These essays begin with a dissection of the intifada at the end of 1987 and deal with people and events through 1994, when Israel began to withdraw from the disputed territories. Ineffective militarily, Edward Alexander notes, the intifada proved a potent propaganda tool: "The spectacle of young Palestinian Arabs (at least in the early stages of the uprising, before the violence became highly organized) facing Israeli soldiers won for the Arabs precisely the victory they had sought: it swung liberal, including (if not ...
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These essays begin with a dissection of the intifada at the end of 1987 and deal with people and events through 1994, when Israel began to withdraw from the disputed territories. Ineffective militarily, Edward Alexander notes, the intifada proved a potent propaganda tool: "The spectacle of young Palestinian Arabs (at least in the early stages of the uprising, before the violence became highly organized) facing Israeli soldiers won for the Arabs precisely the victory they had sought: it swung liberal, including (if not especially) Jewish liberal, sympathy decisively to the side of the Arabs and against Israel." Alexander's book is the first to subject to withering criticism the "body of ideas that lured Israel into the quagmire called the 'peace process.'" He excoriates prominent figures in politics, journalism, education, and literature who express hostility to, or open hatred of, Jews, Judaism, and Israel. Convinced that it is in the realm of ideas that the battle will be lost or won, Alexander has given special attention to "some of the more brazen and flamboyant combatants in. . . the 'Jewish wars'--Edward Said, Patrick Buchanan, the late George Ball, Alexander Cockburn, Michael Lerner, Noam Chomsky and still more to certain omnipresent personality types: the timorous Jew cloaking his timidity in the robes of the biblical prophet; the treacherous Jew presenting betrayal of his own people as ethical idealism; the ferocious antisemite parading as a dispassionate 'critic of Israeli policies'; the journalist and publicist exploiting the full public-address and public-relations systems afforded by his profession while complaining that his voice is being 'stifled' by 'the Jewish establishment.'" Recurring themes in Alexander's essays are the relations between the Jews of America and those of Israel, the incorporation of anti-Zionism into the ideology of "multiculturalism" and the conventions of literary discussion, the politically motivated "distortion and exploitation" of the Holocaust, the strategies of moral and political discrimination used against Israel, the strategies employed by some prominent American and Israeli Jews to evade the implications of this discrimination, and the growing impunity with which antisemitism can be preached at both ends of the political spectrum. Alexander also reproduces some of the lively debate engendered by his essays in Commentary and Congress Monthly.
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