David Harsanyi eats Max Fisher for lunch

 . . . in two recent posts at The Federalist.  The snot-nosed Fisher has been touting his warped worldview at The Atlantic and the WaPo for some time, and recently joined Ezra Klein's "explain-the-news" venture Vox, where he has confirmed himself as an Israel-hater.

Here's from Harsanyi's June 18 piece:

It’s worth noting that Fisher is no stranger to chewing over well-worn anti-Israel tropes in the guise of inquisitive journalism. “Why,” Fisher wondered while at the Washington Post “is the U.S. okay with Israel having nuclear weapons but not Iran?” (I dunno? An openly hostile, theocratic, destabilizing force is less trustworthy than a liberal democratic ally?) Or, “Here’s a List of Countries With a Higher GDP Per Capita Than Israel,” in which Fisher pondered if Mitt Romney’s assertion that Israel’s embrace of Western values allowed them to create a more prosperous society than their neighbors was true or not. (Answer: Maybe if Israel wasn’t poking its nose in everyone’s business, Gaza City would be just like Tel Aviv.)

“The end of ‘both sides’: Israel’s occupation of the West Bank is indefensible,” is the title of Fisher’s piece. It begins by offering dispatches on some of the hardships Palestinians have been subjected to after the recent kidnapping of three teenage yeshiva students in the West Bank — one an American citizen (a fact Fisher is not moved to mention). Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has accused Palestinian terrorist/unity government participants Hamas of being behind these abductions, which does not exactly sound farfetched. But we’ll see.

And while Fisher offers a few superficial declarations about spreading the blame (“no one is pure” — and isn’t that the truth?) overall the Jews are aggressors, paranoid and unreasonable.  And it is they who should cease the occupation, the root cause of all problems.  What that might mean to Israel’s security or the lives of thousands of Jews elsewhere is immaterial. Vox says it’s mean.

In Harsanyi's July 2 piece, he examines this twisted notion of Fisher's that Israel somehow thinks the kidnap-and-response cycle is some kind of gotcha game, a matter of putting points on the board.  How do people that cynical make it through their daily lives without cracking up?

Fisher writes that after the murder of three teenage students by Hamas, it was “Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his allies on Israel’s political right” who “appear to have extracted what they wanted from the crisis.” Or, you may be surprised to learn, the murders make “it far more likely that full-on conflict will resume between Israel and Hamas, a dynamic that Netanyahu seems to prefer.”

Yes, the elected leaders of Israel, the nation’s “right” – because the major swath of the nation’s left-wing doesn’t support putting an end to Hamas, according to Fisher, who fails to offer any polling to back this odd assertion – were happy to use student hitchhikers as bait, hoping they would be kidnapped, executed and dropped in a shallow grave in an empty lot in Hebron. This outcome finally gives Israel the pretext it needed to extract revenge on a bunch of innocent Palestinians.

In Fisher’s view, Israel is pining to kill, longing to occupy, aching to inconvenience. Israel wants to waste millions of dollars tracking down Hamas terrorists; it craves the international backlash that will inevitably follow, and it just never feels quite whole until hundreds of its own citizens, and thousands of Palestinians, are put at risk. There’s nothing quite like persecuting the elderly Arab shopkeeper. Mission accomplished!

Does that sound ridiculous? That’s what the case against Israel sounds like when you refuse to offer any genuine context. And it gets worse. Fisher is also concerned that the Israeli response is “driving a wedge between Hamas and the more moderate, West Bank-based Fatah.” If the groups splinter, Fisher explains, it “will also have the effect of making peace talks far more difficult."

Fisher is emblematic of one of the most poisonous outlooks pervading our society today.  You see it, certainly, among those focused on Middle East issues, but also in other realms of foreign policy, as well as domestic policy and American politics.  People like that really think that Western nation-states, or principled political groupings, are willing to sacrifice their citizens for the symbolic value of staving off accommodation with also known as rivals, adversaries and enemies.  Of course, to someone like Fisher, there are no rivals, adversaries or enemies, except those he deems naive enough to believe in immutable principles worth fighting for.  They see a human landscape characterized by nothing more noble than naked self-preservation.

As I say, how does someone embrace such a cynical worldview without it finally driving them bonkers?