http://www.haaretz.com/general/the-country-that-wouldn-t-grow-up-1.186721
By Tony Judt
Haaretz: 02.05.06
The country that wouldn't grow up At 58, Israel has no friends aside from
the U.S. and its claims of victimhood and anti-Semitism are falling on
increasingly deaf ears. The time has come to mature By Tony Judt
By the age of 58 a country - like a man - should have achieved a certain
maturity. After nearly six decades of existence we know, for good and for
bad, who we are, what we have done and how we appear to others, warts and
all. We acknowledge, however reluctantly and privately, our mistakes and our
shortcomings. And though we still harbor the occasional illusion about
ourselves and our prospects, we are wise enough to recognize that these are
indeed for the most part just that: illusions. In short, we are adults.
But the State of Israel remains curiously (and among Western-style
democracies, uniquely) immature. The social transformations of the country -
and its many economic achievements - have not brought the political wisdom
that usually accompanies age. Seen from the outside, Israel still comports
itself like an adolescent: consumed by a brittle confidence in its own
uniqueness; certain that no one "understands" it and everyone is "against"
it; full of wounded self-esteem, quick to take offense and quick to give it.
Like many adolescents Israel is convinced - and makes a point of
aggressively and repeatedly asserting - that it can do as it wishes, that
its actions carry no consequences and that it is immortal. Appropriately
enough, this country that has somehow failed to grow up was until very
recently still in the hands of a generation of men who were prominent in its
public affairs 40 years ago: an Israeli Rip Van Winkle who fell asleep in,
say, 1967 would be surprised indeed to awake in 2006 and find Shimon Peres
and General Ariel Sharon still hovering over the affairs of the country -
the latter albeit only in spirit.
But that, Israeli readers will tell me, is the prejudiced view of the
outsider. What looks from abroad like a self-indulgent, wayward country -
delinquent in its international obligations and resentfully indifferent to
world opinion - is simply an independent little state doing what it has
always done: looking after its own interests in an inhospitable part of the
globe. Why should embattled Israel even acknowledge such foreign criticism,
much less act upon it? They - gentiles, Muslims, leftists - have reasons of
their own for disliking Israel. They - Europeans, Arabs, fascists - have
always singled out Israel for special criticism. Their motives are timeless.
They haven't changed. Why should Israel change?
But they have changed. And it is this change, which has passed largely
unrecognized within Israel, to which I want to draw attention here. Before
1967 the State of Israel may have been tiny and embattled, but it was not
typically hated: certainly not in the West. Official Soviet-bloc communism
was anti-Zionist of course, but for just that reason Israel was rather well
regarded by everyone else, including the non-communist left. The romantic
image of the kibbutz and the kibbutznik had a broad foreign appeal in the
first two decades of Israel's existence. Most admirers of Israel (Jews and
non-Jews) knew little about the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948.
They preferred to see in the Jewish state the last surviving incarnation of
the 19th century idyll of agrarian socialism - or else a paragon of
modernizing energy "making the desert bloom."
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
policy-making 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 1967 war these sentiments continued unaltered. The
pro-Palestinian enthusiasms of post-1960s radical groups and nationalist
movements, reflected in joint training camps and shared projects for
terrorist attacks, were offset by the growing international acknowledgment
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.
*The Israeli nakba*
But today everything is different. We can see, in retrospect, that the
victory of Israel in June 1967 and its continuing occupation of the
territories it conquered then have been the Jewish state's very own nakba: a
moral and political catastrophe. Israel's actions in the West Bank and Gaza
have magnified and publicized the country's shortcomings and displayed them
to a watching world. Curfews, checkpoints, bulldozers, public humiliations,
home destructions, land seizures, shootings, "targeted assassinations," the
separation fence: 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 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 ultra-modern 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. This unsought distinction does 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 white
South African 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 of being 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 versus Goliath appeal.
*Collective cognitive dysfunction*
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 Holocaust, something
that was 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 to acknowledge fully 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 the
great-grandmother of an Israeli soldier 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 engrained 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 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.
*Israel's undoing*
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 equals 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.
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 U.S. 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 in aid
Israel receives annually - 20 percent of the total U.S. foreign aid budget -
which has helped sustain the Israeli defense budget and 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 10 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 neo-conservative 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 job 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 U.S. 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 they anticipated, the
authors 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 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:
Here at New York University I was teaching this past month a class on
post-war Europe. I was trying to explain to young Americans the importance
of the Spanish Civil War in the political memory of Europeans and why
Franco's Spain has 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 approval. The times they are indeed a-changing.
That Israel can now stand in 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 we shall look back upon the years 1973-2003 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 a backlash. This blinkered arrogance is tragically
summed up in an assertion by Shimon Peres 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."
*The future of Israel*
From one perspective Israel's future is bleak. Not for the first time, a
Jewish state has found 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 can it 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' bluff by offering the
movement's 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 cliche 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, which was far older and better established than
Israel's West Bank colonies, was a military and moral disaster for his
country. 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 70 years old. Israel cannot afford to wait that
long. At the age of 58 the time has come for it to grow up.
Tony Judt is a professor and the director of the Remarque Institute at New
York University, and his book "Postwar: The History of Europe Since 1945"
was published in 2005.
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