Reappraisals

by Tony Judt

  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 policymaking 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 ’67 war these sentiments continued unaltered. The pro-Palestinian enthusiasms of post-sixties radical groups and nationalist movements, reflected in joint training camps and shared projects for terrorist attacks, were offset by the growing international acknowledgement 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.

  But today everything is different. We can see, in retrospect, that Israel’s victory in June 1967 and its continuing occupation of the territories it conquered then have been the Jewish state’s very own nakbar: a moral and political catastrophe. Israel’s actions in the West Bank and Gaza have magnified and publicized the country’s shortcomings and put them on display to a watching world. Curfews, checkpoints, bulldozers, public humiliations, home destructions, land seizures, shootings, “targeted assassinations,” the Wall: 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 terminal 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 ultramodern 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. In itself this unsought distinctiondoes 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 South African white 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 to be 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 vs. Goliath appeal.

  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 Shoah, something that was still 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 fully to acknowledge 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 an Israeli soldier’s great-grandmother 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 ingrained 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 its 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.

  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 = 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.

  For 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 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 paid annually to Israel (20 percent of the total U.S. foreign aid budget) which has helped sustain the Israeli defense budget and cover 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 ten 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 neoconservative 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 work 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 its 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 the authors anticipated, they 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 now 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: At New York University in 2005 I was teaching a class on twentieth-century Europe and trying to explain to young Americans the importance of the Spanish Civil War in the political memory of Europeans and why Franco’s Spain had 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 their approval. The times they are indeed a-changing.

  That Israel can now stand 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 in later years we shall look back upon the years since 1973 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 any backlash. This blinkered arrogance is tragically summed up in an assertion by Shimon Peres in 2003, 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.”

  From one perspective Israel’s future is bleak. Not for the first time, a Jewish state finds 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 what it can 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’s bluff by offering its 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 cliché 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 (far older and better established than Israel’s West Bank colonies) was a military and moral disaster for his country, and 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 seventy years old. Israel cannot afford to wait that long. At the age of fifty-eight the time has come for it to grow up.

  This essay was commissioned by the editors of the Israeli liberal daily Ha’aretz for a special edition on the occasion of the country’s fifty-eighth birthday and was published by them in May 2006. It aroused the predictable flurry of critical responses from correspondents and bloggers reluctant to countenance any criticism of Israel or its policies and practices. Most of the hysterical responses came from the United States; as so often in these matters, Israeli reactions—both critical and supportive—were more measured.

  Part Four

  THE AMERICAN (HALF-) CENTURY

  CHAPTER XVIII

  An American Tragedy? The Case of Whittaker Chambers

  In the fall of 1993, Maria Schmidt, a young Hungarian historian in Budapest, phoned me in New York. She had a question. “Tell me about ‘Alger Hiss’?” I explained as briefly as I could. “You mean that there are people in the United States who still believe that he was telling the truth?” Certainly, I replied, and not least among my fellow professors. “In that case,” she said, “I am going to send you something that I have found.” Schmidt is a historian of contemporary Hungary. She had gained access to the wartime and postwar archives of the Hungarian Communist Party, and there, while combing through communications and reports that passed between Hungarian secret policemen and Communist Party leaders, she had come across the name “Alger Hiss” a number of times. Assuming it to be an alias—the Hiss case does not figure prominently in European history lessons—she was surprised to discover that a man had actually existed by that name (and was at that time still alive). Schmidt’s evidence has since been corroborated by material retrieved from Soviet and American government sources. For those who do not believe in fairies, the Hiss affair is now closed.