Israel
's very own
Naqba - Arabic for disaster-
The
1967 war and the Occupation
"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."
______________________________________
The
country that wouldn't grow up
By
Tony Judt*
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.
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. http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/711997.html
