Back on July 31, Judeosphere linked to a story in the Forward. I was struck by the following:
Hadar Susskind, who directs the Washington office of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, said that there is “zero dissent” within the Jewish community [about the war in Lebanon]. “As opposed to everything else we do, on this we have absolute unanimity,” he said.
This has been my beef with the establishment Jewish organizations all my adult life — there is not simply a lack of dissent, but a tendency to boast about it. Susskind’s claim was probably overstated in any case, although the Israelis, as usual, are ahead of the Americans. The prominent liberal authors Amos Oz, A. B. Yehoshua and David Grossman have finally broken with the war consensus — specifically the decision to expand the ground invasion. So have Peace Now and Meretz.
In the UK, Rabbi David Goldberg is speaking out against Israel’s offensive and critiquing the “existential threat” language being used to justify it. David Hirsh of Engage responds with ambivalence, arguing that the assault on Lebanon is wrong but the “existential threat” cannot be so easily dismissed. My view leans toward Goldberg’s. But I share some of Hirsh’s worry, particularly at a time when so-called peace activists are marching under banners that proclaim “We are all Hizbullah!”
What do we talk about when we talk about Hezbollah? I pondered this as I watched a recent edition of “Scarborough Country,” the MSNBC talk show hosted by the loudmouth former Gingrichite congressman Joe Scarborough. His guests were Mort Zuckerman, the publishing magnate and outspoken right-winger, and Ian Williams, UN correspondent for The Nation.
Scarborough tried to get Williams to call Hezbollah a terrorist organization. Williams wouldn’t do it. He said, at various points, that Hezbollah “might be” or “could be” terrorist, but that it was also a political party and a social welfare organization that basically runs southern Lebanon. Scarborough and Zuckerman saw their opening and pounced. Zuckerman insisted that it doesn’t matter whether Hezbollah “picks up the garbage every once in a while.” Scarborough, in typical fashion, continued to badmouth Williams after the interview was over.
Here, in microcosm, was everything that is wrong with current discourse on the Middle East. Know-nothing rightists like Scarborough refuse to acknowledge the complexities of a society like Lebanon’s. Much of what Williams said about Hezbollah’s role in Lebanon was irrefutable. But he and other left commentators tend to equivocate about Hezbollah’s terrorism, not to mention the explicit antisemitism and rejectionism of its worldview. And that’s to say nothing of left extremists like George Galloway, who support Hezbollah outright.
About a week earlier on the PBS Newshour I heard the Mideast analyst Flynt Leverett describe Hezbollah as a resistance group and a terrorist organization in literally the same breath. He had no trouble holding both ideas in his head at the same time. Leverett, formerly with the CIA, the State Department and the National Security Council, is no Hezbollah apologist. But neither is he a right-wing numbskull. That’s why he left the Bush administration. He hasn’t got all the answers; no one does. But I think we could all learn from that little example.
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