BECOMING ICE IN A SUMMER NIGHT
Two essays in the August 14, 2014 issue of The New York Review of Books light the
fire of moral meditation and invite despair.
Who needs a fire at the very peak of summer in New Orleans?
Jonathan Freedland’s “The Liberal Zionist” (20, 22, 24)
and Gordon Woods’s “A Different Idea of Our Declaration” (37-38) incite
thinking. Walking us through the
mindscape of conflict between the Palestinians and Israel with Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of
Israel, John B. Judis’s Genesis:
Truman, American Jews, and the Origins of the Arab/Israeli Conflict, and
Norman G. Finkelstein’s Old Wine, Broken
Bottle: Ari Shavit’s Promised Land as guidebooks, Freedland points out the
beautiful horrors of hasbara, yorim u’vochim,
mizrachim, and the Holocaust as demonic prototypes for Israeli fascism.
Two of Freedland’s sentences are especially disconcerting:
[1] “On this Shavit and Judis agree:
Zionism’s founding fathers were afflicted by selective blindness, unable or
unwilling to register what was in front of their eyes: the presence of another
people in the Land of Israel” (22) and [2]
“In November 1929, Brandeis wrote: ‘The situation reminds me of that in America
when the settlers who founded the Massachusetts Bay Colony had to protect
themselves against the Indians’.” (22)
The latter sentence is a bridge to Gordon Woods’s ideas
about Danielle Allen’s Our Declaration: A
Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality. Woods’s
review of what he describes as Allen’s “tour de force of close textual analysis”
(38) is less disturbing than what Freedland had to say about liberal Zionists,
but it does contain one fatal flaw in choice of language. Woods makes a brief
reference to Allen’s “background as a mixed-race African-American woman” (37).
He should have written that Allen’s background is that of a “mixed-race
WASP-American woman.” It is embarrassing that he denies Allen the entitlements
and equality of her WASP ancestry, that he is as colorblind and insensitive as
the Declaration of Independence in acknowledging how the construction of race
in the United States constipates thinking. I am led to wonder if Allen notes
anywhere in her book that the American concept of equality is predicated, in
part, on ethnic cleansing and enslavement. Perhaps she does not, because “she
wants to make the ‘encounter with the Declaration easier for readers who have not
yet built up a deep historical knowledge base’” (38).
Who needs a fire at the very peak of summer in New
Orleans? I do. The two essays leave me
as cold as the Arctic Circle. They freeze me into thinking the indigenous
peoples of the United States and the Palestinians are merely items in a lexicon
used to justify American and Israeli moral corruptions. They employ biblical
mythology to tempt me into assigning Palestinians and indigenous peoples to
oblivion. The language of the two essays makes me shiver as Thomas Jefferson
did when he considered that God might indeed be just, for I must weigh the
possibility that contemporary Americans are losing the capacity to shiver.
Jerry W. Ward, Jr. July
28, 2014
