Antony Loewenstein

Philip Weiss, January 5:

Locked in a long-ago mindset of Holocaust guilt and Exodus triumph, never having visited the Jewish state, most American Jews go along with the Dershowitzes and neoconservative extremists who wish to ensure Israel’s “security” by having the U.S. government build a bloody iron wall in the Arab world. And in stark contrast to [Haaretz editor David] Landau, most American Jewish journalists, out of spinelessness or fear or guilt or unspoken religious devotion, refuse to denounce conditions that they would instantly denounce–instantly and righteously–if they existed in South Africa, or the American south, or Utah, or Idaho, or the Soviet Union, or anywhere else. Some day Jerome Slater’s paper showing that the Times has damaged foreign policy-making by failing to describe the horrifying conditions–as Landau’s newspaper has done, repeatedly–will be read as an indictment of a gutless era in American politics. Some day Haaretz will be hallowed as a legend of Jewish history. And day by day, Walt and Mearsheimer’s book, and Jimmy Carter’s, gain stature as brave documents of a moral collapse.