Some of you will have seen this splendid effort to think outside the box on Israel’s delegitimization by Yoram Hazony of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. If you haven’t, I really urge you to read it. And once you’ve done so, please have a look at my essay on The Propagandist; as you’ll see, I have differences with Yoram, particularly over the use of Kant’s ideas on international politics, but these are expressed in a constructive spirit. We owe Yoram a huge debt of thanks for reframing a debate that was becoming extremely sterile.
Subscribe to the Z Word blog via RSS - click on the orange button below. For more information on using RSS, please read this helpful guide.
RSS
- Z Word Merges With The Propagandist
- New Message from Hamas To Israelis: Leave Or Die
- Bob From Brockley Goes One State
- American Human Shields In Korea
- Gurvitz The Progressive Blogger
- Mercosur and Another Confusing Recognition
- The PA’s Choice: Palestinian State or Palestinian Cause
- Assange and Shamir
- Iranian Revolution: Lessons Learnt?
- Gideon Levy And The Dog That Doesn’t Bark
“Ben Cohen, Columnist and Level 6 Cog in the Zionist Propaganda Machine”
Almost died laughing.
I agree that Hazony is reframing an otherwise sterile debate, it also helps that his tone is not as shrill as usual. However, I think that tensions between lessons learned from World War II and the Holocaust have a broader impact on today’s politics than ‘just’ the case of Israel, and I think that point has been made elsewhere. We just need to join the dots.
In ‘Utopia or Auschwitz: Germany’s 1968 Generation and the Holocaust’ Hans Kundnani examines the struggle of that group in Germany and a tension appears between two moral responses to the Holocaust, summed up by the slogans ‘No More War!’ and ‘No More Auschwitz!’. This clearly fits the picture described by Hazony with the development of the EU and the establishment of the State of Israel respectively, but it also describes how and why tensions arose within the German Green Party during the Balkan conflict, and the idea of liberal military intervention in general. Kundnani is dealing with these issues from the point of view of the left, but I don’t believe this is a specifically left wing issue, indeed as Hazony shows IMO).