"But I don't think I asked you to change anything. I asked you a question about the focus of your blog."
Mackey
"That's not how I read either approach, or your bon mot today."
Goldberg
"I'm obviously intensely interested in the way the Times covers Israel. You're the guy who posts about it the most."
Mackey
"I cover the beat I'm asked to cover, but I earnestly look forward to nothing newsworthy ever happening in Israel again."
Abunimah pointed out Goldberg's history and job description:
"Hey @robertmackey, lay off Cpl. @jeffreygoldberg. He's just doing his job policing what politicians, journalists can/can't say about Israel!"
Ali Gharib called Goldberg a "bully" and went back to the root cause, Zionism, and its contradictions.
"Boy from Long Island moves to foreign country, takes citizenship & joins its army.
"Boy says others are too focused on said foreign country."
Lisa Goldman of New America was arch:
"It is stressful to be solely responsible for policing the discourse about Israel in the media."
While these snippets are random, they point in one direction: American Zionism is in crisis. The ongoing Gaza massacre is exposing the fact that whatever its merits on paper as a Jewish liberation story, Zionism unfolded in the real world to become what we see in the news, a violent and racist regime that, backed by powerful Americans, has lost touch with moral norms and is justly isolated in world opinion. The crisis is resounding inside American Zionist circles. The sentient understand full well what I am saying. And while enforcers like Jeffrey Goldberg refuse to tear up their party membership card, we are sure to see many liberal Zionists leave the fold in weeks to come. Some will come out for nonviolent resistance, BDS. Some will reckon that a Jewish state is not worth the killing of even one Palestinian child, and will abandon a tribal ideology and call for democracy, for a binational state, anything to end the long nightmare of religious nationalism.
One last point. In the latest New York Review of Books (not yet online), Jonathan Freedland praises Ari Shavit's neo-Zionist book, My Promised Land, and dismisses John Judis's book on Truman, Genesis, by saying that Jews-- and he and I agree that Jews matter-- will only hear criticism of Israel when it comes from inside the fold. The Haggadah tells us, Freedland says, that the wise son addresses the Jewish community from inside the Jewish circle while the wicked son speaks from outside the circle; and the Jewish community dismisses the wicked son's ideas.
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