The Liberal/Leftist Case Against Israel: A Rebuttal
Ricochet member Trace Urdan has drawn my attention to an interesting piece that just appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education: a review, by Alan Wolfe, of several books critical of Israel. The review, entitled “Israel’s Moral Peril,” draws a distinction between liberal criticism -- that which accepts Israel's legitimacy and views a two-state solution as the only means by which Israel can maintain its ethics and ensure the rights of its non-Jewish citizens -- and leftist criticism, which rejects Israel outright as fundamentally colonialist and racist. Wolfe argues that as criticism of Israel grows ever more vociferous, “the question of which of these approaches will attract the most followers will become increasingly important.”
One obviously need not go far to hear either of these arguments enthusiastically expressed; an avowal of one or the other is practically required for anyone hoping for a long and prosperous career in the American or European academy. What makes Wolfe’s piece interesting is the personal angle: he is himself a secular American Jew, raised on the same brand of milky, earnest, emotional, Reform-Jew love for Israel that produced yours truly. Wolfe's journey toward criticism of Israel was clearly fraught for him, and he is candid about this in the article.
But the piece warrants close reading as much for what it does not say as for what it does. For all his painful self-examination, Wolfe is so serenely confident of the premise of Israel’s ultimate culpability that he scarcely acknowledges that the other side bears any responsibility for the moribund state of the peace process. The Palestinians are simply not to be held accountable for their own choices and actions. Their more egregious acts of violence are to be frowned upon and even, in extreme cases, acknowledged as justifying, to some degree, Israeli anxiety about the Palestinians’ desire for peace -- but the Palestinians must under no circumstances be expected to take responsibility for their own bad choices. Any negative consequences that result -- walls, for example, erected to stop the quotidian problem of Palestinian-on-Israeli violence -- are evidence not of the extremes to which Israel is pushed to keep its citizens safe, but of fundamental and eternal Israeli fault, and fundamental and eternal Palestinian victimhood.
The Jews, on the other hand, must be held responsible again and again and again. Their stubborn insistence on defending their lives and property must at all times be apologized for, and they are above all to be punished for their presumptuous desire to live on their own historic land. The equivalent Palestinian desire is, of course, respected (how splendid that they are defined by their connection to the land!), admired (how moving it is that their passion for the land remains undiminished through time and travail!), understood (these are people who know the meaning of “home”), and encouraged (it is not, after all, for those of us who have never suffered the agony of exile to criticize the way that agony is expressed).
This is a double standard, pure and simple. And I apologize in advance for getting Mr. Wolfe’s liberal knickers in a twist (in the extremely unlikely event that he reads Ricochet), but the basis of that double standard is racism.
The word racist is thrown at Israel a lot, but we are not the racists in the picture -- people who prefer to avoid giving yet more chunks of territory away as extortion payments might be many things, but they are not defined by their racism. Racism is assuming that a whole people cannot be held accountable for anything because they are not capable of distinguishing right from wrong. Racism is listening sagely while a people’s elected leadership states its desire for the total eradication of another people and the theft of all its property, nodding benignly, and then writing the words off as meaningless since those people can’t, after all, be expected to express themselves in any but the most primitive manner. Racism is overlooking or excusing unconscionable and often stupidly self-defeating behavior because those people can’t be expected to do any better. And yes: racism is expecting the paler people in the scenario to behave better than the darker people, and to set a good, instructive example of conciliation. Surely, the racist blithely assumes, the darker people will respond beautifully to such enlightenment. The notion that they are in fact fully as capable of formulating a world view as their white defenders, and that their expression of it is not gibberish but in fact exactly what they mean, is not within the realm of possibility.
This double standard, in combination with that curious brand of cognitive disconnect that tends to characterize so many Americans’ experience of history, is threaded throughout Wolfe’s review. He describes Israel’s victory in 1967 as the first moment when his youthful, tzedaka-collecting, tree-planting affection for Israel began to waver: “I was too much involved in the protests against Vietnam to become an enthusiast for war of any kind.” To interpret elation at Israel’s rescue from destruction -- in less than a week, no less -- as enthusiasm for war is to completely miss both the reality of the danger Israel was in and the eagerness of Israel for the war to end as quickly as possible, but I see his point, sort of.
But his allegiance was hopelessly shattered by the Sabra and Shatila massacres in Lebanon in 1982 (when Sharon stepped aside and let Christian militiamen slaughter Palestinian refugees), and Wolfe jumped right off the reality train. From that point forward, it was one side fits all. “The truly odious Arafat is no longer with us,” he writes. (Okay. And where is the Mandela that replaced him?) “[N]ew Palestinian intellectuals and leaders are making an impressive case for statehood.” (Name three.) “The cruelty of Israel’s blockade of Gaza” (no reference to any reasons why Israel -- and Egypt -- placed Gaza under blockade in the first place), “as well as the clearly peace-destroying intentions of Jewish settlers in Palestinian territory are impossible to ignore” (no mention that it’s the Palestinians, not the settlers, who have declared their intention of making the area free of the other as soon as they get the chance). “Chilling leaks suggest the possibility of an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities” (Good heavens! No mention, of course, of Iran’s apocalyptic threats to annihilate Israel completely -- such mention would be to commit the dread crime of invoking the Holocaust, which real thinkers have apparently agreed is the mark of a fundamentally flawed argument. Unless it’s invoked to implore the Jews not to repeat the crimes once visited upon them, but more on that below).
Wolfe wants to know which camp of Israel criticism he should join, the liberal or the leftist. The liberal case has been laid out by two young Jewish writers: Gershom Gorenberg in The Unmaking of Israel and Peter Beinart in The Crisis of Zionism.
Gorenberg is American but lives in Israel. He believes its ultimate success as a liberal democracy will depend on three things: a reduction of the influence of the ultra-Orthodox by more strictly separating synagogue and state (I agree 100%), a reform of the legal system to ensure that all ethnic groups are treated equally (wholeheartedly with him there too), and pulling out of the whole West Bank. (Oops -- lost me on that one.) Gorenberg believes these three pillars will make Israel more stable as a democracy and “more secure in the long run if it voluntarily gives up land it cannot control.” I see this point from a demographic point of view, but demographics won’t count for a hell of a lot if the opponent is emboldened by the concession into becoming more aggressive and violent. Which, judging from the Palestinian response to the Israeli evacuation of Gaza, is a likely result. (For anyone eager to point out that the launching of a war against southern Israel -- the showering of rockets onto Israeli civilian communities -- was the work of maximalist, Islamist Hamas and not our friends the peacemakers in Ramallah, I remind them of Fatah’s recent reconciliation with Hamas, another historical event about which Wolfe is conspicuously mute.)
Beinart has been in the news recently for a piece he wrote for The New York Times in which he advocated the boycotting of goods produced in the Israeli settlements. He also wrote an essay in The New York Review of Books in 2010 called “The Failure of the American-Jewish Establishment,” of which the recent book The Crisis of Zionism is an expansion. Beinart describes a liberal Jewish awakening that occurred in the US in the seventies, led by a Chicago rabbi named Arnold Wolf. Apparently one of the young idealists who ran with this crowd was Barack Obama, an “aspiring politician [who] was a liberal Zionist at heart.”
Beinart takes Obama to task for failing, as president, to bring a Palestinian state into existence and thereby fulfill the greatest aspiration of liberal Zionism. Obama can’t entirely be blamed, though. According to Beinart, his Israeli opponent -- PM Bibi Netanyahu -- is so adept at “playing off strong Congressional support for Israel against any presidential inclination to take the peace process seriously” that a Palestinian state is “a battle [Obama] cannot win.” AIPAC is largely to blame, Beinart implies, for strengthening Netanyahu at Obama’s expense, with the Palestinians -- as ever -- the real victims. Interestingly, Beinart’s prescription is for American Jews to take their Judaism more seriously. He believes that familiarity with the strong ethical code of the faith will encourage Jews down a more liberal path.
Now, to hardcore leftist critics of Israel, all this look-inward-and-find-the-moral-compass business is kid stuff. Wolfe cites Gabriel Piterberg, historian at UCLA and frequent contributor to the New Left Review, whose book, The Returns of Zionism: Myths, Politics and Scholarship in Israel, dismisses Israel as a monument to “white settler colonialism.” Piterberg cites Bernard Lazare, Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt (all Jews, by the way), who also saw Zionism as a fundamentally colonialist enterprise.
Wolfe then discusses Judith Butler, professor of rhetoric at Berkeley, whose forthcoming book -- Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism -- states that Zionism stands in direct opposition to themes of Jewish tradition. (Butler is thus taking her place on the barricades alongside the Satmar and the Neturei Karta, Jewish religious sects that are furiously anti-Zionist.) Like Piterberg, Butler draws on Arendt, who claimed that the Jews’ lack of a state -- their “unchosenness”, to use Butler’s term -- strengthened Jewish ethics, and that statehood (if I’m understanding Butler correctly) saps them. Or, to quote Butler directly: “it is not only that we may not choose with whom to cohabit, but that we must actively preserve the unchosen character of inclusive and plural cohabitation.” (I’m so glad I left academia.)
Because Jews have survived an attempt at extermination, Butler argues, we have a higher obligation to resist the desire to live only with people like ourselves. And because that is Zionism’s ultimate goal, “Israel has been illiberal from the moment of its creation.”
Except that Israel is one-fifth Arab. It was never Israel’s intention to become an Arab-free state. It is, on the other hand, the Palestinians’ stated goal to create a Jew-free Palestine, and Palestinian children are being fed a steady diet of Jew-hatred in their school textbooks and at the mosque. When their state comes into being, will Judith Butler write books about Palestine being illiberal from the moment of its creation?
Butler indulges in some of those wonderfully zany flights of fancy that can only be gotten away with in the academic world. She asserts that because the Jews’ ethical soundness depends on their dispossession, all Palestinians should be granted the right of return. It’s a win-win! While a little impracticable, that’s at least consistent on a philosophical level. Where she really goes bananas is in the followup: she believes that this mass “return” would result not in the destruction of the Jewish people of Israel, but merely in “the dismantling of the structure of Jewish sovereignty and demographic advantage.” Via what she calls our “complex and antagonistic modes of living together” (you can say that again!), the Jews would “make the case on the basis of their own history of exile for why their Arab neighbors ought not to choose living without them” (Wolfe’s words). The Palestinians would then recall their own experience of exile and we would all hug, or something.
In the end, Wolfe takes the side of the liberals over the leftists because he believes “naivete is preferable to irresponsibility,” which is at least honest. “Israel is a fact of life,” he writes (I can almost hear the sigh), “and given both its military strength and support from the United States, it is going to be with us for some time.” Still, he must be given credit for being at least slightly aware of reality. He notes that Butler, her protestations notwithstanding, “really is calling for the destruction of the Jewish state...Her [one-state solution] would leave Israeli Jews at the mercy of people who would surely take revenge against them if given the chance. I realize that Butler is a philosopher and not a political scientist. Yet even philosophers must say something about the real-world implications of the ideas they advocate. Taking into account the other is indeed a feature of the Jewish ethical tradition. Collective suicide is not.”
I’m glad Wolfe has figured out which team to join, but ultimately I’m not convinced that it matters very much which of the two anti-Israel strains of thought -- the liberal or the leftist -- gains sway. They are equally insidious, because they’re based on the same faulty premises. They both insist that all that’s required for peace to reign is Israeli willingness to make concessions, despite the known results of the withdrawals from Lebanon and Gaza. They both maintain that not only are the Palestinians to be absolved from the consequences of their own actions, but that the Jews are to be obliged to compensate the Palestinians ad infinitum for their own disastrous choices. They are both fundamentally racist in their terminal condescension toward the Palestinians, a condescension that has allowed the Palestinians to sidestep any responsibility for carving out a genuine peace. It has occurred to neither camp to press the Palestinians to alter the poisonous way their children are educated about Jews. Both liberals and leftists reject the validity of the Jewish historical claim to the land while trumpeting the validity of the Palestinian claim. They both reject the appropriateness of Israeli anxiety about a new Holocaust -- despite language meant explicitly to suggest it coming out of the mouths of Palestinians (and Persians) -- while insisting we remain vigilant about our behaving like Nazis ourselves, an analogy both ridiculous on the evidence and disgusting in its inappropriateness.
When liberals and leftists write articles lamenting the Palestinians’ “moral peril,” we might be able to have an actual dialogue. I assure you that many Israelis -- who are far better at criticizing Israel than any of you pikers -- will jump right into the conversation. In the meantime, we’ll get on with trying to keep ourselves in one piece, and you can talk amongst yourselves. I can see you’re doing that already.
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Sep '10
Re: The Liberal/Leftist Case Against Israel: A Rebuttal
One wonders if these one-sided rhetoricians will ever experience what American leftists have experienced over the past three days of oral argument in the U.S. Supreme Court: amazement that everything they said was not as simple and obvious as it sounded to them and, in fact, was not really grounded in reality at all but, raw, unexamined emotion. Unfortunately, that emotion is being stoked by demagogic hot air. Perhaps it's my own sense of isolation talking, but these seem to be extremely scary times for reason.
May '10
Re: The Liberal/Leftist Case Against Israel: A Rebuttal
More than I could have hoped for Judith, this is a really cogent, articulate exegesis and refutation of the core critical arguments that I suspect run deeply inside the U.S. State Department. I think supporters of Israel need to call out the critics in increasingly stark terms -- as you do here -- and fight the increasing acceptance of their argument's faultier premises. Thanks.
Jun '10
Re: The Liberal/Leftist Case Against Israel: A Rebuttal
Israel is the only nation-state that has to argue for its right to exist. That's odd given that Israel was established by a UN mandate. No one is asking the United States to justify its existence. Or Australia. Or the many states where a clear minority rules over a restive majority (Syria being the most egregious example). Israel alone faces this double standard.
The call for Israel to return to the 1967 borders is equally flawed. The vote in the UN to establish an Jewish homeland was characterized by deep cynicism on all sides. Everyone knew that the issue would be decided by war. Many statesmen and diplomats expected the Jews to be annihilated, and they were perfectly content to stand by and watch it happen. But the Jews refused to die which is the only justification needed to maintain a state.
Today, every suggestion that Israel make concessions is a gambit to induce Israelis to commit national suicide. Such suggestions should be regarded with exactly that end in mind, and summarily rejected.
May '10
Re: The Liberal/Leftist Case Against Israel: A Rebuttal
In Western Democracies the leader of the party out of power is often referred to as "the loyal opposition." But in reality, they are the opposition in exile. The opposition in residence is the entrenched bureaucracy of the career "civil servant." And our State Department is no different.
They even have their own union, the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA) and they usually demand that 70% of US Ambassadors come from their ranks. The other 30% are usually political moneymen that are only assigned to "friendlies" where it's difficult to create an "incident."
May '10
Re: The Liberal/Leftist Case Against Israel: A Rebuttal
Except, maybe, the current occupant of the White House...
Sep '10
Re: The Liberal/Leftist Case Against Israel: A Rebuttal
I used to tell people: if Israel doesn't have a right to exist, then the United States doesn't have a right to Texas. I don't say that anymore, though, because there's actually a widespread movement (especially in academe) to "return" Texas to Mexico. Also, I started getting lots of responses to the effect of: hmm, well, yeah, maybe we don't have a right to Texas. ... At least Alice had the benefit of wonder.
Jun '10
Re: The Liberal/Leftist Case Against Israel: A Rebuttal
EJHill
Except, maybe, the current occupant of the White House... · 13 minutes ago
Good point. By which I take him to mean that he doesn't really want fundamental change. He wants our destruction.
Apr '11
Re: The Liberal/Leftist Case Against Israel: A Rebuttal
What about Taiwan it essentially has to justify its own state hood. Many tiny ex Soviet nations are always under constant pressure (even attack) by Russia to become once again become their puppets if not join their territory. Israel is not unique in having its sovereignty and existence challenged.
Further more if one depends on the 1948 UN mandate that formed Israel the Jewish state would have to be a lot smaller in size as the territory granted was smaller. The problem Israel has is that we no longer accept the idea nation can claim conquered territory legitimately.
Sep '10
Re: The Liberal/Leftist Case Against Israel: A Rebuttal
Totally agree, Valiuth. The modern state of Israel also had the great misfortune of being established in the time of television and the emergence of celebrities as anti-American activists.
Apr '11
Re: The Liberal/Leftist Case Against Israel: A Rebuttal
Leslie Watkins: I used to tell people: if Israel doesn't have a right to exist, then the United States doesn't have a right to Texas. I don't say that anymore, though, because there's actually a widespread movement (especially in academe) to "return" Texas to Mexico. Also, I started getting lots of responses to the effect of: hmm, well, yeah, maybe we don't have a right to Texas. ... At least Alice had the benefit of wonder. · 6 minutes ago
Edited 5 minutes ago
Texas voted to join the Union of their own free will after we extended them an invitation for annexation. The question though is was it right for Texas to rebel against Mexico? Also I forget if all the American settlers where there by invitation of if they were illegals. The point is though whats done is done.
Sep '10
Re: The Liberal/Leftist Case Against Israel: A Rebuttal
Valiuth
Leslie Watkins: I used to tell people: if Israel doesn't have a right to exist, then the United States doesn't have a right to Texas. I don't say that anymore, though, because there's actually a widespread movement (especially in academe) to "return" Texas to Mexico. Also, I started getting lots of responses to the effect of: hmm, well, yeah, maybe we don't have a right to Texas. ... At least Alice had the benefit of wonder. · 6 minutes ago
Edited 5 minutes ago
Texas voted to join the Union of their own free will after we extended them an invitation for annexation. ... The point is though whats done is done. · 1 minute ago
You're right, of course, about the annexation, but tell that to the Aztlán folks. Rationality means very little to them.
Re: The Liberal/Leftist Case Against Israel: A Rebuttal
Judith, thank you for a beautifully reasoned essay. My nominee for Ricochet line of the week perfectly summarizes liberalism's relentless anti-Zionism and increasingly anti-Semitic drift: "From that point forward, it was one side fits all."
That's the problem in a nutshell.
May '10
Re: The Liberal/Leftist Case Against Israel: A Rebuttal
P.S. I took the liberty of sending a link to Judith's post directly to Professor Wolfe and received a very gracious reply. He was grateful for the civil tone of the criticism.
But he also noted that his essay was not to offer a critique of Israel, but to assume that criticism as a given, "I was not writing about the Middle East in general but about the way Jews who are critical of Israel should frame their arguments."
My reply was that given his premise, he couldn't have picked a better vehicle for his argument than the Chronicle of Higher Education.
Oct '10
Re: The Liberal/Leftist Case Against Israel: A Rebuttal
Valiuth
The problem Israel has is that we no longer accept the idea nation can claim conquered territory legitimately. · 54 minutes ag
o
Since when? If Argentina had won the Falklands War back in the 80's, I don't think anyone on the left would be condemning them for adding to their territory. After all, the territory we are talking about was captured by the British when they won the Battle of Megiddo in 1918.
Every square inch on the planet was conquered by someone at some point - even if they gave or sold it to someone else later.
Mar '12
Re: The Liberal/Leftist Case Against Israel: A Rebuttal
I would add one more to that--weaning the Ultra Orthodox off state dependency. Right now, 1/4 of Israeli first graders are Ultra Orthodox. Their population doubles about every 10 years due to early marriage and a very high birthrate. And most UO, unlike more modern Orthodox, do not serve in the army, are recipients of various transfer payments and subsidies and heavy users of the socialized healthcare system. Many, many are unemployed or unemployable due to an education that focuses on learning religious texts at the expense of anything else. Israel is going to have to find some way to "solve" this problem in the next 20 years, or it's going to face serious issues.
May '10
Re: The Liberal/Leftist Case Against Israel: A Rebuttal
A true tour de force, Judith. You can even write non-fiction essays and book reviews!
Valiuth
What about Taiwan it essentially has to justify its own state hood. ....................
Taiwan is a bit more complicated, of course. About half of the island is indigenous Taiwanese who have always believed they are an independent entity and no part of China, the other half are Han Chinese (split between early settlers and descendants of the Chiang gang that came in 1949) who very much believe that they are one with the mainland, but the implementation needs to be delayed more-or-less till the GMD is in position to run the whole place.
Dec '10
Re: The Liberal/Leftist Case Against Israel: A Rebuttal
Judith,
Your agrument does sound good in comparison to Mr. Wolfe's. However, I'm not buying.
The Balfour Declaration was a two state solution. The 1948 partition was a two state solution. In 1956 Israel gave back the Suez as it did in 1967. This was an economically valuable territory. This proved Israel's lack of desire for conquest.
The territories held after 1967 were purely to maintain the security of Israel given the relentless desire of the Islamic States to have a one state solution in which all of the Jews were dead.
I believe that after the more recent totally rejected Israeli attempts at a two state solution there is only one objective conclusion. Israel should pursue a one state solution, that being a Jewish State. Any other policy will only encourage Jihadists looking to gain ground during a lull in the shooting war.
Sorry, but I'm really tired of the phoney dichotomy that you present. I find a lack of hope for a two state solution very refreshing.
Regards,
Jim
Apr '11
Re: The Liberal/Leftist Case Against Israel: A Rebuttal
James Gawron: Judith,
Sorry, but I'm really tired of the phoney dichotomy that you present. I find a lack of hope for a two state solution very refreshing.
Regards,
Jim · 2 hours ago
There is no viable one state solution unless Israel does one of two things, converts all the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza into liberal democrats and then has them become Israeli citizens, or Israel simply ethnically cleanses the West Bank and Gaza of Palestinians. The former is impossible: for two reasons, I doubt any one can so easily transform the Palestinians and because Israel has made it clear it has no desire to loose its Jewish majority. The later is an unthinkable crime against humanity which would obliterate all legitimacy for Israel.
So what choice is there but a two state solution. I mean you already effectively have two states, maybe even three if we count Hamas controlled Gaza as its own entity. We might as well acknowledge this fact now.
Mar '11
Re: The Liberal/Leftist Case Against Israel: A Rebuttal
Trace Urdan:
My reply was that given his premise, he couldn't have picked a better vehicle for his argument than the Chronicle of Higher Education. · 11 hours ago
Wolfe and Butler prove Thomas Sowell's point about intellectuals not having to live with the consequences of their theories.
Judith, a pleasure to read your tightly-argued piece. (Loved the jab at academese.) I get panicky thinking about all the people who'd rejoice, or shrug, if Israel were destroyed, G-d forbid. But then I'm calmed by a glance back at all the obstacles that the Jewish people overcame in Israel's truly miraculous founding. May G-d protect and strengthen all of those who hope for Israel's success.
Mar '11
Re: The Liberal/Leftist Case Against Israel: A Rebuttal
Valiuth
So what choice is there but a two state solution. I mean you already effectively have two states, maybe even three if we count Hamas controlled Gaza as its own entity. We might as well acknowledge this fact now. · 4 minutes ago
A two-state solution is a solution on paper only. The reality is that the Palestinians would not tolerate a Jewish minority in their state, and forcing 100,000 Jewish people to leave their homes in a settlement is unethical and impracticable. Those are the facts on the ground. Or, in your words, "whats done is done."
Edited on March 30, 2012 at 8:15am