> http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/sep/26/american-jewish-cocoon/
>
> Jim Farmelant
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It was interesting to read his timid proposal to actually talk to Palestinians and at least visit their Israeli induced squallor. What he didn't notice was the cocoon covers the metamorphosis of history. But history is metamorphosis from which endless butterflies emerge, or from which they never emerge. Hegel's idea of an age is supposed to form a chrysalis. But the more I've studied the more it seems to remain in a continual metamorphosis.
I had to research some of this history to position LS in Weimar 1920s when he wrote for a few magazines on Zionism in Berlin. Absolute adherence to the party line was manditory and the worst denouncements were saved for Jewish writers and intellectuals who deviated from some doctrine that changed with each expression. In the end LS decided his identity as a German Jew needed a better foundation. It was part of his own intellectual transformation and he set about to study the late Medieval period in Jewish and Islamic scholasticism...long story.
I think the article isn't really the main story. Here is a better one and covers the background:
http://nymag.com/news/features/peter-beinart-2012-6/index4.html
>From the comment section:
My main point is that one cannot write about the crisis of Zionism, at least its Israeli part, without reading Israeli literature and history, from the 19th century on. It is the study of Israeli literature and history that shows that the relationship between Zionism and the Arabs is a Gordian knot, where every generation added another loop to the knot. ...
(My note) This idea that there is an Israeli literature of the 19thC is already a transformation because it was European Jewish history from which the metamorphosis gave rise to the modern concept of Israel. Otherwise it's a good suggestion.
CG