PETRA MARQUARDT BIGMAN: THE WARPED MEARSHEIMER
Sunday May 02, 2010
The Warped Mirror: So which category of Jew are you?
Posted by Petra Marquardt-Bigman
Mark 2010 as the year it became acceptable for a professor who serves as the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago to deliver a lecture that proposes how to define, and distinguish between, various categories of Jews.
So are you curious to find out if you qualify for the category of “righteous Jew”, or whether you will find yourself denounced as one of the Jewish “new Afrikaners”? Or will you perhaps be counted as part of the “great ambivalent middle”?
Anyone interested in understanding the issue in its full academic “depth” (think “bottom of the barrel”) might want to consult the original lecture of Professor John Mearsheimer, who introduced these categories when he delivered the Hisham B. Sharabi Memorial Lecture at the Palestine Center in Washington, DC, on 29 April 2010.
First, it is important to note the title of Professor Mearsheimer’s lecture: “The Future of Palestine: Righteous Jews vs. New Afrikaners”. When you read or listen to the relatively long lecture, you will see that the part where he explains how he categorizes Jews (or, to be precise, “American Jews who care deeply about Israel”) comes only toward the end of the lecture. Up to this point, Mearsheimer presents his reasoning – based on highly selective facts, misrepresentations and cherry-picked polls – for his conclusion that “there is going to be a Greater Israel between the Jordan and the Mediterranean.”
Mearsheimer then sets out to speculate about the question who will live in the “Greater Israel” he predicts and what kind of political system will be adopted in this entity. After devoting a few paragraphs to insinuating that Israel is only too eager to find some pretext to expel “massive numbers of Palestinians from Greater Israel”, Mearsheimer argues that in his view, the “most likely outcome in the absence of a two-state solution is that Greater Israel will become a full-fledged apartheid state.”
It is in this context that he turns to the question of whether American Jews and the “lobby” would continue to support Israel, and he then proceeds to offer his advice on how to categorize “American Jews who care deeply about Israel” – and it is truly revealing that it is this issue that gets highlighted in the lecture’s title.
The message then seems clear enough: The “Future of Palestine” – which Mearsheimer explicitly defines at the outset of his lecture as referring to “the future of the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea” – depends on how the battle between “Righteous Jews vs. New Afrikaners” in America pans out.
So, forget about Israel’s Jews, or the Arabs of Mearsheimer’s Palestine – it’s all about American Jews. Since they get such an important part to play in the “Future of Palestine” as envisaged by Professor Mearsheimer, it’s of course very useful to understand in which flavors American Jews come. So, here goes, the new academic 101 of how to divide American Jews into useful categories:
American Jews who care deeply about Israel can be divided into three broad categories. The first two are what I call ‘righteous Jews’ and the ‘new Afrikaners,’ which are clearly definable groups that think about Israel and where it is headed in fundamentally different ways. The third and largest group is comprised of those Jews who care a lot about Israel, but do not have clear-cut views on how to think about Greater Israel and apartheid. Let us call this group the ‘great ambivalent middle.'”
Professor Mearsheimer then proceeds to outline the political credo he ascribes to the “righteous Jews” and the “new Afrikaners” respectively, and he even “fleshes out” the categories he suggests by naming names. His “list” of “righteous Jews” includes Noam Chomsky, Roger Cohen, Richard Falk, Norman Finkelstein, Tony Judt, Tony Karon, Naomi Klein, MJ Rosenberg, Sara Roy and Philip Weiss; also on the list are “many of the individuals associated with J Street and everyone associated with Jewish Voice for Peace, as well as distinguished international figures such as Judge Richard Goldstone.”
By contrast, the Jews who make up Mearsheimer’s “new Afrikaners” list include “most of the individuals who head the Israel lobby’s major organizations”, among them “Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League, David Harris of the American Jewish Committee, Malcolm Hoenlein of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Ronald Lauder of the World Jewish Congress, and Morton Klein of the Zionist Organization of America, just to name some of the more prominent ones.”
Mearsheimer also adds to this list “businessmen like Sheldon Adelson, Lester Crown, and Mortimer Zuckerman as well as media personalities like Fred Hiatt and Charles Krauthammer of The Washington Post, Bret Stephens of The Wall Street Journal, and Martin Peretz of The New Republic.” And, he doesn’t forget to point out: “It would be easy to add more names to this list.”
To illustrate what it takes to make Professor Mearsheimer’s “righteous Jews” list, let’s pick the example of Richard Falk, professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University, who wrote in 2007:
There is little doubt that the Nazi Holocaust was as close to unconditional evil as has been revealed throughout the entire bloody history of the human species. […]Is it an irresponsible overstatement to associate the treatment of Palestinians with this criminalized Nazi record of collective atrocity? I think not.”
It’s revealing to read the statement of Mearsheimer-certified “righteous Jew” Richard Falk together with Mearsheimer’s own thoughts on Israel’s supposed eagerness to find a way to ensure a Jewish majority in “Greater Israel” through “ethnic cleansing”:
We should not underestimate Israel’s willingness to employ such a horrific strategy if the opportunity presents itself. It is apparent from public opinion surveys and everyday discourse that many Israelis hold racist views of Palestinians and the Gaza massacre makes clear that they have few qualms about killing Palestinian civilians.”
Even this short quote illustrates how Mearsheimer and indeed most of his “righteous Jews” operate: First he insinuates that Israel is “willing” to employ the “horrific strategy” of ethnically cleansing millions of Palestinians; then he refers to unspecified surveys and “everyday discourse” documenting “that many Israelis hold racist views of Palestinians”; then he claims there was a “massacre” in Gaza that demonstrates that Israelis “have few qualms about killing Palestinian civilians”.
Are there Israelis with racist views? Oh yes, there are. Are they a majority, and how do rates of Israeli racism compare with other societies? Who cares! How about, for example, anti-Jewish racism among Palestinians? Or how about this survey of Palestinian public opinion from spring 2008:
A new poll shows that an overwhelming majority of Palestinians support the attack this month on a Jewish seminary in Jerusalem that killed eight young men, most of them teenagers […] The survey also shows unprecedented support for the firing of rockets on Israeli towns from the Gaza Strip and for the end of the peace negotiations between Palestinian and Israeli leaders.”
Presumably, Professor Mearsheimer also wouldn’t be keen to define what he considers a “massacre”, or to compare IDF conduct and the ratio between militants and civilians killed with NATO or US military campaigns. Likewise, it’s safe to assume that Professor Mearsheimer wouldn’t want to know that there hasn’t yet been a single instance in which any sizeable group of Israelis celebrated the killing of Palestinian civilians, while there are a number of well-documented instances when crowds of Palestinians celebrated the killing of Israeli – and, on 9/11, American – civilians.
http://cgis.jpost.com/Blogs/warpedmirror/entry/so_which_category_of_jew
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