Date: May 2, 2006 8:17:34 AM PDT
To: Iftah <iftah@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [iftah] The country that wouldn't grow up
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Last update - 14:07 02/05/2006
The country that wouldn't grow up

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.