A Leftist Has a Hard Time Coming to Terms With Ruth Wisse's "Neo-Con" Notions

The chap who wrote this profile in a Jewish rag evinces a grudging respect for Ms. Wisse (who's as smart as she is wise), but, being a person on/of the left, he can't quite figure her--or her ideas--out. Here's an example of what I mean:

When it come (sic) to Israel, she argues, the tendency to look inward for a solution to conflict is a repetition of diasporic accommodationism, “whereby Jews tried to win protection by proving their value… through exemplary behavior and proofs of service.” Such a strategy may have had its place when it came to survival, but it’s hardly an ideal. And the inclination to blame Israel for the hostility against it repeats the mistake of the Enlightenment, which, no sooner had it opened the door for Jews to join non-Jewish society, faulted them for being successful at doing so. Here too, no sooner had the world granted Jews the rights of national sovereignty than it turned around and condemned them for exercising those very rights. 

“I would say that the longer the war against the Jews lasts, the more Jews are going to blame themselves for it,” Wisse said. “They cannot find the solution in other people, because they cannot really affect them, so they have the comfort of finding the solution in themselves. They think, if only I’d cut my peyes and learned German, and behaved differently, and if only I had gotten my fellow Jews to behave differently, it would have solved the problem. We have been through this in so many iterations, and the best people have thought this.”

Sounds good to me. What say you, oh, man of the left?:

It’s hard to deny that Wisse has a point. But her perspective also has limits she doesn’t acknowledge. Perhaps I would feel as she does had I lived through the first decades of Israel’s existence and the aftermath of the Six Day War, when much of the liberal world turned against it. I certainly felt similarly during Operation Cast Lead in 2008 and 2009, when worldwide protest against Israel reached such a fever pitch that it made me, for the first time in my life, concerned for the long-term safety of Diaspora Jewry. But is Wisse’s argument a valid response to a situation in which Israel seems to be prolonging its military rule over Palestinians rather than extricating itself from a morally untenable situation? Wisse argues that the Occupation is a “consequence of the Arab war against the Jews” and cannot be seen retroactively as its cause. But does that absolve Israel of responsibility for what it does to the human beings under its control? 

For many thinkers, the answer is clearly no. Michael Walzer, the longtime co-editor of Dissent magazine and professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, put it this way: “I think one way of describing the disagreement would be to say that she has great difficulty acknowledging the success of Zionism in creating a strong independent state. She is a lover of the Jewish people and feels a deep anxiety about our current situation. And I’m not without anxiety. But I am inclined to think that the success of Emancipation in Western Democracies, especially in the United States, and sovereignty in the Middle East, have made a greater difference than she acknowledges.” 

When I put the question to Wisse, she answered by telling me about “Di Klyatshe,” or “The Nag,” a novel by Sholem Yankev Abramovitsh, otherwise known as Mendele Moykher-Sforim, the first major modern Yiddish writer. In the novel, Abramovitsh tells the story of a beat-up mare that had once been a human being, an allegorical symbol for the once proud, now downtrodden Jewish people. When the hero of the story, Isrolik, encounters the mare, he offers his help as a member of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. But when he writes to his fellow members, they say that the mare must first clean herself up and learn to dance. When he tells her this, she replies that “the dance cannot precede the food.” Only once her basic needs have been met can she consider other forms of self-improvement. 

“In other words,” Wisse continued, “unless you give me human rights and, in the Jewish case, national rights, that precedes anything that we give. That’s difficult for us because we’re a minority used to accommodating. We’ve never learned it had to precede anything else. You can’t win it. You can’t earn it. This is our major task, and I don’t want to be deflected.”

Again, I'm with Wisse on this one while her profiler, clearly, is not:

As with many of Wisse’s arguments, I remain conflicted. Although she’s not wrong, she seems to ignore the experiences of people unlike herself, who may have suffered different injustices or faced different problems. I have heard almost identical speeches about the precedence of human rights from Palestinians, and they aren’t wrong, either. 

What's his problem? Why, it's his own leftism, of course:

Literary critic Adam Kirsch once described liberalism as “the doctrine of complexity and possibility,” and these are the characteristics that draw me to it, despite its flaws. Wisse seems to feel that acknowledging complicating factors would detract from her arguments, and sees her determination not to be deflected as a strength. I am not so sure.

I would describe liberalism as "the doctrine of guilt, wishful thinking, uncertainty and impossibility (i.e. utopianism)," which is why I am sure Wisse is on the right (in both senses of the word) track.