World-shaking news! Leftist Jew gives up leftism—for five minutes

Another leftist Jew, Thane Rosenbaum, formerly an editor at the radical magazine Tikkun, admits that he and his leftist co-mates have been wrong and naïve in their belief that Israel’s neighbors would be willing to make peace with it, and, he says, the left now supports the use of force. But, in accord with my previous analysis of the Israeli leftist mentality, Rosenbaum does not renounce his leftist principles; he just puts them on hold. Nor does he adopt non-leftist principles. Instead, he reluctantly “[surrenders] to the mindset that there are no solutions other than to allow Israel to defend itself.” Thus self-defense is not right and good, but a hideous necessity to which Israel must surrender, a surrender that “[brings] right and left together into one deeply cynical red state.” For Rosenbaum, to defend one’s country, one’s people, one’s family from death and destruction is a “cynical” act. Finally, he makes it clear that this big change over which he expends so much anguish is temporary: the peace process will be resumed, he says, as soon as “kidnapped soldiers are returned and acts of terror [are] curtailed.” Rarely has a leftist stated with more clarity the unprincipled exception—i.e., a temporary suspension of liberalism when the consequences of liberalism have become literally unbearable.

The immediate problem is, how can such a half-hearted conversion to political reality result in effective national defense? If self-defense is something the Israelis feel cynical about, how can they engage in it with the requisite energy, decisiveness, and consistency of purpose? Consider how Olmert’s dithering has produced disaster.

Here are excerpts from the article, with the passages I’ve just quoted set in bold.

After describing the former leftist belief in peace, equality, and harmony with the Arabs, Rosenbaum continues:

However, the world as we know it today—post-Holocaust,post-9/11, post-sanity—is not cooperating. Given the realities of the new Middle East, perhaps it is time for a reality check. For this reason, many Jewish liberals are surrendering to the mindset that there are no solutions other than to allow Israel to defend itself—with whatever means necessary. Unfortunately, the inevitability of Israel coincides with the inevitability of anti-Semitism.

This is what more politically conservative Jews and hardcore Zionists maintained from the outset. And it was this nightmare that the Jewish left always refused to imagine. So we lay awake at night, afraid to sleep. Surely the Arabs were tired, too. Surely they would want to improve their societies and educate their children rather than strap bombs on to them.

If the Palestinians didn’t want that for themselves, if building a nation was not their priority, then peace in exchange for territories was nothing but a pipe dream. It was all wish-fulfillment, morally and practically necessary, yet ultimately motivated by a weary Israeli society—the harsh reality of Arab animus, the spiritual toll that the occupation had taken on a Jewish state battered by negative world opinion.

Despite the deep cynicism, however, Israel knew that it must try. It would have to set aside nearly 60 years of hard-won experience, starting from the very first days of its independence, and believe that the Arab world had softened, would become more welcoming neighbors, and would stop chanting: “Not in our backyard—the Middle East is for Arabs only.”

But that has not worked out, of course.

The Jewish left is now in shambles. Peace Now advocates have lost their momentum, and, in some sense, their moral clarity. Opinion polls in Israel are showing near unanimous support for stronger incursions into Lebanon. And until kidnapped soldiers are returned and acts of terror curtailed, any further conversations about the future of the West Bank have been set aside.

Not unlike the deep divisions between the values of red- and blue-state America, world Jewry is being forced to reconsider all of its underlying assumptions about peace in the Middle East. The recent disastrous events in Lebanon and Gaza have inadvertently created a newly united Jewish consciousness—bringing right and left together into one deeply cynical red state.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 15, 2006 03:05 PM | Send