Avraham Burg profile

The New Yorker has a profile of Avrahum Burg, the former Knesset speaker turned anti-Zionist, that's well worth reading even if it contains obvious faults and biases, notably in the first two paragraphs. It also contains some excellent examples of how the Zionist meta-narrative brooks no dissent and savages its opponents by qualifying critiques as "unutterable":

Soon after the interview was published, Otniel Schneller, a Knesset member from Ehud Olmert’s centrist Kadima Party, said that when Burg dies he should be denied burial in the special section of Mt. Herzl National Cemetery, in Jerusalem, reserved for national leaders. “He had better search for a grave in another country,” Schneller said. One letter to the Jerusalem Post compared Burg to young people who, after military service, go off to India to find their spiritual selves in an ashram. “Yesteryear, Burg would have been disowned as at least a lunatic,” the columnist Sarah Honig wrote in the same paper. “The grave danger is that today he gives voice and lends insidious quasi-respectability to what was heretofore unutterable. By tomorrow, the uncontrollable infestation he spreads might confer outright legitimacy on Israel’s delegitimatization.” If and when Israel’s borders changed, Honig continued, “Burg probably won’t stick around to risk the ensuing slaughter. The new Wandering Jew will pack his sinister seeds and propagate his wicked wandering weeds from afar.”

In some ways I think this article -- notably the themes of Holocaust exploitation and the power of the US Lobby -- would not have been possible before Norman Finkelstein's books and the "lobby" essay by Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer.