Riding shotgun for Netanyahu

[CrackSmokeRepublican]

Riding shotgun for Netanyahu, Uzi Arad had a 'foundational fantasy' about anti-Semitism

by Philip Weiss on May 19, 2009 · 14 comments



OBAMA, PRESUMABLY, WILL be too polite to ask Netanyahu: "What kind of Jewish state?" But perhaps his people could later put the question to Uzi Arad, the other Israeli official in the room, [who has an interesting history] who wrote in the New Republic a few years back what Avigdor Lieberman now suggests, that Israel keep the settlements and offer Palestine, in return, the Israeli Arab towns in the Little Triangle. "The various land swap plans," Arad writes, "proposing a tradeoff of territories aim to increase ethnic homogeneity... [so that] the Jewish majority would remain at 81 percent until 2050." Gee, 81 percent until 2050. And here I thought math was hard; that, anyway, Arab families living in Israel for 61 years, raised in the Hebrew language, and aspiring to lives in Israeli hospitals, high tech companies, and universities, might (if we can get past their rage) actually enrich the country.
Look, Arad was a colleague of mine for a while, and whatever he thought of me, I found him very engaging. I even once tried, in a modest way, to help him raise money in Toronto for his Herzliya Conference and research institute. He always showed me respect, even warmth (though I was hardly in a position to be his rival). I found him brilliant and morally serious; he once told me, what I took to be a kind of foundational fantasy, that he would like to organize a secret force to strike at anti-Semites anywhere in the world–something like the late Mordechai Richler's St. Urbain's Horseman, I thought.

Scott McConnell, who passed this along, writes:
What an idea, to go after anti-Semites–or "anti-Semites"–the same way the Mossad went after the PLO after the Munich Olympics. Who would be on Arad's list? Jimmy Carter? Steve Walt and John Mearsheimer? Contributors to this website? An interesting window into whom we're dealing with.

http://mondoweiss.net/2009/05/riding-sh ... ideas.html