Times Takes Burg To Task…After Providing Platform

"Once a Political Riser, an Israeli Challenges His Country's Identity"
A8, The Saturday Profile, Saturday 12/20/08
By Ethan Bronner

Implicit in this piece on Avraham Burg is an important question: In Israel, a nation that is "no stranger to self-examination," where "nearly everything is subject to debate," why is it that the former speaker of the Knesset and former head of the World Zionist Organization, a man who wanted to stir debate, is now a "public scourge" and has "gained almost no traction"?

Bronner, while providing a platform for Burg's undeveloped and gratuitous views, attempts to provide an answer. "To many friends and acquaintances," Bronner reports, "the soft, flowery answers he has offered to his big, tough questions have left them cold." Haaretz' Ari Shavit calls Burg's latest book "anti-Israel in the deepest sense." Tom Segev calls it "spaced-out," which presumably means spacey.

"No doubt [Burg] raises serious questions," writes Bronner. "Less clear, however, is whether Mr. Burg has provided any serious answers." Most conclusively, Bronner writes that "rather than reconciling [Israel's] complex tensions, Mr. Burg ended up imploding from them."

Still, readers are subjected to Burg's shallow observations masked as deep-sounding questions. Burg asks "what does it mean that Jews define themselves by genetics 60 years after genetics were used against them?" In the Jewish spirit of responding to a question with a question, one might respond "what does it mean that Jews are losing their ethnic identity on their own, 60 years after it was almost destroyed by others?" Or, put another way, "should Jews abandon this identity simply because it's been, and continues to be, used against them?"

Many Israelis see value in provoking debate on how their society deals with the Holocaust or even how it defines Jewishness. Actually, this is done frequently. But it's in his hyperbolic tone, his shock-value rhetoric, that Burg has done less to encourage genuine debate and perhaps more to give ammunition to Israel's adversaries. This could explain why Burg's views resonate so little among Israelis and other Jews. This piece would've benefited from such a conclusion.

"Most interesting of all," Bronner concludes, "Mr. Burg continues to play a public role in Israel. This may be because, despite it all, Avrum Burg is family. And whether he likes it or not, Israelis look out for family."

While this is a thoughtful ending, pointing to Israeli society's openness, passion for self-criticism and debate and deep sense of community, why pay Burg any mind at all when more nuanced views can be found? For the agenda-driven Times, it's more than just Burg's book to promote.

What article on other, less-covered parts of the globe was sacrificed to air another fringe Israeli view castigating Israel and Zionism?