Aside from the Iraq war — which has only consumed our attention for the past four years — is there an international issue that inspires more debate than the Arab-Israeli conflict?
The voluminous number of daily newspaper articles, columns, television reports and Weblog commentary confirm this to the case.
But, amazingly, according to many on the left, Jews prohibit honest debate by smearing those with whom they disagree as “anti-Semites.” Indeed, the allegation that debate regarding the Arab-Israeli conflict is stifled gets almost as much attention as the substantive issue itself.
For instance, in an interview with the Jewish Forward, former President Jimmy Carter said “there’s no open debate in this country if it involves any criticism of the policies of the Israeli government.”
Matthew Yglesias, the insufferable enfant terrible of the liberal blogosphere, frequently refers to the “Lobby that Shall Not be Named,” which supposedly suppresses any critique of the Jewish state.
Nation columnist Eric Alterman writes that criticism of Israel “scares the character assassins into such self-revealing fits of ferocity.”
But what is most “self-revealing” about the debate is the canard — thrown around by Carter, Yglesias, Alterman and their ilk — that pro-Israel advocates constantly smear legitimate critics of the Jewish state as being anti-Semitic.
It is a false accusation motivated by little else than a misplaced sense of intellectual martyrdom. By forwarding the charge of hypersensitive Jews quick to smear anyone with whom they disagree as bigots, Carter — and especially Jewish commentators like Yglesias and Alterman — in turn make themselves out to be heroic victims.
When prodded to identify an instance in which legitimate criticism of Israel has been labeled “anti-Semitic,” the promoters of this meme come up withnothing. Indeed, the debate in the United States could not be more fair and vigorous, especially compared to how the subject is discussed in the rest of the world.
In Europe, Israel is always to blame for whatever trouble boils in the Middle East; in Arab and Muslim nations, there is little deviation from the viewpoint that Israel itself is illegitimate and should be destroyed.
The United States is the only place where Israel gets a fair hearing. To claim that critics of Israel are unfairly maligned and silenced is a pathetic means of avoiding debate on the actual issues that matter.
Yes, the Palestinians have not received a fair shake in history. But neither have black Christians harassed under Arab rule in Darfur, Muslims repressed in Chechnya, or poor Zimbabweans suffering from starvation and torture in Robert Mugabe’s dictatorship.
Based on the media’s inordinate coverage of the Palestinians, one would not know that the world’s largest refugee problem (in terms of actual people displaced — not their descendants, in the case of the largely self-inflicted problem of the Palestinians) is due to Mugabe, whose ruinous policies have forced some 3 million Zimbabweans to flee the country in the past six years alone.
The rightness or wrongness of Israeli policies ought to be discussed, American support for Israel ought to be weighed against its possible negative externalities and the plight of the Palestinians certainly deserves our concern.
But the allegation that it is impossible to have an “open debate” about the Arab-Israeli conflict is a self-comforting fiction, whose propagators are nothing more than intellectual cowards.
James Kirchick’s column will appear bi-weekly in The Examiner.
