Barack Obama Vs. Mort Klein. Who The Hell Is Mort Klein?

Martin Peretz
The New Republic
15 July '10
Posted before Shabbat

(Like Marty Peretz? This is a good one. Y.)

The president doesn’t like Mort Klein. I don’t know whether they’ve ever met. But the Obama folk did convene a meeting for the president with the “Jewish leadership,” which included, as it happens, American Jewish organizations (new on the block and who are financed mostly by Jewish billionaires who care not a fig for the survival of a people they do not think of as their home) believing that Israel is basically responsible for the intensity and duration of the conflict with the Arabs, in general, and the Palestinians, in particular. Anyway, Klein is president of the Zionist Organization of America which makes him, if you’ve read Jeff Rosen’s dazzling TNR essay on Supreme Court justice Louis Dembitz Brandeis, a literal successor to Brandeis who himself had difficult views on a settlement with the Arabs. A literal successor, nonetheless, in the same way that Elena Kagan will be.

Now, Klein takes a harder line than Brandeis did. But then the Arabs had not waged five wars against Israel, and the Palestinian cause had not yet been invented. There were cases of random terror as much against Jewish agricultural workers as against Arab effendi. In any case, the map of the Levant was being divided, and a tiny portion had been allocated to the Zionists—as larger divisions were cut out for new states like Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, etc. Not democratic states or even states cut to demography. Each of these states, by the way, is still a mess, which is a massive understatement. Except the Zionist encampment of Israel, a modern state with a free press, an independent judiciary, a real university system and an open culture. OK, smartass, give your ardor to Palestine. It will be like having given your ardor to Khmer Rouge Cambodia.

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