even-handedness.

I try to be very careful personally about this because I'm not Jewish and don't have the Holocaust in my history. But it seems to me that Israel has squandered its legacy. I can't see that it ever had the leeway to -- as you say -- treat the Palestinians as a luckless indigenous people to be resettled at will.