The Case of Alice Walker Shows That Anti-Semitism Is One Prejudice That Doesn’t Lead to Cancellation

Last week, the New Yorker published a long and fawning profile of Alice Walker, who established her literary reputation in 1982 with her novel The Color Purple. Although focused on Walker’s most recent activities, it makes only oblique mention of her anti-Semitism, which has manifested itself not only in routine denunciations of Israel but in numerous statements, blog posts, and other writings, including a poem about the Talmud that could have appeared in Der Stürmer. Caitlin Flanagan contrasts this ginger treatment to the sort of hand-wringing and denunciations with which publications like the New Yorker treat artists and writers with records of racism, bigotry against homosexuals, or other prejudices:

[S]ince 2012 Walker has promoted the ideas of . . . David Icke, the author of a book called And the Truth Shall Set You Free. . . . Icke suggests that the Jewish people helped pay for the Holocaust themselves (if it even happened; he thinks schoolchildren should be encouraged to debate this). He says that the KKK is secretly Jewish, and he seems to be a big fan of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Walker . . . has rejected charges of anti-Semitism as attempts to silence her support for the Palestinians, but the argument that Walker’s issue is only with the Israeli government, not with the Jewish people, is specious. In that poem, she describes the Palestinians as just the latest examples of the victims of an “ancient” evil perpetrated “with impunity, and without conscience,/ By a Chosen people.” This is hate.

Of all the forms of hatred in the world, why is anti-Semitism so often presented as somehow less evil than the others? Alice Walker’s beliefs are . . . repugnant. . . . Yet even The New Yorker is willing to dismiss them as the consequence of [her age], of the sorrow and oppression of her youth, of YouTube—as a late-in-life aberration. It is willing to print an assessment of And the Truth Shall Set You Free that describes it as promoting “anti-Semitic crackpottery.” Crackpottery? That’s one way of putting it. I realize now that this phrase includes the only appearance of the term anti-Semitic in the essay. If you didn’t come to this essay with a preexisting understanding of Walker’s hateful ideas, I expect it would be very easy to read these sentences about her beliefs and not really know what they are.

Read more at Atlantic

More about: Alice Walker, Anti-Semitism, Cancel culture, New Yorker

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF