Big Duck, Andrew Sullivan, and the Inescapable Need to Condemn the Jewish State

Jan. 20 2022

In the past, the Brooklyn-based public-relations firm Big Duck has worked extensively with several Jewish organizations, including the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. But it recently informed the Shalom Hartman Institute (SHI)—an educational and research center with a decidedly liberal bent—that it would not do business with it for unclear reasons related to Israel. Daniel Gordis, in a wide-ranging reflection on contemporary anti-Semitism, observes:

It would be hard to think of an outfit that is more intellectually acute, moderate, open to a plethora of voices, [and] openly critical of Israel’s policies on numerous issues, that works with Jews and Muslims together, religious and secular—you get the picture. (For the record, I have no affiliation with the Hartman Institute.) Big Duck later claimed that it did not to know about that dimension of Hartman, but to believe that, you’d have to believe that it turned down working with SHI without so much as reading the SHI website.

Realizing that they’d stepped in it, big time, Big Duck tried to make the best of things. . . . “Big Duck does not decline work with organizations solely due to their position on BDS or presence in Israel,” Farra Trompeter, Big Duck’s co-director said. Ouch. The “sin” here wasn’t being situated over the Green Line, or being pro-annexation, or pro-settlement expansion. Or whatever. The sin was having a “presence in Israel.”

The problem isn’t Israel’s policies. The problem is Israel.

And that isn’t so different from what Gordis observed in a podcast conversation between the Anglo-American journalist Andrew Sullivan and the Israeli thinker (and Hartman Institute senior fellow) Yossi Klein Halevi:

Sullivan said on several occasions things like “it’s hard for me not to want Israel to succeed, and it’s hard for me not to see Israel as an astonishing story,” adding that he admires “what has been positively built there, which is stunning.” But it couldn’t end there, could it? . . . That quote about Israel being an “astonishing story” came just seconds before the conversation ended. Still, just as the curtain was dropping, Sullivan wished Klein Halevi well, and closed by noting that he prayed “for you, and for your country, and for those who find your country such an intolerable source of oppression and misery.”

It was a stunning about face. It sounded like Sullivan had been quite taken with Klein Halevi, but then, at the very last minute, remembered his audience. So in what may have been an act of survival, . . . he preserved his bona fides with the world of his listeners, adding the entirely gratuitous comment about “oppression and misery.”

Read more at Israel from the Inside

More about: Anti-Semitism, BDS, Yossi Klein Halevi

Donald Trump’s Plan for Gaza Is No Worse Than Anyone Else’s—and Could Be Better

Reacting to the White House’s proposal for Gaza, John Podhoretz asks the question on everyone’s mind:

Is this all a fantasy? Maybe. But are any of the other ludicrous and cockamamie ideas being floated for the future of the area any less fantastical?

A Palestinian state in the wake of October 7—and in the wake of the scenes of Gazans mobbing the Jewish hostages with bloodlust in their eyes as they were being led to the vehicles to take them back into the bosom of their people? Biden foreign-policy domos Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken were still talking about this in the wake of their defeat in ludicrous lunchtime discussions with the Financial Times, thus reminding the world of what it means when fundamentally silly, unserious, and embarrassingly incompetent people are given the levers of power for a while. For they should know what I know and what I suspect you know too: there will be no Palestinian state if these residents of Gaza are the people who will form the political nucleus of such a state.

Some form of UN management/leadership in the wake of the hostilities? Well, that might sound good to people who have been paying no attention to the fact that United Nations officials have been, at the very best, complicit in hostage-taking and torture in facilities run by UNRWA, the agency responsible for administering Gaza.

And blubber not to me about the displacement of Gazans from their home. We’ve been told not that Gaza is their home but that it is a prison. Trump is offering Gazans a way out of prison; do they really want to stay in prison? Or does this mean it never really was a prison in the first place?

Read more at Commentary

More about: Donald Trump, Gaza Strip, Israeli-Palestinian Conflict