Anti-Israel Critics Want More Attention
In a world full of problems, we all must make choices about where to invest time and energy.
There are so many different tragedies. So many diseases. So many environmental challenges. No individual human being can take action -or even pay attention -to more than a very few. But which?
Well, how about this one: "Too few people call for the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state. And those who do call for Israel's extinction receive too few academic awards and literary honors."
Compelling?
Exciting?
Myself, I am far more concerned about threats to the world's coral reefs. But let me present the facts behind a controversy that has roiled the New York media world over the past week, and you can make up your own mind.
Perhaps you have heard of the playwright Tony Kushner? Kushner is the author of Angels in America, a seven-hour-long play that combined ideas of gay liberation with ideas left over from 1950s-vintage Communist fellow travelling. The play gained immense praise in the 1980s. I won't debate the merits of the play here, but I will note for the record that in a quarter-century of spending a lot of time with literary types, I have never heard anybody quote a memorable line from the play or spontaneously mention the names of any of its characters. Kushner has always seemed to me the 20th-century equivalent of those 19th-century academic artists who painted huge scenes from history: like, say, Henry McArdle, whose vast depictions of the battles of the Alamo and San Jacinto hang in the Texas legislature. Kushner may not have much to say, but he needs a lot of space in which not to say it.
One subject on which Kushner has pronounced is the state of Israel. Briefly: He thinks its creation to have been a mistake. That's far from a unique opinion of course. It's an opinion shared with many millions of people, many of whom have been willing to back their view with war and murder. Kushner goes only so far as lending his name to those who would wage economic warfare against Israel: He serves on the advisory board of Jewish Voices for Peace, a group that accepts boycotts, sanctions and divestment of Israel as legitimate tools of politics.
Kushner has collected a great many honors and accolades over the years. This year, the City University of New York (CUNY) offered him one more: an honorary degree. One of the university's trustees objected. The degree was withdrawn. Protest ensued. The degree was reinstated. Now there are demands for the objecting trustee to resign.
An event of minor significance to those outside the CUNY community, or so you'd think.
You'd think wrong.
Kushner + CUNY pulls up 711,000 references on my Google search. The common theme? The need for North American Jews to make more space for people to criticize Israel. You might think there was already plenty such space? You haven't noticed any shortage of criticisms of Israel, raging from the merely paranoid to the outright genocidal? Again, you'd think wrong. However much there is, we need more, much more. As Kushner himself told New York Times columnist Roger Cohen, there is "a terrible need for a dose of debate" on Israel.
It's strange. The world is full of failed states. Yet nobody ever suggests a debate on whether it was a good idea to create, say, Sierra Leone.
Barely half the population of Iran are ethnic Persians. When do we debate the redrawing of Iran's boundaries so as to show respect to the aspirations of those of its people who speak Turkish languages, or Kurdish, or Arabic? Day after never?
Or look at Libya. Modern Libya is an amalgamation of three provinces of the Ottoman empire. Can we have a debate on an independent Cyrenaica? Too explosive? Too boring? Or just too ... never to be thought of?
Kushner describes his critics as people "whose politics are based substantially on fantasy and theological wishes." Personally, I think that's a much more accurate description of those who place faith in peace negotiations with a Hamas-Fatah Palestinian unity government - or those who fix blame on Israel for the terrible problems of the whole vast Middle East - or those who regard Tony Kushner as a great artist of the age.
But the immediate question before us is the one raised by Kushner supporter Roger Cohen, writing in the New York Times. Will Jewish vigilantes shut down brave critics like Tony Kushner? Cohen reminds us of the tragic case of the late Tony Judt, a historian who likewise urged the dissolution of Israel into a united Palestine. Judt held a named chair at New York University. He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Yet in one instance, Judt was disinvited from giving a lecture at the Polish consulate in New York City. In the face of such fearful persecution, how can the human mind hope to remain free? Or so the question is put.
As for me: Well I'm going back to those coral reefs.
And with any leftover time, I'll focus my concern on the millions of Jews whose very lives are daily threatened by people eager to accept in all its full literal horror the careless speculations of the Kushners and the Judts about the benefits of the erasure of the Jewish homeland.
Originally published in the National Post.