America Right or Wrong

by Lieven, Anatol;

  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 to admit the existence of the Palestinians as a people, with consequent national rights, summed up in Golda Meir’s notorious statement (echoed by innumerable Israeli partisans in the United States): “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.”96

  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.97 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 (anti-Semitism) or the sinister and cynical machinations of Arab regimes.98

  Of course, both these elements have indeed been present among Arab and Muslim 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 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 Edward Said has written, “to criticize Zionism…is to criticize not so much an idea or a theory but rather a wall of denials.”99

  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 nineteenth-century Americans toward the clash between slavery and the American Creed, as described 100 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.”100

  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 toward other such conflicts. Backed by the tremendous institutional power of the Israeli lobby, this has had the effect of severely limiting discussion of this conflict in the United States. The reporting of the conflict is generally fair enough, but it tends to lack all historical context, thereby allowing Palestinians to be portrayed simply as terrorists with no explanation of why they are fighting (unlike the U.S. coverage of the Chechen wars, for example). Much more serious, however, is the general bias of the editorial pages toward partisans of Israel. Unconditional, hard-line partisans of Israel 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). Hard-line critics of Israel, in contrast, never appear. Such criticism as is permitted is by moderates, and is highly qualified and restrained.101

  As Arnaud de Borchgrave (himself a hard-line conservative, and, in part, of Jewish descent) has written bitterly, “for many American Jews, anyone who writes disapprovingly of the policies of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and of his Dionysian neo-conservative backers in Washington is evidence of ‘classic anti-Semitism.’ The mere reference to ‘neo-cons’ is interpreted to mean an attack against a ‘Jewish cabal’…Israeli newspapers—particularly Ha’aretz, the New York Times of Israel—make our own critiques tame by comparison.”102

  With time, freedom of debate in the United States might have increased, and indeed it did improve markedly in the 1990s, until the collapse of the Israeli–Palestinian peace process, the resumption of Palestinian terrorism, and 9/11 turned the clock back again. Over time, Israeli military victories and technological advances have assured it of security against invasion, and Israel has become a more and more firmly established and indeed brilliantly successful state and society. These successes should have diminished fears that by discussing the circumstances of its birth one would somehow be calling its legitimate existence into question. Despite the hateful rhetoric of the Iranian regime, a large majority of Arab countries remain supportive of a peace settlement with Israel, assuming that Israel withdraws from the lands occupied in 1967 and is willing to reach some form of compromise over Jerusalem and refugee return.

  Ever since 9/11 the editorial pages of the New York Times and a number of other American journals have taken a more fair and balanced view of the Israel–Palestinian conflict than they did 20 years ago. Very few mainstream writers, however, have gone from criticism of Israel to adopt the logical consequence of their criticisms and call for pressure on Israel and withdrawal of U.S. support—which they would certainly have done in the case of any other state that received massive U.S. aid and defied U.S. wishes. As a result, their criticisms are deficient in both political and moral content.103 Even the State Department each year produces a human rights report on Israel and the Occupied Territories that is often very critical of Israeli behavior. The problem is that the United States takes no action as a result.104

  Starting with President Anwar Sadat of Egypt in 1977, more and more of the Arab world has admitted that Israel is here to stay, and ideas of driving it into the sea are an empty fantasy. This process culminated in the peace plan drawn up by Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia in 2002, and approved by an overwhelming majority of the Arab League, offering to recognize Israel within the borders of 1967.

  In the meantime, however, successive Israeli governments made the fateful decision to encourage the creation of Jewish settlements in the territories conquered in the Six Day War.105 This decision necessitated a continued denial of the national existence of the Palestinians, long after it had become obvious that the Palestinians had in fact developed a coherent national consciousness separate from that of other Arab peoples. Indeed, one of the tragicomic aspects of the Israeli hard-line camp is that it might be described as Pan-Arabist, since it professes to believe that the Arabs are all one people and therefore that Palestinians have no homeland of their own and might as well live anywhere in the Arab world.

  The issue of the settlements helped add another thick layer of evasion and chauvinism to the politics and rhetoric of the Israeli lobby in the United States, and not just to the rhetoric, but to the reasoning of U.S. politicians who support Israel, because as a result of their creation and the need to defend their presence, Arab states and individuals could not be admitted to be moderate and reasonable even if they offered to sign a peace treaty with Israel within the borders of 1967. Any such offers had to be either ignored, or their authors demonized as inherently mendacious, untrustworthy, and devoted to Israel’s destruction. Discussions with Arab and Palestinian moderates had to be either prevented, or drowned in a torrent of denunciation. Offers like that of Prince Abdullah had to be first brushed aside, and then their authors discredited by a flood of attacks on Arab countries in general and Saudi Arabia in particular as regressive, barbarous, dictatorial, and therefore inherently untrustworthy.106

  The question of Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip had to be presented as vital to Israel’s very survival. This in turn required a constant exaggeration of existential threats to Israel, and hence of the power and malignity of Israel’s (and America’s) Muslim enemies. The result has been a paranoid discourse of permanent emergency and existential crisis with all too many precedents in the history of militarist nationalism. And too much of this discourse is not focused where it should be, on the real terrorist threat to Israel, and the need to reduce this by ending settlement
construction and withdrawing from the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Nor is it focused on the equally real demographic threat to Israel if it continues to rule over huge numbers of Palestinians. On the contrary, it portrays a quite unreal military threat to Israel from Arab states, and is used as a means of diverting public debate away from the real issues of settlements and occupation. Thus, in February 2003, Daniel Pipes wrote that “the existence of Israel appeared imperiled as it had not been for decades.” Yaacov Lozowick, of the Israeli Holocaust Museum, has written a book in which all Israel’s conflicts, whether of genuine self-defense and survival or of invasion and occupation, are subsumed under “Israel’s right to exist.”107 In June 2011, Newt Gingrich declared that “Israel and America are at a dangerous crossroads in which the survival of Israel and the safety of the United States both hang in the balance.”108

  Remarks like this deliberately feed the paranoia of American nationalism as well, and they go to the heart of what has gone wrong with Israeli strategy and U.S. support for that strategy in recent decades. During that period, Israel was repeatedly attacked, but in consequence won a series of great victories, first military, then political. For most of its early history Israel was threatened by militarily powerful Arab rejectionist states backed and armed by the Soviet Union. However, these states were crushingly defeated by Israel in 1967, and to a lesser extent in 1973.

  Thereafter, the defection of Egypt from the anti-Israel bloc, and the Egyptian regime’s adoption of the United States as supplier and protector, made any further serious conventional military threat to Israel inconceivable for the foreseeable future. The victory of Islamist parties in Egyptian elections following the revolution of 2011 will increase the danger that Palestinian terrorists will receive help from Egypt. However, in view of the crushing defeats suffered by Egypt in the past, it is extremely unlikely that an Islamist government would push this to the point of war, or that the Egyptian army—which at the time of writing retain ultimate control of Egypt—would permit them to do so.

  An additional reason why another attack on Israel similar to 1967 or 1973 is highly unlikely is that Israel has developed a powerful nuclear deterrent as an ultimate and effective guarantee against any threat to its existence from Muslim states (though not, of course, against catastrophic terrorist attack). After 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union not only reduced the threat to Israel still further by depriving the remaining Arab “rejectionist” states of their superpower backer, it released a huge flood of Soviet Jewish emigrants, securing Israel’s demographic position within the borders of 1967.

  If the occupied territories are kept in a “Greater Israel,” of course, the demographic picture looks utterly different, and Israel really will be in terrible danger either as a Jewish state, or as a democracy, or both. Henry Siegman has written of the Palestinian demographic threat, in words that also 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 that 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 at 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.109

  Abba Eban’s famous line that the Palestinians have “never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity” to seek peace or gain political advantage has all too often been proved true. Certainly the PLO’s record has often been both politically lamentable and morally revolting, and the same is true of leading Arab regimes. Palestinian leadership has been generally abysmal. Palestinian terrorism has been disastrous and unjustifiable from every possible point of view. But this does not excuse the policies of successive Israeli governments toward the Palestinians. In the words of Amos Elon, “it does not condone terror and murder to say that the Palestinians have a case.”110 Until the 1990s most Arab governments refused to recognize Israel under any circumstances, and Israel similarly refused to recognize the existence of the Palestinians as a separate people enjoying rights of self-determination and genuine self-government.

  If Israel had respected the Geneva Convention, and maintained a military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip pending a peace treaty without planting illegal settlements there, then it could have responded positively to later Arab offers to recognize and make peace with Israel within the borders of 1967—like those of King Hussein in the 1970s and Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia in 2003.111 Israel would also have been in a position to negotiate both quickly and sincerely on the basis of Oslo, focusing on the establishment of international guarantees for Israeli security and Palestinian abandonment of the right of return.

  Instead, Oslo was frittered away in endless haggling while the settlements expanded further—giving the Palestinians the feeling that the whole process was only a delaying tactic to allow more land to be stolen from under their feet. This eventually contributed greatly to the disastrous Palestinian decision to reject Barak’s peace offer of July 2000 and Clinton’s of January 2001, and to the catastrophe of the second Intifada.112

  “Anti-Semitism” and Hatred of the World

  Closely linked to systematic exaggeration of the degree of contemporary geopolitical threat to Israel by the Israeli lobby in the United States has been the recent campaign in both the United States and Israel alleging that criticism of Israel is overwhelmingly anti-Semitic in motivation. It is also stated that this reflects a great wave of new anti-Semitism in Europe and around the world, which is closely linked to hatred of America. Or in the simple title of an essay by Manfred Gerstenfeld: “Anti-Semitism: Integral to European Culture.”113 This too feeds into wider American chauvinism vis-à-vis Europe and the outside world in general. It increases the tendency in the American antithesis to see the entire world outside America (except for Israel) as irredeemably wicked and hostile, and the belief that the values and institutions of the American Creed can be truly held only by Americans and Israelis.

  The savage history of anti-Semitism culminating in the Holocaust makes this subject one of unparalleled moral gravity, and the accusation of anti-Semitism one that should carry crushing moral weight. And indeed, the very grave consequences that can occur for an academic or public figure in the United States who is accused of anti-Semitism also make this matter an extremely serious one.

  Unfortunately, all too often in the United States today it is not being treated seriously. For example, this book was attacked as “anti-Semitic” in a review by Jonathan Tepperman that appeared in the New York Times. Readers can judge for themselves from this chapter whether there is the slightest truth in this allegation.114

  The slur of “anti-Semitism” was used on a very large scale against the most important book on the U.S. relationship with Israel to have appeared over the past decade, The Israel Lobby, by Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer.115 The original essay on which the book was b
ased was commissioned but then rejected by the Atlantic Monthly, and was published instead in the London Review of Books. The facts that the book was published in America, was widely reviewed there (quite often positively, at least compared to previous works on the same subject), and, that unlike previous works on the same subject (like Feuerlicht’s brilliant work The Fate of the Jews), it was not subsequently shunted into oblivion, are all encouraging signs for the state of the U.S. debate on Israeli policy and the U.S. relationship with Israel. Mearsheimer and Walt benefited by association from a book published in the same year by former President Jimmy Carter (the architect of the Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt), Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, which, while not focusing on the Israel lobby as such, made many of the same criticisms of Israeli policy.116 As a result, the debate on this subject in America has opened up to some extent compared to the situation a generation ago.

  Other aspects of the Mearsheimer–Walt controversy have however been a good deal less encouraging. All too many American establishment liberals, instead of taking a clear stand on Mearsheimer and Walt’s central argument, resorted to nitpicking criticisms of alleged minor historical inaccuracies, which in other circumstances they would have ignored. Mearsheimer and Walt showed great moral courage in writing a book that they knew well would attract bitter unpopularity in important circles (something that I was also warned of when I first presented the theses of this book in Washington, DC). However, it has to be said that as senior tenured professors at the University of Chicago and Harvard, respectively, their jobs at least were fairly safe—something that is emphatically not true of junior untenured academics or members of think tanks, let alone aspiring politicians or government officials. Finally, while works such as theirs and Jimmy Carter’s may perhaps have strengthened to some degree the desire of President Obama for an Israeli–Palestinian settlement, as of 2012 it is alas all too clear that they have had no effect whatsoever on the behavior of the U.S. Congress or the overwhelming majority of U.S. political elites.