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February 16, 2011

Amid turmoil, Wieseltier sees clear path in Middle East

By Tom Tugend

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You have to sympathize with public speakers asked to deliver carefully prepared lectures on the situation in the Middle East, where events have a habit of overtaking incisive scholarly analyses.

So it befell Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of the New Republic, prolific writer and all-around public intellectual, who was the speaker at the ninth annual Daniel Pearl Lecture at UCLA last week.

Pearl, of course, was the Wall Street Journal reporter murdered in 2002 by Muslim extremists in Pakistan. The lectures in his name were initiated by his parents, Judea and Ruth Pearl, and always draw a large, well-informed crowd.

Last year, Christopher Hitchens was the speaker, and before him the likes of Anderson Cooper, Thomas Friedman, Daniel Schorr, Bernard-Henri Levy and … uh … Larry King.

Wieseltier said he had his lecture down pat, based on the certainty that “nothing had changed in the Middle East for 60 years,” when, wouldn’t you know, the mass protests in Cairo triggered drastic changes.

When the speaker took the podium, Hosni Mubarak had just announced that he would not give up the Egyptian presidency, so Wieseltier changed his talk to criticize President Barack Obama’s lack of support for the democratic struggle of the Egyptian people, and he speculated about possible bloodshed ahead.

But again the world started spinning in overdrive, and by the morning after the lecture, Mubarak had decided to vacate the presidential palace after all.

Tiptoeing through the thicket of Middle East politics and Israeli, Palestinian and U.S. policies, Wieseltier generally hewed to a middle-of-the-road position, critical of both the left and the right.

In his talk, subtitled “The Defeat of Reason in the Middle East,” and during a Q-and-A session that followed, Wieseltier made such points as:

• A solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through partition has been obvious since the British mandate’s Peel report in 1937. “Everyone knows how to reach peace but won’t go there,” Wieseltier said.

• Regardless of ideologies and historical claims, when a people regard themselves as a nation, be they Jewish or Palestinian, they must be regarded as a nation.

• There has been remarkable development on the West Bank, where Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, a technocrat, has been creating the infrastructure of a future state, copying the Jewish model before 1948.

• The greatest danger facing Israel is the delegitimization of the two-state solution in favor of a single state for Arabs and Jews, which would result in the erasure of Israel.

• Israel’s greatest blunder was the establishment of settlements in Gaza and the West Bank. In the future, if Israeli soldiers have to shoot settlers to assert the state’s sovereignty, “I would not be terribly worried,” he said.

• President Obama has been a disappointment. He believes in his “magical powers,” has dropped human rights as part of U.S. foreign policy and has failed to support Iranian opposition groups.

• Every sphere of Israeli life, especially the economic one, works beautifully, except politics, which are in free-fall and suffer from an unprecedented lack of leadership.

After the two-hour talk and Q-and-A session, the dialogue resumed after dinner at the UCLA Hillel Center. The indefatigable Wieseltier appeared ready to go on until midnight, had not Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller stepped in at 10 p.m. to call it a day.

A version of this article appeared in print.

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In Leon Wieseltier’s universe the unlawful, the unjustified and the unworkable become “obvious” when pursuing the partition of the Land of Israel.  The most senseless and ahistorical schemes turn out to be self-evident when it comes to recognizing a self-proclaimed Palestinian nation in a land where it has no legitimate collective claims.  And the appalling disrespect of human life is of no concern to Wieseltier when Jews may have to be brutally ethnically cleansed in their own land.

Come to think of it, he couldn’t have chosen a better title for this talk on the Middle East: the defeat of Wieseltier’s reason is palpable.

Comment by Salomon Benzimra on 2/17/11 at 3:12 pm

Wieseltier is one more Jew who acquiesces to the Arab world false narrative created with one goal in mind, the destruction of the Jewish State.

It is inconceivable that someone like Wieseltier ignores the legal rights of the Jewish people over the whole land west of the Jordan river under international law.

It is indeed pathetic to see that supposedly knowledgeable and influential Jewish People in the media are so ignorant of the fundamentals.

In fact they are the useful idiots used by the Israel’s enemy.

Comment by Sara Friedman on 2/17/11 at 4:33 pm

A Johnny-come-lately like Leon Wieseltier sure has to put his feet in the goo when it comes to the so-called Israeli-palestinian issue. Well, historically, the Jewish People have already given 90% and more of the original British Mandate. Generosity has it’s limits, Mr.Wieseltier. Well, let’s see now.

Has this wise man ever considered the history of Islam and that genocide is mandated in Islam? As recently as 1971, Muslim soldiers from Pakistan murdered over two million Hindus in the-now Bangladesh. No thank you. No more land to be given away.

Comment by Isaac on 2/17/11 at 4:44 pm

WIESELTIER: THIS IS CRAZY!
• Israel’s greatest blunder was the establishment of settlements in Gaza and the West Bank. In the future, if Israeli soldiers have to shoot settlers to assert the state’s sovereignty, “I would not be terribly worried,” he said.

TO QUOTE AL NEUMAN (February 18, 2011 01:04 am)
” It should be painfully obvious to any rational individual that the only reality which transcends all others in the Mideast Realpolitik is the unrelenting hatred of Israel and its inhabitants by nearly all it neighbor countries.”

Comment by HOWARD LAITIN on 2/19/11 at 12:58 pm

To add to Al Neuman’s quote: ” Unfortunately, Weiseltier and other journalists have become dhimmified as a result of catching the Oslo Fever and succumbing to The Stockholm Syndrome”.

Comment by Isaac on 2/19/11 at 7:58 pm

  Nothing Israel does, no gesture, no concession, no discussion, will make a difference. They can sign a peace treaty for a two state solution. Hezbollah, Al-Qaeda, Hamas,Iran, the surrounding Arab nations, & most Palestinians want Israel dead.The Muslim Brotherhood wants Israel dead.

Comment by HOWARD LAITIN on 2/19/11 at 9:28 pm

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