Instantman points out a particularly odious and mindless piece by Eric Alterman (but you have to forgive him–after all, as Mark Twain once said about someone else of similar cerebral propensity, “I’d brain him, if he had the material for it”) about the unfair balance between pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian pundits.
He writes this as though it’s some kind of Olympic ice-skating contest. As though we all know that there are no objective measures of morality, both sides should be assumed to be of equal weight on the ethics scale (and we certainly can’t expect the judges themselves to be objective), so we have to at least make sure that we minimize the stacking of the deck so that both sides have equal punditry numbers and quality of spinning and support.
Well, Eric, I’ll surprise you here. While roughly half of my ancestors are of Jewish descent (if I’m to believe the tales told to me in my childhood), I think that Israel sucks in multiple ways. It is a socialist nation. It can sustain such socialism only through the largess of American foreign aid and implicit defense. It is a religious state, that imposes unacceptable (to me) strictures on freedom. It continues to subsidize collectives called kibbutzim (though not as much as in years past) in a vain effort to sustain the socialist vision that led to its founding. It is a fractious country, unable to maintain a coherent policy because it is ruled by a multi-party parliamentarian system, derived from failed European models.
Oh, sorry. I know that someone like you considers all of this a compliment–not criticism, so what’s a guy to do, Eric? When one can’t even criticize the state of Israel without sounding like a defender of it to socialist journalists, is it surprising that your little enemies list is so skewed?
But the reality (yes, I know, a vile and unfamiliar concept to writers for The Nation) intrudes. I have to conclude that, for all its flaws, it’s the only nation in that region of the world that has any hope of providing a glimmer of freedom and prosperity to its people, including its Arab citizens.
Israel occasionally kills some civilians accidentally in the process of hunting down cold-blooded murderers. Some Israelis even occasionally kill Palestinians deliberately, but when this occurs, they are brought to trial, and at least a semblance of justice.
Their enemies, on the other hand, vow that all Israelis must die. This is not just the rantings of a few hotheads, but the official policy of their governments (though it’s usually spoken and written only in Arabic, for local consumption). They deliberately target civilians, including women, children, and even babes, in their maniacal hatred of Jews. They suck at the teat of the long-vanquished Nazis, and mourn their passing, and lust to finish the job that they once started. They deny a voice to their own people, filling them instead with an irrational hatred of all things not them, and thus deflect their peoples’ righteous anger from their own failings and despotry.
In light of this, what’s surprising, and dismaying, is not the imbalance of pundits in favor of Israel, but the fact that there are any on the other side.