Seeing the things in front of our eyes

JVL Introduction

In a perceptive essay, Peter Beinart reflects on the fact that “Throughout American history, respectable people have made respectable-sounding arguments on behalf of practices we now consider self-evidently immoral.”

The phenomenon is of course not restricted to the US!

The example Beinart gives is of a criticism of Nelson Mandela made in 1990, which strongly condemned him as a man who “practiced and condoned” violence.

The elements of the critique were all true – only it ignored the core issue: apartheid, a system of institutionalized violence and legalized bigotry…

The American debate over Israel-Palestine is structured in the same way, argues Beinart.

So, while there is a place to talk about Hamas’s repression, the PA’s corruption or even left antisemitism, Beinart says (and all of which he has done), “when they become a vehicle for evading the fact that Israel subjects millions of Palestinians to institutionalised violence and legalised bigotry, they become […] a lie.”

Or again, ” there’s something deeply wrong when Palestinians (who lack basic rights) and their supporters receive far harsher scrutiny than Israel, which is denying them those rights”.

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Thanks to Peter Beinart for permission to repost.

This article was originally published by The Beinart Notebook on Mon 9 Aug 2021. Read the original here.