David Remnick has a piece in The New Yorker this week, on Israeli ex-politician Avraham Burg, called "The Apostate." Remnick frequently dwells in a fantasy world where Israel is always nobly seeking peace according to a two-state scenario that Remnick often proclaims as self-evident. Still, I was astonished to read:

More recently, Hezbollah's ideological ally in Palestine, Hamas -- the Islamic Resistance Movement -- led a violent uprising in the Gaza Strip, overwhelming its secular rival, Fatah. Suddenly, Israel, backed by the United States, found itself propping up the Fatah leadership, in order not to lose the West Bank to Hamas as well.

I always thought The New Yorker was legendary for its fact-checking department. Leaving aside the question of whether the Hezbollah-Hamas alliance is anything more than the fevered product of neocon imagination -- if so it is the only functioning instance of Sunni-Shia harmony in today's Middle East -- the key error is Hamas came to power not by violent uprising but by a democratic election, which the US (over Israeli objections) first insisted on staging, then (with Israeli agreement) rejected, as (oops!) the wrong side won. The "violent uprising" -- actually, a coup attempt against the Hamas government -- was started by US-armed warlord Mohammed Dahlan's gang, which Hamas managed to disarm in Gaza, but not in the West Bank.

Maybe this escaped the fact-checkers because it was too gross to be seen as mere fact. It amounts to no less than a systematic abuse of history.

The main part of the article consists of a couple of quotes from an interview of Burg by Ari Shavit, resulting in numerous people attacking Burg. One quote ends with Burg saying: "There is no one to talk to here. The religious community of which I was a part -- I feel no sense of belonging to it. The secular community -- I am not part of it, either. I have no one to talk to. I am sitting with you and you don't understand me, either." Burg's outrage was his slandering of Zionism: "He describes the country in its current state as Holocaust-obsessed, militaristic, xenophobic, and, like Germany in the nineteen-thirties, vulnerable to an extremist minority."

Remnick's article bears out that description. Burg's critics put their outrage out front to avoid having to discuss anything substantial. Or they just dither around the edges, avoiding the subject, as in this quote:

"The comparison with pre-Nazi Germany is absurd," Shavit said over lunch one afternoon in Jerusalem. "Also, Israel was much more militaristic in the old days. I don't like the role of generals in political life, and i regret the lack of a Truman to restrain the influence of generals -- a tough, decent civilian who understands the need to use power but who is decisive in controlling the Army. But there is nothing here of that Junker tradition or even anything like America's military élites and academies. Israelis live in an open, free society with a very free spirit, even verging on anarchy. To describe us as a Bismarckian state with expansionist chauvinism -- if there was a grain of truth to that, it was thirty years ago! Soldiers here take off their uniforms as soon as they come home. They're not proud of their uniforms or their ranks. Wearing a uniform doesn't get you girls." There are anti-Arab racists in Israel, he added, but nothing like those in Burg's favorite part of the world. "There are actual racist parties in Continental Europe that are far more powerful than any of the sickening elements here," Shavit said. "There is no chance that an Israeli Day parade will draw as many as the number of people who came out for the Gay Pride parade in Tel Aviv. So to describe this as a Prussian Sparta is ridiculous."

Then what is it? Much the same can be said about America, but still we have armed forces based in hundreds of countries abroad, including very hot wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we have an arsenal large enough to toast the entire earth. Talk to Americans in the streets all across the country and you'd never imagine we're capable of doing the things our government routinely does, but there's such an enormous disconnect between everyday life and politics in the US that those questions never even come up for debate -- no one is allowed to debate them. It's not surprising that the same thing applies in Israel, but there's also a lot of willful self-deception. Remnick quotes one poll as showing that 30% of Israelis want Yitzhak Rabin's assassin to be pardoned. It's hard to reconcile that with Shavit's comment about how marginal the "sickening elements" are.

Postscript: After writing this, I saw a note at WarInContext on a piece from Haaretz noting that 4,300 Israelis have received German citizenship in the past year. Paul Woodward commented, quoting Berg, then adding: "The willingness of Jews to 'return' to Germany is an indication that the possibility is now opening for some Israelis to go move beyond the core of that trauma. At the same time, Zionists will clearly feel threatened by the possibility that a significant number of the 300,000 Israelis entitled to German citizenship might take up that opportunity."

Having recently read Tom Segev's 1967 and Sandy Tolan's The Lemon Tree, I've been thinking about revisions to the piece plan piece I posted a couple of years ago. I've been looking for unilateral acts -- things that do not require Israeli agreement -- that would move the argument toward resolution. One thing that I think should be done would be for as many other countries as possible to adopt Israel's "Law of Return" and extend it to Palestinians as well as to Jews. It's very unlikely that it would have much if any demographic impact in any countries, but it would establish the point that Jews don't have to go to or stay in Israel -- that the whole world welcomes them. It would also help settle Palestinian refugees, making some small progress against their tragedy -- and thereby reducing the settlement problem. It would require some soul searching, and a commitment to respect and protect minority rights, but both of those would be good things. It would also drive the Zionists crazy, or crazier, because it would show up how dated and dysfunctional their ideology is.