Soros on AIPAC

Hey, maybe if the New York Review of Books publishes just one more essay on the dread influence of AIPAC, the "wall of silence" surrounding this organization will at long last collapse.

But now I have to ask the question: How did Israel become so endangered? I cannot exempt AIPAC from its share of the responsibility. I am a fervent advocate of critical thinking. I have supported dissidents in many countries. I took a stand against President Bush when he said that those who don't support his policies are supporting the terrorists. I cannot remain silent now when the pro-Israel lobby is one of the last unexposed redoubts of this dogmatic way of thinking. I speak out with some trepidation because I am exposing myself to further attacks that are likely to render me less effective in pursuing many other causes in which I am engaged; but dissidents I have supported have taken far greater risks.

What's the consensus on anyone capable of writing a sentence like, "I am a fervent advocate of critical thinking"?

Since this blog has been unkind to Marty Peretz before, I think it's only fair to point to the hatchet-job his Ultramontane-ness performed on George Soros, if only for the fact that the headline of said hatchet-job was "Tyran-a-Soros":

George Soros lunched with some reporters on Saturday at Davos. He talked about spending $600 million on civil society projects during the 1990s, then trying to cut back to $300 million, and how this year it will be between $450 and $500 million. His new projects aim, in Floyd Norris's words, to promote a "common European foreign policy" (read: an anti-American foreign policy) and also to study the integration (or so he thinks) of Muslims in eleven European cities. He included among his dicta a little slight at Bill and Melinda Gates, who "have chosen public health, which is like apple pie." And then, after saying the United States was now recognizing the errors it made in Iraq, he added this comment, as reported by Norris in The New York Times' online "Davos Diary": "To what extent it recognizes the mistake will determine its future." Soros said Turkey and Japan were still hurt by a reluctance to admit to dark parts of their history and contrasted that reluctance to Germany's rejection of its Nazi-era past. "America needs to follow the policies it has introduced in Germany. We have to go through a certain de-Nazification process."

Now, I'd very much like to say that, in all fairness, Soros repudiated his pathetic "de-Nazification" comment, which he did. (That still leaves me curious about his definition of "certain.") But then there's this backtrack in the present New York Review piece, which has me doubting his repudiation:

The fact that constructive critics of Israel say things that, when taken out of context or paraphrased in provocative ways, can be made to sound similar to the comments of anti-Semites does not make them anti-Semitic or supporters of anti-Semitism in any way. Second, there is a lack of factual evidence. Are the expressions used by the critics really "exaggerated and defamatory"? That depends on the facts. What is the more appropriate term, "Israel's still incomplete security fence" or "an Apartheid Wall?" That can be determined only by considering the actual impact the wall is having on the lives of the Palestinians, a subject ignored by Rosenfeld and AIPAC.

It's easier to defend yourself when you claim to be defending others, and I think it would take a strong act of imagination to see how this paragraph was composed without the "de-Nazification" fracas in mind.

Since Soros, otherwise indifferent to the fate of the Jewish state (as he elsewhere concedes), expresses a desire to help loosen criticism of it at home and abroad, perhaps he can answer the following. How does it further an honest and tough engagement with Middle Eastern realities, under the pretext of advancing peace, to compare the current Israeli regime to one which:

1) Made it a crime for a white person to marry or have sex with a non-white person;

2) Codified racism in all hiring practices and forms of property ownership;

3) Segregated hospitals, ambulances, and public modes of transport, beaches and graveyards according to skin color;

4) Was all too eager to decree separate "homelands" for a subject people, the better to rob them of any and all rights as citizens of the encompassing sovereign nation;

4) Was known the world over as the last redoubt of a colonial slave society?

It seems to me that internal criticism of Israel proceeds apace without resorting to histrionics or semi-informed analogies that imperil any chance of making Likudniks more kittenish, or the government in Tel Aviv more interested in what Americans have to say. Least of all George Soros.