The lead story in the Sunday Styles section of this morning's New York Times reports on the development in the world of fashion of "fascist chic," featuring brown shirts and police-state style uniforms. The article passes along in all seriousness a quote from a professor at the City University of New York who says, "The fascist style exhibits a grandiosity apt to an era of high and maldistributed prosperity. We're in the adulthood of the Reagan youth. I guess the people who grew up in that era bring their taste with them." The quote captures the political agenda of the New York Times just about perfectly. First there is the reference to "maldistributed prosperity." How would the professor and the Times like to redistribute the prosperity? By taking the money away from the people who work hard and giving it to those that don't? Then there is the casual suggestion -- made without any explanation, as if none were needed -- that President Reagan's program was somehow akin to fascism, that "Reagan Youth" are just another kind of Hitler Youth. Those readers who believe that Reagan was a great defender of liberty might take offense at the Times' suggestion. But a close reading of the article suggests that, in context, the Times means this all not as a condemnation of Reagan, but as praise. After all, the article asserts that "the ponderous style identified with tyranny retains an allure," and the Times quotes another fashion authority as saying, "Fascism -- I hate to say it, but it's sexy."
Jewish Socialists: Today's New York Times book review section reviews a new book about the Jewish Lower East Side of New York City. Writing about the neighborhood's achievements, the reviewer asks, "Is it impolite, in this hour of stock market ecstasy, to mention that one of those achievements, back in the old days, had to do with socialism?" The review says, "socialism made Grand Street grand, in its day. And when the modern American Jews look back at the old East Side through a veil of tears, aren't they looking back on a set of ideals, too, and on a passion for social justice that managed to thrive in the semi-European streets of New York for a good many years?" Social justice, perhaps, but socialism, no. As Henry Feingold points out in Volume Four of the five-volume 1992 history "The Jewish People in America," during the 1920s only about a tenth of Jewish voters cast their ballots for socialist candidates. The share of Jews voting socialist peaked at about 38 percent, for Eugene V. Debs, the socialist candidate for president in 1920. As Mr. Feingold writes, "it was often precisely such radicals who were least knowledgeable and committed to the Judaism in which they imagined such values to be embedded." Yet, in looking back on the Lower East Side, the Times reviewer dwells on socialism, dismissing authentic Judaism as a kind of retrograde kitsch.
Apologists for the British: The Times book review gives its cover slot and a glowing review today to a new book by Tom Segev. The Times tells us that the book tells us that "the British were the friends rather than the enemies of the Jews," and the review says the book "will doubtless become the authoritative text for the pre-state history of Israel." If that account of the British role is indeed the book's message, it would be a shame if the book became the authoritative text, because it is wrong. The review, for instance, refers to "The Arab rebellion of 1936-39, which British soldiers suppressed with brutal force." This seems logically inconsistent on its face: if the British really suppressed the Arab rebellion with brutal force, how did the Arabs manage to carry on the rebellion for three years? In fact, as Shmuel Katz records in his magnificent two-volume biography of the Zionist leader Vladimir "Ze'ev" Jabotinsky, at one key point in the Fall of 1936, the British had reinforced their troops in Palestine to 17,000 from 7,000, and they were poised to deliver a knockout blow to the Arab troops led by Fawzi Kaukji. The Arabs were saved by a last-minute decision by the British high commissioner, Sir Arthur Wauchope. As Katz tells it: "When the defeated Kaukji with his battered followers, aiming to retreat across the Jordan, were surrounded on the approaches to the river, and the army prepared to deliver the coup de grace, the Arab Higher Committee protested to Wauchope, and the administration thereupon, as a final chord to the farce, ordered the army chiefs to open the road. Kaukji crossed the Jordan unhindered, to rest, to regroup and to prepare for the next round."
That incident is just one in a series of facts that contradicts the notion contained in the Times front-page book review headline that, "The British mandate in Palestine was the single biggest factor in the making of Israel." The British chief justice in Palestine at the time, Sir Michael MacDonell, was hailed by the Arabs as "the defender of the just Arab cause," according to Katz. Wauchope at the time was prepared to offer the Arabs limits on Jewish immigration to Palestine and a ban on land sales to Jews. He was also pressing for the establishment of a Legislative Council in Palestine that would have had 14 Arab members and eight Jewish members.
Anyway, a signal of where the Times reviewer is coming from should be clear from this sentence in the review: "Tragically, the creation of a Jewish state just three years after the near-total destruction of the Jewish diaspora by Nazism led to the creation of a Palestinian diaspora, whose fate has yet to be determined." This is the classic anti-Israel moral equivalency; the Jews as victims of the Nazis; the Palestinian Arabs as victims of the Jews. Of course, the Times fails to mention the fact that most Arabs left of their own volition, or as the result of the Arab-initiated war or as the result of pleading by Arab leaders outside of Palestine. In some cases, as in Haifa, as Commentary magazine has recorded, the local Jews even pleaded with the local Arabs to please stay.