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Jews and ethnic panic

The New Republic’s cover story for their May 27th edition is a sobering piece entitled “Hitler is Dead: Against Ethnic Panic” by Leon Wieseltier, which provides a good complement to the Edward Said piece I mentioned below. Whereas Said speaks of political stridency among American Jews, Wieseltier disects the historical antecedents behind the recent “Second Holocaust” flames that are being fanned by some Jews:

[…] there is a Jewish panic now. The savagery of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the virulent anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism in the Arab world, the rise in anti-Jewish words and deeds in Europe: All this has left many Jews speculating morbidly about being the last Jews. And the Jews of the United States significantly exceed the Jews of Israel in this morbidity. The community is sunk in excitability, in the imagination of disaster. There is a loss of intellectual control.

Of course, some Palestinians and supporters are not adverse to using Holocaust references for their own rhetorical ends. From another article by Wieseltier I noted this quote from the Portugese writer Jose Saramago who commented after visiting Arafat in Ramallah during the recent Israeli offensive, “Though there are differences of time and place, what is happening here is a crime that may be compared to Auschwitz. They are turning this place into a concentration camp.”

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Said on American Jewry

Edward Said in Counterpunch on what seems to be the prevailing mood these days among American Jews, that Israel can do no wrong, and how this stridency is at odds with the political dynamic in Israel itself, and among Israeli Jews, who seemingly have more room for debate than what is allowed for in America:

[…]public American Jewish support for Israel today simply does not tolerate any allowance for the existence of an actual Palestinian people, except in the context of terrorism, violence, evil and fanaticism.
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Bush off the cuff

Howard Fineman has written a good piece for Newsweek’s May 27 issue on the Bush administration’s spin-control plans now that the press and Democrats are salivating over the red meat of what Bush and Co. knew about potential terrorist attacks before 9/11 (tipped by BuzzFlash).

The best part however is Fineman’s lead-in hook, which details a recent private meeting Bush had with some Republican senators right around the time the story first broke, and some off the cuff remarks he supposedly made in the “heat” of the moment. I particularly liked this recount of a recent conversation with Ariel Sharon:

He said he’d asked the Israeli leader if he really hated Yasir Arafat. Sharon had answered yes, according to the president. “I looked him straight in the eye and said, ‘Well, are you going to kill him?’ ” Sharon said no, to which the president said he’d replied, “That’s good.”