Michael Butler’s Blog

Ha‚aretz     2 May 2006
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. As a teacher I have also been struck in recent
years by a sea-change in the attitude of students. One example among many:
Here at New York University I was teaching this past month a class on
post-war Europe. I was trying to explain to young Americans the importance
of the Spanish Civil War in the political memory of Europeans and why
Franco’s Spain has such a special place in our moral imagination: as a
reminder of lost struggles, a symbol of oppression in an age of liberalism
and freedom, and a land of shame that people boycotted for its crimes and
repression. I cannot think, I told the students, of any country that
occupies such a pejorative space in democratic public consciousness today.
You are wrong, one young woman replied: What about Israel? To my great
surprise most of the class - including many of the sizable Jewish
contingent - nodded approval. The times they are indeed a-changing.
That Israel can now stand in comparison with the Spain of General Franco
in the eyes of young Americans ought to come as a shock and an
eleventh-hour wake-up call to Israelis. Nothing lasts forever, and it
seems likely to me that we shall look back upon the years 1973-2003 as an
era of tragic illusion for Israel: years that the locust ate, consumed by
the bizarre notion that, whatever it chose to do or demand, Israel could
count indefinitely upon the unquestioning support of the United States and
would never risk encountering a backlash. This blinkered arrogance is
tragically summed up in an assertion by Shimon Peres on the very eve of
the calamitous war that will in retrospect be seen, I believe, to have
precipitated the onset of America’s alienation from its Israeli ally: “The
campaign against Saddam Hussein is a must.”
The future of Israel
From one perspective Israel’s future is bleak. Not for the first time, a
Jewish state has found itself on the vulnerable periphery of someone
else’s empire: overconfident in its own righteousness, willfully blind to
the danger that its indulgent excesses might ultimately provoke its
imperial mentor to the point of irritation and beyond, and heedless of its
own failure to make any other friends. To be sure, the modern Israeli
state has big weapons - very big weapons. But can it do with them except
make more enemies? However, modern Israel also has options. Precisely
because the country is an object of such universal mistrust and resentment
- because people expect so little from Israel today - a truly
statesmanlike shift in its policies (dismantling of major settlements,
opening unconditional negotiations with Palestinians, calling Hamas’ bluff
by offering the movement’s leaders something serious in return for
recognition of Israel and a cease-fire) could have disproportionately
beneficial effects.
But such a radical realignment of Israeli strategy would entail a
difficult reappraisal of every cliche and illusion under which the country
and its political elite have nestled for most of their life. It would
entail acknowledging that Israel no longer has any special claim upon
international sympathy or indulgence; that the United States won’t always
be there; that weapons and walls can no more preserve Israel forever than
they preserved the German Democratic Republic or white South Africa; that
colonies are always doomed unless you are willing to expel or exterminate
the indigenous population. Other countries and their leaders have
understood this and managed comparable realignments: Charles De Gaulle
realized that France’s settlement in Algeria, which was far older and
better established than Israel’s West Bank colonies, was a military and
moral disaster for his country. In an exercise of outstanding political
courage, he acted upon that insight and withdrew. But when De Gaulle came
to that realization he was a mature statesman, nearly 70 years old. Israel
cannot afford to wait that long. At the age of 58 the time has come for it
to grow up.
Tony Judt is a professor and the director of the Remarque Institute at New
York University, and his book “Postwar: The History of Europe Since 1945″
was published in 2005.
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