The blogger Andrew Sullivan, an English immigrant who is now an American citizen, was once a pretty down-the-middle Zionist, but he has become increasingly disillusioned with Israel. For several years now, he has been particularly frustrated by what he calls the “Greater Israel Lobby,” a term he chose in place of the more familiar, and anti-Semitic, “Jewish lobby.” A number of my friends and colleagues have decided that Sullivan is a vile bigot, a crypto-anti-Semite if not the real thing outright. I find such charges absurd; as somebody who has read his work almost daily for 15 years or so, I’ve been impressed by his searching honesty and his rigor about his own follies. So, it’s with a sense of hopefulness that I write to point out a recent folly of his, one that is I think characteristic of many who have taken up the quill against Israel, and one whose intellectual implications ping from Israel to Texas, from Honduras to France.
On July 28, Sullivan wrote a post about anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism and how to distinguish one from the other, especially when both are on the rise. Near the end of the post, he quoted a short piece by Jordan Chandler Hirsch that had just run in Tablet. (As it happens, I am guest-editing Tablet for four months, while our editor-in-chief is on maternity leave, but I had not read Hirsch’s words until I saw Sullivan link to them; our blog posts, while edited by staff, don’t need my approval.) Hirsch had argued that “[t]he case for Israel is now unfolding in the heart of Berlin,” where “an angry mob” had recently gathered to shout, “Jude, Jude feiges Schwein! Komm heraus und kampf allein!”—“Jew, Jew, cowardly swine, come out and fight on your own!” In other words, Hirsch argued, it was a bit rich to question the legitimacy of a Jewish state at a time when the necessity for its existence, the murderous intentions of people toward Jews, was being proven and re-proven in the heart of Europe.
From Tablet Magazine
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