Peter Beinart does Obama’s dirty work

Fresnozionism.org
19 May '10

On Monday I mentioned an especially tendentious article by Peter Beinart. It demands a more complete response.

Beinart’s vicious attack is presented as criticism of the failure of the organized Jewish community in the US to relate to Jewish youth, but its real purpose is to bash the Netanyahu government. J Street has been pushing it on its websites and email lists. This isn’t surprising — Beinart encapsulates the J Street / Obama Administration (they are joined at the hip) position nicely.

In a nutshell — as it were — here’s Beinart’s thesis:

American Jewish students (at least the non-Orthodox majority), according to Beinart,

…were liberals, broadly defined. They had imbibed some of the defining values of American Jewish political culture: a belief in open debate, a skepticism about military force, a commitment to human rights. And in their innocence, they did not realize that they were supposed to shed those values when it came to Israel. The only kind of Zionism they found attractive was a Zionism that recognized Palestinians as deserving of dignity and capable of peace, and they were quite willing to condemn an Israeli government that did not share those beliefs.

The Jewish establishment — AIPAC, ADL, etc. — on the other hand, “defend… virtually anything any Israeli government does.” And Beinart devotes the major part of his essay to tying to show that the current Israeli government is dominated by fascist, racist, anti-democratic religious fundamentalist settler-lovers.

Israel, he says, used to be the liberal democratic state that the Jewish establishment presents it to be.

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