Matt Yglesias Retweets New York Times Op-Ed Challenging Israel's Right to Exist

Well, it's not so much that he retweeted it, but that he really likes that bit quoted at the tweet.

“one really ought to question Israel’s right to exist” opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/09/on-…
— Matt Yglesias (@mattyglesias) March 10, 2013

The link to the article is at the tweet, but it's the same anti-Israel eliminationism folks have been dealing with for years. Here's this from the conclusion:

I conclude, then, that the very idea of a Jewish state is undemocratic, a violation of the self-determination rights of its non-Jewish citizens, and therefore morally problematic. But the harm doesn’t stop with the inherently undemocratic character of the state. For if an ethnic national state is established in a territory that contains a significant number of non-members of that ethnic group, it will inevitably face resistance from the land’s other inhabitants. This will force the ethnic nation controlling the state to resort to further undemocratic means to maintain their hegemony. Three strategies to deal with resistance are common: expulsion, occupation and institutional marginalization. Interestingly, all three strategies have been employed by the Zionist movement: expulsion in 1948 (and, to a lesser extent, in 1967), occupation of the territories conquered in 1967 and institution of a complex web of laws that prevent Israel’s Palestinian citizens from mounting an internal challenge to the Jewish character of the state...

There's still more at that tweet. It's not a compelling argument for a number of reasons, the most basic being that it's only Israel that's singled out for this kind of analysis of the state's democratic legitimacy. There are no other democracies in the Middle East, outside of Iraq and Egypt, only marginally so (as Egypt is now verging on single-party Islamic rule, and hence undemocratic).

The author, Joseph Levine, thus engages in the exact kind of anti-Semitism that he claims to be avoiding: singling out the Jewish state for disparate treatment, subjecting it to standards of legitimacy that none of Israel's Arab enemies have to face. But this is progressivism in action, and it's pretty interesting that Matthew Yglesias felt so strongly about the piece to tweet it with such a clearly avowed rejection of Israel's existential rights.

BONUS: The piece is picked up by Yglesias' buddies at the Socialist Worker, the communist rag of the revolutionary International Socialist Organization: "Saying no to Israel's 'right to exist'."