Remnick Razes Israel

From his latest New Yorker piece

...a profoundly anti-democratic, even racist, political culture has become endemic among much of the Jewish population in the West Bank, and jeopardizes Israel proper. The explosion of settlements, encouraged and subsidized by both Labor and Likud governments, has led to a large and established ethnocracy that thinks of itself as a permanent frontier. In 1980, twelve thousand Jews lived in the West Bank, “east of democracy,” Beinart writes; now they number more than three hundred thousand, and include Avigdor Lieberman, Israel’s wildly xenophobic Foreign Minister. Lieberman has advocated the execution of Arab members of parliament who dare to meet with leaders of Hamas. His McCarthyite allies call for citizens to swear loyalty oaths to the Jewish state; for restrictions on human-rights organizations, like the New Israel Fund; and for laws constricting freedom of expression...A visitor to Tel Aviv and other freethinking precincts might overlook the reactionary currents in the country, but poll after poll reveals that many younger Israelis are losing touch with the liberal, democratic principles of the state...

...Prime Minister [Benjamin Netanyahu] clearly feels that the fervor of the few offers him more than the disillusion and drift of the many.  “The dream of a Jewish and democratic state cannot be fulfilled with permanent occupation,” Obama has said. Netanyahu and many of his supporters believe otherwise; too often, they consider the tenets of liberal democracy to be negotiable in a game of coalition politics. Such short-term expedience cannot but exact a long-term price: this dream—and the process of democratic becoming—may be painfully, even fatally, deferred.

He maligns, and misrepresents, like here:

the President is a philo-Semite, whose earliest political supporters were Chicago Jews: Abner Mikva, Newton and Martha Minow, Bettylu Saltzman, David Axelrod. He was close to a rabbi on the South Side, the late Arnold Jacob Wolf. But to Netanyahu these men and women are the wrong kind of Jew. Wolf, for example, had worked for Abraham Joshua Heschel, the rabbi most closely associated with the civil-rights movement and other social-justice causes.

Besides the fact that the actual bona fides of some of those names as regards devotion to Israel could be questioned, if Wolf was a 'baddie', it is because, as Resnick does mention, he was a Breira activist, a member of a vile organization that serves as the begetter of J Street in its attempts to undermine American support for Israel.

Peter Beinart is quoted.

Resnick has no sense of proportion - or truth:

Reactionary elements lurk in many democracies. Ask the Dutch, the British, the Austrians, the French. The Republican Party has flirted with several in this election cycle. But in Israel the threat is especially acute.

This is the writing of no philo-Israelite.  It is that of an ideological perverter, one committed to a vision of extreme liberal progressivm that seeks to subvert Judaism and then its national expression into the framework of non-identity - in a not very democratic method: maligning it in the high profile periodicals of self-elected intellectual elites.

That, I will admit, though, is very Jewish.

Just ask Karl Marx, and Noam Chomsky and followers.

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