Reappraisals (47 page)

Nobody thought much about how to remove the settlements when the time came to exchange land for peace, though it had been clear from the outset that come it would. On June 19, 1967, the Israeli cabinet secretly voted to accept the principle of returning occupied land in exchange for lasting peace. As Eshkol had noted when the war began: “Even if we conquer the Old City and the West Bank, in the end we will have to leave them.”

It is easy to wax nostalgic for the old Israel, before the victories of 1967 and the disturbing changes they brought in their wake. The country may have had “Auschwitz frontiers” (Eban) but its identity within them was at least clear. Yet if the Jewish state was ever to be at home in the Middle East—to be the “normal” polity that its Zionist founders envisaged—then its curious European orientation, a time-space capsule in an alien continent, could not last. And there is no doubt that, for better or for worse, since June 1967 Israel has entered fully into the Middle Eastern world. It, too, has crazed clerics, religious devotees, nationalist demagogues, and ethnic cleansers. It is also, sadly, less secure than at any time in the past forty years. The idea that Jews in Israel might lead their daily lives oblivious of the Arab world, as many did before 1967, is today tragically unthinkable.

Short of forcibly expunging the Arab presence from every inch of soil currently controlled by Israel, the dilemma facing Israel today is the same as it was in June 1967, when the aging David Ben-Gurion advised his fellow countrymen against remaining in the conquered territories. A historic victory can wreak almost as much havoc as a historic defeat. In Abba Eban’s words, “The exercise of permanent rule over a foreign nation can only be defended by an ideology and rhetoric of self-worship and exclusiveness that are incompatible with the ethical legacy of prophetic Judaism and classical Zionism.” The risk that Israel runs today is that for many of its most vocal defenders, Zionism has become just such an “ideology and rhetoric of self-worship and exclusiveness” and not much more. Israel’s brilliant victory of June 1967, already a classic in the annals of preemptive warfare, has borne bitter fruits for the losers and the winners alike.

CHAPTER XVII

The Country That Wouldn’t Grow Up

By the age of fifty-eight a country—like a man—should have achieved a certain maturity. After nearly six decades of existence we know, for good and ill, 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 amour propre, 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 already prominent in its public affairs forty 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: look 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, Lefties—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 catastrophe of 1948. They preferred to see in the Jewish state the last surviving incarnation of the nineteenth-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 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
.