NEW YORK MAGAZINE: "ISRAEL A MISTAKE"

What We Won’t Talk About in the Israel-Lebanon Conflict. (New York Magazine)

Concerning Israel and the Palestinian territories, all the truths tend to be truly, deeply, tragically inconvenient.

And the big one is this: Israel is a good and miraculous nation that deserves the support of civilized people, but the great unfortunate fact about its creation—being carved by the U.N. out of Arab land in 1947—cannot be ignored or wished away. We have no choice but to support Israel, even though the Israeli Defense Forces are killing civilians, dozens a day, in Lebanon. All of those deaths, one wants to believe, are unintentional, unavoidable mistakes. Yet as Richard Cohen wrote in his Washington Post column last week, “Israel itself is a mistake . . . an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable [but which] has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now.” Sixty years on, there can be no revising or reversing that mistake—and when the choice is Israel versus unaccommodating Islamist fanatics, we must be for Israel. Is there any more inconvenient truth?

So it was no surprise that as Israel waged its retaliatory war against Hezbollah and Hamas (zealots, Fascists, nihilists, pawns of Iran and Syria, all of the above), the blogospheric liberals, usually promiscuous with opinions, were averting their eyes, changing the subject, punting—like Republicans are inclined to do about global warming. Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, the Democratic power broker known as Kos, was quite open about his willful disengagement: In a post titled “Why I won’t write about Israel/Lebanon/Palestine fighting,” he said that he “sure as heck ha[s] no desire to get sucked into that no-win situation.” “I wish I had had something brilliant to say about Israel and Lebanon, et al.,” Eric Alterman blogged, then went on to use the crisis as a pretext for his 10,000th easy shot at Bush and the war in Iraq.

But who can entirely blame him? Last year, a writer in the Boston Globe called Alterman a self-hating Jew after he had written that the Palestinians “lost their homeland” as a result of the Holocaust and the 1947 partition, and that he and other supporters of Israel—us—are partly responsible for the Palestinians’ present suffering.

Thus another of the inconvenient truths: It’s essentially impossible to conduct a frank, good-faith public debate in the U.S. about U.S. policy toward Israel and the Palestinians—just as it’s probably impossible to have frank, good-faith public debates in Muslim countries about policy toward Israel and the Palestinians. In the four months since two eminent American political scientists (Stephen Walt of Harvard and John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago) published an article called “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” they have been both strenuously ignored and unjustly besmirched as anti-Semites.