Death of the Liberal Class (26 page)
Read Death of the Liberal Class Online
Authors: Chris Hedges
Tags: #Political Culture, #Political Ideologies, #General, #Conservatism & Liberalism, #Political Science, #Liberalism
The city Schanberg continued to profile in his column did not look like the glossy ads in the
Times
fashion section or the Sunday magazine. Schanberg’s city was one in which thousands of homeless people were sleeping on the streets. It was one where there were long lines at soup kitchens. It was a city where the mentally ill were tossed onto sidewalks or locked up in jails. He wrote of people who were unable to afford housing and New Yorkers who were being displaced by the greed of overzealous developers. He profiled landlords who charged exorbitant rent that drove out the working and middle class. He soon was denied even his column. He left the paper to work for
New York News-day
and later the
Village Voice
. Schanberg knew the rules. But he refused to serve his own career interests or the “practical” concerns of his editors.
Times
fashion section or the Sunday magazine. Schanberg’s city was one in which thousands of homeless people were sleeping on the streets. It was one where there were long lines at soup kitchens. It was a city where the mentally ill were tossed onto sidewalks or locked up in jails. He wrote of people who were unable to afford housing and New Yorkers who were being displaced by the greed of overzealous developers. He profiled landlords who charged exorbitant rent that drove out the working and middle class. He soon was denied even his column. He left the paper to work for
New York News-day
and later the
Village Voice
. Schanberg knew the rules. But he refused to serve his own career interests or the “practical” concerns of his editors.
“I heard all kinds of reports over the years that the wealthy patrons of the Metropolitan Museum of Art would often get to use the customs clearance provided to the museum to import personal items, including jewelry, which was not going to the museum,” Schanberg said when we met in his apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “I can’t prove this, but I believe it to be true. Would the
Times
investigate this? Not in a million years. The publisher at the time was the chairman of the board of the museum. These were his friends.”
6
Times
investigate this? Not in a million years. The publisher at the time was the chairman of the board of the museum. These were his friends.”
6
“And yet they do more than anyone else, although they leave out a lot of things,” Schanberg said of the paper:
There are stories on their blackout list. But it is important the paper is there because they spend money on what they choose to cover. Most of the problem of mainstream journalism is what they leave out. But what they do, aside from the daily boilerplate, press releases and so forth, is very, very important to the democratic process.
“Papers function as a guide to newcomers, to immigrants, as to what the ethos is, what the rules are, how we are supposed to behave,” Schanberg added:
That is not always good, obviously, because this is the consensus of the establishment. But papers, probably more in the earlier years than now, print texts of things people will never see elsewhere. It tells them what you have to do to cast a vote. It covers things like the swearing in of immigrants. They are a positive force. I don’t think the
New York Times
was ever a fully committed accountability paper. I am not sure there is one. I don’t know who coined the phrase Afghanistanism, but it fits for newspapers. Afghanistanism means you can cover all the corruption you find in Afghanistan, but don’t try to do it in your own backyard. The
Washington Post
does not cover Washington. It covers official Washington. The
Times
ignores lots of omissions and worse by members of the establishment.
“Newspapers do not erase bad things,” Schanberg went on:
Newspapers keep the swamp from getting any deeper, from rising higher. We do it in spurts. We discover the civil-rights movement. We discover the women’s rights movement. We go at it hell-bent because now it is kosher to write about those who have been neglected and treated like half-citizens. And then when things calm down it becomes easy not to do that anymore.
South African justice Richard Goldstone was another high-profile apostate from the liberal class. On the international stage, he engendered a clash with the liberal elite much like that which Michael Moore kindled in Hollywood and Schanberg did at the
New York Times
.
New York Times
.
The United Nations Human Rights Council created a fact-finding mission in 2009 to investigate violations of humanitarian and human-rights law in the war in Gaza. Goldstone, who is Jewish, headed the mission, and his name was associated with the report for the United Nations that resulted. The Israeli government refused to cooperate with Goldstone’s mission. Its findings were not what Israeli liberal orthodoxy found acceptable. The report detailed human-rights violations carried out by the Palestinians, but it blamed most of the heavy loss of life on the government of Israel. The Goldstone report investigated Israel’s twenty-two-day air and ground assault on Gaza that took place from December 27, 2008, to January 18, 2009. The report found that Israel used disproportionate military force against Hamas militants in the Gaza Strip while failing to take adequate precautions to protect the civilian population against the military assault. The Israeli attack killed 1,434 people, including 960 civilians, according to the Palestinian Center for Human Rights. More than six thousand homes were destroyed or damaged, leaving behind some $3 billion in destruction in one of the poorest areas on Earth. Hamas rockets fired into Israel during the assault killed no Israelis.
But the report did not limit itself to the twenty-two-day attack: it went on to indict the occupation itself. It examined the beginning of the occupation and condemned Israel for the border closures, the blockade, and for the wall, or security barrier, in the West Bank. It had two references to the right of return—the right of displaced Palestinians and their descendants to return and settle in Israel—and investigated Israeli torture. It criticized the willful destruction of the Palestinian economy. Goldstone, like Moore, immediately felt the wrath of the liberal class. His name was vilified and because of threats and an effort by a Zionist group to bar him, he decided in April 2010 not to risk attending his grandson’s bar mitzvah in South Africa. An arrangement was finally struck that allowed him to attend, after great controversy, both in South Africa and Israel.
Goldstone is the quintessential Jewish liberal, a champion of human rights and international law. He has long and close ties to Israel. His mother was an activist in the Zionist movement. His daughter moved to Israel. He is a member of the board of governors of Hebrew University, where he also has an honorary degree. But Goldstone, like Moore and Schanberg, dared to place his conscience above his career. And the rage of the liberal class directed toward Goldstone was the rage of those who, because of him, had their complicity with power and acts of injustice exposed.
“
Liberal
has a distinct connotation,” Norman Finkelstein said when we spoke:
Liberal
has a distinct connotation,” Norman Finkelstein said when we spoke:
It means to believe in the rule of law. It means to believe in international institutions. It means to believe in human rights. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are liberal organizations. What the Goldstone phenomenon registers and catalyzes is the fact that it is impossible to reconcile liberal convictions with Israel’s conduct. Too much is now known about the history of the conflict and the human-rights record and the so-called peace process. It is impossible to be both liberal and defend Israeli policy. That was the conflict that confronted Goldstone. I very much doubt he wanted to condemn Israel.
7
“Israeli liberalism always had a function in Israeli society,” said Finkelstein, whose book
This Time We Went Too Far
examines the 2008 Israeli attack on Gaza:
This Time We Went Too Far
examines the 2008 Israeli attack on Gaza:
When I talk about liberals, I mean people like A. B. Yehoshua, David Grossman, and Amos Oz. Their function was to issue these anguished criticisms of Israel, which not only extenuated Israeli crimes but exalted Israeli crimes. “Isn’t it beautiful, the Israeli soul, how it is anguished over what it has done.” It is the classic case of having your cake and eating it. And now something strange happened. Along comes a Jewish liberal and he says, “Spare me your tears. I am only interested in the law.”
“Goldstone did not perform the role of the Jewish liberal,” Finkelstein said, “which is to be anguished, but no consequences. And all of a sudden Israeli liberal Jews are discovering, hey, there are consequences for committing war crimes. You don’t just get to walk into the sunset and look beautiful. They can’t believe it. They are genuinely shocked. ‘Aren’t our tears consequences enough? Aren’t our long eyes and broken hearts consequences enough?’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘you have to go to the criminal court.’”
The campaign against Goldstone took the form of venomous denunciations of all activists and jurists. It includes a bill before the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, making it possible to imprison the leaders of Israeli human-rights groups if they failed to comply with crippling new registration conditions. Human-rights activists from outside Israel who work in the Palestinian territories were rounded up and deported. The government refused to issue work visas to employees of 150 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) operating in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, including Oxfam, Save the Children, and Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders). The new tourist visas effectively barred these employees from Palestinian territory under Israeli occupation. Professor Naomi Chazan, the Israeli head of the New Israel Fund (NIF), which has donors in the United States, was vilified by ultranationalist groups such as Im Tirtzu. Chazan had spoken out on human-rights issues in Israel, and Im Tirtzu claimed the NIF was connected with groups that had funneled anti-Israel information to the Goldstone mission. Israeli officials pressured foreign donors to the NIF, as well as other human-rights groups, to halt contributions. Chazan had written a column for the
Jerusalem Post
. The paper terminated the column. Billboards sprouted up around Tel Aviv and Jerusalem with a grotesque caricature of Chazan. Groups such as Im Tirtzu had branded her as an agent for Hamas and Iran, with a horn growing from her forehead. “Naomi-Goldstone-Chazan,” the caption on the billboard read. Im Tirtzu included among its financial backers the ministries of right-wing Christian pastor John Hagee and the New York Central Fund, which also supports extremist settler organizations.
Jerusalem Post
. The paper terminated the column. Billboards sprouted up around Tel Aviv and Jerusalem with a grotesque caricature of Chazan. Groups such as Im Tirtzu had branded her as an agent for Hamas and Iran, with a horn growing from her forehead. “Naomi-Goldstone-Chazan,” the caption on the billboard read. Im Tirtzu included among its financial backers the ministries of right-wing Christian pastor John Hagee and the New York Central Fund, which also supports extremist settler organizations.
“This is the first time the human-rights dimension of the Israel-Palestine conflict has moved center stage,” Finkelstein noted:
It has temporarily displaced the fatuous peace process. It is the first time that human-rights reports have counted. There are literally, because I have read them, tens if not hundreds of thousands of pages of accumulation of human rights reports condemning Israel going back roughly to the first
intifada
[a Palestinian uprising against Israeli rule, 1987-1993] to the present. The human-rights organizations since the 1990s have been quite sharp in their criticism of Israel human-rights policy, but nobody ever reads the reports. They are never reported on, with maybe a couple of exceptions, in the mainstream media. The Goldstone report was the first time the findings of these human-rights organizations moved center stage. People stopped talking about the peace process and started talking about Israel’s human-rights record.
Finkelstein was cut off by the liberal class from the start of his career as an academic. He studied a 1984 book by Joan Peters,
From Time Immemorial
. The book was widely praised by Jewish intellectuals such as Barbara Tuchman, Saul Bellow, and Martin Peretz. But Finkelstein’s research showed that it was a hoax.
From Time Immemorial
made the mendacious claim that the land of Palestine was largely unpopulated when Jewish settlers arrived. Finkelstein’s research discredited a legal document, central to Peters’s book, which denied Palestinians rights to the land in Palestine. He soon found himself at war with the powerful Israeli lobby. But he refused to back down, continuing his scholarship, which demolished myths surrounding Israel and exposed Israel’s political and financial exploitation of the Nazi Holocaust. This work swiftly turned him into a pariah. He was pushed out of numerous universities, including New York University, Hunter College, and DePaul University in Chicago, although his review committee at DePaul had recommended him for tenure.
From Time Immemorial
. The book was widely praised by Jewish intellectuals such as Barbara Tuchman, Saul Bellow, and Martin Peretz. But Finkelstein’s research showed that it was a hoax.
From Time Immemorial
made the mendacious claim that the land of Palestine was largely unpopulated when Jewish settlers arrived. Finkelstein’s research discredited a legal document, central to Peters’s book, which denied Palestinians rights to the land in Palestine. He soon found himself at war with the powerful Israeli lobby. But he refused to back down, continuing his scholarship, which demolished myths surrounding Israel and exposed Israel’s political and financial exploitation of the Nazi Holocaust. This work swiftly turned him into a pariah. He was pushed out of numerous universities, including New York University, Hunter College, and DePaul University in Chicago, although his review committee at DePaul had recommended him for tenure.
He has spent most of his academic career as an adjunct professor earning $15,000 to $18,000 annually. Yet his work, including
Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict,
published in 1995, is one of the finest and most important by any scholar on Israeli relations with the Palestinians. His writing is driven by a relentless search for truth and his compassion for the Palestinians and their suffering. This compassion, he often says, comes from his experience as the son of Holocaust survivors. In the suffering of the Palestinians, he saw the suffering his mother and father endured in the Warsaw ghetto and later the Nazi death camps. Unlike many of his critics, Finkelstein understands the lessons of the Holocaust, and of war. He has applied them to the fight against the abuse and suffering of others, even if this abuse is being carried out by Israel.
Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict,
published in 1995, is one of the finest and most important by any scholar on Israeli relations with the Palestinians. His writing is driven by a relentless search for truth and his compassion for the Palestinians and their suffering. This compassion, he often says, comes from his experience as the son of Holocaust survivors. In the suffering of the Palestinians, he saw the suffering his mother and father endured in the Warsaw ghetto and later the Nazi death camps. Unlike many of his critics, Finkelstein understands the lessons of the Holocaust, and of war. He has applied them to the fight against the abuse and suffering of others, even if this abuse is being carried out by Israel.
Liberals are expected by the power elite to police their own. The Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz plays this role. He has used his position to mount campaigns against liberal dissidents such as Finkelstein and Middle East studies departments in universities such as Columbia. The use of prominent liberals to do the dirty work of the power elite is an old and effective tactic. In the late 1940s into the 1950s, the philosopher Sidney Hook, a former Trotskyist, enthusiastically supported the purging of communists from their posts in universities to avoid “playing into the hands of native reaction which would like to wipe out all liberal dissent.” Hook, who argued that leftists, communists, radicals, and those he termed “ritualist liberals” endanger freedom, understood that the power elite would only accept criticism that did not defy corporate structures and ideologies. It would never permit radical critics to achieve positions of prominence within liberal institutions. He feared that unless the liberal class acted as enforcers of proper doctrine it would collide with the power elite. Hook defended this purging as “the enforcement of the proper professional standards.” He called this “a matter of ethical hygiene and not of political heresy or persecution.” Hook encouraged his fellow academics to “name names” in the 1950s hunt for communists within the universities, drawing an analogy between communists and drug dealers. He founded several groups, such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which took CIA money to counter and discourage American intellectuals from favoring cooperation with the Soviet Union. And the power elite rewarded him for his service. The anti-liberal National Association of Scholars offers a $2,500 Sidney Hook Award every year to “uncommon service in the defense of intellectual freedom and academic integrity.”
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