If they aren’t going back and deleting old comments, you can see for yourself. Before their registration/censorship system, there were supporters of Israel commenting there. Other than a few of my comments that slipped through the net, the closest they come to dissent is someone neutral.

What strikes me about the Mondoweiss crew is that they appear to be lost. I think you expressed it best when you said: “And in this confusion of identity, the Jew in fear of his own deracination reaches for the fat on the flanken….” I really got a kick out of that! I mean, here you have a guy who apparently has been trying all his life to be anything but a Jew so he can be accepted by gentile society, and the more he does to destroy his identity, the less accepted he feels.

It reminds me of Dalton Trumbo’s screenplay of Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer where Alan Bates as the Beilis character, after shaving off his beard and removing his yarmulke finds his way into a middle-class household and just as he’s going to realize his dream of shtupping a blonde (although rather badly crippled) shikse, looks down at his naked self and says “Oy, the stool pigeon!”

I feel like telling Phil Weiss and the others at Mondoweiss that it’s okay. I’m perfectly adjusted to being a secular Zionist living in Israel within the Green Line, and I’m very happy with my half-Catholic grandson and my half-Muslim step-daughter.

Avigdor: I don’t really have any productive thoughts. Eliot, a commenter at Blogger News Network, where my post also appears, said that such people “are profoundly uncomfortable with having a heritage that is somehow different. They transmute that discomfort into an all consuming hatred of Jews and more particularly Israel. They forgive everything the Palestinians could possibly do and find fault with everything Israeli. In the guise of “helping” they do very little to conceal their wish for Israel and thereby their own Jewish differences to disappear. Unfortunately this hatred has some fashionable attraction. Sympathy for the downtrodden transmutes to hatred towards all Israelis and all Jews.” As I tried to suggest near the end of my post, I think a healthy international body politic can tolerate people who find less fault with the Palestinians and more with Israel than, let’s say, I do. I don’t think in the end they will necessarily hurt the goal of peace, and might even contribute to it. But when the goal is not peace, but a denial of Israel’s right to exist, we’re dealing with anti-Semitism masquerading as humanitarian concern. I can live with Jews who don’t want to take ownership of their inheritance. But when their rejection of it becomes pathology, they need to be opposed. Saving them from themselves is not what I’m qualified to do.

Andrew R.: Had there not been a delay in getting his comment up, you would have known that the clever David T. had already salvaged your essential message from your slightly muddled setup. But you’re a clever fellow too, and I know that when you read a bit about the fallaciousness of false analogies, you’ll understand that comparing an explicitly racialist ideology (that has no other defining characteristic but its racialism) to the nationalistic expression of a, let’s say, three thousand year-old religion and culture, and doing it on only one of the, minimally, scores of potential comparison points that would need to be chosen – e.g. ethical system, political system, intellectual standards and humanitarian contribution to society –for the comparison to have any inductive value is, well, kind of weak. But for the sake of argument, let’s accept your one point of comparison, and accept it, too, in the very negative light you present it for Jews. (Yes, I know you said “Zionism,” but Andrew, Zionism is just a nationalistic idea; it’s Jews who live it.) That negative light can be found shining on the French, who can’t quite integrate their Algerian population and consider them French, the Spanish, who go to great lengths to keep out North African refugees, the Russians, who have a long reputation for xenophobia, even – oh, well, you know I could go on and on. Sometime we view concerns with cultural integrity positively, sometimes not. It’s a complex issue of human nature. So what’s the point here? On a good day, anti-Semites are obsessed with Jews.

As for your last comment, which came in just as I was about to post this – it doesn’t really open itself to engagement, does it?

Inherit Israel? No thanks. The inheritance I’ve got now is so massive, so destructive, so frought with opportunity to struggle or cower there’s just something greedy about having an overseas enclave to go with it. If this enclave can’t be stopped I’d like to stop the entity here from conferring indirect responsibility on myself.

David T. – Give the man a ceegar.

The first bit is from David Duke’s website, the other is from Michael Oren’s ‘Seven Existential Threats’. That’s the point here: on a good day, Zionism is obsessed with the same things as white supremacy.

You’ve hit on a number of significant points, which are not the end, but the beginning of understanding these individuals at their core, and formulating an transformative response. As Jews, it is simply not an option to defeat them, or ignore them – they need our help.

The struggle over their identity… this is the key. The hatred they intimately feel for themselves, their Jewish selves, for their inability to purge the “inner Jew”, not in a way that satisfies. How can we help them to accept themselves, to take ownership of their inheritance?

It’s something I’ve been thinking about since the Lebanon War in 2006, punctuated by the experience of Cast Lead. If you have some thoughts, please email me at avigdorbendovid@gmail.com

Andrew R. — A simple Google search reveals that you’re first quoting David Duke talking about the US:

http://www.davidduke.com/general/2174_2174.html

and then Michael Oren talking about Israel:

http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/84568.html

So let me guess what you’re getting at: Zionists are racist Nazis, like David Duke, and Israel is an apartheid state in the making.

Do I get a “peace and justice” prize now?

Or perhaps you had something else in mind?

Mike: thanks.

Petra: yes, actually quite remarkable about HuffPo and TPM. For all the talk of American media bias in favor of Israel, if an outlet featured the work of someone who was not merely pro Israel, but virulently anti-Palestinian, as Mondo is so hatefully anti-Israel, it would be news itself. In these instances, it’s completely under the radar. By the way, keep up your own good work.

Andrew: let me see, Yemen? Tom Paine? Alex Trebeck? How’d I do?

“The younger generation of ___________ are now outnumbered by _________ their own age. In the 1960’s ___________ constituted over 90 percent of the ________ population–now we are at 66 percent and, at this rate, in a decade or two we will be a minority in the nation our own people founded.”

“Even if the minimalist interpretation is largely correct, it cannot alter a situation in which _________ currently constitute one-fifth of the country’s population—one-quarter of the population under age 19″

Well, it’s probably obvious anyway. Now, can you name the two who wrote these?

Can you do another such analysis of Richard Silverstein?