Book on Jewish Israel-Haters is Valuable, But Problematic Leon Cohen, Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle, November 3, 2006 “Jewish boys and girls, children of the generation that saw Auschwitz, hate democratic Israel and celebrate as ‘revolutionary’ the Egyptian dictatorship… a few go so far as to collect money for Al Fatah, which pledges to take Tel Aviv. About this, I cannot say more; it is simply too painful.” So wrote historian and renowned “public intellectual” Irving Howe in 1971 in the New York Times Magazine. And with this quotation begins a more recent book that, in contrast, says a lot about this same phenomenon. The book is The Jewish Divide Over Israel: Accusers and Defenders (Transaction Publishers, 2006, 283 pages, $39.95). It is an anthology of essays that denounce and try to refute those Jewish intellectuals who “either explicitly advocate Israel’s removal from the family of nations, or else seek to besmirch, vilify, blacken, and delegitimize it so as to render it both morally and politically vulnerable to the onslaught of its (numerous) enemies.” Some of these essays are valuable and useful for pro-Israel activists. I don’t know how anybody with a truly open mind could take seriously linguist and activist Noam Chomsky’s writings on the Arab-Israel conflict after reading the heavily documented essay by the book’s co-editor, Paul Bogdanor, The Devil State: Chomsky’s War Against Israel. Other essays take on historian Tony Judt, author of the infamous Israel: The Alternative essay of 2003; political scientist Norman G. Finkelstein, who called Israel “racist” in an interview I did with him for the April 22, 2005 Chronicle; pro-Palestinian Jewish theologian Marc Ellis; and others. Most of the essays do a credible job of refuting arguments and exposing lies, distortions, ignorance and obtuse misunderstandings. But as I read through the book, I found myself feeling increasingly irked by the writers and editors themselves. Emotional reactions Co-editors Bogdanor and Edward Alexander, a former English professor and author of The Jewish Idea and Its Enemies (1988), clearly share Howe’s pain at the existence of anti-Israel Jews. Indeed, they allow their pain to carry over into personal attacks and vituperation. “‘Cowardice’ is the word that springs to mind most often as the suitable epithet for Israel’s Jewish enemies,” they write in their introduction. And this is one of the problems of the book, even for someone like me who basically agrees with the editors and essayists and also feels distressed when meeting or interviewing anti-Israel Jews or reading their works. The editors and some of their contributors also seem eager to attack as an Israel-defamer any Jewish person with whom they disagree on such matters as whether or not Israel should keep the West Bank (Judea and Samaria). For example, though Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun Magazine is not treated in one of the essays, the editors devote about a page of their introduction to excoriating him. I have both met Lerner and read his book Healing Israel/Palestine (2003). While I believe he is mistaken about many things, I also believe that he is sincerely trying to do justice to Israel and the Palestinian Arabs. New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman does get an essay devoted to him in this collection. To writer Martin Krossel, Friedman is a “Diplomat from Chelm” (the legendary town of fools in Yiddish folklore) because Friedman believes passionately that Israel needs to allow a Palestinian state to form in the West Bank and Gaza. Well, a lot of Israelis who want Israel to remain a Jewish state feel the exact same way. And that leads to the real question I would want to ask of these editors and writers: Do you recognize even the possibility that any Jewish person could disagree with you on good faith grounds over what is best for Israel’s existence and survival? Friedman, Lerner and Jews like them differ vastly from Jews like Chomsky, Finkelstein and Michael Neumann (a Canadian philosophy professor whose book The Case Against Israel I reviewed in the Chronicle’s last Passover edition). The former do believe in the moral legitimacy of Israel’s existence, which the latter deny. But to Alexander, Bogdanor and other writers in this book, it appears, any Jewish people who disagree with them on whatever grounds about what Israel should do - including Israelis who have to live or die with their government’s policies - are enemies of Israel and the Jewish people, no different from Hamas. And this leaves them open to a tu quoque (“you also”) accusation - i.e., they may well be guilty of some of the same demagogic tactics like oversimplification, exaggeration, distortion and bad faith that they accuse their opponents of using. While The Jewish Divide Over Israel is worth reading, one should approach it with caution. Moreover, one should balance it with other books, such as Lerner’s Healing Israel/Palestine, Yaacov Lozowick’s Right to Exist: A Moral Defense of Israel’s Wars and Isaac Deutscher’s The Non-Jewish Jew. Reviewer Missed Points of Book Edward Alexander, Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle, November 10, 2006 In his review of our book The Jewish Divide Over Israel in last week’s Chronicle, Leon Cohen accuses me and Paul Bogdanor and some of our 11 co-conspirators in the volume of being “eager to attack as an [anti-]Israel defamer any Jewish person with whom [we] disagree on… whether or not Israel should keep the West Bank... for example, Rabbi Michael Lerner of Tikkun.” Then, in a dramatic rhetorical flourish, he asks all of us: “Do you recognize even the possibility that any Jewish person could disagree with you on good faith grounds over what is best for Israel’s existence and survival?” The answer, of course, is yes, we do – as the contents of the book amply demonstrate. Our book takes no position whatever on such issues as “settlements.” Indeed, neither of its editors even knows what the other thinks about the matter. If we had an editorial policy with respect to settlements or a political litmus test of any kind, why would we have invoked, at the beginning and the end of our general introduction, the blessing of Irving Howe, who was in his lifetime the most eminent intellectual of Americans for Peace Now? Why would we have included an essay by a long-time left-wing Israeli peace activist and critic of settlements like Menachem Kellner? Why would we have allowed Alvin Rosenfeld, in his long essay on “Modern Jewish Intellectual Failure,” to criticize settlements as ill-advised? The point – which Cohen seems to miss entirely – that several of our contributors do make, and with hammering insistence, is that settlements or “occupation” did not lead to Arab hatred of and violence against Israel; rather it was Arab hatred and violence, in 1948 and 1967 and well beyond, that led to “occupation.” Philosophy and character Likewise, our remarks on Lerner had nothing to do with his position (which is of no interest to us) on “whether or not Israel should keep the West Bank.” Rather it centered on the guiding principle of his entire career, which has been to blame Jews for the violence unleashed against them. In 1969, Lerner wrote (in Judaism magazine) that “Black anti-Semitism is a tremendous disgrace to Jews; for this is not an anti-Semitism rooted in... hatred of the Christ-killers but rather one rooted in the concrete fact of oppression by Jews of blacks... an earned anti-Semitism.” In May 2002, in the midst of Palestinian suicide bombings, lynchings and pogroms, Lerner declared in The Nation magazine that “Israeli treatment of Palestinians has been immoral and outrageous” and has caused “a frightening upsurge of anti-Semitism,” endangering Jews in Berkeley and other centers of prophetic morality. In defense of Lerner, Cohen assures us, partly on the basis of a personal meeting, that Lerner is “sincere,” i.e., that his intentions are good. But does Cohen think that every malefactor is like Shakespeare’s Richard III, who steps to the front of the stage and announces, “I am determined to be a villain”? If someone promotes, as Lerner has eagerly done, such Israel-haters as the late Edward Said or the omnipresent Cindy Sheehan, or writers who fill Tikkun magazine with references to “conspirators” running our government on behalf of “Jewish interests” and to the “industrial-sized grain of truth” in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, his declared good intentions count for little. As the old adage has it, “The road to hell is paved with good intentions.” Cohen finds the epithet “cowardice” unduly “personal” and “vituperative” when applied to Israel’s inveterate Jewish accusers. Perhaps. But what better word would he propose to describe people who – historian Tony Judt being the classic example – lash out obsessively at Israel and advocate its removal from the family of nations because, by their own admission, they suffer extreme embarrassment, downright shame, at faculty cocktail parties and dinners because, as Jews, they are linked to the Jewish state? Ultimately, philosophy is no more than character. If one is corrupt, so will the other be. Edward Alexander is professor emeritus of English at University of Washington.