Conferences at Washington think tanks are interesting and sometimes fun, but they are rarely places where the sparks fly. Maybe Daniel Levy and Robert Lieber should be put on panels together more often. They appeared at a recent Hudson gathering to discuss U.S.-Israel relations. Levy performed his usual routine, which is part neocon conspiracy theory and part pleading for the United States to teach Israel a lesson once and for all because Israel is a retrograde, dysfunctional society.

Lieber followed Levy and began his remarks with a devastating rejoinder:

If I can throw in a gratuitous remark, it is that our previous speaker is also a close associate of Yossi Beilin, and let me suggest that his talk suggests why Yossi Beilin is irrelevant to the wider dialogue in Israel today, let alone the United States.

Too true. Which is why the most important thing to understand about Levy, Beilin, and J Street is that the blood-soaked failure of their diplomatic project — Olso — earned their complete rejection by Israeli voters. Today, Yossi Beilin’s Meretz Party holds three seats in the Knesset, and the ideas on which Meretz was founded hold the imaginations of a marginal coterie of Jewish leftists represented by the likes of Daniel Levy, an immigrant to Israel who prefers to spend his time in America telling audiences what a bunch of fools and failures his countrymen are.

Israel’s rejection of Beilinism has caused Levy to reject Israel in kind, which is why he has grown more and more open about his loathing of Israeli democracy itself.

You can listen to the entire Hudson event here.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, October 15th, 2009 at 6:10 AM and is filed under Contentions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.