Israel at Sixty: An Interview with Mitchell Cohen
Daniel Buarque: You point out in your article, “Anti-Semitism and the Left that Doesn’t Learn” (Dissent, Winter 2008), that Israel’s legitimacy is often questioned in the world because of conflicts in the Middle East and because of Israel’s relationship to the Palestinians. Should the rest of the world celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of Israeli independence? Why?
Mitchell Cohen: One of the points I tried to make is that Israel is subjected to double standards, especially on the left. Saying tha... MoreThe Turin Book Fair Controversy: Q and A
Uproar broke out after Paris and Turin’s international book announced their plan to honor the state of Israel at their upcoming events. Many protested the choice—and some, including Tariq Ali and Tariq Ramadan, have called for a boycott. Dissent co-editor Mitchell Cohen speaks with Elisabetta Ambrosi, a Rome-based journalist for the Italian journal, Reset.
Elisabetta Ambrosi: This year the Turin Book Fair has chosen to honor Israel on its sixtieth anniversary of statehood. Novelists David Grossman, A.B. Yehoshua, Amos Oz and Etgar Keret, amo... More
The Turin Book Fair Controversy: A Debate
Uproar broke out after Turin’s International Book Fair announced plans to honor the state of Israel on its sixtieth anniversary. Several European and Arab intellectuals threatened to boycott the event while others, including Dissent co-editor Mitchell Cohen, argued that the call to boycott represented a larger “campaign across borders to de-legitimize one state and apply standards to this one state that are applied to nobody else.”
With the book fair a month away, Cohen and fellow political theorist Andrew Arato debate the issues surrounding the Turin Contro... More
Turin Controversy: Attacking the Left is Pure Evasion
This is not the right time to make Israel the guest of honor at a book fair, unless Israeli Jewish and Arab writers were put into the center of attention. With that said, the boycott is stupid.
Why boycott precisely the writers who are critical of government policies? Yes, let us support the Israel’s right to exist. But a state is a people, a territory, and a coercive organization. There is no question about the identity of the coercive organization, and we should accept it as such.
But should we all accept every Jew (by the very uncertain standards of the law of retur... More
Turin Controversy: Missing the Point
My friend Andrew Arato charges me with “pure evasion,” but he misses the point, indeed, several points. He grants Israel’s right to exist, which is good of him, but asks: “which territorial entity” should be recognized? That, however, is not the issue for Tariq Ramadan, Tariq Ali and (most) of the black-listers. Their issue is the existence of the Jewish state regardless of borders. My criticisms are of the “left that doesn’t learn” in explicit contrast to “the fair and opened minded left.” (See “Anti-Semitism and the ... More
Turin Controversy: Ethnocentrism and Israel
“States exist in history” is just about as ridiculous and ambiguous truism we can say about them. Of course they do, but what constitutes them as states? As far as history is concerned it is radically a matter of interpretation, and to a lot of people, not Mitchell Cohen, Judea and Samaria are historically parts of the State of Israel. It so happens Israel occupies these places.
It does not matter whose fault it is that it came to be so. As far as I now see it, the 1967 War was an aggressive Israeli war. But the Jordanian annexation of the West Bank in 1948, and its subsequent Israe... More
Turin Controversy: Against Integral Cosmopolitanism
I delayed responding to Andy Arato in the hope that Tariq Ramadan and Tariq Ali might clarify some issues by demanding a boycott of the Olympics to protest the killings in Tibet, a poor land occupied brutally since 1951. Alas, I cannot report that Ramadan has called on members of the Arab League or Iran to act against Beijing, which is also a chief patron of Sudan’s genocidal government. Ali does not seem to be urging intellectuals to action on China comparable to his (and Ramadan’s) campaign to deny Israel honors at European book fairs. Perhaps sport must just go on as it did the Olympics ... More
Turin Controversy: Missing the Point
My friend Andrew Arato charges me with “pure evasion,” but he misses the point, indeed, several points. He grants Israel’s right to exist, which is good of him, but asks: “which territorial entity” should be recognized? That, however, is not the issue for Tariq Ramadan, Tariq Ali and (most) of the black-listers. Their issue is the existence of the Jewish state regardless of borders. My criticisms are of the “left that doesn’t learn” in explicit contrast to “the fair and opened minded left.” (See “Anti-Semitism and the ... More
Anti-Semitism and the Left that Doesn’t Learn
I.
A DETERMINED offensive is underway. Its target is in the Middle East, and it is an old target: the legitimacy of Israel. Hezbollah and Hamas are not the protagonists, the contested terrains are not the Galilee and southern Lebanon or southern Israel and Gaza. The means are not military. The offensive comes from within parts of the liberal and left intelligentsia in the United States and Europe. It has nothing to do with this or that negotiation between Israelis and Palestinians, and it has nothing to do with any particular Israeli policy. After all, this or that Israeli policy m... More
Arctic Jews: An Interview with Michael Chabon
Like Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America, Michael Chabon’s newest novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, is set in a counterfactual world. In Chabon’s retelling of history, the U.S. permitted European Jews fleeing Hitler to settle in Sitka, a small fishing town in Alaska. After the 1948 defeat of the nascent state of Israel, the city becomes the improbable center of a new Jewish homeland—one where the language remains primarily Yiddish. The book is, among other things, a gripping murder mystery set in the “present” as the settlement is preparing to revert back to... More
Bridging the Divide
Palestinian intellectual Sari Nusseibeh is no stranger to the difficulties of achieving peace between Israelis and Palestinians. He notes in his recent memoir Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life: “Putting moral theory into practice—never very easy—is a daunting task in a war zone.” A long-time advocate of a two-state solution, he was the PLO’s chief representative in Jerusalem in 2001 and 2002 and is now president of Jerusalem-based al-Quds University. Dissent contributor Jon Wiener (“The Weatherman Temptation,” Spring 2007) caught up with N... More
