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Their statement on his essay:
Peter Beinart has written what I hope will be a powerful wake-up call to the leadership of the American Jewish establishment.
J Street shares Beinart’s deep concern over the consequences of the course that leadership has chosen: blind support of Israel ‘right-or-wrong’ and demonization and black-listing of those who disagree with Israeli policy. Beinart – with his impeccable pro-Israel credentials – is hopefully an effective messenger to convince the American Jewish establishment that it is not simply enabling self-destructive Israeli behavior that is damaging American interests, it is sowing the seeds for the end of the American Jewish community as we know it.
Over the course of the last several years, we’ve seen that there’s no such thing as “impeccable pro-Israel credentials” when it comes to making critiques like Peter’s. J Street’s entire existence is dedicated to the proposition that you can in fact be a liberal Zionist, devoted to peacemaking in the name of Jewish democracy. If the Foxmans of the world stopped to think for a moment about the crisis of a younger Jewish generation’s sentiments toward Israel, then they would see J Street as a godsend. Instead, they attack J Street as inauthentically Jewish. If J Street actually believes that arguments — let alone smears — get preempted by presenting a series of credentials, then it hasn’t thought sufficiently about the campaign waged against it within the Shtetl for the past two years.
A deeper problem is the associative reasoning that infects us within the Shtetl. J Street embraces Peter, and so that’ll be enough for some readers to marginalize Peter’s piece. After all, how many times have you read a Jewish author writing that someone’s views about this-or-that are “Walt/Mearsheimer-esque” or some other evasion? It’s a technique to preemptively discredit something as opposed to dealing with it, but it only discredits the author. Sadly, you see Jeffrey Goldberg writing not a word of substance over Peter’s piece, but instead lamenting that Peter published it in the presumably-anti-Israel crowd at the New York Review of Books! Goldberg says that he’ll follow up with Peter and get into the guts of the actual critique, and I hope he will. But we should all stop ourselves if we notice that we use an association to describe an argument as opposed to the argument-itself.
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Jeffrey Goldberg quotes approvingly Ben Smith’s definition of “Liberal Zionist.”
I don’t quite see how the word liberal can be attached to the word Zionist when used with respect to Goldberg and Jonathan Chait. The only liberal thing about their attacks on Goldstone last week was the liberality with which they attacked him.
I would be very surprised were Chait not to attack Beinart. At the end of the day Chait is too much of a coward to stray too far from the role of Peretz’s attack dog he has developed over the last few years. And now with Kirchick seemingly gone from TNR there is no one left to do the dirty deed.
As to the liberalism of both Chait and Goldberg. I would like to see them actually being positive about their liberalism. Neither of them spend any time advocating for a liberal Israel. Indeed, Chait won’t venture into much policy other than to say he, unlike Peretz, supports the Israeli Labour party. Both of them seem to find it far more congenial to attack critics of Israeli policy than to advocate rational policy positions for Israel that will lead it off the current dead-end track.
As for TNR. Beinart seems to be the second recent editor, after Andrew Sullivan, who has come to realise that things are seriously off-track with Israel. A few years ago the magazine did a major mea culpa over its support of the war in Iraq. It would be nice if the mea culpa it will one day make over its misguided attacks on those who seek a genuinely liberal future for Israel would come before there is a final peace settlement in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“But we should all stop ourselves if we notice that we use an association to describe an argument as opposed to the argument-itself.”
Kinda like your argument in the prev post which partly blamed this mess on Jewish-American groups “building more durable ties to evangelical Christian” types.
Always blamin’ da Christians. Yes sir, they are the ones that keep Mustafa Barghouti from stepping foot in the city of his birth, shot Tristan Anderson in the head with a tear gas canister, and crushed Rachel Corrie with a bull dozer. Those damn Christians!
csp1: don’t be a deliberate idiot. It in no way absolves the Israeli government, nor the IDF, nor any last citizen of Israel of any particular misdeed to note that the larger political context that enables Israeli intransigence (to say the least) has rather a lot to do with American evangelical protestantism’s embrace of Israel for its own eschatological purposes.
Chait’s response seems to be to minimize the force of Beinart’s argument, though I don’t find his counter-arguments persuasive. For example, Chait dismisses Beinart’s fear that right-wing hawkishness is a “long-term trend” by saying, “[I]t was not that long ago that left-of-center parties governed Israel.” However, Chait either ignores or does not understand that Labor/Avoda’s grip on power was the result of unusual structural factors that collapsed in the 1977 elections; he might equally as well observe that animus against the “left-of-center parties” was so strong after 1977 that Likud managed to keep itself in power despite a debilitating war in Lebanon, the launch of the First Intifada, disastrous economic policies, and a general air of corruption, only losing power due to the fragmentation of political authority on the right. Once out of power, Labor was unable to regain it, and the twin blows of discredited socialism and the party’s move to the dovish left virtually assured the creation of a centrist opposition (under the quite awful Sharon) in Kadima.