Why left-wing McCarthyism is no better than right-wing McCarthyism

In her recent Jerusalem Post Magazine column, in which she gave Israel a "Democracy Check" fourteen years after Yitzhak Rabin's assassination, Naomi Chazan ominously failed her own test.

In analyzing Israel's "ongoing democratic malfunctioning," Professor Chazan offered such one-sided and exaggerated examples that her article was actually detrimental to democracy. Faced with, alas, far too many examples of violence, intolerance, hysteria, or insensitivity from across the Israeli political spectrum, she only saw the Right's abuses. I am always amazed at partisans' inability, both Left and Right, to engage in self-criticism - even to build credibility. But preaching about democracy in such a myopic manner deforms democracy, reducing this delicately balanced mechanism to just another bludgeon for bashing your enemies.

Most outrageously, in lamenting the "persistent inability to distinguish between freedom of speech and incitement," Professor Chazan failed to distinguish between violent crimes and honest disagreements regarding strategy or policy. "Peace movements and activists have been a favorite target" of unhealthy incitement, she observed, correctly. But then she added: "The bombing of Prof. Ze'ev Sternhell's home, Moshe Ya'alon's depiction of Peace Now as a virus and Ambassador Michael Oren's innuendo that J Street is promoting positions that are not in Israel's interest are just three recent examples."

Say what? I read that obscene absurdity three times to make sure I wasn't misreading it. Equating, in any way, Ambassador Oren's decision not to address a lobbying group - but to send an observer - with the evil violence perpetrated against Professor Sternhell is unconscionable. And using a term like "innuendo," reeking as it does of McCarthyism, is itself a McCarthyite technique. It suggests that Professor Chazan failed to understand the argument she advanced so eloquently; that democracy requires what she called "self-restraint" that accepts "diversity" along with civil "disagreement" - acceptance of the idea that fair-minded, intelligent people may arrive at different conclusions. And such failure, under the guise of honoring Yitzhak Rabin's memory, profanes that tragedy's profound lessons with partisan bile.

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Birthright Israel as an Rx to 'Israel Exhaustion'

Although life in Israel is, overall, delightfully safe and calm these days, these are sobering times for the pro-Israel community abroad. Israel-bashing is all the rage in the Arab world, in European salons and at the UN. It is also becoming an increasingly popular pastime on campuses and even among some "progressive" American Jews, who confess to "Israel exhaustion."

Smart analysts like Rabbi Daniel Gordis, author of Saving Israel: How the Jewish People Can Win a War That May Never End, point to structural and ideological shifts that explain why so many more young Jews throw up their hands in exhaustion rather than raising their voices in unison not just to defend Israel, but to celebrate Israel.

"The issue isn't Israel, or utopia," Gordis recently wrote in The Jerusalem Post. "It's America, and the 'I' at the core of American sensibilities." Challenging the community for "basically doing nothing" Gordis concluded: "Try to list the serious Jewish educational enterprises addressing this challenge, asking how American Jewish education can counter America's unfettered individualism, or what Israel could do to help. Can you name even one? Neither can I."

Although I have never played poker with my friend and role model Rabbi Gordis, I will see him, and raise him, on his analysis. Not only do too many North American Jewish enterprises fail to counter American individualism, careerism and materialism - too much North American Jewish life fosters individualism, careerism and materialism. We need think-tanks analyzing this problem, educational, communal and religious institutions countering the problem, and the entire community embarking on a twelve-step program to end our collective addiction to the modern paganism of selfishness, individuation, acquisitiveness, hyper-ambition and greed. Yet we must do this subtly, moderately, because North American individualism, careerism and materialism are also keys to North American Jewish liberty, creativity and vitality. To get the right balance, to find the right mix, we must blend in Jewish values, spirituality, textual learning, an appreciation of history, Zionist passion, a love of Israel, the power of community and the sheer fun of living Jewish, loving Jewish, doing Jewish. 

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An open letter in response to J-street's

Dear Jeremy Ben-Ami,

Allow me to respond to your open letter to Ambassador Michael Oren with an open letter of my own.

I share your worry "that the connection to Israel for a large number of Jewish Americans has become strained over time." I love your statement to the Ambassador, and presumably to the entire pro-Israel community, that "what J-Street shares in common with you far outweighs that on which we disagree." As someone trying to figure out how to sing a new song of Zion for the next generation of Jews and as someone who champions "big-tent" Zionism, like there was during the movement's early days, it sounds like you're singing my song.

Alas, when I examine what you advocate and what you ignore, when I read your statements, surf your website and look at your conference program, I am troubled. For starters, I do not see the use of the word "Zionism" anywhere. I wonder if that is tactical or ideological.

I wonder if you would display on your website the following statement:

Year after year, century after century, Jews carried on their traditions, and their dream of a homeland, in the face of impossible odds…. And I deeply understood the Zionist idea - that there is always a homeland at the center of our story."

Those are the words of then-Senator Barack Obama, spoken on June 4, 2008, the day after he clinched the nomination.

Or what about this:

My starting point when I think about the Middle East is this enormous emotional attachment and sympathy for Israel, mindful of its history, mindful of the hardship and pain and suffering that the Jewish people have undergone, but also mindful of the incredible opportunity that is presented when people finally return to a land and are able to try to excavate their best traditions and their best selves."

Obama again. If President Obama is not afraid to affirm Zionist ideals, why do you seem to be?

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Noble hopes, Nobel prizes and an ignoble world

Nobel-Prize-award week was yet another split-screen week for Israel, emphasizing the gap between Israel's noble achievements and its adversaries' ignoble aims, as well as between Barack Obama's worldwide popularity and his unpopularity in Israel. Israel must do more to ensure it is a country filled with people like Ada Yonath, who won Israel's ninth Nobel prize, and the first Chemistry Nobel for a woman since 1964. But Israel must also bridge the growing gap between Barack Obama's saintly status in Europe and the skepticism he generates in Zion.

Israelis giddily celebrated Yonath's extraordinary achievement; further proof that this little country has disproportionate impact in bettering this world, in revolutionizing science. The headline of one Jerusalem Post article noting that nine Israelis had won the prize (counting two Sveriges Riksbank Prizes in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel), read: "Closer to a Nobel Minyan." The piece echoed my (and so many others') Jewish parents' questions when we came home from school with a 97: "Where are the other three points?"

Simultaneously, headlines speculated about a third intifada; rather than collecting Nobel Prizes, Palestinians were collecting stones to hide in wheelbarrows on the Temple Mount and building up rage over imagined insults. The latest trigger was the visit of French Christian tourists whom demagogic Palestinians decided were Jewish militants. The Israeli authorities had banned Jewish groups to keep order, but that did not stop the rabble rousers, led by Sheikh Ra'ed Salah, who cries: "if Zionism isn't eliminated, there will not be peace."

Fortunately, peace reigned throughout most of Jerusalem, as tens of thousands thronged the Old City for Succot festivities. But once again, it seemed we needed a corollary to Golda Meir's cliché. Meir supposedly said: "Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us." Peace will also come when the Palestinians are more passionate about building their state and society than destroying ours.

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Slichot, Leonard Cohen, the joy of Succot

With Israel best known for generating headlines about its troubles, its joys are too frequently overlooked. To be in Israel for "the hagim," the High Holidays, including Sukkot, is a blessed, underreported privilege. From the shanah tovah greetings everywhere to the antacid commercials responding to bouts of holiday overeating, the holiday spirit is pervasive. But this is not simply the Jewish version of the Christmas season three months early. It is striking to an outsider how seriously so many Israelis take the Yamim Noraim, truly making them Days of Awe.

Especially in Jerusalem, the engagement with repentance feels ubiquitous. In North America, the ten days of penitence frequently divide into three holy days (Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur) and seven scrambling-to-catch-up-at-work days. In Israel, many people carve out the time for spiritual reflection, following the journey from self-evaluation to redemption our ancestors mapped out for us.

Affirming the Zionist idea that returning to the land would make us whole as a people, the spirit is in the air; the spirituality has a geography to it too. School kids hum Adon HaSlichot, the Lord of Forgiveness, a multi-stanza piyyut, poem, as they scamper about. High school students have all-night  tours in the neighborhoods around Jerusalem's Machaneh Yehudah market, culminating in pre-dawn "slichot" penitential prayers, as the magic of the night and the romance of the place enhance the prayers' power. And for people of all ages, there are classes galore, in schools and synagogues, in community centers and private homes.

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'J Street' to the Left of me, jokers to the Right...

When one is attacked from both sides, it's easy to feel virtuous. Having opponents from the far left and the far right does not guarantee you're a moderate. It simply situates you in what farmers who trusted butter over its artificial modern substitute would have called the "margarine middle."

Last week I was hit from both extremes. There seems to be a missing "nuance gene" when it comes to Israel. The most reasonable people, the most skilled professionals, somehow find themselves behaving irrationally, talking wildly and acting sloppily when the topic is raised.

My previous blog, "Israel's self-hating Jews," which condemned Ariel Mayor Ron Nachman for blaming the Obama settlement freeze idea on the president's "Jew boy" advisers, triggered numerous attacks against me for daring to question the mayor's horrific choice of words. You would have thought Mayor Nachman was the holy Reb Nachman of Breslav, given his devotees' intensity. My critics refused to acknowledge that using such language - when trying to convince a State Department delegation, no less - was crude, rude and self-defeating.

Nachman's followers took an attack on him as an attack on them, on Israel, on the Jewish people and on truth itself, while perceiving it as a deluded defense of Obama's foreign policy, despite my criticisms of the administration's Israel strategy.

Most disturbingly, they felt completely justified using offensive, racist language to describe fellow Jews with whom they disagree, thus undercutting those of us who have been forced to spend far too much time fighting anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, racism, and ethnic stereotyping of all kinds.

These rhetorical bomb-throwers confirmed every liberal caricature of the aggressive, self-righteous, my-way-or-the-highway settlers - but characteristically blamed me for helping to perpetuate that stereotype.

Let me say regarding the "Jew boy" issue what I say when anti-Semites masquerading as "mere" anti-Zionists compare Israelis to Nazis. Intelligent people can find a rich choice of words to convey disdain without resorting to cheap, ugly, inflammatory anti-Semitic language that reveals the critics' own prejudices.

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Israel's self-hating Jews

Last week, while hosting a State Department research team, Ariel mayor Ran Nachman spoke like a hoodlum, sounding like a self-hating and self-destructive Jew.

The Jerusalem Post reported that Nachman "blamed the idea of a settlement freeze on the 'Jew-boys' who are advising US President Barack Obama on foreign policy, such as David Axelrod."

To explain his language, reporter Tovah Lazaroff added, "Nachman noted that he did not speak in politically correct terms and that it was his style to be blunt."

Nachman flatters himself. There is blunt and there is stupid. Many reasonable people do not want to be "politically correct" these days, but that is not a license to make statements that, if uttered by someone else, say, his State Department guests, would be deemed "anti-Semitic."

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Treat the apartheid slur - the "A-word" - like the "N-word"

Since Neve Gordon published his controversial Los Angeles Times op-ed "Boycott Israel" on August 20, critics have called for officials at Ben Gurion University, his academic home, to punish him or to risk losing donations.

Cutting donations to a university because of an outspoken professor or suspending that professor for his views is as shortsighted and self-destructive as an Israeli citizen endorsing a boycott of his own country. Maybe I am perverse, but I relish these moments to demonstrate that Israel has freedom of speech and Israeli campuses have academic freedom - unlike their neighbors.

At the same time, it is important to denounce Gordon and others for perpetuating the apartheid smear against Israel. Everyone who cares about peace in the Middle East and truth in the world must stop making the false comparisons between the difficult national conflict pitting Israelis against Palestinians and the ugly racist regime that discriminated against South Africans of color for decades.

In his article, Gordon proclaims: "The most accurate way to describe Israel today is as an apartheid state." This may be the trendiest, most politically correct, and most demeaning way to describe Israel today, but for a professor of politics to claim that it is "the most accurate way" is absurd. The unconscionable, inaccurate apartheid label insults anyone who supports the modern Jewish state of Israel as well as everyone who suffered under South Africa's evil apartheid system.

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'Queers against Israel' - are gays blinded by hypocrisy?

How could hatred of Israel be so intense that it blinds people to what they usually perceive as their most basic self-interest? This past Sunday in Montreal, a few dozen marchers in the 2009 Montreal LGBTA Gay Pride parade marched against what they called "Israeli Apartheid." Witnesses reported that many onlookers cheered these anti-Israel ideologues as they paraded by.

Similarly, in late June in Toronto 180 protesters from "Queers Against Israeli Apartheid" (QuAIA) marched in an attempt to "reignite Toronto's queer community in the fight against apartheid," which is the latest trendy accusation against Israel. These antics take anti-Zionism to an absurd extreme.

As I argued in a Montreal Gazette op-ed the day of the parade, identifying as "Queers Against Israeli Apartheid" defies logic, perverts history and distorts priorities. It reflects such hatred against Israel that maligning Zionism overrides all other causes, including gay liberation; it eclipses all identities, including one's sexual identity.

The dirty little secret QuAIA must suppress is that Israel is the safest refuge in the Middle East for persecuted homosexuals, including Palestinians.

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Defending Israel is not Smearing Obama or Bullying Mary Robinson

Just as savvy lawyers teach their associates to pound the table harder the weaker their argument becomes, Israel's critics are accusing its defenders of "smear" tactics and "bullying."

In the toxic atmosphere which pollutes Middle East discourse, rife with accusations about super-powerful Jews doing their dirty work through the omnipotent "Jewish lobby," Israel's defenders are frequently put on the defensive. These unfair, hysterical accusations undermine the democratic discourse essential to governing effectively, especially in a complicated, messy policy arena such as the Middle East.

Let's face it, no one wants to be accused of McCarthyite tactics, and few people have the stomach these days to be on the wrong side of Barack Obama and his minions. People who dare criticize the American president get the kind of treatment Marc Stanley, the chairman of the National Jewish Democratic Council, meted out in The Jerusalem Post this week.

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