@BenRossTransit @Alon It was easier to track that balance in November, when yes there were egregious excuses made and morally destitute revolutionary cosplay among the (generally discreditable) “anticolonial” left. But now, 30,000+ dead, no plausible endgame, a domestic population that, by the polling, dislikes its leader, yes, but supports the war and does not think its brutality over much. 1/

Perhaps this is me projecting my own experience, but perhaps I am far from alone. It becomes harder and harder to take a balanced view against the backdrop of so many bodies. Dresden and Hiroshima are cautionary takes we worked to put behind us, not precedents to cite in justification. I can’t know, nor can you, but I think every day of this is killing American Jewish sympathy for Israel as a project. /fin

@Alon @BenRossTransit antisemitism is not discriminating in its targets, jews of any politics can find swastikas on their doors on college campuses these days, just like peace advocates can be murdered by Hamas. nevertheless, the politics of younger American Jews is much more antizionist i think than you choose to believe. if you want a nonfreak patron saint, try someone like Peter Beinart (my age, not millennial, but a leader). 1/

@Alon @BenRossTransit i think you are badly underestimating younger US jewish exhaustion with Israel. we can look for polling or something to argue over later. i think very current events have polarized US jews, but the mass of the pole giving up on Israel as a potentially virtuous project is much larger than you want ti acknowledge.

@BenRossTransit

• "Murdered Nahal Oz peace activists are 'oppressors'"

He makes no mention of Nahan Oz. This is your talking point if the word "oppressor" is ever used. It is used once in the piece. Do you disagree that Israel has become a sometimes oppressor of Palestinians in its occupied territory, and that some "ferocity" is predictable, if not justifiable, as a result of that? Predictable is not exclusable. Lots of what is predictable in human affairs is inexcusable.

1/

@BenRossTransit

• "Palestinians were 'dispossessed and punished for crimes in which only Europeans were complicit'"

Here he is explicitly characterizing the arguments of "darker" people. Do you disagree that many in the global south view Israel's founding this way?

Do you disagree even with the full substance? "Punished" you and I would agree is not accurate, but Arabs of the mandate were dispossessed — as well as Mizrahi Jews! — as a result of primarily European problems and events.

2/

@BenRossTransit

Do you object to this characterization when it is presented as exonerative of Jews? In fact, post WWII Europe was presented with terrible refugee problems, there were paroxysms of ethnic cleansing, the remaining Jews had no European home that they would accept settlement in and that would accept them. Europe needed Israel and Zionism gave it cover to present its own ethnic cleansing as a gift to the Jews.

3/

@BenRossTransit
• "Israel, with its survivalist psychosis"

I understand that you find this description objectionable, it is obviously contestable, but to claim that a country has its psychoses is not to claim that it is "uniquely evil". I would accept claims that the United States is "psychotically" consumerist and deferetial to plutocratic romanticism. Does that mean I say the US is uniquely evil? Is any disparaging characterization of Israel's culture out of bounds?

4/

@BenRossTransit

I'd mostly endorse the claim, by the way. I think Israel does suffer from a culture of perhaps-we-are-vulnerable-but-never-again-a-victim in ways that twist it towards actions that are supremely maladaptive. Perhaps you disagree, and I'd not characterize a position I disagree with as "psychosis" in a cordial discussion. But to claim Israel's culture is deformed by its traumas in ways that lead it to err against its own and others' interests I would defend as a true claim.

5/

@BenRossTransit

● It's wrong & evil to say Israel has a right to defend itself"

He never said its wrong or evil to say that Israel has a right to defend itself. He talks about a "chorus" and about politicians affirming that right in ways that don't include and aren't balanced against the rights of Palestinians. Obviously, that is a selective critique. One can find plenty of politicians who rehearse the rights of Palestinians without acknowledging those of Israel and Israelis.

6/

@BenRossTransit

But criticizing some (pretty important!) politicians and influence communities for lack of balance isn't in adjudicating Israel's rights against the rights of others doesn't somehow suggest that Israel is "uniquely evil". You can criticize his lack of balance, for sure.

But again, I think you are letting your own sensitivities override a fair description — to yourself! — of what is being said and argued.

7/

@BenRossTransit
• "The history of revisionism as told by Rick Perlstein was a basic part of the history of Zionism and Israel as I learned it in the 60s. Jabotinsky's split, Irgun vs Haganah, Altalena, etc."

I guess what's new is that side seems to have pretty definitively won the battle for how the Israeli polity actually behaves, if not for its soul and the meaning of the project to roughly half the country.

8/

@BenRossTransit

In my own 1980s Hebrew school education, this stuff was entirely omitted. Begin was a good guy, a leader of Israel, the country where we were vicariously planting trees, a land without a people for a people without a land. You are fortunate to have been educated when you were, before history and a holocaust in amber froze Jewish education into a fairy tale vulnerable to the sharpest disillusionments when younger Jews learn a bit of what was omitted.

/fin

@scheidegger i don't think automation is quite that deterministic. sometimes technology (almost all of which is loosely automation) decentralizes power, for better and for worse. recent developments in military tech have, for example, has dramatically reduced US ability to protect navigation — see the Red Sea right now — by "democratizing" (a ridiculous use of a ridiculous word) technological projection of power. 1/

@scheidegger i think we have let automation concentrate power, by virtue of how we have organized markets and tolerated network effects to accrue to private actors. technology certainly isn't neutral, we aren't left with unconstrained choice about how or whether to use it, but its also an error to assume we have no or very little agency in shaping the world technological change ushers in. /fin

@Alon @BenRossTransit I don' know anything about the "Zionist doctors" line on Twitter, but I strongly disagree with the claim that anti-Zionism is a type of antisemitism. certainly there are plenty of antisemites who hide under the label antizionist, for sure. but there are lots of antizionist Jews, for example. 1/

@Alon @BenRossTransit i've always been a squish-middle liberal diaspora Jew, conscious of the dissonance between some liberal values I uphold and the notion of an avowedly "Jewish state" where Judaism is exclusive, not just a national heritage into which all are free to assimilate. Nevertheless, Israel has in its history had some very admirable aspects, and the Jewish experience has been exceptional. 2/

@Alon @BenRossTransit i, like most diaspora Jews, have been willing to live with the tension between our general ideals about how a modern state should define itself and Israel, treating it hopefully as an experiment in reconciling disparate goods and values. but it's getting harder to resist a conclusion that the second intifada, and the change in the Israeli polity that trauma provoked, has shown the model simply to be unworkable in actual practice, a failure. 3/

@Alon @BenRossTransit i don't quite identify as antizionist yet. but a few months more of this, the endlessly ticking clock of more than 30,000 lives, people ill and starving in ways my own Jewish imagination cannot fail to connect to concentration camps, might well push me over that line. /fin