Newsletter Special: The Peter Beinart One State Solution Debate
David Shasha
Friends,
White Jewish Supremacy is culturally and intellectually rooted in Ashkenazi dysfunction and its stubborn insistence that only my group can be right. It promotes a culture of Jewish Holy War, where the gloves fully come off, and everything is permitted in the struggle to win.
More than this, as has become clear in our media-saturated age, go-getter careerist Jews who look to pad their bank accounts have become quite savvy when it comes to garnering attention, as we saw in the recent hysteria over Bari Weiss.
A short time before the Weiss uproar, which continues to rile the Right Wing Trumpworld in its desperate attempt to call The New York Times and other mainstream media outlets “Fake News,” we saw an equally vicious and deranged battle over Peter Beinart’s very public rejection of the Two-State Solution and an embrace of Diasporism and Bi-Nationalism in the Judah Magnes-Martin Buber IHUD vision.
Let me say at the outset, that whoever wins this White Jewish Supremacy battle, Sephardim are the losers. The Zionist Right, as well as the Anti-Zionist Left, is permeated with the stench of White Jewish Supremacy, as Eurocentrism and its arrogant paternalism characterizes both political factions. The Israelis and Palestinians have managed to screw up everything, and justice has become a relative term after so many years of violence and bloodshed.
The idea that Sephardic Jews could present the values of Andalusian Convivencia has been roundly rejected by all the factions, regardless of national identification. It is all about cultural hermeticism, Jewish and Arab, and the rejection of a synthesis.
There is nothing to be said about the impasse that has not been said, and as Sephardim continue to be erased by the White Jewish Supremacy, “The Levantine Option” is that much more of a pipe dream. There is nothing culturally intellectual about the discussion, as both sides go for the strictly atavistic and ignore the rich history of Convivencia and its Andalusian and Ottoman foundations.
We begin this special newsletter with my article on Beinart and his dance partner Daniel Gordis. My discussion shows how the whole thing is a PILPUL where both sides of the Jewish Nationalist divide are talking past each other. My main concern in the article is to once again turn to the classical rabbinic tradition and look at the role of theology in the process.
Both Beinart and Gordis avoid the theological, but Shalom Hartman Institute executive Yehuda Kurtzer does not.
In his article he goes straight after Beinart’s deployment of the Yavneh topos and its Diasporist connections.
Kurtzer relies on the current “New Talmud” academic scholarship, rooted in the Anti-Semitism of Spinoza and Wellhausen, which has marked Rabban Yohanan Ben Zakkai’s Yavneh as a “myth,” but goes much further in seeking to completely undermine the integrity and historicity of the Talmudic canon.
In order to uphold his Zionist vision, it becomes necessary for Kurtzer to adopt the neo-Karaism and neo-Christianity of the Eastern European Zionist founders, who sought refuge in the Bible, and rejected as fanciful and delusional the later rabbinic writings of the Oral Law.
Even more than this, Kurtzer provides an excellent example of Anti-Sephardi racism, which can clearly be seen in the Table of Contents of a new book he co-edited entitled The New Jewish Canon. The book is a sobering reminder of how Sephardim have been maliciously removed from the current institutional Jewish discourse.
Thus, in both cases, we have ultra-Zionists like Gordis and Kurtzer standing against the classical Jewish tradition and its rabbinic values. And that provides an interesting contrast to Beinart’s use of the German Jewish tradition which reaches back to Moses Mendelssohn and Hermann Cohen, as it denies Jewish Separatism and seeks a more cosmopolitan and integrated sense of Jewish culture and identity.
It thus makes perfect sense that Trumpscum Alan Dershowitz would get into the Beinart fray, as he went full Dersh and called him a Nazi!
Jonathan Ofir’s Mondoweiss article functions as both a Talmudic-style critique of Dershowitz’s patent libels, as well as a very helpful primer on where the Anti-Zionist, pro-Palestinian Jewish Left is at present.
In painstaking and often excruciating detail, Ofir reviews the history of the Israel-Palestine conflict, as he brings us completely up-to-date on the most contentious points in the battle. It is an excellent review of the present stalemate and its attendant dysfunction.
We close with Self-Hater Lyn Julius’ HASBARAH article on Peter Beinart’s Egyptian Jewish grandmother. Julius is most unconcerned with Ashkenazi racism against us, as she very gleefully uses the grandmother’s own words against her progeny.
It is apt to close with Julius, because it once again reminds us that to get a platform in the discussion you must side with one of the White Jewish Supremacist factions. If you promote the classical rabbinic heritage as it has been understood in the classical Sephardic heritage, you are plum out of luck when it comes to finding a spot on a mainstream Jewish platform.
Julius shows us how Arab Jews are routinely used and abused by HASBARAH discourse, in a way that completely betrays our intellectual, literary, and religious traditions. She is utterly ignorant of that rich history, and can therefore more easily find a place in a White Jewish Supremacy that has no use for Sephardic books and ideas, but does very much want to use us as a wedge against the Arab-Muslim world generally, and the Palestinians more specifically.
The Beinart One State Debate proves to us that the contemporary Jewish world is utterly dysfunctional, as it replays the many divisions in the long history of Ashkenazi contentiousness and adds a few new ones, just for good measure.
David Shasha
The Peter Beinart One State Solution: Let the PILPUL Begin!
By: David Shasha
Yavne: A Jewish Case for Equality in Israel-Palestine
By: Peter Beinart
I No Longer Believe in a Jewish State
By: Peter Beinart
End the Jewish State? Let’s Try Some Honesty, First
By: Daniel Gordis
Tikvah Tablet on the Warpath against Peter Beinart: Yehuda Kurtzer Says Yavneh is a Myth!
By: David Shasha
Memory Malpractice: Peter Beinart, the Future of Israel, and the Meaning of Yavne
By: Yehuda Kurtzer
Appendix: The New Jewish Canon Table of Contents
Dershowitz Calls Beinart a Nazi
By: Jonathan Ofir
The Wisdom of Peter Beinart’s Grandmother
By: Lyn Julius