Andrew Sullivan: The Anti-Beinart Fallacy
[Andrew Sullivan writes for the Atlantic Monthly.]
I'm glad Peter has gotten around to a response to the fundamental argument his critics have made, and shown the bleeding obvious - that it is not an argument at all:
The main complaint is that I didn’t spend enough time discussing the nastiness of Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and extremist Muslims in general.
Well: duh. This was an essay about Israel and America's Jewish leadership, not about Hamas. It was about whom the American Jewish Establishment could influence, but have chosen not to. It was about a Rubicon in Israel's increasingly fundamentalist politics. It is not a valid criticism of an essay to say that it should have dealt with another subject instead. And on almost all the substantive points Peter makes about the Israeli right, his critics broadly agree. I would not feel so bleak about Israel, if I had not read so many of Jeffrey Goldberg's Cassandra-style warnings these past few years. No one is really defending the settlement expansion. No one is defending the Greater Israel the Israeli right is so wedded to.
So the real issue at hand is whether the situation is serious enough to prevent the AJE from using its clout to slo-mo any change and smear any critic (as they now are) or whether they should shift to saving Israel from itself, before the next generation of American Jews moves on from the subject en masse. I have to say that after reading Peter's critics concede almost all his points on Israel, Beinart's case stands up even more strongly. Have Chait and Wieseltier and Frum refuted his analysis of Israeli politics and society? Or have they simply thrown some Hamas sand in his eyes?