David Adesnik, dork extraordinaire, offers a self-serving analysis of why Israel’s so easy to write about for wingnut bloggers, but is difficult for lefties to discuss:
Clearly, something else besides complexity is preventing liberal bloggers from writing about Israel. I would suggest that there is a part of the online left which is so viciously anti-Israel that moderates have been intimidated into silence. Let’s hope that this kind of viciousness never migrates off line, where it might threaten bipartisan support for Israel.
Contra Adorknik (whose schtick is “civility” but whose tolerance for extremist and indecent positions from the Right is only matched by his intolerance for decent and often even-handed positions from the truly Left of Center; quick, someone get him a date with Mark A. Kleiman), I would suggest that, “clearly”, lefties are hesitant to talk about Israel because:
a) We’re sick to fucking death of being called anti-semites which, since wingnuttia thoroughly internalized Norman Podhoretz’s absurd and wickedly dishonest formulation that criticism of Israel = anti-semitism, is the inevitable reaction to any writing we do on Israel, because
b) We tend to deal with Israel-Palestine evenhandedly. This, of course, is the true crime in the eyes of the Right, which sees through its tribalist, nationalist and sectarian filters any criticism of Israel or America as inherently immoral. Hence their bullshit “moral equivalence” hectoring.
c) We think there’s plenty of guilt to go around and it stems from two of the nastiest urges in human history: tribalism and religion. Since the Right loves the identity politics of extreme tribalism and thinks religion in general is the bee’s knees, it’s going to be more enthusiastic about taking sides and
d) The right wing loves war for its own sake — or perhaps it’s better to say, loves the idea of “righteous slaughter” for its own sake. Wingnuts are either butchers, butchers by proxy, or connoisieurs of butcher porn. They love the smell of incinerated civilians in the morning, of this I have no fucking doubt, so long as the civies are “heathens” or “useful idiots” (like the Lebanese who apparently should have murdered all of Hezbollah on their own or else be deemed guilty enough to deserve “collateral” damage) or “wogs”. Slaughter is what gives them purpose, what makes them feel morally alive, what gives them direction in life. For wingnuts, neutrality is only for the Swiss while disgusted and appalled wholesale condemnation is only for appeasers and traitors. A side must be taken, a purely good and purely evil declared. Wingnuts are Manichean for things about which they have imperfect knowledge and irrational biases. We’re only Manichean for things about which we do have perfect knowledge because such things are from within our own culture and socio-political context — if it comes from without, we just try to be as objective as we can, which is a damn sight better than the wingnuts’ tidy formulation that ‘if it’s American or Israeli it must be good, and if it’s anything else, it’s evil.’
