The view from no-man's-land

Sunday, 1st February 2009

A brave piece by Eric Alterman in The Nation, on how America's opinion-formers take sides in the Arab-Israeli conflict:

Within the mainstream media punditocracy, discussion of the Israeli invasion of Gaza is not only one-sided in Israel's favour but also deeply contemptuous of anyone who deviates from that side... On the non-liberal left - including, alas, most of what has been published on this magazine's website - Israel is not merely guilty of a foolish misadventure but is sufficiently evil to have earned itself a South Africa-style boycott. The middle, meanwhile, is a muddle because it's not so easy to figure out how a small, powerful but beleaguered nation ought to address a threat from an implacable ideological foe who lives on your doorstep, is sworn to your destruction, lobs missiles into your cities and hides behind its civilian population. And given the ferocity of the likely response, coupled with the unlikelihood that anyone will actually listen in good faith, the benefits of intervening in this debate from anything but an extremist perspective are decidedly murky.
If I lived in Europe--to say nothing of an Arab or Islamic nation--where the Palestinians are held to be innocent victims of Israeli aggression, my strong personal identification with, and intellectual belief in, the historic Zionist project would no doubt lead me to spend most of my time defending Israel's legitimacy, if not its every action. But in the United States, where right-wing Jewish organizations and neoconservative pundits dominate nearly all Middle East discussion--and where one rarely if ever hears about, say, Israel's illegal settlement and expropriation policies or the daily indignities and immiseration of Palestinian life--I find myself forced to focus on the various means by which pro-Israel hawks seek to discredit and delegitimize anyone who dares to disagree with them.