From Friend to Fraud, the real Fred emerges

In 2017 I came across a blogger on Times of Israel (TOI) who I thought was a refreshing and different voice on matters of the Middle East. Reading much of his social media shares as well as many of his blogs, I was pretty impressed that he wanted to change people's attitudes and be a positive force for showing readers and friends of his a rational and earnestly liberal perspective. The vast majority of his writings concerned Israel and its conflict with the Palestinians, and to be frank in many cases this person seemed much more of a stalwart supporter of Zionism than I. However in recent months this person has undergone a very thorough shift in his public attitudes.

The writer in question is Fred Maroun, and while I did correspond with him from time to time I would say we were casually friendly and very open about our differences of opinion. But when I say that he appeared to be more Zionist than I, it is very notable that he happens to be a Lebanese Canadian, and I am a former IDF serviceman whose parents were both born in Israel. I have always found the appellation of being "Zionist" to be completely meaningless, and Fred may have proven my point entirely through his recent posts. The word Zionist in its strictest sense means someone that believes in the inherent right of Jews to have a homeland in the historical Land of Israel. That's a very low bar to clear in terms of a concrete belief system, in particular as there are secular, religious, Christian, atheist, socialist, liberal, and progressive Zionist tendencies, along with various subgroups of each of those. For its opponents some of the most absurdly unrelated topics are contemptible as being agents of "Zionism" as happened to the left-wing gay Israeli expatriate Manny Yekutiel in January whose cafe was boycotted by San Francisco progressives as an instrument of gentrification.

The reason that I believe his audience grew was owing both to his eloquent style of speaking and writing and a further factor that is a bit taboo to discuss. This is the desire by many Israel supporters to attract friends in a hostile world that has given rise to a willingness to market so-called Zionist arguments using themes and issues that are completely irrelevant to it. One such tendency was to portray Israel as a secular liberal progressive society that is way ahead of the surrounding Arab world, or even western states, in accepting the gay community and LGBT rights in general as well as other progressive ideals. This was the type of Israel that supporters like Fred Maroun (a staunch LGBT supporter) wanted to believe in, and like many that become obsessed with an idealized model of something they are bound to be left disappointed when it does not live up to their standards. 

Red Fish Blue Fish, Left Fish Right Fish

Before that disappointment set in, Fred was a vociferous defender of Israel, in some cases to the point of being illogical. In 2018 I had the pleasure of interviewing him but was perplexed as to why a self-described left-wing Arab Zionist would support banning someone like Roger Waters from appearing on Long Island. While I detest Waters on a musical as well as political basis, as a freedom of speech supporter I recognized that such a ban would only embitter some of his casual fans and cause them to gravitate toward his support for BDS. Worse than that, it validates the heckler's veto tactic that Waters uses to intimidate other artists like Radiohead from appearing in Israel. While disagreeing with both the ethical and strategic angle of my argument, Fred responded:

"Your point of view I don't agree with it. I think it's fair when somebody is in our opinion. . . breaking moral standards and. . . that we don't want this person to benefit from our community that we would tell them they are not welcome yeah and I think that's the rationale behind the effort by these groups in Long Island and in Florida to get him banned". 

The irony is that Fred's statement about Roger Waters echoes the same rationale used by religious groups to oppose gay pride parades or other deviant behaviours that they do not want around their neighbourhoods. This is a classic case of a "liberal" person mimicking the illiberal tendencies that belie their so-called tolerant ideals. The same issue exists by extension for organizations in the US that seek to pass anti-BDS legislation. In the interest of expediency and hoping to rid themselves of an odious movement like BDS that is itself very authoritarian and intolerant, they seek to put laws on the books that would be easily struck down in courts as violations of the 1st Amendment. And indeed just such a thing happened in May when a federal judge in Texas ruled in favour of the plaintiff in Amawi v. Pflugerville. It is this type of authoritarian stance that is in my opinion one of the reasons that Maroun's recent change is either illogical or insincere.

While always defining himself as a person of the left, Maroun always seemed at pains to define what the hell that even meant. Usually the best examples he could give were supporting organized labour and LGBT rights. In 2017 he wrote a TOI blog post claiming that "Supporting Israel is a duty of the left". He opened it with this very free thinking statement:

"Left-wing people who are anti-Zionist are either fools or anti-Semites. To put it more politely, they are either taking a position on an issue that they do not understand or they are deliberately siding with haters."

But for whatever reason as a person telling the left what to think, Maroun also felt the need to warn conservatives that they're getting conservatism wrong. Prior to the 2016 election he claimed that Donald Trump's candidacy was a "hostile takeover" of the United States and a betrayal of the "conservative" ideals of . . . President George W. Bush. One of the main selling points of his perspective to conservatives was that Bush's foreign policy was remarkably similar to. . . Hillary Clinton. 

It's this type of tone deaf reasoning that seems to have made Maroun completely oblivious to the fact that not everyone fits into convenient camps like liberal and conservative. Similarly in January 2016 Maroun analogized claims of Israeli war crimes to what he termed false war crime claims against Bush and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. He even characterized those that were skeptical that Bush and Blair believed that Iraqis could build democracy as racist. What Maroun is omitting is that many moderate critics of Bush and Blair, not just radicals like Jeremy Corbyn, recognize that the two leaders initiated the Iraq War due to unverified and fabricated evidence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). This was illustrated in the UK government's Chilcot Report, which found that "policy on the Iraq invasion was made on the basis of flawed intelligence assessments. It was not challenged, and should have been". The topic of George Bush was a very sharp point of contention between Maroun and I. Several times I told him that it is fully consistent for people on both the right and the left to hate President Bush, because many people on either side of the spectrum happen to be anti-war. 

So to recap for a second, Fred Maroun for the last few years was a left wing Arab Zionist who supports organized labour and gay rights but supported the most pro-war, anti-gay, anti-union president of the last few decades, George W. Bush.

Taking a stand against asymmetry

However, this is not about my disagreement with Fred over BDS bans and laws as well as the inconsistency of his views on Bush, Blair and the Iraq War. My stances haven't changed on this and other topics, partly because I've left open the door for dialog even with people that deeply disagree with me. Not so with Fred Maroun. Many of his erstwhile followers and friends started to notice a dramatic shift in his views recently. I personally chart it to this past March around the time of the Israeli election to the Knesset. Since then he has begun to block long-time followers that criticize his views on all manner of topics from Israel to Canadian politics to Donald Trump. 

In his recent post on Times of Israel Blogs entitled "Why I am no longer an advocate for Israel" he cited a number of reasons for his shifting beliefs all of them predicated on the idea of an "asymmetrical conflict":

1. Israel protects its civilians very well while inflicting disproportionately more damage on the Palestinians during military conflicts with them. 

This ignores the issue of how often Palestinian attackers don civilian garb in order to carry out attacks  or Palestinian media incites civilian youth to carry out stabbing attacks against Israeli targets as occurred on August 8 claiming the life of off-duty IDF Corporal Dvir Sorek.

2. Israel builds settlements on Palestinian land while not granting them equal rights within Israel's political system thereby belying its democratic ideals. 
This leaves out the fact that the lands are disputed and the Oslo Accords establishing the Palestinian Authority were meant to pave the way for a final status agreement. Under Prime Minister Ehud Barak's leadership the Israeli government would have delivered 97% of the West Bank/Judea & Samaria as well as all of Gaza in 2001. That offer was rejected by PA Chairman Yasser Arafat. Thinking that he could wrest more from the Israelis including the Right of Return to pre-1967 Israel, he gambled and turned Barak down. No one else is responsible for his choice, except possibly his advisers. As the English say: A bird in hand is worth two in the bush.

3. While it allows its Arab citizens to live in Israel with equal rights, Israel discriminates by permitting Jews from elsewhere to apply for citizenship while denying a homeland for Palestinian Arabs. 
What Maroun omits that any descendant of a pre-1948 Palestinian living worldwide is permitted to move to the Palestinian Authority and receive citizenship. 

Some would say that this latest blog post of his signals a "change of heart", but to many of his erstwhile readers it seems that he was never a true believer in what he was writing up until now. I cannot say either way, but I can say that it will be very difficult for the 2019 Maroun to run away from some of the things that pre-2019 Maroun has written. For example, in his December 2018 post titled "Moral imbalance: The real disproportionality in the Israel-Arab conflict" Maroun lamented:

"I have never seen Arabs question the ethical contradiction between the fact that Jews were expelled from the Arab world, from Gaza, and from Judea and Samaria, and the fact that Arabs remained in Israel and are still there today as equal citizens."

So at that time he felt that the disproportionate blame in the conflict had been on the side not only of the Palestinians, but the entire Arab world. 

And what about his complaint about Jewish settlements endangering a future Palestinian state? This is contradicted by his article from this February entitled "Jews should be able to live wherever they want to live":

"I am thinking in particular of a claim that these leaders typically make, which is that Jewish settlements in Judea and Samaria are illegal. Have they considered the fact that Jews have lived in Judea and Samaria for thousands of years, and that they lived there until they were ethnically cleansed by Arab armies during the war of 1947/48? Have they considered the fact that wherever Arab authorities, such as the Palestinian Authority, are in charge, Jews are forbidden to live, and that therefore Jewish settlements protected by the Israeli army is the Jews’ only option to live in Judea and Samaria?"

 Triggered by #Bibigeddon

What changed between February and now? In April Israel held a new election to the Knesset. While Maroun publicly maintained that the result should be respected regardless of who won, it is my personal belief that he was holding out hope that the centrist coalition Blue and White would dethrone Benjamin Netanyahu and present a more digestible face of liberal Israel to the rest of the world in the form of its leaders Yair Lapid and Benny Gantz. And he was not alone, as many left-leaning journos at home and abroad were gleefully proclaiming Bibi's demise due to either impending criminal indictments or an electoral collapse.

This is not what happened and due to the composition of the rest of the seats in the Knesset being skewed to right-wing parties it was an almost impossible scenario. Instead of processing this entirely expected result, Maroun got angry and rationalized it by complaining that Netanyahu's Likud had intimidated voters by placing hidden cameras at polling stations in Arab Israeli villages. As his pieces grew more bitter by the week, Maroun has begun to use words like "occupation" and "apartheid" that he previously considered to be completely inappropriate with respect to the Israel-Palestine conflict. 

And finally, returning to his latest piece throwing off the mantle of being an Israel advocate, Maroun writes:

"I now realize that Israel’s political leaders make decisions based on what they see as the best interests of Israel and sometimes of their own political careers, and that those interests often clash with the pursuit of peace and a lasting solution."

A statement like this reveals the true nature of "illiberal liberalism": the preaching of tolerance, progress, and democracy against tradition and self interest until democracy disappoints. Then they will gripe about how no one else has the real moral cause (in this case "peace") as a priority but are acting selfishly. It's sad to see the true face of someone once respected, but perhaps were blinding ourselves to it the entire time.