Jewtopian Pete and His Kooky Cocoon

In "honour" of "social justice" fanatic Pete Beinart's appearance in Toronto this Sunday (he's the big attraction at a J Space confab), here's a parsing of Beinart's latest anti-Israel expectoration. As per usual, Pete couches it disingenuously as constructive criticism of what he sees as a shamefully flawed Jewish land:

Peter Beinart’s newest screed in The New York Review of Books (“The American Jewish Cocoon,” September 26) offers variations on a familiar theme. It sharply criticizes the American Jewish community, especially “the American Jewish establishment,” for its insularity from legitimate Palestinian grievances against Israel and its distorted perception of Palestinians as “a faceless, frightening, undifferentiated mass.” 

At the top of Beinart’s agenda is the necessity of talking to Palestinians. “Our isolation from Palestinians,” Beinart admonishes, “keeps us dumb.” He faults American Jews, especially community leaders, for their lack of empathy.  Encountering Palestinians would combat “American Jewish ignorance” and “American Jewish hatred.” Yet even he concedes: “Virtually every Palestinian I’ve ever met considers Zionism to be colonialist, imperialist, and racist.” What, then, is the point of closer communication? 

Beinart’s indictment is a reprise of his previous New York Review critique (June 10, 2010). Then, echoing Palestinians, he castigated Jewish leaders for supporting the Israeli “occupation” of “Palestinian” territories. Expanded into The Crisis of Zionism, and further refined in a New York Times op-ed, he effectively pledged allegiance to the worldwide Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, which reframes traditional anti-Semitic tropes in the currently fashionable delegitimization of Israel. Advocating a “Zionist B.D.S.” movement, he proposed a boycott on products from “nondemocratic” Israel i.e. Jewish settlements. Even far-left lobby group J Street rejected his proposal. 

As if to demonstrate its irrelevance, Beinart’s current New York Review essay coincided with the publication of a Pew Research Center survey revealing a far more ominous development within the American Jewish community than any disinclination to communicate with Palestinians. 

The “changing nature” of American Jewish identity reveals a sharply declining religious identification (except among the Orthodox), long the defining attribute of Jewish identity. One in five American Jews has no religious identification. Nearly two-thirds identify as Jewish on the basis of ancestry, ethnicity or culture, not religion. Among them, an equivalent proportion is not raising their children Jewish or partially Jewish. The rate of Jewish intermarriage is approaching 60 percent, above 70 percent among non-Orthodox Jews. 

The lack of attachment of American Jews to Israel is equally worrisome. Only one-third of Jews who identify by religion are “very attached”; barely ten percent of non-religious Jews feel bound to Israel. Nearly one-quarter of the former have little or no attachment; more than half the Jews of no religion are completely detached from the Jewish state. 

As good liberals (like Beinart), barely one-third of American Jews believe that Israel is making “a sincere effort to establish peace with the Palestinians.” Nearly half believe that settlement construction is harmful to Israel’s security interests. But only twelve percent believe that Palestinian leaders are sincere in seeking peace with Israel. 

The “American Jewish Cocoon” that Beinart laments entirely misses the point. Any unwillingness of American Jews to communicate with Palestinians is dwarfed in significance by their exodus from Jewish identity. Embracing the great wide wonderful world of assimilation, the theology of liberalism grows ever stronger as their prevailing faith. More than double the percentage of American Jews who feel attachment to Israel, according to the Pew findings, are concerned with discrimination against gays, lesbians, Muslims and African Americans...

You can see why J Space's "social justice" gang would hang on his every word.

Update: Someone who would never be invited to speak at a J Space event--Julie Burchill. That's because she knows exactly who these Jews are, and isn't afraid to say so. (FYI, I poached the link from FFF):

These days the Jew-baiters wear left-wing drag and pretend to care about Third World rights — but they are still the same old Jew-haters, just with a fresh’n’funky style-up.  

They love to drape themselves in the keffiyeh scarf — “a fetish”, my comrade Ben Marshall told me, that “the feminist Oriana Fallaci compared to Nazis draping themselves with the swastika — I assume it provides a similar sexual thrill.” 

Exotic drapes aside, it’s interesting that whereas our side is so very varied, their side is so white and middle-class. 

(And in the age-old tradition of patronising white liberals, they do of course know what is better for Arab Israelis and Palestinians than the Arab Israelis and Palestinians themselves who choose to work in the Ecostream factory in Mishor Adumim for a higher-than-average salary.)  

Though they do, predictably, parade around a couple of self-loathing Jews of the type Howard Jacobson so savagely spiked in his Man Booker winning novel, The Finkler Question.  

Update: From a review of The Finkler Question:

Finkler joins "Ashamed Jews," a group of Jews proud to be ashamed of their Israeli or Israel-supporting fellow Jews. His first act is to modify the typography of the name, to bring out the group's affinity with the dead, good Jews of the Holocaust, and to intimate the affinity of bad, living Israelis with Nazis: "ASHamed Jews." He insists on calling Israel "Palestine"; he "did not allow himself to use the word Israel at all." Talk of antisemitic incidents irritates him: "Ring me when a Jew gets murdered for being a Jew on Oxford Street." He believes that the world waits on the findings of his conscience.
But he is dismayed by boycott calls: "Whoever boycotted his own family?" He also finds himself in contention with another ASH member, when the latter explains, in almost involuntary self-disclosure, "I am a Jew by virtue of the fact that I am not a Zionist." Finkler rises up to protest, "I bow to no one in my Jewish shame, but…"  

Later still, Finkler's son gives practical effect to his father's anti-Zionism by assaulting a Jew at a demonstration (and then protests, "How can I be an antisemite? I'm a Jew").  

And then, during a debate with Board of Deputies types - "community Jews," whose debating skills are such that "had they been the only speakers they'd still have contrived to lose the debate" - he is moved to slap down a non-Jewish speaker, caught out by him posturing on Zionism's betrayal of Jewish ethics. And so he leaves the group...

Speaking of which, "community Jew" Howard English will be speaking at the J Space thingy.