Attacking Israel Online

[Valin]

Commentary :

Ben Cohen

July 2012

 

Throughout the greater Middle East, opposition to the concept and existence of a Jewish state is an idée fixe for hundreds of millions of Arab and non-Arab Muslims. A hatred of Jewish political sovereignty that frequently dovetails with more traditional anti-Semitism animates café discussions and street protests as surely as it prohibits regional political progress. Yet the strand of anti-Zionism that has lately come to attract the most attention in the West is the one articulated by a tiny minority of left-wing Jews at a handful of websites.

 

Full-time antagonists of Israel such as M.J. Rosenberg, Max Blumenthal, Philip Weiss, and Peter Beinart have accumulated an influence that vastly exceeds their single-digit numbers. This is in part due to the financial sponsorship of successful and well-established media institutions. Until March 2012, Rosenberg was employed by Media Matters for America (MMfA) at a salary of some $130,000 per annum. Weiss was supported for years by the Nation magazine’s Nation Institute. Peter Beinart’s new Open Zion blog is hosted by the Daily Beast, an online publication jointly owned by the Harman family and the Internet media giant IAC.

 

(Snip)

 

In an Internet age characterized by instant, rolling comment, they have helped to reactivate a set of ideas that many thought had perished with the grubby pamphlets published in the old Soviet Union, screeds that bore titles such as “Zionism: A Tool of Reaction.” Whereas the true dissidents of the Cold War era introduced words such as samizdat into the vocabulary of the West, the ersatz dissidents of the Jewish left have popularized a host of expressions—Judaization, Israel-firster, Zionist apartheid, and so forth—that were once relegated almost entirely to the openly anti-Semitic fringe.

 

What an accomplishment.

(Snip)