Death of the Liberal Class

by Chris Hedges

  But the report did not limit itself to the twenty-two-day attack: it went on to indict the occupation itself. It examined the beginning of the occupation and condemned Israel for the border closures, the blockade, and for the wall, or security barrier, in the West Bank. It had two references to the right of return—the right of displaced Palestinians and their descendants to return and settle in Israel—and investigated Israeli torture. It criticized the willful destruction of the Palestinian economy. Goldstone, like Moore, immediately felt the wrath of the liberal class. His name was vilified and because of threats and an effort by a Zionist group to bar him, he decided in April 2010 not to risk attending his grandson’s bar mitzvah in South Africa. An arrangement was finally struck that allowed him to attend, after great controversy, both in South Africa and Israel.

  Goldstone is the quintessential Jewish liberal, a champion of human rights and international law. He has long and close ties to Israel. His mother was an activist in the Zionist movement. His daughter moved to Israel. He is a member of the board of governors of Hebrew University, where he also has an honorary degree. But Goldstone, like Moore and Schanberg, dared to place his conscience above his career. And the rage of the liberal class directed toward Goldstone was the rage of those who, because of him, had their complicity with power and acts of injustice exposed.

  “Liberal has a distinct connotation,” Norman Finkelstein said when we spoke:

  It means to believe in the rule of law. It means to believe in international institutions. It means to believe in human rights. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch are liberal organizations. What the Goldstone phenomenon registers and catalyzes is the fact that it is impossible to reconcile liberal convictions with Israel’s conduct. Too much is now known about the history of the conflict and the human-rights record and the so-called peace process. It is impossible to be both liberal and defend Israeli policy. That was the conflict that confronted Goldstone. I very much doubt he wanted to condemn Israel.7

  “Israeli liberalism always had a function in Israeli society,” said Finkelstein, whose book This Time We Went Too Far examines the 2008 Israeli attack on Gaza:

  When I talk about liberals, I mean people like A. B. Yehoshua, David Grossman, and Amos Oz. Their function was to issue these anguished criticisms of Israel, which not only extenuated Israeli crimes but exalted Israeli crimes. “Isn’t it beautiful, the Israeli soul, how it is anguished over what it has done.” It is the classic case of having your cake and eating it. And now something strange happened. Along comes a Jewish liberal and he says, “Spare me your tears. I am only interested in the law.”

  “Goldstone did not perform the role of the Jewish liberal,” Finkelstein said, “which is to be anguished, but no consequences. And all of a sudden Israeli liberal Jews are discovering, hey, there are consequences for committing war crimes. You don’t just get to walk into the sunset and look beautiful. They can’t believe it. They are genuinely shocked. ‘Aren’t our tears consequences enough? Aren’t our long eyes and broken hearts consequences enough?’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘you have to go to the criminal court.’”

  The campaign against Goldstone took the form of venomous denunciations of all activists and jurists. It includes a bill before the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, making it possible to imprison the leaders of Israeli human-rights groups if they failed to comply with crippling new registration conditions. Human-rights activists from outside Israel who work in the Palestinian territories were rounded up and deported. The government refused to issue work visas to employees of 150 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) operating in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, including Oxfam, Save the Children, and Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders). The new tourist visas effectively barred these employees from Palestinian territory under Israeli occupation. Professor Naomi Chazan, the Israeli head of the New Israel Fund (NIF), which has donors in the United States, was vilified by ultranationalist groups such as Im Tirtzu. Chazan had spoken out on human-rights issues in Israel, and Im Tirtzu claimed the NIF was connected with groups that had funneled anti-Israel information to the Goldstone mission. Israeli officials pressured foreign donors to the NIF, as well as other human-rights groups, to halt contributions. Chazan had written a column for the Jerusalem Post. The paper terminated the column. Billboards sprouted up around Tel Aviv and Jerusalem with a grotesque caricature of Chazan. Groups such as Im Tirtzu had branded her as an agent for Hamas and Iran, with a horn growing from her forehead. “Naomi-Goldstone-Chazan,” the caption on the billboard read. Im Tirtzu included among its financial backers the ministries of right-wing Christian pastor John Hagee and the New York Central Fund, which also supports extremist settler organizations.

  “This is the first time the human-rights dimension of the Israel-Palestine conflict has moved center stage,” Finkelstein noted:

  It has temporarily displaced the fatuous peace process. It is the first time that human-rights reports have counted. There are literally, because I have read them, tens if not hundreds of thousands of pages of accumulation of human rights reports condemning Israel going back roughly to the first intifada [a Palestinian uprising against Israeli rule, 1987-1993] to the present. The human-rights organizations since the 1990s have been quite sharp in their criticism of Israel human-rights policy, but nobody ever reads the reports. They are never reported on, with maybe a couple of exceptions, in the mainstream media. The Goldstone report was the first time the findings of these human-rights organizations moved center stage. People stopped talking about the peace process and started talking about Israel’s human-rights record.

  Finkelstein was cut off by the liberal class from the start of his career as an academic. He studied a 1984 book by Joan Peters, From Time Immemorial. The book was widely praised by Jewish intellectuals such as Barbara Tuchman, Saul Bellow, and Martin Peretz. But Finkelstein’s research showed that it was a hoax. From Time Immemorial made the mendacious claim that the land of Palestine was largely unpopulated when Jewish settlers arrived. Finkelstein’s research discredited a legal document, central to Peters’s book, which denied Palestinians rights to the land in Palestine. He soon found himself at war with the powerful Israeli lobby. But he refused to back down, continuing his scholarship, which demolished myths surrounding Israel and exposed Israel’s political and financial exploitation of the Nazi Holocaust. This work swiftly turned him into a pariah. He was pushed out of numerous universities, including New York University, Hunter College, and DePaul University in Chicago, although his review committee at DePaul had recommended him for tenure.

  He has spent most of his academic career as an adjunct professor earning $15,000 to $18,000 annually. Yet his work, including Image and Reality of the Israel-Palestine Conflict, published in 1995, is one of the finest and most important by any scholar on Israeli relations with the Palestinians. His writing is driven by a relentless search for truth and his compassion for the Palestinians and their suffering. This compassion, he often says, comes from his experience as the son of Holocaust survivors. In the suffering of the Palestinians, he saw the suffering his mother and father endured in the Warsaw ghetto and later the Nazi death camps. Unlike many of his critics, Finkelstein understands the lessons of the Holocaust, and of war. He has applied them to the fight against the abuse and suffering of others, even if this abuse is being carried out by Israel.

  Liberals are expected by the power elite to police their own. The Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz plays this role. He has used his position to mount campaigns against liberal dissidents such as Finkelstein and Middle East studies departments in universities such as Columbia. The use of prominent liberals to do the dirty work of the power elite is an old and effective tactic. In the late 1940s into the 1950s, the philosopher Sidney Hook, a former Trotskyist, enthusiastically supported the purging of communists from their posts in universities to avoid “playing into the hands of native reaction which would like to wipe out all liberal dissent.” Hook, who argued that leftists,
communists, radicals, and those he termed “ritualist liberals” endanger freedom, understood that the power elite would only accept criticism that did not defy corporate structures and ideologies. It would never permit radical critics to achieve positions of prominence within liberal institutions. He feared that unless the liberal class acted as enforcers of proper doctrine it would collide with the power elite. Hook defended this purging as “the enforcement of the proper professional standards.” He called this “a matter of ethical hygiene and not of political heresy or persecution.” Hook encouraged his fellow academics to “name names” in the 1950s hunt for communists within the universities, drawing an analogy between communists and drug dealers. He founded several groups, such as the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which took CIA money to counter and discourage American intellectuals from favoring cooperation with the Soviet Union. And the power elite rewarded him for his service. The anti-liberal National Association of Scholars offers a $2,500 Sidney Hook Award every year to “uncommon service in the defense of intellectual freedom and academic integrity.”

  Schanberg, Goldstone, and Finkelstein violated the unwritten code, one established in the anticommunist hysteria of the twentieth century, between the power elite and the liberal class. The liberal class is expected to mask the brutality of imperial war and corporate malfeasance by deploring the most egregious excesses while studiously refusing to question the legitimacy of the power elite’s actions and structures. When dissidents step outside these boundaries, they become pariahs. Specific actions can be criticized, but motives, intentions, and the moral probity of the power elite cannot be questioned.

  The liberal class has ossified. It has become part of the system it once tried to reform. It continues to speak in the language of technical jargon and tepid political reform, even though the corporate state has long since gutted the mechanisms for actual reform. The failure by the liberal class to adjust to the harsh, new reality of corporate power and the permanent war economy, to acknowledge its own powerlessness, has left the liberal class isolated and despised. The liberal class has died because it refused to act as if anything had changed. It ignored the looming environmental and economic collapse. It ignored the structural critique that might pull us back from the horrific effects of climate change and a global depression. Our power elite and their liberal apologists lack the ideas and the vocabulary to make sense of our new and terrifying reality.

  We have entered a historical vacuum. The systems built around the old beliefs have failed, but new alternatives have yet to be articulated. The longer the power elite and the liberal class speak in words that no longer correspond to reality, the more an embittered and betrayed populace loses faith in traditional systems of government and power. The inability of liberals and the power elite to address our reality leaves the disenfranchised open to manipulation by the demagogues. The moral nihilism Dostoyevsky feared with the collapse of the liberal class inevitably leads to social chaos.

  Alan Greenspan, the former head of the Federal Reserve Board, once treated with reverential deference by the power elite and the liberal class, announced in 2008, “I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interest of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in their firms.”8

  Greenspan exposed the folly of the liberal experts and economists, who had promoted a baseless belief in the power of free markets to self-regulate and solve the world’s problems. In holding up what amounts to a strenuously defended utopianism, these leaders ignored three thousand years of economic and human history to serve a corporate ideology. All the promises of the free market have turned out to be lies.

  The mechanisms of control, which usually work to maintain a high level of fear among the populace, have produced, despite these admissions of failure, the “patriotic” citizen, plagued by job losses, bankrupted by medical bills, foreclosed on his or her house, and worried about possible terrorist attacks. In this historical vacuum, the “patriotic” citizen clings to the privilege of being a patriot—or, perhaps, the double privilege of being white and a patriot. The retreat into a tribal identity is a desperate attempt to maintain self-worth and self-importance at a time of deep personal and ideological confusion. The “patriotic” citizen, although abused by the actual policies of the state, unfailingly supports widespread surveillance and permanent war. The “patriotic” citizen does not question the $1 trillion in defense-related spending. The “patriotic” citizen accepts that the eighteen military and civilian intelligence agencies, most of whose work is now outsourced to private corporations, are held above government. The “patriotic” citizen accepts the state’s assertion that it needs more police, prisons, inmates, spies, mercenaries, weapons, and troops than any other industrialized nation. The “patriotic” citizen objects when anyone suggests that military budgets can be cut, that troops need to come home, that domestic policies need more attention than the pursuit of permanent war. The military-industrial lobbies have ensured that military budgets are untouchable. The “patriotic” citizen admires the military and somehow pretends that the military is not part of the government. In the name of patriotism, the most powerful instruments of state power and control are effectively removed from public discussion. We endure more state control than at any time in U.S. history. And the liberal class, whose task was once to monitor and protest the excesses of the power elite, has assisted in the rout.

  The failure by the liberal class to articulate an alternative in a time of financial and environmental collapse clears the way for military values of hypermasculinity, blind obedience, and violence. A confused culture disdains the empathy and compassion espoused by traditional liberalism. This cruelty runs like an electric current through reality television and trash-talk programs, where contestants endure pain and humiliation while they betray and manipulate those around them in a ruthless world of competition. These are the values championed by an increasingly militarized society and the manipulation and dishonesty on Wall Street. Friendship, trust, solidarity, honesty, and compassion are banished for the unadulterated world of competition.

  This hypermasculinity, the core of pornography, fuses violence and eroticism, as well as the physical and emotional degradation of women. It is the language employed by the corporate state. Human beings are reduced to commodities. Corporations, which are despotic, authoritarian enclaves devoted to maximizing profit and ensuring that all employees speak from the same prompt cards, have infected the wider society with their values. Hypermasculinity crushes the capacity for moral autonomy, difference, and diversity. It isolates us from one another. It has its logical fruition in Abu Ghraib prison, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with our lack of compassion for our homeless, our poor, our mentally ill, our unemployed, our sick, and our gay, lesbian, transgender, and bisexual citizens. It is the antithesis of liberalism.

  In his two-volume 1987 study entitled Male Fantasies, which draws on the bitter alienation of demobilized veterans in Germany following the end of World War I, Klaus Theweleit argues that a militarized culture attacks all that is culturally defined as the feminine, including love, gentleness, compassion, and acceptance of difference. It sees any sexual ambiguity as a threat to male “hardness” and the clearly defined roles required by the militarized state. The elevation of military values as the highest good sustains the perverted ethic, rigid social roles, and emotional numbness that Theweleit explored. It is a moral cancer that the liberal class once struggled against. The collapse of liberalism permits the hypermasculinity of a militarized society to redefine the nation. Sexual metaphors of abuse and rape are used to justify imperial and military power. And once the remnants of the liberal class adopt the heartless language of sexual violence, they assent, consciously or not, to the rule of corporate greed and violence.

  Tom Friedman, interviewed in 2003 by Charlie Rose, used this hypermasculine, sexualized language of violence to justify the invasion and occupation of I
raq. It was a window into the moral and intellectual collapse of the liberal class. The old liberal columnists at the New York Times, writers such as Anthony Lewis, would have never descended to Friedman’s crudity. These older liberals were domesticated by corporate capitalism, but they retained some moral and intellectual independence. Friedman and the new liberal class has none.

  What Islamic extremists needed to see, Friedman told Rose, “was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, and basically saying, ‘Which part of this sentence don’t you understand? You don’t think, you know we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we’re just gonna let it grow? Well, suck on this.’ That, Charlie, is what this war is about. We could have hit Saudi Arabia, it was part of that bubble. Could have hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could.”9