Wednesday, May 01, 2024
From Ian:
Seth Mandel: Addition by Subtraction at the State Department
Seth Mandel: Addition by Subtraction at the State Department
Although defections and resignations can come in waves, the extent of opposition to President Biden’s policy of favoring Israel over Hamas has yet to kindle much of an exodus from his administration. Mostly we’re subject to a lot of whining from people who continue to accept a paycheck from the man they claim is genociding Palestinians.Answering Tom Friedman's binary options for the Middle East
That tells you something about how many of the complainers actually believe the rhetoric they’re parroting. It also provides a clue as to the cynical motivations of the few who actually resign.
Josh Paul was the first to do so, back in December, to great media fanfare. Paul, a former Booz Allen Hamilton employee, was in charge of arms transfers. He could abide those weapons going to many governments around the world, but not Israel’s.
At the time, I detailed the distortions in Paul’s explanation for his resignation. These in part had to do with Paul’s refusal to read past the headline of a news story about a sudden lack of donkeys in Gaza. I had hoped that he would devote his newfound free time to reading the rest of the article on the donkeys, but it appears he had other plans. He has resurfaced at DAWN, a nongovernmental organization called Democracy for the Arab World Now. The director of DAWN is none other than Sarah Leah Whitson, the former Human Rights Watch official who was found to have been raising money from Arab governments by complaining about the need to battle pro-Israel (read: Jewish) money in U.S. politics.
Funded by the Ford Foundation and Rockefeller Brothers Fund, among others, DAWN is a fierce advocate of boycotting Israel and of pressuring Israel’s fellow democracies to enforce an arms embargo against the Jewish state. It also opposed the Abraham Accords—that is, it is opposed to peace in the Middle East. Josh Paul will fit right in.
Then in March, there was Annelle Sheline, who worked for the State Department for a year before leaving. The State Department has a Dissent Channel through which employees can raise concerns about policy with protection from professional retribution, and Sheline utilized the channel. But she gave up after a year because her bosses wouldn’t change their policies to fit her ideological worldview.
In Sheline’s (very limited) defense, she was used to working for a employers who were more receptive to her anti-Israel activism. Sheline came to the State Department from the Quincy Institute, whose executive vice president is Trita Parsi, founder of the National Iranian American Council. NIAC is a major pro-Iran pressure group with influence in Democratic Party policymaking circles. Also at Quincy are such international-relations luminaries as John Mearsheimer, mostly infamous for his campaign against American Jews’ participation in the democratic process. This includes the book he co-authored with Stephen Walt, The Israel Lobby and American Foreign Policy—a shoddy work of agitprop aimed at raising suspicions against Jewish political activists. Mearsheimer is also a proponent of the “good Jew/bad Jew” worldview, wherein non-Jews decide which Jews can be trusted and which cannot. Judging by Sheline’s hero worship of Aaron Bushnell, the Air Force service member who self-immolated outside the Israeli embassy in Washington, D.C., she must have been quite comfortable at Quincy as well.
Two years ago, I published an analysis of a news article by The New York Times bureau chief in Jerusalem for bias, and he promptly complained to my editor. Today, I will tackle the Times’s opinion writer, Thomas Friedman, and his recent column, “Israel has a choice to make: Rafah or Riyadh,” for factual context and even-handedness.Enlightenment and Conspiracy
In his latest column, he said the Biden team demands Israel make a choice: go into Rafah, where the last organized brigades of Hamas are, or choose the benefits of normalization with Saudi Arabia.
Friedman paints a binary picture: Israel accepts what the Biden administration wants – no Rafah operation – while creating a path for Palestinian statehood; otherwise, Israel becomes an international pariah with the acquiescence of America, with the US restricting arms shipments as punishment for its choice.
Friedman puts the onus on Israel to abandon its campaign to rid the area of the implacable Hamas army, not mentioning that the Biden administration asks, on the other hand, very little of the Palestinians.
The ultimatum is for Israel to create a “political horizon for a two-state solution with non-Hamas-led Palestinians.” It sounds reasonable to the uninformed, but Friedman doesn’t mention that Israel has offered a state five times over the last 75 years.
In 2008, the Israelis offered 100% of the West Bank and Gaza with land swaps and Jerusalem as their capital, supposedly everything the American negotiators believed the Palestinians wanted. Unfortunately, the current Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud Abbas never responded.
Those who push for a two-state solution at this time seem oblivious and insensitive to the fact that this would represent to everyone the greatest reward possible for the Hamas massacre, especially with hostages still in captivity and their sexual abuse being exposed. Calling for a reformed Palestinian Authority sounds nice but the fact is that free elections would almost certainly bring Hamas to power.
Friedman says Israel’s strategy is “revenge.” Israel’s strategy is to end the presence of terror organizations on its borders that strive tirelessly for the genocide of the Jewish people, with the backing of Iran.
There are no explicit agendas provided of what PA reform means, an essential point if you want them to take over the West Bank and Gaza. Should Israel be forced to begin a path to statehood without America demanding first that the hundreds of millions of dollars a year paid by the PA to convicted terrorists and their families end?
The PA has also said they would pay Hamas terrorists, excuse me, martyrs. There is an American law, the Taylor Force Act, which demands the withholding of US aid to the PA until they end these payments. Mr. Friedman, are you OK beginning your path to Palestinian independence with this hideous practice left in place?
As many of the Yale students I spoke with pointed out, Israelism is so one-sided and so certain of its own virtue and rightness that critique seems almost beside the point. Palestinian activists (Sami Awad, in particular) come across as deeply humane, and their characterizations of Israelis and the conflict are never challenged. An immigrant Jew, for instance, is described by Awad as a foreigner who “just moved here to join the army and play cowboys and Indians.” And the only Jewish settler who appears in the film is callous and unlikeable.
So certain are the filmmakers that the entire history of the conflict can be summed up as one in which the Israelis are simply and only the oppressors that we are informed, “In 1967, the State of Israel managed to complete its control of Palestine by taking over the territory of the West Bank and Gaza.” No mention is made of Egypt, Syria, or Jordan, or the circumstances of the Six-Day War. Similarly, the Second Intifada goes unnamed in the film except as “a battle for Jerusalem.”
In short, what is important to note about Israelism is not its historical distortions or polemical tricks but the myth it constructs of Eitan’s and Simone’s—but especially Simone’s—journey to enlightenment. What did Simone see that the American Jewish establishment—personified in the film as an elderly Foxman rambling on in his elegant glass office high above Manhattan—didn’t want her to see, and how did it change her?
Whether the film is conscious of it or not, the archetype here is Paul, who had been the Pharisee Saul until he had a vision on the road to Damascus, not too far from the one Simone had on the streets of Bethlehem. Paul’s vision transformed him from a self-described persecutor of Christians to Christianity’s first great evangelist. He went from being fierce, ignorant, and sad to happy, articulate, and liberated, as, the film shows us, has Zimmerman. Like Paul, Simone’s conversion moved her from a self-interested cloud of particularism to a vision of spiritual universalism—“There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female,” Paul tells the Galatians.
The appeal of Paul is understandable, especially for those of us who grew up in America. The Pauline tradition brings some of the best of Jewish universalism and offers a shortcut to the theological endgame, skipping over particularism and otherness. It is easier for diaspora liberal Jews today to imagine that the Jewish people can finally achieve our place in the world, and retain our moral character, by subordinating our nationalism rather than trying to compete for a place in a world of nations, and the occupation proves the point.
The Pauline trope helps explain two key dimensions of the film. Its insistence that young American Jews are lied to makes sense once one understands that the Jewish community has placed scales upon their eyes. And once the scales fall away and the truth is revealed—once one sees the horrifying truth that has been hidden—one must become an evangelist and bear the tragic burden of preaching the gospel, even at the cost of alienation from the community one seeks to transform.
To be clear, I am not suggesting, as some advocates of Israel unfortunately have, that Zimmerman and her allies are no longer Jews (or are now “Un-Jews”). Zimmerman and her allies believe that their critique of our community comes from their Jewishness—and they make no claims to be leaving. In fact, by the end of the film, the gauzy sequences of protests by IfNotNow (which Zimmerman cofounded) and others portray a different vision of Jewish particularism: the dissidents proudly wear tallitot and kippot; they sing Jewish songs. But identifying the Pauline trope that underlies the film helps us understand the story that its protagonists and creators want to tell about their journey from ignorance to enlightenment, from obscurantism to moral grandeur. This is not really a political story—one learns almost nothing about the history and politics of the conflict from this film—it is a story of personal spiritual transformation. Movie poster from the film Israelism. (Courtesy of Tikkun Olam.)
For the enlightened, everything that runs counter to their new narrative must be a lie. This naturally gives rise to conspiracy theories. How else can one explain how the plain truth has been hidden, except through the perfidy of deception? This assumption helps explain the surprising plot turn of the second half of Israelism. The film argues explicitly that the rise of Donald Trump, and therefore the emboldening of the white supremacist antisemitism, is the fault of the pro-Israel community in America. The rationale for this claim is offered by Simone at the film’s midpoint, when she concludes that the Jewish community believes that “the only way we Jews can be safe is if Palestinians are not safe.” Ultimately, the film argues, this belief has led the Jewish establishment to trade our safety in America for the safety of Jews in Israel, because President Trump could be counted on to support the Israeli government’s oppression of the Palestinians.
This argument blames the Jews for their own victimization and begins to make the film, in the words of a friend, “epistemically antisemitic.” Plenty of Jews blame other Jews today for the rise of antisemitism, so the argument here is not novel. The only irony here is that polarization in America has driven the rise of the antisemitism in America on both the right and the left, and the film is only too eager to help that trend along.
As a liberal Zionist, I aspire to be what Michael Walzer has famously called a “connected critic,” and I struggled watching Israelism and its translation of complexity into conspiracy. Entirely missing from the film was the majority of Jewish leaders and educators in America who know and teach about Palestinians and occupation, neither lying to their students nor concluding that Israel’s challenges require them to abandon their loyalties. Where, in Israelism’s world, are the majority of American Jews—and the majority of Israelis—who know the present is untenable but fear the alternatives? Or the parallel majority on the Palestinian side, who know that the path toward mutual safety and security lies in recognizing our inextricability? And what happens to us in this desperate attempt to generate mass appeal for the most populist and partisan version of our impossible story?
