American Nationalism, Israel and
the Middle East
excerpted from the book
America Right or Wrong
An Anatomy of American Nationalism
by Anatol Lieven
Oxford University Press, 2005,
paper
p174
Since 9/11, U.S. relations with the Muslim world have become central
to American strategy and American security. At the time of this
writing, the United States actually is ruling one large Muslim
country (Iraq) and playing a critical part in the government of
a second (Afghanistan). Most important, through Sunni Islamist
terrorism, Muslim societies are generating the only truly serious
threat of a catastrophic attack on the American mainland. Success
or failure in the struggle against this terrorism may be of existential
importance for the survival of Western liberal and pluralist democracy:
For given certain tendencies observable in the wake of 9/11, it
is not difficult to imagine how even worse attacks in future,
with or without weapons of mass destruction, could push Western
political cultures in a much harsher, more chauvinist and authoritarian
direction ...
p176
... the U.S. Congress, and to a very considerable extent successive
U.S. administrations, have pursued policies of largely unconditional
support for Israel, irrespective of Israeli behavior in the Occupied
Territories-behavior often completely incompatible with the ideals
which the United States professes and the standards it demands
elsewhere. The reasons for this almost unanimous stance by U.S.
politicians in support of Israel are rooted partly in genuine
identification with that country, as well as in some cases sympathy
with Israeli ideologies. Thus the dominant elements of the Bush
administration proved especially close to the Likud-led government
of Ariel Sharon." There is also, however, a strong element
of political calculation, opportunism and indeed fear related
to the real or perceived strength of the Israel lobby.
In the words of M. J. Rosenberg of the
Israel Policy Forum:
The fact is that both Democrats and Republicans are very adept
at this game and sometimes the sheer effrontery of it is astonishing.
Democrats attack a Republican for "selling out" Israel
even though the policy advocated by the Republican is the same
one they supported when a Democrat advanced it. And Republicans
do the exact same thing. Is it any wonder that candidates seem
to go to great lengths to avoid saying anything remotely substantive
on the Middle East?... Knowing that any substantive statement
could be used against them, candidates just play it safe. And
segments of the pro-Israel community encourage them by criticizing
constructive suggestions as anti-Israel, and by giving ovations
to candidates who tell them what the candidates think they want
to hear."
p177
[Republican leaders]... argue that social and economic liberalism
now runs a poor second to support for Israel and that they have
for the first time outdone Democrats in cheering the Jewish state.
There is no more unyielding supporter of Israeli Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon's policies than House Majority Leader Tom DeLay,
the exemplar of muscular Republicanism.
p178
This Republican strategy can be seen as a continuation of Reagan's
strategy of the 1980s in trying to draw away the votes of "Reagan
Democrats," comprising mainly "Southern [White] evangelicals,
Northern 'blue collar' workers and pro-Zionist Jews. "6 This
alignment was based on thoroughly Jacksonian principles of conservative
populism at home and aggressive nationalism abroad (although under
Reagan, as noted, this nationalism was to some degree more rhetorical
than real).
That is not to say that this Republican
strategy has necessarily been successful after Reagan left the
scene. In general, voting patterns and surveys suggest that when
it comes to elections, most Jewish Americans remain true to their
liberal traditions, with 51 percent recorded in 2003 as Democrats
to only 16 percent Republicans (with 31 percent independents).
In the 2000 elections, 79 percent of Jewish Americans voted for
Gore to only 19 percent for Bush." The alliance of Jewish
American supporters of Israel with Christian fundamentalists often
makes Jewish American liberals very uneasy; as the liberal Jewish
American writer Roberta Feuerlicht has noted, "In Jewish
history, when fundamentalists came, Cossacks were not far behind."
No one can say for sure though how Jewish American voters would
react to a Democratic administration which took a really tough
line with Israel. They certainly punished Carter severely in 1980
for his moves toward dialogue with the Palestine Liberation Organization
(PLO).
If Bush had wanted his administration
to be taken seriously as a force for peace in the Middle East,
he would have had to fire those of his own senior officials who
during the 1990s had opposed the Oslo peace process and advised
the Israeli government to abandon it." In their policy paper
of 1996, "A Clean Break," Richard Perle (later chairman
of the Defense Advisory Board in the Bush administration), Douglas
Feith (later deputy under-secretary of defense in the Bush administration)
and other members of the Project for the New American Century
(PNAC) advised the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu to
abandon both the Oslo process and the whole idea of land for peace
in favor of insistence on permanent control of the Occupied Territories:
"Our claim to the land-to which we have clung for hope for
2000 years-is legitimate and noble .... Only the unconditional
acceptance by Arabs of our rights, especially in their territorial
dimension, 'peace for peace,' is a solid basis for the future".
The paper makes clear that it rules out
the "peace for land" idea on which the whole "two-state"
solution is based, describing this as "cultural, economic,
political, military and diplomatic retreat"; and what it
means by "peace for peace" is to go on attacking Arab
regimes until they accept Israeli rule over the whole of Palestine.
The authors were thereby opposing, in the name of "our"
claim to the whole of Palestine, not only the then current policy
of the Clinton administration, but that of all previous U.S. administrations
and that formally adopted later by the George W. Bush administration
of which some of them were to be officials. Elliott Abrams, appointed
by Bush in 2003 as chief official for the Middle East at the National
Security Council, had also argued-before the collapse of talks
in 2000 and the second Intifada-that Oslo should essentially be
abandoned in favor of a new crackdown on the Palestinians .
It is true that U.S. policy and the U.S.
public discourse concerning the Palestinians have improved greatly
since the 1970s, when Washington essentially echoed Israel in
declaring that no such separate people existed. A critical moment
in this regard was the peace initiative of President Anwar Sadat
of Egypt in 1977, when for the first time an American poll showed
more Americans approving of an Arab leader's policy than that
of the Israeli government, by 57 to 34 percent.
Since the Iraq War, public figures such
as Zbigniew Brzezinski and General Anthony Zinni have argued strongly
that the new U.S. role in the Middle East demands a serious change
of emphasis in dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
On the other hand, the attacks of 9/11 and the link made between
anti-American and anti-Israeli terrorism mean that much of the
American political classes and public opinion have once again
become strongly anti-Palestinian and are willing to see Israeli
actions simply as part of the war on terrorism. As a result of
this and the Israeli lobby's iron grip on the U.S. Congress, American
support for Israel, including support for its occupation of the
Palestinian territories, has continued unchanged with all that
this means for the image of the United States in the Muslim world
and for U.S. chances of success in the struggle against Islamist
terrorism.
p179
Israel and the American Antithesis
... in the American antithesis were admirably
summarize in a speech to the U.S. Senate in March 2002 by Senator
James Inhofe (Republican, Oklahoma) setting out seven reasons
why "Israel alone is entitled to possess the Holy Land' including
the Palestinian territories. These views are widely shared among
other members of the Christian Right in Congress. As described
earlier, members of the Christian Right make up a significant
proportion of senators and congressmen and a very powerful proportion
of the Republican Party. Their numbers include both of the last
Republican leaders in the House, Dick Armey and Tom DeLay, both
of them very strong supporters of Israel. Thus in May 2002 Armey,
then House Majority Leader, called during a television interview
for the deportation of the Palestinians from the Occupied Territories
. Tom DeLay has also expressed unconditional support for Israel,
without reference to Palestinian rights."
p180
John Wayne
"I don't feel that we did wrong in taking this great country
away from the-m[the Indians] .... Our so-called stealing of this
country from them was just a matter of survival. There were great
numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly
trying to keep it for themselves."
p180
Leo Strauss, one of the intellectual fathers of the neoconservatives,
asserted that "theft of land" has been the basis for
all states, while arguing that this unpleasant truth should be
veiled from the masses.
p181
Senator James Inhofe
"... The Bible says that Abram removed his tent and came
and dwelt in the plain of Mamre, which is in Hebron, and built
an altar there before the Lord. Hebron is in the West Bank. It
is at this place where God appeared to Abram and said 'I am giving
you this land'-the West Bank. This is not a political battle at
all. It is a contest over whether the word of God is true. "
p181
As recorded by Donald Wagner, Grace Halsell, Gabriel Almond and
other leading students of this tradition, especially sinister
are the links between these forces in the United States and the
powerful mixture of fundamentalist and ultra-nationalist forces
on the Israeli radical Right. The latter share the moral absolutism
of their American Christian counterparts without necessarily sharing
their commitment to democracy. Such Israelis are of course represented
especially strongly among the settlers on the West Bank.
Israeli radical fundamentalists and nationalists
are implacably opposed to a state for the Palestinians and in
many cases are committed to the most radical of all solutions
to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: the ethnic cleansing ("Transfer")
of the Palestinians from the Occupied Territories.
p182
Jerry Falwell
"To stand against Israel is to stand against God."
p184
Over the past four decades U.S. policy has become bogged down
in a glaring contradiction between American public ideals and
partially U.S.-financed Israeli behavior. On one hand, America
preaches to Arabs contemporary civic ideals of democracy, modernity
and the peaceful resolution of disputes. On the other, it subsidizes
not only a brutal military occupation but the seizure of land
from an established population on the basis of ethnoreligious
claims which in any other circumstances would be regarded by U.S.
governments and a majority of public opinion as utterly illegitimate.
The most truly tragic aspect of all this,
as more and more Israelis and Jewish Americans have begun to argue,
is that this kind of unconditional U.S. support, coupled with
continued Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory, is also
proving disastrous for Israel itself and for the noble ideals
which motivated the best elements in the Zionist enterprise. These
critics include not just liberals, but senior retired military
and security officials, such as the four former directors of the
Shin Bet domestic security service who in November 2003 warned
the Sharon government that if Israel does not withdraw from the
West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israel's very existence will ultimately
be endangered. They also said that this withdrawal is necessary
even if it leads to a clash with Jewish settlers. According to
one of the four, Avraham Shalom, "We must once and for all
admit that there is another side, that it has feelings and is
suffering, and that we are behaving disgracefully We have turned
into a people of petty fighters using the wrong tools."
In the words of former Knesset Speaker
Avraharn Burg
"The Zionist revolution has always rested on two pillars:
a just path and an ethical leadership. Neither of these is operative
any longer. The Israeli nation today rests on a scaffolding of
corruption, and on foundations of oppression and injustice. As
such, the end of the Zionist enterprise is already on our doorstep.
There is a real chance that ours will be the last Zionist generation.
There may yet be a Jewish state in the Middle East, but it will
be a different sort, strange and ugly...
We cannot keep a Palestinian majority under an Israeli boot and
at the A same time think ourselves the only democracy in the Middle
East. There cannot be democracy without equal rights for all who
live here, Arab as well as Jew. We cannot keep the territories
and preserve a Jewish majority in the world's only Jewish state-not
by means that are humane and moral and Jewish...
Do you want the greater Land of Israel? No problem. Abandon democracy.
Let's institute an efficient system of racial separation here,
with prison camps and detention villages. Qalqilya Ghetto and
Gulag Jenin...
Do you want democracy? No problem. Either
abandon the greater Land of Israel, to the last settlement and
outpost, or give full citizenship and voting rights to everyone,
including Arabs. The result, of course, will be that those who
did not want a Palestinian state alongside us will have one in
our midst, via the ballot box.
Israel's friends abroad-Jewish and non-Jewish
alike, presidents and prime ministers, rabbis and lay people-should
choose as well. They must reach out and help Israel to navigate
the road map toward our national destiny as a light unto the nations
and a society of peace, justice and equality."
The Israeli lobby in the United States
is well aware that the settlements-which have been condemned in
principle by successive U.S. administrations-are by far the weakest
element in its entire argument. Determined attempts have been
made to distract attention from this issue, described in one advisory
paper as "our Achilles heel" in terms of wooing U.S.
public support."
Because of the way in which America and
Israel are entwined spiritually, politically and socially, and
because so many people in the world treat the Israeli-U.S. relationship
as a litmus test of U.S. behavior, the choices that Israel makes
will have very grave implications not only for the security of
the United States and its Western allies, such as Britain, and
for America's role in the world, but also perhaps for the political
culture of the United States itself."
From an American point of view, Israel
cannot be compared with Russia, China, or other authoritarian
states which have waged crueler wars against national secessionist
movements. The Israeli lobby makes this comparison repeatedly
in an effort to prove that demands for U.S. pressure on Israel
are hypocritical and/or anti-Semitic, because the authors of these
demands do not ask that the United States apply similar pressure
to states like Russia or China.
This argument, however, fails in both
ethical and realist terms. Most U.S. and European critics of the
U.S. relationship with Israel are not asking that the United States
impose trade sanctions against Israel or expel it from international
bodies, but only that the United States use its aid and support
as a powerful lever to influence Israeli behavior: For most other
states do not receive massive subsidies, military support and
diplomatic protection from the United States. Israel as of 2004
receives more than a quarter of the entire U.S. aid budget (excluding
that for the ' reconstruction of Iraq).
The figure for U.S. aid to Israel in 2002
was around six times that to the entire. desperately impoverished
continent of Africa and ten times the proposed U.S. share of aid
for the reconstruction of liberated Afghanistan-the latter being
both a U.S. moral imperative and supposedly a vital U.S. strategic
interest" This radical imbalance clearly makes Israel a special
case. It makes the United States morally complicit in Israel's
crimes, not only in the eyes of the world but in reality...
p187
The nature of [the U.S. alliance with Israel] is a matter of concern
not only to the United States but to any U.S. ally in the war
on terrorism. If one thing must be apparent to all but the most
prejudiced observers, it is that this war cannot be won-cannot
even be waged-without strong support from Muslims. Even if the
United States succeeds somehow in extricating itself from Iraq,
it is extremely doubtful that thereafter it could successfully
occupy even one more Muslim country, let alone the entire Muslim
world. The United States can, of course, try to retire behind
protective walls. If, however, these walls become indefinitely
higher and higher, sooner or later they will begin to undermine
the U.S. and world economies and America's cultural and political
prestige in the world, and therefore the vital underpinnings of
U.S. hegemony. The impact of Israeli behavior on the sentiments
of Muslim societies is therefore of critical importance not just
to the war on terrorism but to American power and America's success
as a civilizational empire.
In the context of either a realist or
an ethical international tradition, there is nothing wrong in
a U.S. commitment to Israel based on a sense of cultural and ethnic
kinship, nor in U.S. willingness to make geopolitical sacrifices
for the sake of defending Israel. This, after all, was the position
of Britain vis-à-vis its former White colonies long after
they had become politically independent, and even when some had
ceased to be real strategic assets.
In the case of Israel's role in the U.S.-Israel
alliance, alas, a darker historical parallel suggests itself.
If anything, the alliance is beginning to take on some of the
same mutually calamitous aspects as Russia's commitment to Serbia
in 1914, a great power guarantee which encouraged parts of the
Serbian leadership to behave with criminal irresponsibility in
their encouragement of irredentist claims against Austria, leading
to a war which was ruinous for Russia, Serbia and the world.
One might almost say that as a result
of the way in which the terms of the Israeli-U.S. alliance have
become set, Israel and the United States have changed places.
The United States, which should feel protected both by the oceans
and by matchless military superiority, is cast instead in the
role of an endangered Middle Eastern state which is under severe
threat from terrorism and which also believes itself to be in
mortal danger from countries with a tiny fraction of its power.
Meanwhile, thanks largely to support from the United States, Israel
has become a kind of superpower, able to defy its entire region
and Europe as well. This situation is bad not only for the United
States; it is terribly bad for Israel itself ... For Israel is
not a superpower. It is rich and powerful, but it is still a small
Middle Eastern country which will have to seek accommodations
with its neighbors if it is ever to live in peace. Blind and largely
unconditional U.S. support has enabled Israeli governments to
avoid facing this fact, with consequences which prove utterly
disastrous for Israel itself in the long run.
p190
As a result of a combination of Israel and oil, the United States
finds itself I pinned to a conflict-ridden and bitterly anti-American
region in a way without precedent in its history. In all other
regions of the world, the United States has been able either to
help stabilize regional situations in a way which broadly conforms
to its interests (Europe, Northeast Asia, Central America), or,
if regional hostility is too great and the security situation
too intractable, to withdraw (as from Mexico in 1917 and Indochina
in the early 1970s).
If the result of U.S. entanglement in
the Middle East is also unprecedented embroilment in a series
of conflicts, then this is likely to severely damage not only
U.S. global leadership, but the character of U.S. nationalism
and even perhaps of U.S. democracy. Prolonged war may bitterly
divide American society and create severe problems for public
order, as it did during the Vietnam War; and it also may help
push the U.S. government in the direction of secretive, paranoid,
authoritarian and illegal behavior.
p191
it may well be the difficulty of defending their position within
the scope of basic liberal principles that explains in part the
hysteria among Israeli partisans which too often surrounds-and
suppresses-attempts at frank discussion of these issues in America,
and which is one of the most worrying aspects of the U.S. foreign
policy scene. Of course, the principal reason for this atmosphere
is the appalling crime and the terrible memory of the Holocaust,
and the effects of this memory in deterring criticism of Israel
and creating a belief in the legitimacy of Israeli demands for
absolute security. The image of the Holocaust has been used deliberately
by the Israeli lobby to consolidate support for Israel in the
United States and elsewhere; but it also emerges quite naturally
and spontaneously from Jewish and Jewish American consciousness,
and indeed that of any civilized and honorable citizen of the
West.
However, whatever the natural, legitimate
and understandable roots of unconditional loyalty to Israel, its
effects often resemble wider patterns of nationalism in the world.
One of the saddest experiences of visits to countries undergoing
national disputes and heightened moods of nationalism is to meet
with highly intelligent, civilized and moderate individuals whose
capacity for reason and moderation vanishes as soon as the conversation
touches on conflicts involving their own nation or ethnicity.
Otherwise universally accepted standards of behavior, argument
and evidence are suspended; facts are conjured from thin air;
critics are demonized; wild accusations are leveled; and rational
argument becomes impossible.
p192
The Western European elites and many U.S. liberal intellectuals
essentially decided that the correct response to Nazism and to
the hideous national conflicts which preceded, engendered and
accompanied it was to seek to limit, transcend and overcome nationalism.
Hence the creation of common European institutions leading to
the European Union and the great respect paid in Europe, and by
many liberal Americans, to the United Nations and to developing
institutions of international law and cooperation. Given the strong
past connections between chauvinist nationalism and anti-Semitism
(even to a degree in the United States) and the role of nationalism
in Fascism, most of the Jewish diaspora intelligentsia naturally
also identified with these attempts to overcome nationalism around
the world.
However, given the failure of the Western
world (including the United States) in the 1930s and 1940s to
prevent genocide, or even-shamefully--to offer refuge to Jews
fleeing the Nazis, it is entirely natural that a great many Jews
decided that guarantees from the international community were
not remotely sufficient to protect them against further attempts
at massacre. They felt that, in addition, a Jewish national state
was required, backed by a strong Jewish nationalism. This nationalism
embodied strong and genuine elements of national liberation and
social progressivism, akin to those of other oppressed peoples
in the world, and it was from this that Zionism drew its powerful
elements of moral nobility, as represented by such figures as
Ahad Ha'am, Martin Buber and Nahum Goldmann.
Israel also developed a central importance
for Jewish diaspora communities because of the decline of religious
belief and practice, of ethnic traditions and of the Yiddish language
concurrent with the steep rise of intermarriage. Due to these
friends, these communities fear that they themselves may be in
the process of dissolution . Judaism had always been what the
German Jewish nineteenth-century poet Heinrich Heine called "the
portable Fatherland of the Jews"; its eclipse threatened
a form of soft extinction, unless a substitute could be found."
Jacques Torczyner of the Zionist Organization
of America declared during the Carter Administration that "whatever
the administration will want to do... the Jews in America will
fight for Israel. It is the only thing we have to sustain our
Jewish identity." Or according to religious historian Martin
Marty: "As other bases of Jewish identity continued to dwindle...
Israel progressively became the spiritual center of the American
Jewish experience."
But although the bases for this sacralization
of the nation were specifically, and tragically, Jewish, the advancement
of nationalism as a substitute for fading religion and the transmogrification
of religious passions into nationalist ones also form part of
a wider pattern in nationalist history, one which in the past
has contributed to national and international catastrophes: "Our
most blooming life for Thy most withered tree, Germany!"
Unlike most other national senses of martyrdom,
the Jewish sense was truly justified-unlike that of France after
1871 or Germany after 1918. But that fact has not saved many Jews
from the pernicious results of such a sense of martyrdom in terms
of nationalist extremism and self-justification-any more than
it has the Armenians, for example. It has produced an atmosphere
which has shaded into and tolerated the religious-nationalist
fundamentalism of Israeli extremist groups and of ideological
settlers in the Occupied Territories, as well as crude hatred
of Arabs and Muslims.
Furthermore, while Zionism of course originated
in the late nineteenth century and is a classic example of the
modern "construction" of a nation, the Jewish ethnoreligious
basis on which it originated represents the oldest and deepest
"primordial" national identity in the world. As demonstrated
by a series of clashes within Israel over the definition of who
is a Jew, who can become a Jew and who has the right to decide
these questions, this identity is a basis for nationalism which
if not necessarily completely antithetical to notions of civic
nationalism based on the American Creed, certainly has a complex
and uneasy relationship to them; and this too is perceived by
Muslim peoples to whom the United States wishes to spread its
version of civic nationalism.
An appeal to religious and quasi-religious
nationalist justifications for rule over Palestine was also implicit
in the entire Zionist enterprise. Given the large majority of
Palestinian Arabs throughout Palestine-even at the moment of the
declaration of Israeli statehood in 1948-the claim to create a
Jewish state in Palestine could not easily be justified on grounds
of national liberation alone. It needed also to be backed by appeals
to ancient ethnic claims and religious scripts and by civilizational
arguments of superiority to the backward Arabs and "making
the desert bloom?' These appeals could not be readily assented
to by other peoples around the world, and indeed they made even
many Western liberals think uneasily of their own nationalist
and imperialist pasts. °
Following one original strand of Zionism,
great Zionist leaders and thinkers such as Nahum Goldmann originally
dreamed that Israel, like other civilized states, would also be
anchored in international institutions and might even form part
of a multiethnic federation with the Arab states of the Middle
East, thereby resolving the dilemma in which Jewish diaspora liberalism
found itself."
Tragically, the circumstances in which
Israel was created made any such resolution of the Jewish intellectual
and moral dilemma exceptionally difficult, and would have done
so for any group in this position. The intention here is not to
condemn or vilify, simply to point out the nature of the dilemma
and the sad and dangerous consequences that have stemmed from
it.
p194
It cannot be emphasized too strongly that if the Palestinian Arabs
in the 1930s and 1940s had agreed that a large part of Palestine-where
they were still a large majority and had until recently been an
overwhelming one-should be given up to form the state of Israel,
they would have been acting in a way which, as far as I am aware,
would have had no precedent in all of human history. It is not
as if intelligent and objective observers did not point this fact
out at the time. As Hannah Arendt wrote in 1945, three years before
Israeli independence, the war with the Arabs and the expulsion
of the Palestinians:
American Zionists from left to right
adopted unanimously, at their last annual convention held in Atlantic
City in October 1944, the demand for a free and democratic Jewish
commonwealth... which] shall embrace the whole of Palestine, undivided
and undiminished."
... however one might condemn the Palestinians
and Arabs for their long delay in coming to terms with the reality
of Israel, to blame them for initially resisting that reality
is to engage in moral and historical idiocy. While condemning
the Arabs as demons, it suggests that they should have acted as
saints. The tragedy of 1948 is not only that of a clash of valid
rights, but also that neither ('side in the conflict could have
acted otherwise. Years later former Israeli Foreign ) Minister
Abba Bean (1905-2002) said just as much: "The Palestine Arabs,
were it ) not for the Balfour Declaration and the League of Nations
Mandate, could have counted on eventual independence either as
a separate state or in an Arab context acceptable to them ....
It was impossible for us to avoid struggling for Jewish statehood
and equally impossible for them to grant us what we asked. If
they had 7 submitted to Zionism with docility, they would have
been the first people in history to have voluntarily renounced
their majority status.
p195
Alan Dershowitz, professor of law at Harvard University
"The Arabs bore sufficient guilt for the Holocaust and for
supporting the wrong side during World War II to justify their
contribution, as part of the losing side, in the rearrangement
of territory and demography that inevitably follows a cataclysmic
world conflict."
p196
Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion himself is reported (by
Nahum Goldmann) to have asked in private
'Why should the Arabs make peace? If I were an Arab leader I
would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken
their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that
matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We came from Israel, it's
true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There
has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was
that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and
stolen their country. Why should they accept that?
p196
Together with the establishment of the Jewish state came the war
of 1948 and the expulsion of most of the Arab population of Palestine
from the territories of the new Jewish state. So intolerable to
the liberal conscience was this action, and so deeply did it seem
to call into question the legitimacy of the new state, that for
two generations it had to be denied, with absurd arguments being
advanced instead-in the face of logic and both Palestinian and
Jewish testimony-that the Palestinians had somehow fled voluntarily
on the orders of the Arab governments and their own leaders. Indeed,
some leading Israeli partisans in the United States are in essence
still arguing this.
For my own part, although I deeply regret
the human suffering caused by the expulsions of 1948,1 have never
been especially shocked by them-if only because the facts were
largely available, from Israeli sources quoted in various books,
long before Israeli revisionist historians "revealed"
from the late 1980s on that the expulsion of the Palestinians
was in large part a process deliberately planned by the Israeli
leadership and accompanied by numerous atrocities.' And with regret
- and without in anyway endorsing the infamous collective guilt
argument advanced by Dershowitz and others-I must on the whole
accept Benny Morris's recent arguments that this cruel process
was necessary if the state of Israel was to be established and
its Jewish population to avoid renewed extermination or exile:
"Ben-Gurion was a transferist. He understood that there could
be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in its
midst. There would be no such state. It would not be able to exist
.... Ben-Gurion was right. If he had not done what he did, a state
would not have come into being. That has to be clear. It is impossible
to evade it. Without the uprooting of the Palestinians, a Jewish
state would not have arisen here .... There are circumstances
in history that justify ethnic cleansing. I know that this term
is completely negative in the discourse of the twenty-first century,
but when the choice is between ethnic cleansing and genocide-the
annihilation of your people-I prefer ethnic cleansing."
This was after all the 1940s. At the end
of World War II, some 12 million Germans were expelled from eastern
Germany when these lands were annexed to Poland and Russia, and
3 million from Czechoslovakia, amid immense suffering, atrocity
and loss of life. Hungarians were deported from Czechoslovakia
and Rumania. And allied peoples also suffered. As Poles moved
westward into former German lands, so millions were deported by
Stalin into Poland from the Soviet Union, to create more ethnically
homogenous populations in Soviet Lithuania, Byelorussia, and Ukraine.
In 1947, a year before the creation of Israel and the expulsion
of the Palestinians, more than 10 million Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims
had fled from their homes, amid horrendous bloodshed, as a result
of the partition of the British Indian empire. A generation earlier
Greece and Turkey had conducted a great exchange of populations
after repeated national conflicts involving great atrocities on
both sides.
Horrible though these events were, they
did in some ways lay the groundwork for a future absence of war,
which is difficult to imagine if these populations had remained
mixed up together. Certainly it is difficult to imagine how a
Jewish state could possibly have been established and consolidated
with such a huge and understandably hostile Palestinian minority.
Finally, Israel does have a legitimate case that the subsequent
expulsion to Israel of hundreds of thousands of Jews from Arab
countries created a kind of rough justice between Israel and the
Arab world.
Today it should also be quite clear that
if one of the absolute preconditions for peace between Israel
and the Palestinians is Israeli abandonment of many settlements
in the Occupied Territories, the other is Palestinian abandonment
of the "right of return" for those Palestinians who
were expelled in 1948. 14 Note by contrast that I strongly support
the Jewish "right of return" to Israel within the borders
of 1967, as an ultimate fallback line in the event of a real return
of anti-Semitism elsewhere in the world.
But while the expulsions may have been
necessary for Israel's survival, the lies which they have generated
over the succeeding generations, and which continue to this day,
have been extremely dangerous for both Israel and the United States.
It would have been far better if Israel and its partisans in the
United States had-as Ben-Gurion did in private-accepted the truth
of what happened in 1948 and then used it as the basis for thinking
seriously about compensation and laying the foundations for future
peace. Instead, the pro-Israel camp committed itself to an interlocking
set of moral and historical falsehoods. Over time, the intellectual
consequences of these positions have spread like a forest of aquatic
weeds until they have entangled and choked a significant part
of the U.S. national debate concerning relations not only with
the Muslim world, but with the outside world in general, and thereby
have fed certain strains of American nationalism.
To the refusal to consider the Palestinian
case before 1948 and to acknowledge the expulsions of that year
was added for several decades a widespread refusal even to admit
the existence of the Palestinians as a people, with consequent
national rights. Such an attitude was summed up in Israeli Prime
Minister Golda Meir's notorious statement (echoed by innumerable
Israeli partisans in the United States) that "it was not
as though there was a Palestinian people and in Palestine considering
itself a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and
took their country away from them. They did not exist."
Thus in 1978 Hyman H. Bookbinder of the
American Jewish Committee denounced the Carter administration
for even using the words "homeland" or "legitimate
rights" with reference to the Palestinians. This meant in
turn that the real bases of Arab grievances against Israel could
not be considered, and Arab hostility had to be explained away
either by inveterate hatred and malignity ("antiSemitism")
or by the sinister and cynical machinations of Arab regimes.
Of course, both these elements have been
present among enemies of Israel. But the necessity of making them
the only real explanations for Arab and Muslim hostility led inexorably
to the demonization of Arab and Muslim societies and culture-and
later, by extension, of sympathizers with the Palestinians in
Europe and elsewhere. Such demonization was by no means always
a deliberate strategy of Israeli partisans. In many cases, the
sin was rather one of omission. By keeping silent on the subject
of what had happened to the Palestinians and on the roots of the
Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Arab conflicts, intellectual supporters
of Israel left irrational, cynical and implacable hostility as
the only available explanations of Arab behavior. Or as the Palestinian
scholar and polemicist Edward Said has written, "To criticize
Zionism... is to criticize not so much an idea or a theory but
rather a wall of denials."
The position of the pro-Israeli liberal
intelligentsia in the United States toward the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict came somewhat to resemble the position of many enlightened
mid-nineteenth-century Americans toward the clash between slavery
and the American Creed, as described one hundred years ago by
Herbert Croly: "The thing to do was to shut your eyes to
the inconsistency, denounce anyone who insisted on it as unpatriotic,
and then hold on tight to both horns of the dilemma. Men of high
intelligence, who really loved their country, persisted in this
attitude."
One result of this uneasy moral situation
has been a tendency to launch especially vituperative attacks
on anyone who draws attention to the radical inconsistencies between
the stances of many American liberals on the Israel-Palestine
conflict and the attitudes of the same people to other such conflicts.
Backed by the tremendous institutional power of the Israeli lobby,
this has had the effect of severely limiting discussion of the
conflict in the United States. Reporting of the conflict is generally
fair enough, but unlike the U.S. coverage of the Chechen wars,
for example, it tends to lack all historical context, thereby
allowing Palestinians to be portrayed simply as terrorists with
no explanation of why they are fighting. Much more serious however
is the general bias of the editorial pages toward partisans of
Israel. Unconditional, hard-line partisans of Israel such as William
Safire are given regular space even in the New York Times which
emerged as a moderate critic of Likud policies and Bush administration
support for them. By contrast, hard-line critics of Israel never
appear..."
p201
... Henry Siegman of the Council on Foreign Relations has written
of the Palestinian demographic threat, in words which remind us
of the falsity of claims concerning continued existential threats
to Israel within the borders of 1967:
Morris's account points to the sorry fact there is not much that
distinguishes how Jews behaved in 1948 in their struggle to achieve
statehood from Palestinian behavior today. At the very least,
this sobering truth should lead to a shedding of the moral smugness
of too many Israelis and to a reexamination of their demonization
of the Palestinian national cause.
The implication of the above for the territorial issue is that
it would be irrational for Palestinians not to believe that the
goal of Sharon's fence is anything other than their confinement
in a series of Bantustans, if not a prelude to a second transfer
Unless Israelis are willing to preserve their majority status
by imposing a South African-style apartheid regime, or to complete
the transfer begun in 1948 (as Morris believes they will - policies
which one hopes a majority of Israelis will never accept) - it
is only a matter of time before the emerging majority of Arabs
in Greater Israel will reshape the country's national identity.
That would be a tragedy of historic proportions for the Zionist
enterprise and for the Jewish people.
What will make the tragedy doubly painful is that it will be
happening a time when changes in the Arab world and beyond...
are removing virtually every strategic threat that for so long
endangered Israel's existence. That existence is now threatened
by the greed of the settlers and the political blindness of Israel's
leaders."
p208
A belief in the necessity of developing and eventually democratizing
the Middle East if terrorism and extremism are to be defeated
there is both correct and laudable. I" The widespread inability
to readdress the U.S. relationship with Israel as part of this
effort not only gravely undermines it in Arab eyes, but also adds
to the confusion of American thought concerning the necessary
bases of modernization-of which nationalism is one of the most
important.
Amid U.S. professions of a desire for
democracy in the region, U.S. administrations and much of the
U.S. political class and media have treated the opinions of the
vast majority of Arabs concerning the Israel-Palestinian conflict
and U.S. strategy in the region with open contempt. It is suggested
that these feelings are the product of cynical manipulation by
cynical Arab elites; but when relatively free, modern and liberal
Arab media outlets like Al Jazeera reflect the same opinions,
they are equally condemned. And in the matter of attitudes to
Israel, ordinary Arabs are treated as at best deluded and ignorant
sheep, at worst as filled with primeval, irrational malignancy.
Yet these are the people to whom the Bush
administration professes to want to bring democracy and also declares
are ready for democracy. Meanwhile, all too many American op-eds,
essays and books which call for the democratization of the Middle
East skirt round the question of Israeli treatment of the Palestinians,
condemn this treatment briefly and formally while devoting incomparably
more space to Arab anti-Semitism, ignore this issue altogether,
or simply take Israel's side.
In a book of 214 pages on the ideology
and roots of Islamist totalitarianism, in which he bitterly condemns
a range of Muslim targets and sections of the European Left, the
self-described liberal Paul Berman devotes precisely two lines
to a suggestion that America should act against "the manias
of the ultra-Right in Israel"-not, it should be noted, against
the Israeli government or state as such. Elsewhere, Berman espouses
without qualification the view that all blame for the collapse
of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process in 2000-01 lies with
the Palestinians.'
By behaving in this way, such writers
discredit themselves in the eyes of Muslims and Europeans; but
their effect is also much worse than that. By suggesting to Muslims
and others that on this issue liberal intellectuals in the United
States, the supposed role model of international democracy, are
motivated not by genuine democratic idealism but by ethnic chauvinism,
moral cowardice or both, they undermine not only American prestige
in the world but the democratic model they are seeking to propagate.
... the absolutist nature of the American
Creed, with its ideological faith in Democracy and Freedom, tends
to produce etherized, contentless versions of both these concepts.
This tendency is strongly evident in the rhetoric of the Bush
administration, with its talk of the "freedom-loving"
people of wherever, and so on. In turn, by making democracy look
both so universally applicable and so easy, this approach feeds
American messianism and militant interventionism.
Within the United States today, and even
more if one looks at the history of the nation or of other democratic
states, two things are obvious: Our contemporary version of democracy
has emerged only after long struggle among different races, ethnicities
and social groups; and this struggle was often bloody, and not
at all democratic in form. As the American historian Eric Foner
has recorded, the concept of freedom has meant radically different
and even contradictory things to different groups of Americans,
and at different times in American history. Second, even today,
democratic institutions and even judicial systems remain forums
for competition between different ethnic and other groups-not
only for power, but for the fruits of power in terms of the distribution
of state patronage.
Yet when it comes to the world outside
the United States, "democracy" is all too often treated
not as a procedure, but as an end; not as a way of posing a set
of questions about the state and society, but as an answer to
those questions-and as a quick answer, which, once achieved, will
allow the United States to pull out of a country again, leaving
behind a stable and reliable U.S. ally. It is in part due to this
mind-set that large sections of U.S. public opinion were convinced
to support the Iraq War by the argument that this would bring
democracy to Iraq as a prelude to democratizing the Middle East
as a whole. In this discourse, the inevitable embitterment of
the disempowered Sunni minority, ethnic tensions between Arabs
and Kurds, the persistence of Shia religious networks as the last
civic institutions left by Ba'ath totalitarianism, and the rivalries
between these networks-all these perceptions were simply obliterated
by the simple mantras of "democracy" and "freedom?"
Most important of all in this context
is the way in which too many commentators have forgotten the very
frequent and important connection between nationalism and the
birth both of mass politics and of successful socioeconomic development.
This obliviousness stems in part from wider failings of analysis
which are by no means restricted to the United States. It is in
America, however, and especially with regard to the Middle East,
that the failure to appreciate this link has achieved its most
dangerous proportions.
This blank spot in much of U.S. thought
stems in part from the etherealization of democracy mentioned
above, in part from the difficulty that all nationalist countries
have in appreciating other people's nationalisms, and in part
from the U.S. inability to focus on the role of Israel both in
fomenting Arab anger and in focusing wider Arab and Muslim frustrations
and resentments on Israel and the United States: "The hidden
[U.S.] agenda most commonly identified by Arab writers is the
[alleged] United States' decision to allow Israel to control the
region and to give Prime Minister Ariel Sharon carte blanche in
dealing with the Palestinian territories and the Intifada."
p214
As long as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict continues as a full-scale
national struggle, Arab westernizers will go on being discredited
as traitors, Arab nationalism will go on working against reform
and all the worst elements of Arabic and Muslim political culture
will continue to be fed and nurtured.
Unfortunately, strong elements in the
Israeli lobby in the United States appear to be using the language
of democratization precisely as a way of evading or even permanently
blocking a just and stable Israeli-Palestinian peace. This fact
emerges quite clearly from the already mentioned 1996 "A
Clean Break" by several future Bush administration officials,
which originated this approach in the Israeli lobby and the U.S.
establishment. This paper combined its strategy of "democratizing"
the Middle East with the fantastic proposal that a U.S. invasion
of Iraq be used to restore the Hashemite monarchy in Iraq."'
In October 2003 Frank Gaffney (of the
Center for Security Policy in Washington) declared:
Authoritarian and for that matter totalitarian regimes have a
compelling need for external enemies. This is particularly true
because in the absence of external justifications for their generally
very repressive domestic behavior, there's no other way to justify
the suffering that is entailed on their population, particularly
the failure-the manifest failure-of their economic and social
policies.
I believe, having said that, that even
if there were no West, no United States, no Israel, you would
have these same imperatives of external enemies for domestic consumption
driving bloodletting in the Middle East and making our world a
more dangerous place .... This ought to inform the policies we
pursue, especially as we are told endlessly that if only we make
Israel make territorial concessions to its Palestinian Arab neighbors,
that will end the problem. It won't end the problem between Israel
and the Palestinians, let alone transform this region into the
sort of peaceful arena we hope it would be.'
The argument is entirely clear: that Israeli
territorial concessions are irrelevant to Israeli- Palestinian
peace and Arab attitudes to Israel and the United States, and
that in any case no peace is possible until the Arab and Muslim
worlds become
fully democratic-in other words, at some
point so far in the future that it is not worth even discussing.
Although Gaffney is a neoconservative radical, the same dynamic
seems to be at work with some self-described liberals like Paul
Berman, to judge by the complete lack of any balance in the attention
they pay to Israeli and Arab policies.
The sincerity of some of these democratic
advocates is also highly questionable when it comes to the promotion
of democracy and freedom. In 2002 I attended a discussion at the
State Department on this subject. Confronted with the evidence
of strong opposition to U.S. policies toward Israel and Iraq on
the part of ordinary Arabs, a leading U.S. partisan of Israel
and critic of Arab tyranny replied that it did not matter, as
the United States had more than enough force to crush any Arab
opposition, whether from states or peoples: "Let them hate
us, as long as they fear us' he declared. Oderint dum metuant:
the motto of that distinguished humanitarian democratizer, the
emperor Caligula.
In the articles for the New Yorker magazine
that brought the abuses at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere into the open,
Seymour Hersh attributes part of the philosophy behind the interrogation
techniques to a book by an Israeli and American cultural anthropologist,
Professor Raphael Patai, called The Arab Mind. This work is characterized
by deep contempt for Arab culture and traditions, and was described
by Hersh's official sources as "the bible of the neoconservatives
on Arab behavior." From it, they said, members of the Bush
administration drew beliefs that Arabs only understand force and
that their greatest weakness is sexual shame. Mark Danner in the
New York Review of Books also suggested that the methods used
to "soften up" the prisoners at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere
reflected not just random sadism but an analysis of Arab culture.
The combination of these attitudes to
Arabs on the part of the neoconservatives with their loudly professed
belief in democratizing the Arab world is one for which terms
such as "hypocrisy" and "cognitive dissonance"
are quite inadequate. This is Orwellian doublethink, an offense
against fundamental human standards of intellectual decency. That
such an incoherent and morally repellent mixture could be taken
seriously and exert influence on U.S. policy and the U.S. national
debate reveals starkly the hideous muddle into which American
thinking about the Muslim world has fallen.
In the Middle East, therefore, American
policy at the start of the twenty-first century is an attempt
to combine the promotion of values and behavior among Arabs based
on the American Creed and American civic nationalism with support
for an Israeli state whose policies are based on the American
antithesis: strong and exclusive ethnoreligious nationalism, a
dominant militarist ethic and rule over another people based on
a mixture of claims none of which is related to universalist liberal
values.
p217
For all their faults, the American Creed and American civic nationalism,
and the American democratic system which they sustain, are a great
force for civilization in the world. Within the United States,
they have up to now provided what might be called America's self-correcting
mechanism, which has saved the nation from falling into authoritarian
rule or a permanent state of militant chauvinism.
Periods of intense nationalism-such as
the panic leading to the passage of the Aliens and Sedition Act
in the 1790s, the Know-Nothings of the 1840s, the antiGerman hysteria
of World War I, the anti-Japanese chauvinism of World War II and
McCarthyism in the 1950s-have been followed by a return to a more
tolerant and pluralist equilibrium. Chauvinist and bellicose nationalism,
although always present, has not become the U.S. norm and has
not led to democratic institutions being replaced by authoritarian
ones. Moreover, imperialist tendencies in the United States have
been restrained by the belief, stemming from the Creed, that America
does not have and should not have an empire; as well as by isolationism
and an unwillingness to make the sacrifices required to have an
empire.
Given the power of the American Creed
in American society, there are good grounds to hope that this
self-correcting mechanism will continue to operate in future.
Indeed, by the middle of 2004 the wilder ambitions of the Bush
administration had already been considerably reduced as a result
of public disquiet over the aftermath of the war in Iraq and of
the fundamental rationality of the greater part of the American
establishment.
However, there are also grounds for concern
that in the future this self-correcting mechanism may fail, and
America be drawn in a more and more chauvinist direction. The
reasons for this can be summed up by saying that in the past,
the United States went out to shape the world, while being itself
protected from the world.
Militarily, it was protected by the oceans.
Economically, it was protected by the immense strength and dominance
of the American economy. Hence in no small part the unique American
combination of power, omnipresence, idealism, innocence and ignorance
vis-a-vis the rest of humanity. This happy situation is no longer
the case. The first change is obviously that like most other countries
in the twenty-first
... A monstrous terrorist attack on the
U.S. mainland has now occurred. It whipped aspects of American
nationalism to fury, and this fury was then directed by a U.S.
administration against quite different targets. If attacks like
9/11 are repeated, / chauvinist nationalism may become a permanently
dominant feature of the United States, with everything that this
would mean for the country's international behavior, for the prestige
of the American system in the world and indeed for the American
system at home.
If, as seems all too likely, more such
attacks do occur, the mood of the American population could become
one of a permanent state of siege and atmosphere of war, with
civil liberties restricted and chauvinist politicians fishing
assiduously for opportunities in the stew. In this context, it
should be remembered that vigilantism and racial justice on the
U.S. Frontier ended only with the Frontier itself. The atmosphere
of racial fear and a belief in potential conflict in the South
also lasted for by far the greater part of American history and
ended only when the Southern racist system was overthrown by intervention
from the rest of the nation in the mid-twentieth century. September
11 knocked U.S. pluralist democracy off balance. Further terrorist
attacks might increase the tilt and make it permanent. In the
very worst of outcomes, such attacks could one day capsize the
whole American democratic ship of state.
p218
In the Middle East ... the United States appears hopelessly and
permanently bound to an unstable, violent and hostile region by
two immensely strong ties. The first is the defense of the American
Way of Life as presently defined, insofar as this has come to
be associated with the gas-consuming automobile. This requires
continued American access to cheap and guaranteed supplies of
oil, most of which for the foreseeable future will come from the
Middle East. The second is the American attachment to Israel,
which involves the United States in a national struggle with Arab
nationalism and Muslim radicalism-also, so it would seem, for
the foreseeable future.
p221
... the fact that lower middle classes tend to vote according
to culture and class self-image rather than class interest is
a very well-established one historically. So too is the fact that
this self-image has usually included nationalism, and that the
more embattled the middle classes become, the more radical their
nationalism tends to become.
p221
Faced with the economic upheaval and misery of the early 1930s,
America elected a great democratic reformer and defender of civilization,
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and developed the New Deal. The responses
of other countries were much darker and grimmer. Of course, the
social effects of changes in the U.S. economy are much more ambiguous
and above all very much slower than those of the Slump on various
countries after 1929. Nonetheless, history has given us plenty
of unpleasant examples of the effect on middle-class political
behavior even of slow and partial decline.
If the middle classes continue to crumble,
they may therefore take with them one of the essential pillars
of American political stability and moderation. As in European
countries in the past, such a development would create the perfect
breeding ground for radical nationalist groups and for even wilder
dreams of "taking back" America at home and restoring
the old moral, cultural and possibly racial order. Such developments
might lead to unrestrained strikes against America's enemies abroad,
or they might lead to isolationism. Or, if past patterns are anything
to go by, they might lead to first the one and then the other.
This would be a dangerous scenario for America and for the world
as can easily be imagined.
p222
In the past, because America was so victorious, so isolated and
so protected, even most American intellectuals never had to reflect
on their own nationalism in the way that was forced on Europeans
by the disasters of the twentieth century.
p222
... American elites should have both more confidence in and more
concern for the example their country sets to the world, through
their institutions, their values and the visible well-being of
ordinary Americans. This example forms the basis of America's
"soft power" and makes possible a form of U.S. hegemony
by consent. These institutions and values constitute America's
civilizational empire, heir to that of Rome. Like the values of
Rome, they will endure long after the American empire, and even
the United States itself, has disappeared. The image of America
as an economically successful pluralist democracy, open to all
races and basically peaceful and nonaggressive, has been so powerful
in the past because it has largely been true. Americans must make
sure that it continues to be true.
America
Right or Wrong
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