Critique of 'The Israel Lobby'

"...the real problem is not whether The Israel Lobby pleases this Grand Kleagle or that, or the one-sidedness of its depiction of Israel and its supporters, so much as the profound failure of the moral imagination that the book reflects. A failure to connect with the historical experience of Jews that motivates their support of Israel. A failure to empathize with the real danger the 6 million Jews of Israel face: the threat of a second Holocaust..."

 

"...As Omer Bartov, the widely respected historian, wrote in the New Republic (yes, the New Republic) in 2004, speaking of contemporary Jew-haters such as those who wrote the exterminationist language in the Hamas charter: "These are people who mean what they say." And "there are precedents for this."

Precedents: The world's willingness to permit one Holocaust gives cause for concern that it will stand by, if not enable, another.

On the cover of the New Republic—almost as if deliberately counterposing it to Wieseltier's "Hitler Is Dead" piece—the magazine billed Bartov's article: "Hitler is dead, Hitlerism lives on."

Exactly my point in my "second Holocaust" piece. It demonstrates how unbalanced things have become that one has to make an argument in favor of opposing Hitlerism, its goals and potential consequences (i.e., a second Holocaust). That one has to make the point that opposing Hitlerism is not the parochial concern of Jews alone or their allegedly insidious lobby, that opposing Hitlerism may even be more important, in fact, than opposing the Israel lobby, and should be the concern of all moral human beings. Just as preventing Darfur from becoming another Rwanda should be. What's at stake is not just a failure of the moral imagination but of historical memory..."

http://www.slate.com/id/2173908/