I read many stupid things every day, some of them even from smart people who are saying intelligent things as well. An example of a stupid thing I often see is some sort of kneejerk statement about Trump being a dictator, something many people seem to feel the need to throw in there to prove themselves members of the intellectual class. Or, sometimes it’s something about how Israel is motivated by revenge, or it’s about the cycle of violence tit-for-tatism. Or something about WWII itself that shows ignorance – either poor analogies or outright misstatements.
Here’s a good example. It’s an interview with a journalist on the left named Susan Winfield. She is critical of the left’s response to Hamas and Israel, and as I read the back-and-forth I alternate between nodding in assent and shaking my head in disagreement, over and over. I’m not going to do an analysis of the whole thing; I’ll just take this one part of what Winfield says as an example of what I mean:
There’s an excellent essay on the concept of “decolonization” in the most recent issue of Liberties by Kian Tajbakhsh. He’s an Iranian-American academic who was formerly a political prisoner of the Ayatollah. He has a very clear view of Middle Eastern politics; I urge everyone to read the essay, which I think is brilliant. Tajbakhsh writes that what the Palestinians need is not a Mandela but “an Adenauer, who can accept an imperfect and unsatisfactory reality in the present to achieve a better future.” That is, someone who can lead them from conspiratorial thinking and revanchist fantasies into the reality principle, which can be the only basis of a true national revival.
Well, that would certainly be nice. But I don’t see a chance of it happening without something else Winfield deplores: a postwar occupation. Did Adenauer spring forth out of nowhere to lead the German people from Nazism by the sheer force of his argument and courage? Of course not. First there was a very brutal and long-lasting war which destroyed much of Germany. Then after the war, Germany was occupied for eleven years in the Western part (and much longer in the Eastern part, for different reasons). Adenauer had been an anti-Nazi during the war but had managed to survive. The occupation involved the victorious Allies reshaping the utterly defeated Germany and included denazification and re-education (Adenauer was against the former but much of it had already occurred by the time he came to power in 1949).
I cannot think of a single possible Palestinian candidate for a future Adenauer, nor do I see how such a person could ever be elected in a future Palestine without years of occupation and re-education either by Israel or preferably by a less Jew-hating Arab government such as the UAE.
And then there’s German society prior to the Nazis, which although somewhat dysfunctional was nothing like as sick as Palestinian society. There was more to build on in the first place with Germany compared to Palestine – although the building was far from easy. However, it required utter defeat and occupation to begin to take place at all.
And yet Winfield also says the following:
Israel is unusual in that it is the only country in the world that does not have settled borders: It has neither annexed the Palestinian territories nor freed them. The Occupation is a political and moral failure of phenomenal proportions. I have no problem calling it a crime. Israel is also the only country in the world that faces existential threats from an array of states and terrorist groups that are fanatically devoted to its destruction. Does this justify the Occupation? Not at all. Can the Occupation be separated from this? Not at all.
If you can make head or tail of that, or reconcile it with her approval of the idea of a Palestinian Adenauer, be my guest.
Did the author care back when these so-called “occupied territories” were occupied by Egypt and Jordan? I doubt it (was she even alive? I don’t know how old she is, but from her photo she doesn’t look like she was an adult in 1967). Also, Gaza essentially became autonomous in 2005, in case she hadn’t noticed. And these areas were only occupied by Israel after Israel won a war against them and their Arab brethren in 1967. The story:
Israel has occupied the Palestinian territories and the Golan Heights since the Six-Day War of 1967. It previously occupied the Sinai Peninsula and southern Lebanon as well. Prior to Israel’s victory in the Six-Day War, occupation of the Palestinian territories was split between Egypt and Jordan, with the former having occupied the Gaza Strip and the latter having annexed the West Bank; the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights were under the sovereignty of Egypt and Syria, respectively. The first conjoined usage of the terms “occupied” and “territories” with regard to Israel was in United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, which was drafted in the aftermath of the Six-Day War and called for: “the establishment of a just and lasting peace in the Middle East” to be achieved by “the application of both the following principles: … Withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict … Termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force.”
If the Palestinians would recognize the Israelis’ right to live in peace, there would be no occupation. Period.
You can read more on the subject here.
And yet Susie Linfield is a journalism professor at NYU and wrote this Quillette article that’s discussed in that interview. The article is a critique of the anti-Israel anti-Semitic left, and although I can only read portions of it (it’s behind a paywall), the part I can see is excellent. Some excerpts:
The history of the modern Left’s romance with terrorism—not the “old-fashioned” version aimed at czars or imperial officials, but the kind directed against unarmed civilians … started with the Algerian War and gained momentum throughout the 1960s, ’70s, and beyond with the emergence of the Red Brigades, the Baader Meinhof Gang, the Irish Republican Army, the Japanese Red Army, the Weathermen, and the panoply of organizations included in the Palestine Liberation Organization and, especially, its Rejectionist Front. The latter held pride of place …
Indeed.
More:
In the age of the “progressive atrocity,” PLO terrorist attacks on Israelis, Jews, and civilians throughout the world were hailed as instruments of liberation. A very partial list of such incidents would include the murder of 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics (the games continued, nonetheless) and the Lod Airport massacre the same year (death toll: 26, along with at least 80 injured); the Ma’alot massacre of 1974, in which 115 Israelis, mainly schoolchildren, were taken hostage (resulting deaths: 31); the Entebbe hijacking of 1976, in which Israeli and other Jewish passengers were separated from others and threatened with death (most were rescued by Israeli commandos); the 1978 Coastal Road massacre, in which a civilian bus was highjacked (death toll: 38, including 13 children; 71 wounded); the 1982 attack on the Chez Jo Goldenberg kosher restaurant in Paris, considered at the time to be the worst incidence of antisemitism in France since the Holocaust (death toll: six, with 22 injured); and numerous other instances of air piracy. Various international groups, especially Baader Meinhof of Germany and the Japanese Red Army, sometimes assisted their Palestinian brothers “in solidarity.” Not all leftists or leftwing organizations supported these actions, but to criticize them was a sign of “bourgeois moralism” as Ghassan Kanafani, a leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, put it. …
In recent years, the Left’s embrace of terror seemed to have ebbed; you won’t find many defenders of al-Qaeda, ISIS, the Taliban, or Boko Haram. The notable exception has been groups devoted to the destruction of Israel: Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah, all of which still garner enthusiasm and deluded admiration. One might have thought that an orgy of sadistic murder, of the kind that Hamas committed on October 7th, would have inspired serious moral and political self-interrogation. As the past four weeks have illustrated, however, the exact opposite is the case.
She’s of the left but doesn’t really understand the depth of its anti-Semitism and of its romance with and sympathy for the devil.
There the free part of her essay ends, but I found more of it here. The following excerpt from her essay is similar to points I made years ago in my series of posts about the 1979 Iranian revolution and the participation of the left:
In 1979, leftists who supported the Iranian Revolution had a rude awakening when the mullahs came to power and promptly executed them, along with secularists, union organizers, intellectuals, feminists, and everyone else who fit into the enormously capacious category of a counterrevolutionary. There was a lesson here: Activists have the responsibility to know who and what they support, and to separate themselves—openly and decisively—from programs and regimes that are predicated on violence and repression. Similarly, those who imagine that Hamas’s slaughters may have promoted “liberation,” “justice,” and “freedom” for Palestinians, as the banners demand, have a big surprise in store.
Unlike Iran in 1979, though, there’s no mystery as to what kind of state Hamas (an acronym for the Islamic Resistance Movement) aims to create; we need only look at what it already has created. This time, no one can plead ignorance. …
… History has proved, again and again, that terrorists and freedom fighters aren’t the same, which is why the former never achieve anything approaching either liberation or justice.
For many leftists and many students these days, it’s just a game they’re playing from their safe Western countries and the liberty those countries afford them. If they are successful in their goals, they may indeed be very surprised at what awaits them.
