First, an illustrative anecdote: A little over a year ago, Iraq’s prime minister Nuri al-Maliki arrived in Washington and addressed Congress. The event was supposed to be a booster for the elected Iraqi leadership, showing U.S. support for the new government. But at the time, Israel was pummeling Beirut in response to Hizballah’s capture of two Israeli soldiers, so U.S. legislators naively tried — and failed — to get Maliki to condemn Hizballah. And, revealing the extent to which Washington is encased in a bubble when it comes to matters involving Israel in the Middle East, Senators Chuck Schumer, Harry Reid and Dick Durbin wrote Maliki a letter saying the following: “Your failure to condemn Hezbollah’s aggression and recognize Israel’s right to defend itself raise serious questions about whether Iraq under your leadership can play a constructive role in resolving the current crisis and bringing stability to the Middle East.”
To cut bluntly to the chase, there is scarcely a single politician in the Arab world willing to endorse Washington’s definitions of the problems or the solutions when it comes to Israel’s impact on the region — and that even among the autocrats with whom the U.S. prefers to work, much less that rare breed that Maliki represents, i.e. a democratically elected leader. It is the U.S. leadership that is in denial about what is needed to create security in the region.
Indeed, the grownups in Washington know this better than anyone. In response to the same crisis in Lebanon, former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft wrote:
Hezbollah is not the source of the problem; it is a derivative of the cause, which is the tragic conflict over Palestine that began in 1948.
The eastern shore of the Mediterranean is in turmoil from end to end, a repetition of continuing conflicts in one part or another since the abortive attempts of the United Nations to create separate Israeli and Palestinian states in 1948.
But nobody in power listens to Brent Scowcroft any more. Washington’s Israel bubble so detaches it from an objective view of the Middle East that Howard Dean’s 2003 call for the U.S. to adopt an “even-handed” position between Israel and the Palestinians has longsince entered the U.S. political playbook as an example of foot-in-mouth campaigning. (See my earlier entry on how well Barack Obama has learned this lesson.)
Like the tech-bubble and real estate-bubble, Washington’s “Israel bubble” is unhealthy and dangerous — in fact, it not only jeopardizes U.S. interests throughout the region and beyond (by serving as Exhibit A for any anti-American element anywhere in the Islamic world to win the political contest with America’s friends), but it is also exceedingly bad for Israel: Particularly over the past decade, the U.S. has essentially enabled Israeli behavior so self-destructive that it may have already precluded any chance of it being able to live at peace with its neighbors.
It is the lancing of this Israel bubble — in the best interests of the United States, the Arab world, and Israel’s own prospects for peaceful coexistence with its neighbors — that John Mearsheimer and Steven Walt have dedicated themselves, first in last year’s London Review of Books essay and now in a new book, titled “The Israel Lobby.”
They argue, firstly, that the absolute bias hardwired into U.S. policy towards Israel is neither a rational foreign policy for the U.S. or even particularly helpful to Israel. And they further make the case that this policy has been maintained and extended with increasingly destructive effect by the interventions and activities of a network of groupings they broadly define as the Israel lobby, which actively puts Israel positions (rather than American ones) at the forefront of U.S. policy (on issues ranging from the Palestinians to Iran), and which uses its considerable reach in the political process in Washington to ensure that challenging the U.S. bias towards Israel, as Dean did, is considered political suicide for a politician with presidential ambitions.
Their book is a comprehensive scholarly work, but its purpose is unashamedly political. The book has a number of weaknesses — I find its analytical approach often static and institutional; insufficiently dynamic and, dare I say it, insufficiently dialectical. On the nature of the U.S.-Israel relationship in last summer’s disastrous war in Lebanon, for example, I disagree with their denial of responsibility on Washington’s part — the original impulse to take some form of action may have come from the Israeli leadership, but as I made clear at the time, it was hard to avoid the suspicion that the scale and objectives of the operation became defined by Washington, and they were plainly goals for which Israel had not prepared its forces.
Also, the process of skewing U.S. bias towards Israel may reveal the machinations of a lobby, but they have also become deeply-entrenched tropes in U.S. political and civil society — tropes which now function quite independently of the lobby’s interventions.
But regardless of a number of specific instances that I might analyse somewhat differently, I have no quarrel with its central argument that U.S. policy on Israel and its neighbors is grotesquely biased in favor not only of Israel, but of Israel’s most self-destructive impulses. As such, it is a policy dangerous to U.S. interests and ultimately to those of Israel itself. This biased is maintained and policed in substantial part by an aggressive lobbying effort by an elaborate pro-Israel political infrastructure. Despite its analytical weaknesses, it is a refreshingly candid and courageous (given the all too common fate of those who tackle this taboo — just take a look at the important logging of this stuff at Muzzlewatch) embrace of what has long been the “third rail” of American foreign policy, insisting that a debate be conducted where none has been tolerated until now.
And, its significance may be measured in part by the response it has elicted. Not so much the predictable fulminations of Abe Foxman in his prebuttal of Mearsheimer and Walt, The Deadliest Lies, or the manic chatter of Haaretz’s resident arbiter of all things Hebrew Nationalist in America, Shmuel Rosner — all of that may be par for the course. But M&W share with Jimmy Carter that ability to call forth a rather unfortunate habit among sections of America’s liberal punditocracy, in which sharp and fundamental criticisms of Israel must be discredited and squashed, even at the cost of the cool reason for which the pundits in question are usually known. To put it unkindly, when Israel is under the spotlight, many liberal commentators feel compelled to embarrass themselves in its defense.
I noticed this phenomenon last year when Jimmy Carter made the entirely valid comparison between Israel’s West Bank regime and the apartheid system that prevailed in South Africa until 1994. That prompted Michael Kinsley — a well-known and generally smart liberal pundit — to denounce Carter’s comparison in an op-ed that only served to show how little he knew about either the Middle East or apartheid South Africa. Clearly, though, the idea that Israel was committing crimes equivalent to apartheid clearly made Kinsley so uncomfortable that he felt compelled to blurt out something — anything, really, to negate Carter, and make the discomfort he caused go away. (I critiqued his lame response to Carter in an earlier post.)
This phenomenon is reflective of a trend that has been confirmed to me anecdotally dozens of times, both in the U.S. and at home in South Africa, where some Jewish liberals of faultlessly progressive politics on every other issue turn into raving tribal belligerents of the Ariel Sharon hue when the conversation turns to Israel. We’ve all seen it, dozens of times, I’m sure — although I’m pleased to say I know a lot more whose politics are consistent, and are not prone to being possessed by Zionist Mr. Hydes.
David Remnick is not among them, unfortunately. In response to Mearsheimer and Walt, New Yorker editor Remnick offers a fresh specimen of the denial pathology.
What is most strking about his piece, however, is that it is more of a kvetch, designed to discredit M&W in the eyes of New Yorker readers, than a serious engagement with their argument. For example, Remnick notes that M&W are realists, i.e. they make their case for a foreign policy based on national interests. Remnick writes:
“There is a strong moral case for supporting Israel’s existence,” [M&W] write, but they deny that Israel is of critical strategic value to the United States. The disappearance of Israel, in their view, would jeopardize neither America’s geopolitical interests nor its core values. Such is their “realism.”
The latter line seems to be dropped in with a note of bitter irony, as if it somehow damns the authors, who repeatedly make clear their belief that the U.S. should support Israel where it’s right to exist is threatened, but note that its existence is not actually under threat, right now — instead, the U.S. is being called upon to underwrite its brutal occupation policies. But the argument that Israel’s disappearance would not substantially harm U.S. national interests is a perfectly legitimate one in the realist framework, bereft of emotion: Israel safeguards no vital national interests of the United States, and is more of a liability than an asset in the broad U.S. strategic approach to the Middle East. Those who argue that Israel has value as a U.S. ally can point only to tactical advantages, e.g. Israel’s intelligence services can better infiltrate radical groups than can their American allies. No doubt. But on the strategic plane, such advantages are negated by the fact that by unconditionally backing Israel and its regime of occupation over the Palestinians, it becomes virtually impossible for any Arab leader to openly associate with U.S. goals.
It was precisely this recognition of Israel’s limited strategic value to the U.S. in a post-Cold War world that led Yitzhak Rabin, a longtime hawk, to embrace the Oslo deal presented to him by Shimon Peres. Like the leaders of apartheid South Africa in the late 80s, Rabin had come to recognize (particularly in the era of the first Bush administration) that Israel could no longer count on unconditional U.S. backing given Washington’s interests elsewhere in the region. As a result, it was compelled to seek an accomodation with the Palestinian national leadership. Of course, this was an exceedingly good thing. Unfortunately, Rabin needn’t have worried, because the changing domestic political atmosphere in the U.S. — the success of the Israel lobby beyond its wildest dreams, particularly as a result of the backing of perhaps its latterly most important constituent, the Evangelical Christian Zionists, had meant that Israel could count on U.S. backing regardless of its behavior in relation to the Palestinians. M&W are simply pointing out that this does not accord with an accurate reading of U.S. national interests.
Remnick notes that M&W “are right to describe the moral violation in Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands. (In this, most Israelis and most American Jews agree with them.)” But then he complains that they reveal a nefarious agenda in blaming Israel for all ills in its relationship with the Palestinians, and the Arab more broadly.
The narrative rightly points out the destructiveness of the Israeli settlements in the occupied territories and America’s reluctance to do much to curtail them, but there is scant mention of Palestinian violence or diplomatic bungling, only a recitation of the claim that, in 2000, Israel offered “a disarmed set of Bantustans under de-facto Israeli control.” (Strange that, at the time, the Saudi Prince Bandar told Yasir Arafat, “If we lose this opportunity, it is not going to be a tragedy. This is going to be a crime.”)
But while Remnick may satisfy his liberal conscience by conceding the idea that the occupation is bad, what he’s not answering is M&W’s case that it is bizarre to the point of inexplicable that the U.S. no longer bothers to even threaten to take steps to restrain Israel from this “moral violation.” U.S. support for Israel is unconditional, settlements and all. The sad fact, for the likes of Remnick, is that the occupation is not some aberration on Israel’s part; there really is no longer any real distinction, in practice on the ground, between Israel and its occupation of the lands it captured in 1967. As Henry Siegman recently explained in an excellent piece in the London Review of Books, Israel quite simply has no inclination to withdraw from the occupied territories, and its ideas of a “peace process” are essentially limited to the pursuit of Palestinian surrender.
As for evoking the authority of Prince Bandar, oy. Remnick himself had suggested that debate on U.S. Middle East policy was welcome, and that it should include questions such as “whether we should be supplying arms to the Saudis.” Uh, Dave, those deals are typically negotiated by Bandar. And by the way, since when did this Bush-Cheney acolyte become a voice of Arab authority? How many Arab leaders were willing to publicly endorse the deal offered at Camp David? (Bandar himself wouldn’t, you can be sure. And nor would Mahmoud Abbas.)
Remnick is entirely correct that most American Jews would agree with M&W about the occupation, but that simply underlines a point they make throughout the book — that the positions and interventions of the Israel lobby are not representative of mainstream American Jewish opinion; they’re way to the right of it. It’s not a “Jewish lobby,” it’s a lobby of people — many of them Evangelical Christians — supporting the positions of the hardline nationalist right in Israel.
Remnick also attempts the rather silly argument that U.S. support for Israel has little impact on the appeal of Osama bin Laden and other radicals in the Arab world, because Bin Laden’s objective is to overthrow Arab autocracies backed by the U.S. Yes, of course it is, but the point is that Bin Laden hardly needs to break a sweat in “proving” American malfeasance to any Muslim audience — he simply needs to point for Washington’s unswerving support of Israel, and the argument is over. And that precludes U.S. allies in the Arab world from attaining any popular legitimacy.
While denying that M&W are anti-Semites, Remnick nonetheless questions the bona fides of their intervention. His message to his readers is, don’t worry about what these guys are saying, they’re just grinding an axe. Wink. “Taming the influence of lobbies, if that is what Mearsheimer and Walt desire, is a matter of reforming the lobbying and campaign-finance laws,” but he suggests that, intead, the authors are a product of a polarized political moment, reducing all ills to a single cause — the Israel lobby. But Remnick hasn’t honestly engaged with their arguments aside from clucking over the settlements: Does Remnick agree, for example, that the U.S. should leave Israel no choice but to withdraw its West Bank settlements, by threatening to cut off the spigot if it doesn’t stop and reverse its colonization of the West Bank? Should the U.S. not use its considerable power over Israel to march it back to its 1967 borders? That, really, is what’s at issue here.
Remnick’s own Israel bubble has been taking a bit of a battering of late: Just three weeks ago, he found himelf compelled to write a subtle smear of Avrum Burg, largely attributing the former Knesset speaker’s renunciation of Zionism to his supposed personality defects! Plainly, Remnick has little appetite for engaging with Burg’s notion that, as he put it, he had always considered himself a human being, a Jew and a Zionist until he began to recognize that his Zionism negated the other two aspects of his identity.
Burg, like Mearsheimer and Walt, had clearly made Remnick uncomfortable. But he’s substantially correct in challenging the M&W idea that the lobby is singularly responsible for policing America’s public discourse on Israel. After all, nobody asked Remnick to write these pieces. Nor did anyone tell Kinsley to try and shoot down Jimmy Carter’s apartheid argument. Just as important as challenging the Israel lobby is drawing attention to the deep-rooted tropes of knee-jerk defensiveness in sections of the liberal-Jewish intelligentsia that allows them to avert their eyes and cling to fantasy when Israel is an agent of oppression.
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There is nothing more amusing in America than seeing how seemingly intelligent people become complete moronic cretins when the issue of Israel comes up. Remnick is the perfect illustration of this.
Not only does he lash out with these moronic editorials, but he also hires criminal racists like Jeffrey Goldberg to preach to the world how great Israel’s occupation is and how all of the world’s problems are because of Palestinian extremists.
Once this bubble of Israeli worship erodes in America, morons like Remnick, Kinsley and Goldberg will be laughed at like we laugh at segregationists from the South.
The USA may be captive, if not prisoner to the Israeli lobby, but not most of the globe sees APIAC, the Defammation League and equivalent and its reciprocity in returning American taxpayer’s dollars, by bribing congress men and women, as immoral/unethical. And as Tony Karon makes clear, abundantly dangerous, for USA foreign policy.
The Palestinian situation encapsulates this circular funding in purusuit of deterrming foreign policy, but it comes with a price. And that price is becoming inordinantly expensive as is evident by the drum beats of the Israeli led neocons, preparing for an attack on Iran, Hizbollah and consolidation of their current scorched earth ,on Hamas.
The blowback on America will be much more than 9/11 and 3754 fatalities by American military in Iraq, but do obsessed Zionist idelogues care. Not a bit.
Mersheimer and Walt do the world a favour to expose this poisonous relationship. Can’t wait to get their book.
Funny, I read the Remnick profile of Avram Berg (Sp?) and had a different take on it. I thought it was revolutionary that the New Yorker was airing Berg’s views at all. Such ideas have never been seen in a mainstream US publication that’s not The Nation or something even farther to the left.
I perceived Remnick’s attempts to discredit Burg as a rhetorical move meant to pacify all the hysterics who would have conniptions over Burg’s ideas on Zionism and the state of Israel today.
If you think like a Communist Party newspaper editor or reporter, the maneuver becomes clear. You want to present an idea that the ruling party cannot bear to have published. You present it by first saying “look at this crazy idea, look at how insane or unreliable this person is. Isn’t it terrible what a perverse person he has become?” Then you present the whole idea in great detail. People get to read it. If the ruling party apparatchik or the loyalist readers complain, you can say – but I think the public has a right to know about this terrible person. I just wanted to expose his wrong ideas.
Few New Yorker readers would have given a hoot about Avram Burg without this article. He is not exactly on the radar in America. Why profile him then? If Remnick really wanted to smear him or take him down a peg or three, couldn’t he just have ignored him? Why give him the New Yorker’s attention?
No, I posit that the Burg article, at least, was Remnick’s way of getting the ideas out in front of the American public despite the incredible atmosphere of censorship that prevails on the topic of Israel.
On the M&W article, however, I am not as sure of my theory. The piece does seem more like an attempt to reassure those who are worried. But on the other hand, how many New Yorker readers were following Mearshimer and Walt, anyway? What if once again this were Remnick bringing attention to an issue that was percolating under the surface, and he has to poopoo the ideas in order to slip them past the censor?
OK I don’t understand how Remnick can hire Jeffrey Goldberg. I have some speculations but they start to sound too conspiratorial to discuss in public. Why does that guy Michael Gordon get his pieces on the front page of the Times when experts in the field claim he’s making stuff up about Iran?
The way the US media operates these days, you are best off approaching it as if it were similar to the Soviet media of the USSR years. Look for byzantine conspiracies, propaganda, and signs of factions jockeying for position. Assume that everything is a lie or a cover-up or a feint to distract the public’s attention from real news. Etc.
In the end, Israel will probably succeed in its campaign of deception, but it will be a pyrrhic victory. As Henry Siegman notes in his essay referenced above, Israel has created enough “facts on the ground,” and scared enough people about the “great Arab menace,” that they should be able to keep the status quo for a few more years. BUT, since the conditions are so unstable, I fully expect that within 25 years Israel will cease to exist. That is, the Jews in the so-called Holy Land will either leave or die. In addition to the destruction of Israel, the US will suffer who knows what horror.
This is the real problem with Israel successfully shutting down debate, most people will never understand the likely consequences to the US, Israel and the rest of the world as a result of Israel’s actions. Nothing every gets debated. This is good for Israel which would not like the results of such a debate in the short term but will be tragic to everyone in the long term.
To anyone that understands the flow of history it is obvious that the whole situation is unstable and in a logical world would never have been allowed to even get started. Israel should NOT exist because for Israel to exist requires the ethnic cleansing of huge amounts of land. The western countries should never have allowed the Jews into the ME, but they did, because of guilt over the Holocaust, unwillingness to accept Jewish refugees (antisemitism) after WW2, and willingness to treat the Arabs like second-class world citizens (since the early 1800s the Arabs had warned repeatedly to keep the Jews out of the ME). As a result, the Arabs in the ME have been punished for the sins of the Nazis.
In the end, as world power shifts away frorm the US to China and to a lesser extent Russia, the Arabs will eventually have the means to destroy Israel and since they are still upset about the Crusades there is no reason to expect they will not take advantage of the opportunity. I expect that the world will causally watch in amusement.
This is what the folks in Israel can not seem to internalize. They can not hold off the Arab anger forever. They do not have enough financial, people or technology resources to do this.
It is tragic to see a group of people on the path to destruction and not be able to persuade them of the danger they are in. Every conversation I have with Israelis about the future has them confident that they can control everything forever but the lesson of history is they can not.
Oh well, some people have to learn the hard way. Unfortunately i suspect the people in the US will pay a very heavy price for letting Israel suck the US into the black hole Israel has created. I suspect also that the people of the US will wrongly blame the Arabs instead of placing the blame on the Israelis where it should be, causing additional problems for the US.
“Mearsheimer”, I believe.
Apart from that quibble, cracking piece.
I subscribe to the New Yorker and I have strong views about its writers (some are supremely gifted; others should be writing greeting cards for Hallmark). Like Leila, therefore, I really wonder how they do their recruiting.
But my comment is about Tony’s point regarding the lobby’s power. Perhaps more than AIPAC and the Christian fundies,
history itself helps explain some of the reflexive pro-Israel
bias in the public discourse.
And no, I don’t mean the Promised Land status of
both countries in their respective mythologies.
1967 was a watershed year for Israel and the European Left. Prior to 67, Israel was a plucky little country that embodied much of the progressive values of the Left: fairness, social justice, embrace of ethnic diversity, etc. Among Jews and non-Jews alike, it was the height of coolness to go visit a kibbutz in the late 60s.
1967 changed all that. The occupation exposed the increased militarization of Israeli society and its colonial outlook. Economically, meanwhile, Israel slowly but surely came to embrace the dog-eat-dog brand of American capitalism. (Israel has never been richer than today yet one child out of three lives in poverty. Sound familiar?)
Israel moved from Athens to Sparta. And Americans loved
every bit of it. The late 60s is when Civil Rights made
it increasingly impossible to spew out racist hate openly
in America. It’s when the Democrats lost their majority
in the South (which, you’ll recall, they had won when Southerners suddently noticed that Lincoln was a Republican).
Israel isn’t that whitey white really, but Americans like to believe it is. Arabs are not that dark really, but Americans like to believe they are. So the analogy works: Arabs are the new Blacks and Israelis are the new Americans. Bibi Netanyahu is more American than George Bush (he can actually speak English), and Nasrallah
is Malcolm X, a dark, threatening figure.
Americans identify with Israelis. Now that Israelis
are getting into the American habit of losing their wars,
the identification –and insecurity — will grow even stronger as time goes by.
Americans and Israelis also share a common paranoia. No other nations believe they are so hated by everyone else.
(OK, maybe that’s because no other nation is).
Israel and America are the only two Western countries still fighting the natives. That’s a tie that binds.
I think that In 2000, when the Second Intifadah was just getting started, there far more debate over Israeli treatment of the Palestinians. Then came Al Queda’s attacks on 9/11, and subsequent images of Palestinians dancing in the streets of East Jerusalem. In the months following the attacks, I watched in horror as public opinion ossifying around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and as Likudnik Zionists triumphantly exclaimed “NOW America understands!”
Then came the War on Terror, which was basically a global application of American Israel policy. At one point, Bush explicitly used the term “Crusade” in reference to the War. He later apologized, but one could see his true intent. The War on Terror is an apocalyptic vision of a Clash of Civilizations, a Christian-Moslem conflict modelled on and reinforcing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Since then, I can barely recognize either America or Israel, the two countries I call home.
In 2003, America launched an unprovoked and unecessary attack against Iraq that ruined the country. In 2006, Israel with minimal provocation launched an unecessary attack against Lebanon that ruined the country. I am convinced the 2nd Lebanon War would not have been possible without the political cover provided by the War on Terror. When I argue with my conservative Zionist friends about the Lebanon War, they say Israel is not to be blamed because its actions were fine within the context of the War on Terror.
Today, the road to Ramallah runs through Washington; there is zero chance of a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict until the War on Terror is repudiated. If the War is not ended, we will see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict repeat itself on a global scale. Israel/Palestine itself will be a living vision of apocalypse: probably, one side will completely exterminate the other, but neither side will win.
I evaluate a politician almost entirely based on his ideas toward the War on Terror. The Republicans are completely out of control, with Giuliani holding the “moderate” opinion that a Palestinian state is a terrorist state. Hillary Clinton truly is Bush-Cheney lite, with no objections to this hopeless War itself, only to “incompetence” and “irresponsibility” in its execution. Edwards has explicitly denounced the War on Terror as no more than a “bumper sticker”, and is the only major candidate to do so.
Obama is not as hawkish as he seems. I truly believe that he is against the War on Terror. He does not say so openly because this would alienate conservatives, and he prides himself on bridging political gaps. But look at his positions, which in many cases go further than Edwards: no unconditional support for Musharraf (as bad for Pakistanis as unconditional aid to Israel is to Israelis), a big antipoverty initiative, negotiations with “evil dictators”, and a new dialogue with Islam.
America never really recovered from 9/11. Our political discourse has been dead since then. To revive this country, and then Israel, the 2008 Presidential Election must exact a searing defeat against the basic principles of the War on Terror. Otherwise, the American and Zionist dreams both may perish.
More than 20 years ago I was invited to Israel to participate at a seminary for journalists. Avraham Burg, who was at the time leading the Jewish Agency gave us a very Zionist speech. He was not a youngster anymore. His sudden change is not one of Saulus to Paulus. Change came because he was unsuccessful in his political career. The moment a prominent Israeli decides to lash out at Zionism, he can be sure to get plenty of invitations to Europe, where in complete contradiction to the USA such people are welcome to speak and write.
Lets imagine for one moment there is no more State of Israel. Would then Saudi-Arabia turn democratic, would be less poverty in Egypt, less stoning and hanging of homosexuals and women who had illicit sexual relations in Iran? Would the rape of young boys in Pakistans religious schools stop? Would Palestinians stop killing each other and be able to form a democratic society?
Abolishing the state of Israel probably wouldn’t end global warming either, so what?
Israel is in no danger of being “terminated” by anyone. That’s a right-wing talking point that has no basis in reality.
Israel is in danger of becoming a pariah state where no sane person would want to live. That’s the issue Israelis and friends of Israel should worry about instead of conjuring up imaginary existential threats.
Long before M&W and Carter, I came to my own conclusions about the Lobby and Israel through close observation of the pattern of events in Israel-Palestine and the US congress over the past decades.
It doesn’t even need to be “debated”, it needs to end.
I have written my congressman and senator and the heads of both parites to say I, my extended family, and everyone else I have contact and influence will not support or vote for any candidate for any office who pledges alliegence to Israel and continues this corruption of American values and government. Instead we will actively work against them and name the reason we are doing so
Anyone who isn’t wiling to notify their elected representives that they won’t support this perversion is just pontificating and wasting their time.
Only when congress fears American voters more than they fear groups like AIPAC will it end.
Julia,
The main issue is not that the candidate “pledges allegiance” to Israel. If we exclude the West Bank, Israel proper is one of the only democracies in the Middle East, and one that gives nearly equal rights to Israeli Arabs. I view this not as a corruption of American values, but as an embodyment of the best of American values. All men are created equal. Everyone’s voice matters. Of course, Israeli laws will have a Jewish flavor–that is to be expected in a state with the highest concentration of Jews in the world.
The problem is that Israel was founded on contradictory principles: a Jewish democracy. As Jews will eventually be in the minority, they will eventually have to choose between a majority-Arab democracy with a Jewish flavor, and a Jewish apartheid state. The former is far superior from a ZIONIST perspective, because Israel can be majority Arab and retain a Jewish character, but can not possibly be apartheidal while retaining its democratic character.
So the problem is not that American politicians pledge their support for Israel. The problem is that they don’t mean it, and are as insincere about Zionism as the American neocons are about American patriotism. By essentially promoting the aparheidal solution, the so-called “friends” of Israel are in fact destroying the country–just as American “patriots” here, with their War on Terror, are bombing the American dream.
I am a Zionist. I am an American patriot. It is not in spite of this but because of this that I criticize both my home countries; the fundamental principle of democracy is loyal dissent. Take that away, democracy dies.
Shlomon — you’re in a fantasy world when you say “if we exclude the West Bank” — the West Bank has been part of the Israeli regime for the past 40 years, and Israel is not planning to end that regime for the foreseeable future. The West Bank settlements, walls, checkpoints etc. are as much part of Israel today as the beaches of Tel Aviv…
There is a dreariness to all this. We are faced with a complex, fast-changing world and we have politicians chanting meaningless “verities” about Israel and Arabs. (Cue: Bill Cutty.)
Instead of an Armaggedon, we are watching the tide go out on American power. Most of our Fundies and Fox News watchers speak to so few foreigners, they don’t understand that the American brand is tarnished; the American dream is a self-reinforcing myth, and American ingenuity involves importing brains from Europe, India, and China. Has anyone looked at origin of almost every American Chess Grandmaster? (Okay, not the best example….)
Considering the overt religiousity of our current public square, why should we expect our foreign policy to have less obscurantism? Simple question: Would John Hagee have been a national figure 20 years ago? Would any self-respecting Jew have invited him to address AIPAC 20 years ago?
The Armageddon is already here (it’s called the MIddle East), and politics is diverted by what a flunkey Senator did in a public toilet rather than whose interests he has been pandering to during his long sojourn on the public tit.
1. Bernard Chazelle is as perceptive as ever, and the Athens/Sparta analogy with pre and post 1967 Israel is appealing. Yet that divide reflects the accepted wisdom rather than the reality. After all, Athens was not merely sweetness and light but rose to power as an exploitative imperial machine. So also pre-1967 Israel is the parent of post-1967 Israel. Born in sin and continues in sin. The 1956 outrage is symptomatic. Pre-1967 Israel as utopia is just so much blather.
2. It would seem to me that one can’t be a Zionist without becoming an Israeli citizen. This practice of, as in the old days, doing time on a kibbutz, or, as now, herbing over for a break while cavorting on a Tel Aviv beach or staying in an upmarket apartment in Ma’aleh Adumim and doing the Souccah with not an indigene in sight is basically Sicko.
3. So what is this other phenomenon of rooting for Israel from the benches, in comfortable American (name your country) suburbia? Tribalism. As one would root for a football team, except that this particular team specialises in ethnic cleansing. The cost of membership in the rooting club is the loss of one’s intelligence and education and the loss of one’s humanity – vide the post by ‘Eli of Austria’, for whom the A-rabs are essentially sub-human.
A tribalism that has thus acquired pathological dimensions. As TK notes:
‘This phenomenon is reflective of a trend that has been confirmed to me anecdotally dozens of times, both in the U.S. and at home in South Africa, where some Jewish liberals of faultlessly progressive politics on every other issue turn into raving tribal belligerents of the Ariel Sharon hue when the conversation turns to Israel.’
Can one then take such people seriously on anything?
The layers – Israel’s criminality, and a pathological tribalism that ensures the former’s continuity. The latter demands explicit redress before the former can be confronted (note Elliott Abrams’ undermining of Quartet and UN initiatives in Gaza, with Wolfensohn and de Soto, for example, both with long experience and detachment, quitting in disgust) .
And the pathological tribalism demands attention for its own sake – centuries of contibution by Jewry to the Englightenment and centuries of suffering by Jewry debased by the socialised obeiscance to institutionalised barbarism.
Frankly, the israel lobby is the ‘West’s numero uno moral problem.
Shlomo — “Israel proper is one of the only democracies in the Middle East, and one that gives nearly equal rights to Israeli Arabs.”
“gives NEARLY equal rights to Israeli Arabs?” Then it’s not a democracy. Quit fooling yourself or us.
“Of course, Israeli laws will have a Jewish flavor–that is to be expected in a state with the highest concentration of Jews in the world.”
You mean Russian emigres, who claim Jewish as their religion whether observant or not, dont you? Israel’s population is around 6 million. 4.8 million of them are Russian. Eighty percent (80%). The US paid for them to emigrate since 1970. Israel is a Russian satellite now.
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600 000 of those russians have left for the u s & europe
the countdown has already started
geo graphical time bomb
350 000 000 arabs in 2025
Actually Israel is an Israeli-Russian Mafia satellite now.
But I digress from my main point.
Based on Tony’s reference to Burg, I looked up this interview with him in Haaretz.:
Leaving the Zionist ghetto
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/868385.html
Amazingly, the man sounds like me – if I were Jewish and disgusted with the Zionist program. He does everything I’ve done (and been castigated for, and banned from Talking Points Memo by Josh Marshall for, and called “anti-Semitic” for): comparing the Israeli regime with the Nazi regime, declaring that the concept of a “Jewish state” is not workable, accepting the Diaspora as the best thing that ever happened to Judaism, suggesting that Israelis would be smart to move, etc,, etc.) And this guy is not only Jewish, he’s a former Zionist, and a former member of the Israeli government!
Guess he, as Josh Marshall likes to accuse me of, “despises Jews”…
Sounds to me, however, that he loves Jews and despises what Zionism has become.
See Noam Chomsky’s comments on this issue (link below).
The basic idea, quoting Stephen Zunes,
“there are far more powerful interests that have a stake in what happens in the Persian Gulf region than does AIPAC [or the Lobby generally], such as the oil companies, the arms industry and other special interests whose lobbying influence and campaign contributions far surpass that of the much-vaunted Zionist lobby and its allied donors to congressional races.”
Noam concludes, “Convenient, but not too convincing. In either case.”
http://www.chomsky.info/articles/20060328.htm
Excellent rebuttal to a piece which I think I found more disturbing. I wrote this to editor Remnick a few days ago:
I read with astonishment your curiously untimely comments about Palestine and Israel, and the putative “symptomatic” essay that prompted your ravings. That will do it; no more subscription, ever, for me. There are many issues of global importance, from economic inequality to US militarization to worldwide poverty and climate change, yet when one
piece is such fascist journalism, I must register my complaint about your support of the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. There are many good and honorable people in Israel and here who do not promote the
on-going violence against the refugees in Palestine; it is in their name, and most specifically that of Norman Finkelstein, upon whose momentous case you have been silent, that I ask that my association with your
magazine be terminated.
I’m just one reader, one no-account like everybody else, but I got incensed when a Princeton boomer with a million readers gets on his high horse…
After reading the above comments,as well as the review itself, it is increasingly apparent that M&W have succeeded in bringing this subject to the fore,one of their stated objectives. The placement of Remnick’s review in the NYer’s “editorials” section (first!) is in direct relation to this topic’s currency and weight. Though the conversation will inevitably include all forms of whackos,haters,denyers and everything in between,at least there IS discussion and this is good for all.
@ Adamchik
While there may be other interests involved, I don’t believe the arms or oil industries could or would bring the total unanimity of praise for Israel among the U.S. political class. Do you really believe Exxon would attack a congressman for expressing mild sympathy for the Palestinians? Would General Dynamics lobby congress AGAINST arms sails to Saudi Arabia? Seems unlikely to me.
I’m 61 years of age and hope that I live long enough to read- “All Israelies have left M.E. and settled in America “. Try this tid bit,never talked about–Hitler’s Germany was trying hard to settle Palestine as a Jewish state—WHY ?
The irony of this Israel’s American lobby is that they are fueling a rising tide of American anti-semitism. It is a tide that continues to accellerate. Israel and its lobby are hastening the coming crisis for itself and American Jews.
Excellent piece as usual. A few points:
“Israel’s intelligence services can better infiltrate radical groups than can their American allies. No doubt.”
Leaving aside the whole issue over whether laypeople can ever have a clue about what goes on in the neccessarily secretive world of intelligence gathering, but should we really have no doubt that Israel’s intellignces services are all that great? Insiders such as Bob Baer and Michael Scheuer contend that the only department in which Mossad excels is that of PR. Other experts also claim that the US would be far better off cultivating the Iranian or Syrian intelligence agencies, which are far better equipped to deal with Middle Eastern “extremists”. So you could definetely make the argument that America’s entanglement with Israel results in a net intelligence loss (pun intended!)
“the moral violation in Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands. (In this, most Israelis and most American Jews agree with them.)”
I would never claim any expertise on Israeli or American Jewish society, but surely, if there was a genuine anti-occupation groundswell in Israel, we would know about it? IF ‘most’ Israelis are against the occupation, they certainly don’t show it on election day, or when they urge their governments to ‘hit the terrorists hard’. Surely, if the majority of Israelis wanted to end the occupation, opposition to it wouldn’t only be voiced by fringe organisations?
No, Israel does not give “nearly equal” rights to its Palestinian citizens. They are Palestinians or Palestinian Arabs, not Arabs. The way people who support Israel ignore their Palestinian identity is purposeful, because it recalls that Palestinian Arabs are the indigenous people. Also, calling them “Arabs” without any mention of their Palestinian identity ignores their connections, historical, familial, sociological and political with Palestinians in the Occupied Territories.
Israel is a democracy for Jews. It is not a democracy for Palestinian citizens of Israel who have nothing like “near equal rights” to Jewish citizens. Israel is an ethnic state with a definition of statehood right out of the 19th century. It’s an anachronism, albeit a powerful one.
There’s an interview with Stephen Walt done last year (after the publication of the paper “The Israel Lobby & U.S. Foreign Policy”) on the I.N.N. World report website:
http://www.innworldreport.net
The Walt interview is well worth a listen.
Beyond that, I started calling Congress in protest when I first discovered the existence and power of the pro-Israel lobbies, which was between the September 11 attacks and the run-up to the invasion of Iraq.
Congress is not listening to us on this topic, as evidenced by the August 2007 recess trip to Israel of 80 members of the U.S. House. Some of these House members were led by Steny Hoyer (DEMOCRATIC House Majority Leader) himself.
That’s close to 20% of the U.S. House visiting another country during time designated for them to be in their home districts listening to their constituents’ complaints.
What’s even more creepy is that Hoyer’s office won’t even say who went on the trip to Israel.
This is yet another example of who the U.S. Congress IS listening to and who it is not, the latter being the people of the U.S.
Past that, Remnick in a July New Yorker article called “The Apostate” (the one about Burg) repeated the lie that Ahmadinejad called for Israel to be “wiped off the map” when in fact Ahmadinejad said that Israel would “vanish from the pages of time” much like the Soviet Union had done, a victim of its own hubris and corruption.
I have become increasingly disgusted with the New Yorker and its subtle and not so subtle pro-Israel propaganda. I tried to cancel my subscription in protest but for some reason they refuse to stop sending me the magazine.
For another example of subtle pro-Israel propaganda, Conde Nast’s Portfolio magazine casually mentions that we should worry about Iran’s quest for a bomb, in an article that had nothing to do with Iran or nuclear weapons.
There’s all kind of things wrong with that casual mention — for one thing, as I’m sure everyone here knows, Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and is allowed peaceful nuclear development. IAEA inspectors are regularly in Iran.
The second would be that Israel is not a signatory, has more than 200 nuclear weapons AND delivery systems, and has never allowed inspections
Both the New Yorker and Portfolio are exhibits of Hasbara (pro-Israel) propaganda at its best — plant that little seed in the minds of the reading classes and watch it grow into carte blanche support for what in my opinion is a racist, rogue, apartheid state.
With the British papers reporting imminent U.S. air strikes on Iran — a “three day blitz” with more than 1200 targets, I feel that the worst is yet to come, and we can blame our non-ally, Israel for it. We do not have a Senate ratified defense treaty with Israel, by her choice, yet we get fed this “ally” baloney all the time by our congressional whores.
BTW: both Zunes and Chomsky are Zionist propagandists, but in such a subtle way that many on the “left” are snowed. For them it’s all about oil and empire. My fingers are too tired to type a rebuttal but I would have to suggest that oil companies like stability, and a fair rate for the oil would be preferable to paying $12 billion a month to NOT secure it in Iraq.
It’s been many years since I read “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” but as I recall, the disproportional power of the German Jewish community in their press, their financial institutions, their elected governments and their businesses in general was a factor in the rise to power of Hitler. Again in the early 2000’s, the USA is being manouvered by the whims of a powerful Jewish minority (less that 3%), something that most average Americans don’t even understand or recognize. When this lobby has egged the USA into successive wars with Iraq, Iran and Pakistan for the sake of protecting Israel and created national debts for these exercises of 15-20 trilliion dollars, American taxpayers might take note and elect a strong opposing leader. Can another holocaust be far behind?
Tony: I wonder how many Zionists (maybe excluding Shlomo) are really troubled by the fact that Zionism, by definition leads to ethnic cleansing, at least, or extermination, at worst. And that is not because Zionism is a nihilist ideology like National Socialism. It is because it is a negation of the real world. If God wanted the Jews to reeem the ‘promised land” [I’ve been there–it’s just about the least promising real estate in the world], He did a sorry job communicating this message to his other children, i.e., the descendants of Ismail.
Like the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland, and Apartheid South Africa, Zionism requires the negation of facts on the ground. Palestinians are inconvenient, so they don’t exist. They have no real identity and separate history. They will eventually just disappear, etc. If you starve them enough, they will admit they are really Egyptians and Hashemites. Sigh. I used to work out with an uber-Likudite who peddled this piffle.
The problem is that whatever virtues Zionism holds for the Jewish People will be utterly lost if they take the “necessary ” steps to make it “succeed.” (Ethnic cleansing or extermination. Look at the American example of the “Winning of the West.” )
I believe most countries and cultures have a suicide impulse. What else is the Occupation?
Israel’s problem is that it is America’s “ally”. Israelis will wake up one day and find that it is dangerous to be America’s ” ally”. I have said it before and I will repeat it: The Arabs do NOT pose a threat to Israel’s existence. That comes from a combination of Israeli arrogance and American idiocy. Toxic combination, indeed.
There really will never be any peace in the Middle East until the US un-glues itself from Israel. As simple as that. Israel has nukes. Let it defend itself. It doesn’t need US protection. And let us hope Iran gets nukes too, so Israel and Iran can have a peace of mutually assured destruction, a la the US and USSR during the cold war.
M & W, whatever minor faults might lie in their book, have provoked the rage of such “luminaries” as Abe Foxman of the ADL (who, as you recall, wanted hysterically to invoke the PATRIOT Act against Mel Gibson for his rather sadistic movie, The Passion fo the Christ.
The roots of the problem are, of course, the Jewish-dominated media which have conditioned America into a Weltanschauung which cannot tolerate the thought that Israel is basically a criminal enterprise and that the Arabs, whatever their actions, are merely reacting to Israeli ethnic cleansing (executed, as I discovered for myself on a visit to the West Bank) in a manner which is unspeakably brutal.
M & W therefore have a Sysiphean task.
One can but hope that they have the stamina.
When Zionists tell us that any adjustment, any change in policy would mean the death of Israel and all the Jews in it, they make me wonder if the anti-zionists, who insist Israel could not exist without the ethnic cleansing ond oppression of the existing peoples, are right.
Any time you suggest any amelioration of the condition of the people in the Occupied Terrortories, or suggest an equitable system of laws, or even suggest a concession by Israel, the Zionists scream: “They’ll kill us all”
Also, don’t anyone suggest any course of action for Israel unless you have a concurrent proposal to cure every other ill in the world.
The hasbara is becoming tiresome.
TruePatriot, I totally aagree with everything in your response. I come here for Tony, and always feel that his posting, combined with the brilliant replies, nourishes the mind. More than any other site.
Can’t agree with you regarding Remnick’s “hysteria”. His piece in the “New Yorker was steady and evenhanded. Set against the larger background of pro-Israel thought control, it seems “biased” in favor of fact and reality.
I call your attention to Remnick’s closing comment:
“Finally, the Israeli government has to confront its own crazies and create a national consensus on democratic ideals, enact a secular constitution, and really confront the settlers. So far, the government is only willing to say that it is making ‘painful’ moves. We are told that we have to grieve with the settlers, think about making deals, but quietly let on that we actually think these are the real Israeli pioneers. Bullshit. Avrum Burg might not express the need to change in the most effective way, but at least he has the courage to insist on it.”
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It now appears that the evidence used to convict Libyan agents of the Pan Am Lockerbie bombing was tampered with.The circuit board of the timing device used to explode the bomb on board the plane was examined by the manufacturer of the device before the trial.The color of the board was brown but the color of the circuit boards of the timing devices shipped to Libya were green.When the fragments of the board were introduced in the trial they had been burnt,or carbonized to the point that the original color was no longer recognizable.If the Libyans didn’t carry out this attack,then who did?It was way before bin Laden’s time but it occurred within the time span of an attempt to create a terrorist attack by Israel to blame on the Egyptian government,an incident well documented with Israel caught red handed.The Guardian newspaper of Britian is handling this story.
Tony,
As recently as two years ago withdrawal from the West Bank was within sight. The Lebanon War has set the country back, and driven the electorate rightward, but the pendulum can swing back. Also, just because West Bank has been under the “Israeli regime” for forty years does not mean the territories are inseparable. India was under the “British regime” for longer, but could still be forced out by Gandhi’s blistering and brilliant nonviolent resistance. An independent and separate Palestinian state is still possible, in spite of the Israeli electorate and the Hamas-Fatah rivalry. It also remains the best option, and I would not be so quick to abandon it.
Janie,
When I said “Gives nearly equal rights”, I was referring to economic discrimination of the type Black America faces today. Arab students study and live Israeli University beside their Jewish friends. Israeli Arabs/Palestinians can order a drink at the same lunch counters Jews can, and sit on the same buses that Jews can, and live in the same apartments that Jews can. The Israeli government could provide more social services for Palestinian Israelis, but you could say the same about the U.S. government and African-Americans.
And I don’t see how it matters what the internal demographics of Israeli Jews are. Judaism is both a religion and a race. You might like to know, however, that all those Russian Jews faced severe repression under the Soviet leadership, which happened to be a REAL mortal threat to America. That’s why the U.S. helped them get out, and Israel is no more a Russian satellite today than Denmark was a German satellite for protecting Holocaust refugees.
Deborah,
Your comment is very timely. The pendulum is already, finally, beginning to swing back on the issue of Palestinian identity. All textbooks for Israeli Arabs now include reference to the Nakhba, despite Netanyahu’s and Lieberman’s indignant outcries that this “teaches treachery”.
See the above comments to Jamie about the rights of Palestinian Israelis. Treatment of Israeli Arabs in VERY different than West Bank Palestinians. Only the latter includes increasingly apartheidal practices.
Matthew,
I don’t agree that Zionism necessarily leads to ethnic cleansing. Zionism was primarily a SECULAR nationalist movement, like the German, Polish, and Italian nationalist movements. I agree with you that Zionism should not be about “redeeming the promised land”—that’s not supposed to happen until Messiah comes. Unfortunately, the Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza continues, largely due to the Messianic Zionism neither one of us likes. I also agree that this Messianic Zionism is a suicidal impulse. In fact, here’s a fascinating thought. If you are an ultra-Orthodox Jew, you’re either overtly anti-Zionist or gung-ho for settlements. Should tell you something.
Listen, if I were alive in the 1940’s, and had avoided the gas chambers, I would have had some things to say to the thugs of Irgun and other similar groups. But I’m not. It is 2007 not 1947, and as horrible and tragic as the Nakhba was, it can not be reversed. The best we can do now is ensure maximum happiness for the grandchildren of Nakhba and Holocaust survivors. I believe the best way for this is to recognize both Jewish and Palestinian claims to the land. The Palestinian Territories are the only place of refuge for Palestinians, who face persecution in virtually every place they are exiled to. That sounds so familiar to me, it is almost painful. At the same time, two whole generations of Israeli Jews have grown up in Israel. Their grandparents, who are now mostly in their 70’s or 80’s, remember what it was like to be a minority, reviled even in their home countries, and with no country to truly call home. In the future, neither group should have a repeat of the exile and persecution they’ve gone through. Both deserve separate states, and a homeland that is uniquely theirs.
Mr Karon has written a generally thoughtful piece, especially in his suggestion that the mass-marketed hyper-pro-Zionist idiom that pervades American political discourse functions “quite independently of the lobby’s interventions.” (The word “trope” understates how deep and wide Israeli bias has penetrated our speech.)
Two points, however. First, there is nothing evanescent–“bubble”-like– about the Israeli bias that plagues US policy. It is not some out of control fad or hip phenomenon. It is baked into both formal and informal structures of politics, government and media. After decades of brainwashing through repeated message of Israeli moral superiority–contrasted with repetitive negative racist imagery of Arabs–the Israeli-first bias has become an organic part of our culture. The notion that this
bubble may burst like the stock market and real estate bubbles cannot be taken seriously. I am afraid it will likely take a lot more than a sudden “correction” of perspective to re-align US foreign policy to Anerican rather than Israeli interests. For example, the economic and social upheaval to the US that inevitably will follow the forthcoming war on Iran….
Second, why should it concern Americans in the least whether policies undertaken for the sake of Israel are actually bad for Israel in the long term? Time and again, the US’s Israeli-first policies show themselves to be suicidal. At most, the impact of American policy on Israel must be a matter of indifference to American policy makers (except to the narrow and likely trivial extent that any impact affects American interests). Indeed, it is somewhat obvious that America’s best interests would be served by entirely severing the Israeli albatross from its neck. That would not bode well for the survivability of the “only democracy in the Midle East”–short or long term–but so what?
deeply-entrenched tropes in U.S. political and civil society — tropes which now function
Like the tech-bubble and real estate-bubble, Washington’s “Israel bubble” is unhealthy and dangerous — in fact, it not only jeopardizes U.S. interests throughout the region and beyond (by serving as Exhibit A for any anti-American element anywhere in the Islamic world to win the political contest with America’s friends), but it is also exceedingly bad for Israel:
Great article, we badly need more Jews with guts to stand up to the suicidal megalomanic policies of Israel. (I am an Israeli, by the way)
Wonderful blog, as always. I think the problem people like Remnick find themselves in is that once you accept the premises of Zionism, or at least Zionism as expressed in the creation of the Israel, you find yourself in a place that is implicitely illiberal. So, either you ignore these premises, turn a blind eye to the history and pretend that the status of the West Bank is the only issue that can legitimately be debated, or you get dragged down into a very dark place. The obvious example is the once-liberal Zionist historian Benny Morris. To Morris’ credit, he remains honest, but that honesty when combined with his Zionism, has taken him in a horrible direction, one where he talks of Palestinians as ‘barbarians’ and says they should be put in ’something like a cage’. The premises I am talking about relate to the facts about the creation of the Jewish state. Morris states that “the whole Zionist project is apocalyptic”. and that “in a certain sense its (Israel’s) existence is unreasonable.” And yet he defends it. He says establishing a Jewish state in a country where Jews were the minority (one third of the population of Palestine in 1947, he acknowledges) was the right thing to do, and that “there are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing” and “without the uprooting of the Palestinians a Jewish state would not have arisen here” and “there are cases in which the overall, final good justifies harsh and cruel acts that are committed in the course of history.” He even says, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” To me, this is the morality of fascism. It is proufoundly immoral. It is in Morris’s favour that he recognises that without this egg-breaking, the Zionist project would have failed. It seems to me that to be an honest and informed Zionist you have to reach this point: either you ditch your Zionism or you accept the ethnic cleansing and massacres that were necessary for it to succeed. But if you do reach that point you should no longer pretend to be a liberal, in any sense. My own view is the opposite of Morris’s: that it what happened in Palestine in 1948 was a tragedy which will run and run and run. http://www.gavinevans.net
Shlomo: As a secularist, I oppose any solution that states “let’s move some people….” You are quite right that two generations of Jews have grown up in Israel and Israel is their home. All I’m suggesting is that we treat this like a boundry dispute, end all discussion that God mandates the proper borders of Israel or any other country, and focus on building a healthy Palestinian society, which will be a benefit to the Jewish society next door. I only argued that Zionism is dangerous to the extent, like Manifest Destiny, it defines itself as “owning” what is actually lived on by another.
Thanks Gavin, and you’re right: What Morris makes clear is that to be a Zionist, you basically have to concede to the morality and perspective of the Likud; there really is no “progressive” Zionism that can absolve itself of the crimes and violations of Israel on the basis of the “purity” of its vision. When I was in Habonim, we used to call them — the Likud — “fascists,” imagining our side (the Zionist left) innocent of everything from teh ethnic cleansing of 1948 to the settlements. But in reality, that’s a self-serving evasion. The Likudniks used to laugh at us — “Do you seriously believe there would have been a Jewish state if things like the massacre at Deir Yassin hadn’t happened and the Palestinians had stayed in their homes?” This is why I think Burg recognized the conflict between his Zionism on the one hand and his Judaism and humanity on the other.
Tony,
The Likudniks have a vested interest in ramming all opinions into one of two boxes: anti-Zionist, or anti-Palestinian. In fact, anti-Zionists have the same interest. Therefore, anyone who says “Boo!” about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will immediately face ferocious criticism from these two parties.
One favors returning Jews to a perpetual state of exile, the other favors keeping Palestinians in a perpetual state of exile. Neither of these parties have a solution to the conflict. All they can offer is a chance to drown in the blood-soaked history of Judeo-Arabic relations.
One sentence in your last post revealed how absurd the all-or-nothing advocates truly are:
“there really is no ‘progressive’ Zionism that can absolve itself of the crimes and violations of Israel on the basis of the ‘purity’ of its vision.”
The problem with this sentence is how you deal with purity and absolution. When you talk of the “purity” of the Zionist vision, it seems to me you are sharply criticizing the ethnic cleansing of 1948–as you should. But just before that, you write that progressive Zionism can not “absolve” itself of its crimes. Does this mean that Zionist absolution should be a goal? Abolution is a process of purification!
All this emphasis on “atoning” for past crimes makes peace impossible. Hamas seeks to “cleanse” Israel of Zionists because fifty years ago Zionists “cleansed” their grandparents. Therefore, Hamas uses mass murder as a negotiating tool, and attempts to bomb pizzerias and kill children on the playground. But after the terrorist attack, the IDF can not sit idly. It has to make Hamas “pay” for what happened, which is basically synonymous with forcing Hamas to “atone”.
No, the goal should not be “atonement”, the goal should be to build a brighter future. Immersing oneself in a pool of blood only leads to greater defilement.
Shlomo, dude, you’re trying my patience here: Firstly, the majority of Jews have actually chosen what you describe as “exile” — we have no interest in “returning,” we’re not Israelis, nor do we intend to become such. So we’re not in “exile” any more than fifth-generation Irish-Americans are. It’s only in the fevered nationalist imagination of the Zionists that we’re somehow deficient for living wherever we choose. The Palestinians, by contrast, have not chosen their exile — although I know one or two (maybe even tens or hundreds of thousands, really) who would be quite happy to remain in their place of exile. Doesn’t change the reality.
As for the “blood-soaked history of Judeo-Arabic relations,” this is another Zionist construction. For the Jews of the Arab world, the terms “Jew” and “Arab” were in no way antonyms; Arab Jews considered themselves Arabs. Jews may have suffered the disadvantages of being a non-Muslim minority in the Arab world, but that was nothing like the violent persecution of Christian Europe. There is no “blood soaked” history of relations between Jews and Arabs before the advent of modern Zionism, which, as we both know, came entirely from Europe and had negligible presence among Arab Jews.
As for atoning, actually, I believe the key to resolving the conflict begins with Israel accepting moral responsibility for creating the Palestinian refugee problem. We all know it’s true, yet Israel can’t bring itself to acknowledge this…
But my point is that this business of liberal Zionists like Remnick clucking sympathetically about how terrible the settlements are before going on to denounce and negate all fundamental criticism of Israel is simply being in denial — the settlements have become an integral part of the Zionist enterprise, as was the ethnic cleansing of ’48.
Tony, your comment on “exiles” is well-taken. Our local paper recently published a piece about Indian and Jewish cooperation on the setting-up of community centers in which the reporter intoned that Jews and Indians had much in common as “:they are both far from their homeland”.
In light of the fact that our local Jewish community is mostly composed of 3rd, 4th and 5th generation Americans, many of whom have never set foot in Israel , the statement was ludicrous but it did serve to illustrate the sentimental mindset that brooks no criticism of Israel.
Neither Israelis and Indians who live here are exiles since they are here of their own volition and can return to their “homelands” at will.
1. The ‘blood-soaked history of Judeo-Arabic relations’. As Tony notes, Hello? tell that to the Iberian Jews who ended up in Salonica, courtesy of the Ottomans. Thrived, until the Ottoman empire decays, and that Salonican community, under Greek passive patronage, is wiped out by Hitler’s minions.
2. TK is right about Remnick. His touch of honesty in the first part of the editorial is overwhelmed by the felt need ot Remnick to bend the knee in the second half. Blame the victims. To borrow a marvellous label from the political scientist Arnold Wolfers, this is ‘auto-abnegation’ at work.
3. As for Shlomo’s ravings, apart from the usual bullshit re Hamas, this notion of return from exile is the greatest lurk of the whole Hasbarian palaver. Hey, some of my antecedents are Welsh. Some of that Welsh real estate looks mighty attractive, especially those bits currently occupied by Jewish families who fled to Britain following Tsarist pogroms. I think that it’s time I exercised my inalienable right of return. And it doesn’t matter whether I’m really Welsh at all; I can just fudge it, like so many ersatz ‘Jewish’ Israelis. This right of return lurk is the ultimate racket; one can’t believe that anybody could make it up, leave alone seek to implement it.
1. “Blood-soaked history”
You know, history did not end right before Zionism started. It actually continued onward (unlike some people’s interpretations of it!), and saw a steady deterioration of Jews’ status in Islamic lands. Antisemitism was a cultural transmission from Europeans to Arabs. At the height of imperialism, suddenly Arab cities had blood libels for the first time, and it took off from there. This culminated with mass expulsions, some at the hands of Hitler, others at the hands of ARABS.
2. “Exile”. Tony, please: patience. Read more carefully. I never said Jews were in exile now. What I said was that Jews have seen enough of exile not to want a repeat, and that therefore they deserve their own state. As do Palestinians. The human cost of Palestinian exile is clear for all to see, just as the human cost of Jewish exile was clear in 1948.
3. “Atoning”. Just because Jews admit they did the Nakhba does not mean help is on the way. As you yourself stated before, Likudniks practically revel in Deir Yassin. It would be nice if the Israeli government admitted Zionist culpability, but that’s besides the point. I think the goal is to just take practical steps to solve the problems, not for each party to dish out the maximum blame possible. Especially when said” blame” implies liscense for both sides to commit war crimes.
4, Settlements. Tony, you’ve offered virtually no evidence that settlements are “an intergral part of the Zionist enterprise”. Israel and the Palestinian Territories are geographically and politically distinct entities. One is democracy, the other is imperialism. One is the essence of Zionism, one flies in the face of it.
I deny nothing. Israel cleansed the Palestinians. Or it didn’t. I could care less. I’m more worried about the Palestinian kid who will die tomorrow than the one who died sixty years ago. Tell me, does what happened sixty years ago have any bearing on modern events, save for the purposes of revenge? I’d like to hear.
5. Right of return. Evanj, you hit the nail on the head about how crazy the logic behind a “Right of Return” is. That’s exactly why it’s absurd to be talking of the “inalienable Palestinian right of return” sixty years later. It has no bearing on today’s events, except for revenge. Am I wrong? Would someone care to convince me otherwise?