The ‘Cronkite moment’ during the Vietnam War was the night in 1968 when CBS anchor Walter Cronkite said the U.S. was stuck in a “stalemate” and that the only honorable path was to negotiate a withdrawal. President Johnson concluded that he’d lost Middle America and soon decided not to run for reelection.
Israel lost Middle America at least a year ago, according to opinion polls, and it is at last losing what is more important to its support, prominent mainstream voices, the Cronkites of our era.
On April 23, Geoff Bennett of the PBS NewsHour did the unthinkable. He sharply questioned the Israeli ambassador to the U.N. over Israel’s (wanton) killings of civilians and journalists in Lebanon.
“How many civilian deaths per Hezbollah target is acceptable? Is it five? Is it 10? Is it 300? Or is there no ceiling at all?” Bennet said.
And this, too: “What military objective is served by killing reporters?”
Ambassador Danny Danon did what any self-respecting spokesperson for Israel does in such a spot . . . he accused Geoff Bennett of antisemitism. He said the charges were a lie and a “blood libel.” But Bennett did what no broadcaster does, and fought back.
“I take issue with that, sir,” he said and cited Committee to Protect Journalists figures on 15 reporters and media workers killed in Lebanon.
The NewsHour surely anticipates criticism of Bennett’s refusal to accept Israeli propaganda (a sharp departure from the Dana Bashes and Jake Tappers of the world). So it has headlined the story, “Israel’s U.N. ambassador says IDF is the ‘most moral military in the world.’” Giving Danon a victory, though Danon is peeved.
There are two other signs this week that mainstream outlets are sick of Israeli talking points.
On The New Yorker Radio Hour, the Holocaust scholar Omer Bartov accused Israel of genocide, and New Yorker editor David Remnick did not seek to contradict him (as, for instance, public radio host Brian Lehrer and others do routinely when guests use the g-word).
Remnick asked Bartov about Zionism, and Bartov said that the genocide springs from the ideology of Zionism:
“Zionism… kept transforming itself into what it is today, which is an insupportable ideology of extremism, of militarism, of racism and eventually of genocide. Anyone who supports it becomes complicit in the acts.”
Remnick asked if Zionism is reformable.
“Zionism is not reformable. The state of Israel is, but the state of Israel has to be reinvented… and it cannot be reinvented according to this ethno-national principle that has taken a hold of it. What Israel needs right now is shock therapy.”
(It should be noted that Palestinians said that Zionism is racism decades ago, and our website has expressed the need for reforming Israel for many years.)
Just as bracing was former Obama aide Tommy Vietor, of the popular podcast Pod Save America, who, in a dialogue with a former Obama aide who is now an Israel lobbyist, said that the “political class” has missed the anti-Israel groundswell.
Average Americans and young ones especially, Vietor said, are enraged by “intolerable amounts of killing by Israel, first in Gaza, and now in Lebanon and Iran– and they’re doing it with American weapons.” He went on:
“Why is this really strong country bombing the shit out of Gaza over and over again? They’re just horrified by it. It’s a visceral reaction… Jonathan Greenblatt will scold me if I use the wrong words to say what’s happening, but it’s happening no matter what.”
Vietor said the political class is clueless.
“The challenge to the Democratic leadership is that the base of the Democratic party, young people, have moved way further way faster than the Democratic elected officials have, even if they’ve moved historically fast.”
Vietor said that Hasan Piker has a right to express his criticisms of Israel and went on to fault the establishment’s censorship of such criticisms.
If an American official calls Israel an apartheid state, he said, that “is treated as outrageous and essentially antisemitic.” But the Israeli human rights group B’Tselem concluded that it is an apartheid state in 2021. And anyone can see “egregious” examples of racism in Israeli policy– “unequal treatment of individuals based on religion.” Why can’t our political class have a more honest discussion?
His interlocutor, Ilan Goldenberg of J Street, sought to restrain the criticism. He said he fears that the mainstream discussion will “go too far” if it includes the “loudest voices.” He said that “Israel is not the devil,” and we should “not treat it as a uniquely evil or sinister thing, which I think is happening in some far extreme places.”
To show that Israel is not the devil, Goldenberg said that 50 to 100 other countries have committed ethnic cleansing, as Israel has done.
(I would note that Israel is actively conducting ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the West Bank right now, and if this argument is what liberal Zionists are reduced to, they have lost the Democratic base, and they know it.)
Vietor said the bottom line for most American voters is that they don’t want to spend money on Middle East wars. “That nationalist isolationist view will be the siren song that is politically powerful that frankly works on me in a lot of instances,” he said. His comments are not that different from Tucker Carlson and former national counterterrorism boss Joe Kent, on the right.
Liberal Zionists and the Democratic leadership are both seeking to dampen the rage with Israel by adopting a civility standard.
At Harvard, the school’s president recently decried “anti-Israeli bias,” which he called “insidious and maybe more corrosive of University life” than antisemitism. While at a high school in Scarsdale, N.Y., everyone in authority has decried activists who stuck an Israelfest flyer in a toilet as antisemites.
These officials are all living in “the propaganda dreamworld pre-Gaza,” as Donald Johnson (a longtime voice on this site) tells me. “That dreamworld goes back decades, where you were supposed to take for granted that Israel was a lovely democracy, the unquestioned good guys, and harsh rejection of this was antisemitic, aimed at Jews in general. And we aren’t supposed to think this attitude didn’t have influence on our politicians who pandered to it. But of course, it does and the Iran War is one of its products.”
That discourse is shifting by the minute. Bartov said that diverse students flock to his Brown University course in which he outlines Israel’s failings, because other professors are avoiding the topic lest they be accused of antisemitism. “And I don’t give a damn.”
The reason Bartov doesn’t give a damn is because he is an Israeli Jew who served in that country’s army and is therefore officially immune to the antisemitism charge.
So we are back to the core question– who has the right to criticize Israel in the United States media? Who has a right to express the outrage of ordinary Americans? Geoff Bennett broke a seal last week.
