Big Duck, Andrew Sullivan, and the Inescapable Need to Condemn the Jewish State https://mosaicmagazine.com/picks/israel-zionism/2022/01/big-duck-andrew-sullivan-and-the-inescapable-need-to-condemn-the-jewish-state/

January 20, 2022 | Daniel Gordis
About the author: Daniel Gordis is the Koret Distinguished Fellow at Shalem College in Jerusalem and the author of the ongoing online column, Israel from the Inside.

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 on Israel from the Inside: https://danielgordis.substack.com/p/the-sin-of-presence-in-israel