Israel's Powerful Friends
By George Szamuely, 06/2000, www.antiwar.com
George W. Bush and Al Gore made the predictable pit stops at the American
Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). With characteristic daring, Bush
vowed to waste no time moving the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
He also denounced the Clinton administration for putting too much pressure
on Israel. "In recent times Washington has tried to make Israel conform to
its own plans and timetables...but this is not the path to peace." The
next day it was Gore's turn and he seized the opportunity to
denounce...Bush's father. In 1991 the elder Bush blocked loan guarantees
to Israel, protesting the continued building of settlements. "I vividly
remember standing up against a group of administration foreign policy
advisers who promoted the insulting concept of linkage," Gore boasted. "We
defeated them..."
So there we have it: the next administration's attitude will be that
Israel should be able to do whatever it wants with the vast fortune that
the U.S. annually bestows on it, and we should have no say at all in the
matter.
Every other country gets hit with sanctions the moment it fails to follow
Washington's orders, but not Israel. No country in the world is the object
of so much hysterical veneration, so much anguished cheerleading and so
many outrageous double standards as Israel. Case in point: a recent Weekly
Standard cover story written by Charles Krauthammer. "Israel's enemies see
the future," he writes, "a future Israelis themselves may now be creating:
a world without Zionism, a world without Israel." Krauthammer bases his
conclusion on Yoram Hazony's new book The Jewish State. Hazony, invariably
described as Israel's leading "neoconservative," claims that the "idea of
the Jewish state is under systematic attack from [Israel's] own cultural
and intellectual establishment." Israel's elite is in the grips of
something called "post-Zionism," a way of thinking that sees no point to
the continued existence of a specifically Jewish state. According to
Hazony, fashionable people believe that Israel should become a state like
any other a so-called "state of its citizens." They want to divorce
Jewish nationality from the state of Israel.
Hazony finds this horrifying. But why? Everyone else is giving up on
nationalism. Fifteen European nations have surrendered much of their
sovereignty. No one even talks about the American nation. We are simply
the "indispensable nation." Why should Israel be immune? Krauthammer
provided an answer a couple of years ago in a New Republic symposium
marking the centenary of the Zionist movement. He wrote: "Large nations
may suffer defeats, even occupation. They may even, for a time, lose their
independence. But they cannot disappear. Small nations can. Israel is a
small nation. That is the reason post-Zionism is so dangerous. It is
dedicated to dismantling the Zionist fortress state... To do so when the
danger is at the gate is suicide." What he says about small nations is
true. But he fails to mention that, unlike other small nations, Israel can
call on the services of the greatest power in the world. Israel's enemies,
on the other hand, have no one to call on.
Moreover, it would be nice if Israel's champions would occasionally
acknowledge the existence of other "small nations" who may be fighting for
survival. Instead, Israel's amen corner is notable for the virulence of
the attacks it directs at the national aspirations of others. Few
publications are as filled with visceral hatred as The New Republic.
Russians are condemned for "reactionary nationalism"; the Kurds for
"romantic nationalism"; the Chinese for "bellicose nationalism." Arab
nationalism a creation of Christians "fearful of Muslim dominance" is
all "Germanic ideas about volk and anti-Semitism." When Marty Peretz's
boys are not denouncing "the age-old European bugaboo of nationalism,"
they are fretting about the "neo-nationalists" of Japan, who "are
dangerously anti-American, or harbor loopy notions about reconstructing a
stronger and more aggressive Japanese military." Then there was Daniel
Goldhagen's anti-Serb screed last year surely the most repulsive atrocity
The New Republic ever perpetrated: "The vast majority of the Serbs are
animated by a particularly virulent variant of the nationalism
characteristic of Western civilization... The majority of the Serbian
people...have rendered themselves both legally and morally incompetent to
conduct their own affairs."
You get the idea. Jewish nationalism is good and every other nationalism
is bad. Yet endless repetition scarcely makes the claim any more
plausible. "Israel was our sovereign land from which we were exiled and
the claim to which we never renounced," writes Krauthammer, "unlike the
colonizers of, say, Australia, South Africa and North America, we are
returning to...our patrimony. And the argument from necessity that a
people savagely persecuted and denied refuge in every corner of the globe
needs at least one place of its own was made 50 years ago, tragically and
definitively, in the wake of the Holocaust."
This is the standard argument and just about every ingredient in it is
unsustainable. First, the Jews who arrived in Palestine were colonists and
the indigenous people did not want them there. The claim that your
ancestors lived there 2000 years ago is not legally the soundest.
Moreover, the Jews in Israel, surrounded as they are by Arab enemies, are
hardly secure. Jews are much safer today in almost every country in the
world than in Israel. And if Israel is the proper home for the Jews, why
are so many Jews choosing to live elsewhere? America's Jews are staying
put.
In the end, Israel exists because it won its wars. It faces no mortal
threat to its existence. And no more Jews are expected to arrive any time
soon. The time has come for Israel to address some of the painful issues
of the past and to become a normal state. The worst possible outcome would
be if "neoconservatives" Israeli or American were to come to dominate
this debate.
