INCOMPREHENSIONS: On the subject of Israel, our favorite blogger...

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 28, 2023

...adopted a slightly odd tone: As readers will know, we've often described Kevin Drum, late of Mother Jones, as our favorite blogger.

We long for the day when we get to see a fuller discussion of his lengthy cover report for that magazine about the so-called "lead-crime hypothesis."

That cover report appeared in the January 2013 issue of Mother Jones, with a great deal of blogging to follow. Ten years later, we're still waiting for a fuller excavation of the fascinating suggestions it contained.

We don't think Drum is always right—but then again, neither is anyone else. That said, we thought one recent post by Drum was perhaps a bit strange in its tone.

It dealt with a very sensitive topic. Headline included, the initial post went like this:

Israelis and Arabs have both acted abominably over the years

I know this is hardly a brilliant insight, but I continue to be sort of stunned by how absolutist Americans are—or seem to be, anyway—on the subject of Israel and its enemies. It hardly requires a scholar's dedication to nuance to understand that both sides have acted horrifically at various times over the past century. There are no heroes in this story and no clean hands.

I get that tribalism accounts for much of this, but the sins of both sides are so numerous and so appalling that it's hard to see how anybody can be a die-hard supporter of either one. The best I can bring myself to believe is that perhaps one side is slightly less repellent than the other.¹

¹In my view, Israel is the less horrible. But it's hardly a slam dunk.

This post dealt with a very sensitive topic in a largely imprecise way. In part for reasons of personal history, the somewhat curt tone of the post struck us as somewhat unhelpful.

Drum's post triggered a large number of comments, and he offered an UPDATE about the point he was trying to make. For ourselves, we'll offer this:

We don't think it's hard to understand the depth of feeling which has often surrounded this ongoing matter in the aftermath of October 7 To cite one basic example:

For many American Jews, the horror of the October 7 killings and kidnappings directly recalled the events of the Holocaust. It's also clear that many American Jews were greatly surprised by the number of college students and academics who were soon expressing a "pro-Palestinian" view with respect to Israel's military action in Gaza.

Quite plainly, many American Jews were deeply shocked by both sets of events. As for the devotion to Israel felt by many American Jews, Ruth Marcus offered this overview in her recent, deeply humane column for the Washington Post:

MARCUS (11/23/23): I was born in 1958, just 10 years after the establishment of Israel. The nation’s existence was new and tenuous; it was embattled, encircled by enemies committed to its destruction. It needed our support—our dimes diligently tucked into the cards we collected to plant trees in its fledgling forests.

My childhood memories are of the Six-Day War and the accompanying joy over access to the Western Wall; of the shock of the Yom Kippur War. I was walking back to synagogue to join my father for evening services that day when a neighbor stopped to ask: Had I heard the terrible news?

And, I am obliged to confess, the narrative of Israel’s founding that Jewish children of my generation were offered in Hebrew school and on trips to Israel was deeply misleading at best, tinged with anti-Palestinian bias at worst. This account utterly failed to acknowledge the expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in 1948 or consider Palestinians’ legitimate claims to a homeland. The tenor of our rabbi’s sermons, the discussions in my childhood home, were that Israel could do no wrong.

In that passage, Marcus describes the way Jewish kids of her generation were taught about a very important country—about a very important country which "could do no wrong." For the record, many American kids have been taught in a broadly similar way about the United States itself.

Marcus was taught that Israel "could do no wrong." Her daughters have come of age with a different set of understandings, she went on to say:

MARCUS (continuing directly): My children grew up in a different environment—more honest about the contours of the conflict, more complex in the nature of the political discussion, and more fraught. They have scarcely known an Israel without Netanyahu, which is to say an Israel whose aggressive settlement policy that has made a two-state solution increasingly unattainable, and an Israel that fails to treat Palestinians with fairness and dignity.

That's how it has been for Marcus' two daughters. But for many people of Marcus' generation, Israel was the country which emerged from the Holocaust with the purpose of providing the world's Jews with a homeland, full stop. 

Most people don't follow world events in great detail. It isn't surprising that many people of Marcus' generation, or that many people who are younger, may continue to hold the overall picture of this situation which Marcus associates with her upbringing.

For such reasons, it isn't surprising that many American Jews reacted to "pro-Palestinian" demonstrations with surprise and deep concern. That doesn't mean that it was helpful or wise when some major voices in our own blue tribe's cable punditry reacted to these events in some of the ways we saw on programs like Morning Joe and Deadline: White House.

Major pundits went on the air, seeming to say they had no idea why anyone could possibly adopt a "pro-Palestinian" viewpoint with respect to these ongoing events. 

"This is just so black and white stuff," one major pundit told Nicolle Wallace on the October 30 Deadline: White House. "There's no gray areas here." 

In largely murky fashion, he angrily complained about the way "the media"—he specifically named CNN and the New York Times—"are so quick to blame Israel" in the course of covering these events.

In fairness, Donny Deutsch was specifically comparing Israel to Hamas when he made those statements. But in one conversation after another, pundits railed against college students who were "pro-Palestinian" without offering any idea of the background which might underlie such viewpoints.

In her column, Marcus described some of the behaviors by Israel which helped inform her own daughters' sympathies for the Palestinian people. 

According to Marcus, she herself remained more heavily aligned with Israel—with its need to survive in a dangerous region and world. But she was willing to cite the events which had more heavily influenced the viewpoints of her own daughters—of her own Jewish daughters. 

On major cable news programs, blue tribe thought leaders made amazingly little effort to do any such thing. They railed against those college kids without offering any idea about the possible source of their possible viewpoints.

There's no one reaction to these recent events which can be said to be intellectually and morally perfect. It's also true that the blue tribe pundits we have in mind—we include the irate Joe Scarborough—have seemed to scale back their rhetoric in the past few weeks.

In real time, these pundits seemed to have no earthly idea why anyone might sympathize with the ongoing situation of the Palestinian people. Frequently, they almost seemed to be proud of their total incomprehension—and we're afraid that this attitude affects our current set of blue tribe pundits when they approach other topics too.

Could Donald J. Trump get elected next year? Yes, of course he could!

Like other blue tribe members, we see that as a massive point of concern. (Tens of millions of friends and neighbors disagree with us about that.) 

Tens of millions of friends and neighbors disagree with our assessment! But with that major concern in mind, the ongoing situation in Israel and Gaza has become a challenging topic for our own blue tribe—and so are several other major political and policy topics.

Donny Deutsche is Jewish. It isn't surprising that he was unmistakably deeply upset by the events of October 7, and by some of what followed.

In our view, it isn't surprising that he sounded like "a die-hard supporter" of Israel when he appeared on a range of programs, even including The View.

That said:

As we noted yesterday, Michael Dukakis ended up losing in 1988. As we blues proudly persist in our varied incomprehensions, we leave you again with a basic question:

Could such a thing happen again?

Tomorrow: Diversity can be hard