Rosenberg takes on Pipes

M.J. Rosenberg is the Director of Policy Analysis at the extremely centrist American pro-Israeli organization Israel Policy Forum (IPF). And he has a beef with the extremely hardline American pro-Israeli activist Daniel Pipes.
In a very moving column Rosenberg wrote last Friday, he started off by talking a little about his extended family of Holocaust survivors, including his kids, their American cousins, and their Israeli cousins:

these kids are here. That’s the miracle.
The ancestors they have in common would have a hard time recognizing their descendants. The Americans are very….American. Life is all about jobs, sports, hip-hop music, internships, iPods, etc.
The Israelis, from a 1939 Polish Jewish point of view, are just as improbable. They live in a country that last existed as a Jewish state 1900 years previous. They speak Hebrew. And they are also very religious (none of the Americans are) with their lives revolving around youth groups, studying in yeshivot, the army, etc.
When we are together, there are always discussions about politics. The Israeli cousins demonstrated against the Gaza withdrawal and are on the Right. That certainly is not the case with the Americans.
But the political discussions do not descend into arguments. Even though we are family and even though the Americans have strong feelings on Israeli politics, the Americans are not going to tell the Israelis what they should think. The Israelis live there and the boys go into the army. There is a real hesitancy about telling them what they should or shouldn’t do with their lives.
Everyone is aware of what is and isn’t appropriate for American Jews to be telling their Israeli counterparts…

But not so, Danny Pipes, very comfortably ensconced in his self-made little empire up there in Philadelphia. Rosenberg writes of him:

He is best-known for running an outfit called “Campus Watch” which enlists college students to monitor their professors in an effort to curb free discussion of Middle East issues.
He believes, and has repeatedly written, that Israel should abandon the idea of compromise of any sort with the Palestinians and should instead defeat them the way the allies defeated the Nazis i.e. make them surrender and have the victor dictate the terms of the peace.
In general, Pipes’ view of the situation indicates a fairly unsophisticated grasp of Israel’s situation. He seems not to know that the Palestinians are not a regime, which can be eradicated, but rather a people with whom Israel is destined to share the land forever. (They also represent close to half the population of historic Palestine and, before the refugees fled, represented a majority of it).
In his New York Sun column, Pipes excoriated all of Israel’s leading political parties for seeking ways to achieve coexistence with the Palestinians rather than “offer[ing] the option of winning the war against the Palestinian Arabs.”
He calls this omission a “striking and dangerous lacuna.” (I didn’t know what lacuna meant until I looked it up. It is “an empty space or a missing part.”) In other words, missing from Israeli politics is a determination to fight the Palestinians to the death.
Brave words from Philadelphia.
Pipes then itemizes all the bad ideas Israelis have come up with as alternatives to war. These include the security barrier, disengagement, promoting Palestinian economic development, territorial compromise, promoting democracy and bilateral negotiations.
He even rejects the noxious idea of “transfer,” the Kahanist plan to deport Palestinians across the border, as an attempt to “manage the conflict without resolving it.” How chilling is that? If Pipes considers the insane idea of “transfer” too moderate, what precisely would be acceptable to him?
For a start, he believes Israel needs another war. Anything else is a waste of time. Only another war will do the job although seven previous wars – 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982, and the first and second intifadas –somehow did not. But Pipes believes that the next one will – if it is pursued to unambiguous victory.

He continues:

Pipes’ call for war would be outrageous enough if an Israeli offered it. But an Israeli, of course, puts his money where his mouth is. An armchair warrior in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania simply sits on the couch and watches the action on cable.
Needless to say, Israelis, who heard about Pipes’ call to arms, were angered.
Bradley Burston, a Ha’aretz columnist, calls Pipes a “new kind of Israel basher.” And, he adds, Pipes is far from alone in his physical bravery by proxy.
“In fact,” Burston writes, “a number of our readers who live in North America, some of whom regularly use the word coward to describe Israeli moderates, have any number of suggestions for us as well, up to and including the use of weapons of mass destruction on Palestinians, apparently in an effort to change their minds about us.
“Daniel Pipes…is an equal-opportunity hater of Israelis. None of us is good enough for him. We lack the will to fight….Try as we might, we just can’t seem to win his war for him.”
“His war.”
Pipes, like so many others on the Right, does not support endless war for Israel out of a love for the Jewish homeland gone terribly wrong. They support war because they are simply tough guys from afar. They walk taller when some Israeli 19-year old dons his uniform. As Burston puts it, Israelis are their “mercenaries.” Or, at least, that is what these guys want them to be.
I have read many columns by Pipes and the other well-known columnist/hawks and I cannot recall any in which their ardor for Zion is expressed in a positive way. They don’t extol the beauty of Jerusalem or the live-and-let-live Mediterranean style of Tel Aviv. Israel, as depicted by them, is neither beautiful, nor spiritual nor cultural. It is just some would-be Sparta, clad in uniform, always ready for the next fight. In fact, their negative feelings toward Palestinians far outweigh any positive sentiments toward Israel.
“A new kind of Israel basher.” That is exactly right.

By the way, up at the top here, I was about to describe Rosenberg’s organization, the IPF, as “just slightly left of center.” But I saw that they featured Ehud Olmert at their “Tribute to Israel” dinner last June. And I looked at the web-page on which they list their (one gender only) “leaders”, who include Seymour Reich and Steve Spiegel, and I had a hard idea thinking of the organization as being “left of” anything… Unless you say “left of AIPAC”, which really isn’t saying anything significant at all.
So that’s even better in a way. If even people associated with a very middle-of-the road Jewish-American pro-Israel organization are expressing such strong public criticisms of Danny Pipes, that’s good news indeed.