April 9, 2020 39
In the afterword to City of Bohane,
and in several interviews, Barry ex-
plains that he was heavily influenced by
The Wire, the brilliant HBO series set
in the inner city, schools, newsrooms,
and docks of Baltimore. In “Wifey
Redux,” arguably the funniest story in
his collection Dark Lies the Island, a
happily married woman with “a Pinot
Grigio habit that would knock a fuck-
ing horse” is a passionate fan of the
series: “She was freezeframing bits of
The Wire that featured the gay killer
Omar because she had a thing for him.
She had lately been waking in the night
and crying out his name.”
Those of us who have had “a thing”
for the assassin Omar Little may feel
one step closer to understanding why
we’ve developed a similar thing forCharlie and Maurice. It’s why we so
happily spent five seasons watching The
Wire’s crime boss Stringer Bell, why
we mourned the murder of D’Angelo
Barksdale, even though he’d been sent
to jail for a double homicide. It’s why
I’ve missed Maurice and Charlie ever
since I finished Barry’s novel.
Like The Wire, Night Boat to Tan-
gier—and much of Barry’s work—inspires us to rethink our ideas of
character, of compassion and forgive-
ness. Without romanticizing crime,
they humanize the criminal. Enabling
us to “get the speech,” to see beneath
the surface and into the souls of the
losers, the lovelorn, the kind of guys
we’d cross the ferry terminal to avoid—
surely that’s one of the great things that
a work of art can do. QWe Stand Divided:
The Rift Between
American Jews and Israel
by Daniel Gordis.
Ecco, 293 pp., $26.99
Our American Israel:
The Story of an Entangled
Alliance
by Amy Kaplan.
Harvard University Press,
352 pp., $29.95
At the start of the last decade,
Peter Beinart issued in these
pages an anguished call to save
liberal Zionism in the United
States.* Young American Jews
committed to human rights and
averse to military power were
growing alienated from Israel,
which rules over millions of
Palestinians in the occupied
West Bank while populat-
ing the territory with Jewish
settlements. As Beinart put it,
“For several decades, the Jew-
ish establishment has asked
American Jews to check their
liberalism at Zionism’s door,
and now, to their horror, they are find-
ing that many young Jews have checked
their Zionism instead.”
His argument appeared at an op-
portune moment. President Obama
had made the Israeli–Palestinian con-
flict a priority. His national security
adviser, James Jones, said that of all
the foreign policy challenges facing
Washington, the conflict stood out for
its urgency, significance, and potential
for resolution. The United States was
deeply invested in the Middle East,
both for access to its oil and in order
to prevent the spread of Islamist ter-
rorism. But the Arab states viewed the
US as Israel’s sponsor and protector;
until it persuaded Israel to stop build-
ing settlements in the West Bank and
permit the establishment of a Palestin-
ian state, Washington’s influence in the
region would be limited. Ending the
conflict through a two-state solution
would advance American interests in
countless ways.
Beinart’s essay (expanded into a
book, The Crisis of Zionism, in 2012)
was essentially a plea to the American
Jewish community to back the Obama
administration’s efforts. Yes, Beinart
was saying, unlike in earlier decades,
Israel had the means to protect itself
militarily. But it was abandoning any
serious attempt to make a deal with the
Palestinians just as it was undermining
democratic principles by giving greater
status and privileges to its Jewish citi-
zens than to its Arab ones, barring crit-
ics from entering the country, allowing
members of small communities to
prevent Arabs from renting or buying
homes, and threatening to downgrade
Arabic from its status as an official
language (which was later done). Is-
rael, Beinart argued, would soon face
a crisis of legitimacy that would under-
mine its existence. Palestinians would
rise up again; the world would censure
the state as it once did apartheid South
Africa; and as American Jews turned
away, so would America. The status
quo was unsustainable, the solution
clear.
The decade since has not been kind
to this prediction. While the moral ar-
guments were once interlaced with the
geopolitical ones, they are today sepa-
rate. The Arab Spring, which broke out
in late 2010, exposed suppurating dis-
putes both within and between coun-
tries of the Muslim Middle East—none
of them linked to Israel’s mistreatment
of the Palestinians. The shale revolu-
tion in oil and natural gas essentially
ended America’s energy dependence
on the region.
Moreover, the West Bank Palestin-ians are foundering. Israel’s security
services monitor them constantly. Since
the end of the second intifada in 2005,
every keystroke and phone conversa-
tion has been subject to surveillance,
a policy that is complemented by late-
night commando raids on the homes
of suspected rabble rousers, making
any organized uprising very unlikely.
The Palestinian political leadership is
divided between the nationalist Fatah
and the Islamist Hamas, with neither
faction showing realism or initiative
and both dismissed by their people.
The chance of a meaningful political
solution is minimal.
Meanwhile, Obama’s nuclear deal
with Shia Iran so alarmed its rival,
Saudi Arabia, and other Sunni sheikh-
doms that they quietly created anti-
Iranian security arrangements in
cooperation with Israel, an alliance
subsequently joined by the military
government of Egypt. Even a casual
survey of the region—taking in Syria,
Yemen, Libya, and Iraq—makes it
hard not to see Israel as a monument
to stability and a reliable US ally. And,
of course, Obama has been replaced
by Donald Trump, who has withdrawn
from the Iran deal, lavished uncriti-
cal attention on Riyadh, and offered
unprecedented support for Benjamin
Netanyahu and the Israeli right in his
peace plan. It offers Israel full sover-
eignty over all of Jerusalem, annexa-tion of 30 percent of the West
Bank, and a veto over anything
the Palestinians might want to
do in building their state. For
its part, Israel today has a set
of government and private in-
dustries focused on security
and espionage that makes it an
all-but- indispensable partner
in US and Gulf Arab antiter-
rorism efforts. The West Bank
and Gaza Strip have served as
testing grounds for Israel’s sur-
veillance tools.
None of this diminishes the
moral force of Beinart’s argu-
ment, but it does yank away
its geopolitical underpinning.
Israel’s policies toward the
Palestinians are every bit as
oppressive today as they were
a decade ago. It is, however,
much harder to claim that end-
ing the occupation should still
be a top US priority because
it would stabilize the region
and strengthen American in-
terests throughout the Middle
East. Israelis look at their two
recent military withdrawals—
from southern Lebanon in 2000 and
from Gaza in 2005—and see their oc-
cupying forces replaced with missile-
firing Islamists: Hezbollah, Hamas,
and Islamic Jihad. Withdrawing from
the West Bank, most of them believe,
would endanger the roughly 60 percent
of Israel’s population that lives nearby.
The occupation gnaws at the nation’s
moral and democratic fiber and poses
a risk that there will be more non-Jews
than Jews ruled by the Jewish state.
Still, Israelis believe that withdrawal
would be even more dangerous. As
many say, we are stuck; better stuck
than dead. As a result, the issue lingers
and festers.Beinart identified a rift opening be-
tween American Jews, a majority of
whom are liberal, and Israel, which
has embraced a more right-wing vision
of itself as a Jewish state than it did a
quarter-century ago. His solution was
to urge American Jewish leaders to
stand up for the principles they claimed
to support (the rights of minorities,
freedom of religion and expression)
and push Israel to help establish a Pal-
estinian state. That would bring young
liberal Jews back into the fold and
strengthen the Jewish nation.
That has not happened, and the notion
that US Jews and Israel are headed for
some kind of ugly divorce continues toStuck
Ethan Bronner
Benjamin Netanyahu*“The Failure of the American Jewish
Establishment,” The New York Review,
June 10, 2010.