At 58, Israel has no friends aside from the U.S. and its claims of
victimhood and anti-Semitism are falling on increasingly deaf ears. The time
has come to mature
By
the age of 58 a country - like a man - should have achieved a certain maturity.
After nearly six decades of existence we know, for good and for bad, who we
are, what we have done and how we appear to others, warts and all. We
acknowledge, however reluctantly and privately, our mistakes and our
shortcomings. And though we still harbor the occasional illusion about
ourselves and our prospects, we are wise enough to recognize that these are
indeed for the most part just that: illusions. In short, we are adults.
But
the State of Israel remains curiously (and among Western-style democracies,
uniquely) immature. The social transformations of the country - and its many
economic achievements - have not brought the political wisdom that usually
accompanies age. Seen from the outside, Israel still comports itself like an
adolescent: consumed by a brittle confidence in its own uniqueness; certain
that no one "understands" it and everyone is "against" it;
full of wounded self-esteem, quick to take offense and quick to give it. Like
many adolescents Israel is convinced - and makes a point of aggressively and
repeatedly asserting - that it can do as it wishes, that its actions carry no
consequences and that it is immortal. Appropriately enough, this country that
has somehow failed to grow up was until very recently still in the hands of a
generation of men who were prominent in its public affairs 40 years ago: an
Israeli Rip Van Winkle who fell asleep in, say, 1967 would be surprised indeed
to awake in 2006 and find Shimon Peres and General Ariel Sharon still hovering
over the affairs of the country - the latter albeit only in spirit.
But
that, Israeli readers will tell me, is the prejudiced view of the outsider.
What looks from abroad like a self-indulgent, wayward country - delinquent in
its international obligations and resentfully indifferent to world opinion - is
simply an independent little state doing what it has always done: looking after
its own interests in an inhospitable part of the globe. Why should embattled Israel
even acknowledge such foreign criticism, much less act upon it? They -
gentiles, Muslims, leftists - have reasons of their own for disliking Israel.
They - Europeans, Arabs, fascists - have always singled out Israel for special
criticism. Their motives are timeless. They haven't changed. Why should Israel
change?
But
they have changed. And it is this change, which has passed largely unrecognized
within Israel, to which I want to draw attention here. Before 1967 the State of
Israel may have been tiny and embattled, but it was not typically hated:
certainly not in the West. Official Soviet-bloc communism was anti-Zionist of
course, but for just that reason Israel was rather well regarded by everyone
else, including the non-communist left. The romantic image of the kibbutz and
the kibbutznik had a broad foreign appeal in the first two decades of Israel's
existence. Most admirers of Israel (Jews and non-Jews) knew little about the
Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948. They preferred to see in the Jewish state
the last surviving incarnation of the 19th century idyll of agrarian socialism
- or else a paragon of modernizing energy "making the desert bloom."
I
remember well, in the spring of 1967, how the balance of student opinion at
Cambridge University was overwhelmingly pro-Israel in the weeks leading up to
the Six-Day War - and how little attention anyone paid either to the condition
of the Palestinians or to Israel's earlier collusion with France and Britain in
the disastrous Suez adventure of 1956. In politics and in policy-making circles
only old-fashioned conservative Arabists expressed any criticism of the Jewish
state; even neo-Fascists rather favored Zionism, on traditional anti-Semitic
grounds.
For a
while after the 1967 war these sentiments continued unaltered. The
pro-Palestinian enthusiasms of post-1960s radical groups and nationalist
movements, reflected in joint training camps and shared projects for terrorist
attacks, were offset by the growing international acknowledgment of the
Holocaust in education and the media: What Israel lost by its continuing
occupation of Arab lands it gained through its close identification with the
recovered memory of Europe's dead Jews. Even the inauguration of the illegal
settlements and the disastrous invasion of Lebanon, while they strengthened the
arguments of Israel's critics, did not yet shift the international balance of
opinion. As recently as the early 1990s, most people in the world were only
vaguely aware of the "West Bank" and what was happening there. Even
those who pressed the Palestinians' case in international forums conceded that
almost no one was listening. Israel could still do as it wished.
The Israeli nakba
But
today everything is different. We can see, in retrospect, that the victory of
Israel in June 1967 and its continuing occupation of the territories it
conquered then have been the Jewish state's very own nakba: a moral and
political catastrophe. Israel's actions in the West Bank and Gaza have
magnified and publicized the country's shortcomings and displayed them to a
watching world. Curfews, checkpoints, bulldozers, public humiliations, home
destructions, land seizures, shootings, "targeted assassinations,"
the separation fence: All of these routines of occupation and repression were
once familiar only to an informed minority of specialists and activists. Today
they can be watched, in real time, by anyone with a computer or a satellite
dish - which means that Israel's behavior is under daily scrutiny by hundreds
of millions of people worldwide. The result has been a complete transformation
in the international view of Israel. Until very recently the carefully
burnished image of an ultra-modern society - built by survivors and pioneers
and peopled by peace-loving democrats - still held sway over international
opinion. But today? What is the universal shorthand symbol for Israel,
reproduced worldwide in thousands of newspaper editorials and political
cartoons? The Star of David emblazoned upon a tank.
Today
only a tiny minority of outsiders see Israelis as victims. The true victims, it
is now widely accepted, are the Palestinians. Indeed, Palestinians have now
displaced Jews as the emblematic persecuted minority: vulnerable, humiliated
and stateless. This unsought distinction does little to advance the Palestinian
case any more than it ever helped Jews, but it has redefined Israel forever. It
has become commonplace to compare Israel at best to an occupying colonizer, at
worst to the South Africa of race laws and Bantustans. In this capacity Israel
elicits scant sympathy even when its own citizens suffer: Dead Israelis - like
the occasional assassinated white South African in the apartheid era, or
British colonists hacked to death by native insurgents - are typically
perceived abroad not as the victims of terrorism but as the collateral damage
of their own government's mistaken policies.
Such
comparisons are lethal to Israel's moral credibility. They strike at what was
once its strongest suit: the claim of being a vulnerable island of democracy
and decency in a sea of authoritarianism and cruelty; an oasis of rights and
freedoms surrounded by a desert of repression. But democrats don't fence into
Bantustans helpless people whose land they have conquered, and free men don't
ignore international law and steal other men's homes. The contradictions of
Israeli self-presentation - "we are very strong/we are very
vulnerable"; "we are in control of our fate/we are the victims";
"we are a normal state/we demand special treatment" - are not new:
they have been part of the country's peculiar identity almost from the outset.
And Israel's insistent emphasis upon its isolation and uniqueness, its claim to
be both victim and hero, were once part of its David versus Goliath appeal.
Collective cognitive dysfunction
But
today the country's national narrative of macho victimhood appears to the rest
of the world as simply bizarre: evidence of a sort of collective cognitive
dysfunction that has gripped Israel's political culture. And the long
cultivated persecution mania - "everyone's out to get us" - no longer
elicits sympathy. Instead it attracts some very unappetizing comparisons: At a
recent international meeting I heard one speaker, by analogy with Helmut
Schmidt's famous dismissal of the Soviet Union as "Upper Volta with Missiles,"
describe Israel as "Serbia with nukes."
Israel
has stayed the same, but the world - as I noted above - has changed. Whatever
purchase Israel's self-description still has upon the imagination of Israelis
themselves, it no longer operates beyond the country's frontiers. Even the
Holocaust can no longer be instrumentalized to excuse Israel's behavior. Thanks
to the passage of time, most Western European states have now come to terms
with their part in the Holocaust, something that was not true a quarter century
ago. From Israel's point of view, this has had paradoxical consequences: Until
the end of the Cold War Israeli governments could still play upon the guilt of
Germans and other Europeans, exploiting their failure to acknowledge fully what
was done to Jews on their territory. Today, now that the history of World War
II is retreating from the public square into the classroom and from the
classroom into the history books, a growing majority of voters in Europe and
elsewhere (young voters above all) simply cannot understand how the horrors of
the last European war can be invoked to license or condone unacceptable
behavior in another time and place. In the eyes of a watching world, the fact
that the great-grandmother of an Israeli soldier died in Treblinka is no excuse
for his own abusive treatment of a Palestinian woman waiting to cross a
checkpoint. "Remember Auschwitz" is not an acceptable response.
In
short: Israel, in the world's eyes, is a normal state, but one behaving in
abnormal ways. It is in control of its fate, but the victims are someone else.
It is strong, very strong, but its behavior is making everyone else vulnerable.
And so, shorn of all other justifications for its behavior, Israel and its
supporters today fall back with increasing shrillness upon the oldest claim of
all: Israel is a Jewish state and that is why people criticize it. This - the
charge that criticism of Israel is implicitly anti-Semitic - is regarded in
Israel and the United States as Israel's trump card. If it has been played more
insistently and aggressively in recent years, that is because it is now the
only card left.
The
habit of tarring any foreign criticism with the brush of anti-Semitism is
deeply engrained in Israeli political instincts: Ariel Sharon used it with
characteristic excess but he was only the latest in a long line of Israeli
leaders to exploit the claim. David Ben-Gurion and Golda Meir did no different.
But Jews outside of Israel pay a high price for this tactic. Not only does it
inhibit their own criticisms of Israel for fear of appearing to associate with
bad company, but it encourages others to look upon Jews everywhere as de facto
collaborators in Israel's misbehavior. When Israel breaks international law in
the occupied territories, when Israel publicly humiliates the subject
populations whose land it has seized - but then responds to its critics with
loud cries of "anti-Semitism" - it is in effect saying that these
acts are not Israeli acts, they are Jewish acts: The occupation is not an
Israeli occupation, it is a Jewish occupation, and if you don't like these
things it is because you don't like Jews.
In
many parts of the world this is in danger of becoming a self-fulfilling
assertion: Israel's reckless behavior and insistent identification of all criticism
with anti-Semitism is now the leading source of anti-Jewish sentiment in
Western Europe and much of Asia. But the traditional corollary - if anti-Jewish
feeling is linked to dislike of Israel then right-thinking people should rush
to Israel's defense - no longer applies. Instead, the ironies of the Zionist
dream have come full circle: For tens of millions of people in the world today,
Israel is indeed the state of all the Jews. And thus, reasonably enough, many
observers believe that one way to take the sting out of rising anti-Semitism in
the suburbs of Paris or the streets of Jakarta would be for Israel to give the
Palestinians back their land.
Israel's undoing
If
Israel's leaders have been able to ignore such developments it is in large
measure because they have hitherto counted upon the unquestioning support of
the United States - the one country in the world where the claim that
anti-Zionism equals anti-Semitism is still echoed not only in the opinions of
many Jews but also in the public pronouncements of mainstream politicians and
the mass media. But this lazy, ingrained confidence in unconditional American
approval - and the moral, military and financial support that accompanies it -
may prove to be Israel's undoing.
Something
is changing in the United States. To be sure, it was only a few short years ago
that prime minister Sharon's advisers could gleefully celebrate their success
in dictating to U.S. President George W. Bush the terms of a public statement
approving Israel's illegal settlements. No U.S. Congressman has yet proposed
reducing or rescinding the $3 billion in aid Israel receives annually - 20
percent of the total U.S. foreign aid budget - which has helped sustain the
Israeli defense budget and the cost of settlement construction in the West
Bank. And Israel and the United States appear increasingly bound together in a
symbiotic embrace whereby the actions of each party exacerbate their common
unpopularity abroad - and thus their ever-closer association in the eyes of
critics.
But whereas
Israel has no choice but to look to America - it has no other friends, at best
only the conditional affection of the enemies of its enemies, such as India -
the United States is a great power; and great powers have interests that sooner
or later transcend the local obsessions of even the closest of their client
states and satellites. It seems to me of no small significance that the recent
essay on "The Israel Lobby" by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt has
aroused so much public interest and debate. Mearsheimer and Walt are prominent
senior academics of impeccable conservative credentials. It is true that - by
their own account - they could still not have published their damning
indictment of the influence of the Israel lobby on U.S. foreign policy in a
major U.S.-based journal (it appeared in the London Review of Books), but the
point is that 10 years ago they would not - and probably could not - have
published it at all. And while the debate that has ensued may generate more
heat than light, it is of great significance: As Dr. Johnson said of female
preachers, it is not well done but one is amazed to see it done at all.
The
fact is that the disastrous Iraq invasion and its aftermath are beginning to
engineer a sea-change in foreign policy debate here in the U.S. It is becoming
clear to prominent thinkers across the political spectrum - from erstwhile
neo-conservative interventionists like Francis Fukuyama to hard-nosed realists
like Mearsheimer - that in recent years the United States has suffered a catastrophic
loss of international political influence and an unprecedented degradation of
its moral image. The country's foreign undertakings have been self-defeating
and even irrational. There is going to be a long job of repair ahead, above all
in Washington's dealings with economically and strategically vital communities
and regions from the Middle East to Southeast Asia. And this reconstruction of
the country's foreign image and influence cannot hope to succeed while U.S.
foreign policy is tied by an umbilical cord to the needs and interests (if that
is what they are) of one small Middle Eastern country of very little relevance
to America's long-term concerns - a country that is, in the words of the
Mearsheimer/Walt essay, a strategic burden: "A liability in the war on
terror and the broader effort to deal with rogue states."
That
essay is thus a straw in the wind - an indication of the likely direction of
future domestic debate here in the U.S. about the country's peculiar ties to
Israel. Of course it has been met by a firestorm of criticism from the usual
suspects - and, just as they anticipated, the authors have been charged with
anti-Semitism (or with advancing the interests of anti-Semitism:
"objective anti-Semitism," as it might be). But it is striking to me
how few people with whom I have spoken take that accusation seriously, so
predictable has it become. This is bad for Jews - since it means that genuine
anti-Semitism may also in time cease to be taken seriously, thanks to the
Israel lobby's abuse of the term. But it is worse for Israel.
This
new willingness to take one's distance from Israel is not confined to foreign
policy specialists. As a teacher I have also been struck in recent years by a
sea-change in the attitude of students. One example among many: Here at New
York University I was teaching this past month a class on post-war Europe. I
was trying to explain to young Americans the importance of the Spanish Civil
War in the political memory of Europeans and why Franco's Spain has such a special
place in our moral imagination: as a reminder of lost struggles, a symbol of
oppression in an age of liberalism and freedom, and a land of shame that people
boycotted for its crimes and repression. I cannot think, I told the students,
of any country that occupies such a pejorative space in democratic public
consciousness today. You are wrong, one young woman replied: What about Israel?
To my great surprise most of the class - including many of the sizable Jewish
contingent - nodded approval. The times they are indeed a-changing.
That
Israel can now stand in comparison with the Spain of General Franco in the eyes
of young Americans ought to come as a shock and an eleventh-hour wake-up call
to Israelis. Nothing lasts forever, and it seems likely to me that we shall
look back upon the years 1973-2003 as an era of tragic illusion for Israel:
years that the locust ate, consumed by the bizarre notion that, whatever it
chose to do or demand, Israel could count indefinitely upon the unquestioning
support of the United States and would never risk encountering a backlash. This
blinkered arrogance is tragically summed up in an assertion by Shimon Peres on
the very eve of the calamitous war that will in retrospect be seen, I believe,
to have precipitated the onset of America's alienation from its Israeli ally:
"The campaign against Saddam Hussein is a must."
The future of Israel
From
one perspective Israel's future is bleak. Not for the first time, a Jewish
state has found itself on the vulnerable periphery of someone else's empire:
overconfident in its own righteousness, willfully blind to the danger that its
indulgent excesses might ultimately provoke its imperial mentor to the point of
irritation and beyond, and heedless of its own failure to make any other
friends. To be sure, the modern Israeli state has big weapons - very big
weapons. But can it do with them except make more enemies? However, modern
Israel also has options. Precisely because the country is an object of such
universal mistrust and resentment - because people expect so little from Israel
today - a truly statesmanlike shift in its policies (dismantling of major
settlements, opening unconditional negotiations with Palestinians, calling
Hamas' bluff by offering the movement's leaders something serious in return for
recognition of Israel and a cease-fire) could have disproportionately
beneficial effects.
But
such a radical realignment of Israeli strategy would entail a difficult
reappraisal of every cliche and illusion under which the country and its
political elite have nestled for most of their life. It would entail
acknowledging that Israel no longer has any special claim upon international
sympathy or indulgence; that the United States won't always be there; that
weapons and walls can no more preserve Israel forever than they preserved the
German Democratic Republic or white South Africa; that colonies are always
doomed unless you are willing to expel or exterminate the indigenous
population. Other countries and their leaders have understood this and managed
comparable realignments: Charles De Gaulle realized that France's settlement in
Algeria, which was far older and better established than Israel's West Bank
colonies, was a military and moral disaster for his country. In an exercise of
outstanding political courage, he acted upon that insight and withdrew. But
when De Gaulle came to that realization he was a mature statesman, nearly 70
years old. Israel cannot afford to wait that long. At the age of 58 the time
has come for it to grow up.
Tony
Judt is a professor and the director of the Remarque Institute at New York
University, and his book "Postwar: The History of Europe Since 1945"
was published in 2005.
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