David Remnick’s Article Telling Us to Support Haaretz Reveals Why We Don’t Need Haaretz

Seth Mandel
www.newsrealblog.com
04 March '11

New Yorker editor David Remnick has a 10,000-word piece on Haaretz in the magazine’s current issue, echoing the fantasy that the leftist Israeli newspaper is integral to the country’s intellectual and political health.

The first hefty chunk of Remnick’s story gushes over Haaretz’s coverage of the uprising in Egypt. But read beyond that and you get to Remnick’s descriptions of the people who make Haaretz what it is. For example, he starts with publisher/owner Amos Schocken. He quotes Schocken complaining about the Israeli national anthem: “How can an Arab citizen identify with such an anthem?” It’s time to change the anthem, Schocken believes, and Remnick quotes Schocken’s editorial on the subject:

“Hasn’t the time come to recognize that the establishment of Israel is not just the story of the Jewish people, of Zionism, of the heroism of the Israel Defense Forces and of bereavement? That it is also the story of the reflection of Zionism and the heroism of IDF soldiers in the lives of the Arabs: the Nakba—the Palestinian ‘Catastrophe,’ as the Arabs call the events of 1948—the loss, the families that were split up, the disruption of lives, the property that was taken away, the life under military government and other elements of the history shared by Jews and Arabs, which are presented on Independence Day, and now only on that day, in an entirely one-sided way.”

This is, of course, an argument for changing more than the anthem. There is no reason to object to a Jewish anthem for a Jewish state—unless you object to both.

(Read full "David Remnick’s Article Telling Us to Support Haaretz Reveals Why We Don’t Need Haaretz ")

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