Читать книгу Israel vs. Utopia - Joel Schalit - Страница 10
ОглавлениеIt felt like a dream. I was watching President Bush introduce the November 2007 Annapolis Conference on C-SPAN. But I could have sworn I was a boy sitting in my parents’ former home in London. I had been transported back in time, and instead of President Bush, I was fixated on the spectacle of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat addressing Israel’s parliament thirty years earlier.
I heard my father behind me shouting, “But he’s a brownshirt!” * in reference to former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who was playing host to the event. The idea that a right-winger like Begin would permit Israel’s nemesis to speak in the Knesset had left him dumbfounded. My stepmother Esther was there too, talking on the phone to a friend. She sounded exasperated, repeating over and over in Hebrew, “Bemet, Rut … ha Aravit, Sadat, hu be ha Knesset!” (“Really, Ruth … Sadat, the Arab, is in parliament!”) But Ruth didn’t seem convinced. The absolute truths of our nation’s turbulent history had suddenly been revealed as relative. If this could happen, what might be next?
I rubbed the sleep of nostalgia from my eyes. No, I wasn’t in London. The man on my TV screen was a different sort of nemesis, one who the people of my other homeland, the United States, had voted into office for a second term in 2004, despite ample evidence that he was well on his way to becoming one of the worst presidents in the nation’s history. And the unnerving sense of possibility that had resonated through my parents’ voices that stunning day of November 20, 1977, had turned into the weary conviction that hope was too much to hope for.
Still, it was clear that something inside me wanted to remember a past that would make the present seem less grim. Despite the hostility I harbored toward President Bush, I yearned for a temporary détente. I didn’t believe for a moment that he had Israel’s interests at heart. But the parallel between 1977 and 2007 was too apparent to miss. Both speeches followed a decade of bloodshed: Sadat’s address came after both the major Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973, and nonstop fighting between Israelis and Palestinians from Tel Aviv to Munich during the intervening years; Bush’s address came amid a comparably vexing sequence of events—Israel’s 1999 withdrawal from its security zone in southern Lebanon, the al-Aksa Intifada that began in 2000, and the second Lebanon war of 2006.
This isn’t to imply that the events of the last decade mirror the ones that led to Sadat’s successful 1977 trip to Jerusalem, because they don’t. No matter how much I might have wanted to find hidden historical patterns that tie these two time periods together, I couldn’t. A peaceful outcome to the present strife along the lines of 1979’s Camp David Accords remained highly unlikely, and even if President Bush were to have brought one about, it would have been very different from the agreement President Carter helped broker between Begin and Sadat.
No, my imagined connection between 1977 and 2007 was based on a superficial and erroneous analogy— the sort that psychoanalysis teaches us to discern in dreams—between Bush and Sadat. Despite Bush’s insistence throughout his presidency that strong support for Israel must lie at the foundation of America’s Middle East policy, I still wanted to perceive him the way I remembered Sadat—as a former foe seeking to make peace with Israel. After all, despite Bush’s steadfast declarations of support for Israel, his administration’s strategy in the Middle East had done more damage to the nation than Sadat at his most belligerent.
This realization troubled me throughout the 2007 Annapolis Conference. Although it had been convened to restart the work of peacemaking between Israel and the Palestinians, I couldn’t shake the impression that, because its stated goal was so obviously lacking in credibility, it was really an attempt to reconcile Israel with the United States. That was what I found so interesting about the event and why, unlike a lot of my fellow analysts, I was not willing to take a position on its declared purpose. To me, it was clear that the conference was about something else entirely.
It was with considerable bemusement, then, that I watched my colleagues argue with each other about how to react—as though formulating the proper response, whatever that might be, was as important as the mission of the conference itself. Do we support it, despite the fact that we don’t like Bush? Do we boycott it because we don’t trustBush? So conditioned had they become to the disappointments of the peace process that, taking its futility for granted, they had stopped thinking about the reality of the conflict. Instead, many in the media worried about staking out the correct position on the inevitable failure of the latest talks.
I’ve grown exceptionally tired of this cynical posture. It only leads to the dead end of intellectualism, in which writing precisely calibrated editorials takes the place of working for real change. Americans, in particular, appear to take comfort in the reinforcement of familiar roles that events like the Annapolis Conference bring about. Even if they disagree vehemently with the policies of the current Israeli or American governments, they welcome being confirmed in their political and professional identities through these kinds of rituals.
The lack of meaningful progress during Bush’s years in office compelled me to adopt another kind of disposition to events of this sort. The Annapolis Conference was interesting, but for entirely different reasons than the pronouncements made there or the threadbare journalistic conventions that framed them. I solicited opinions from friends, read countless wire reports, and watched as much video footage of the conference as I could, until I felt that I had something worthwhile to say. When it finally came, it wasn’t what I had expected.
I realized that what mattered most to me were my concerns about Israel’s lack of independence from the United States, especially evident during the 2006 Lebanon war, when the notion that Israel might be a proxy for American interests in the Middle East came into play more than ever. In hosting this conference, the United States was no longer the distant mediator it had been in 1979 when Carter brokered the first peace agreement between Israel and Egypt, nor even the nation tasked with enforcing Iraq’s infamous no-fly zone and simultaneously hosting repeated peace talks between the Israeli government and the PLO in the early 1990s. No, this was a United States that had gone local, one that had finally become a part of the Middle East. The Iraq War had transformed the United States into one of Israel’s neighbors. American investment in the Middle East—which has conditioned Arab-Israeli relations since colonial Great Britain and France largely pulled out of the region in the 1960s—was now grounded in a physical proximity to Israel, which, unlike the limited military force that occupied Lebanon in the early 1980s, had lost the aura of temporary engagement.
This crucial change in the region’s political landscape combined with my personal history to shape a fundamental intuition: Israel can’t make peace with its neighbors unless it first makes peace with the United States. Having spent my entire life split, both literally and psychologically, between the two countries, my demand for reconciliation has reached a fever pitch. As the child of a man whose family was among the first to settle in Palestine in 1882—predating not just the creation of Israel but also the British colonial authority that came before it—I have no choice but to live and breathe Israel.
Yet I am no less an American. Although she spoke to my dad in French half the time, my mother, whom my father first met as a child in Jerusalem, was as much a product of New York as my father is of Tel Aviv. I spent a good part of my adolescence and most of my adult life in the United States. For me, dual citizenship isn’t merely a by-product of my Jewishness, but a condition that defines my outlook on the world and punctuates my identity as a self-described Israeli American. Whether the divide between Israel and the United States is augmented or diminished, I feel every change as a fluctuation in my soul.
MASH DOWN BABYLON
Writing this book has posed a huge challenge for me. So many people have gotten Israel wrong that the demand to get it right is almost unbearable. But the more I worked on this project, the more I came to realize that the only way to get it right is to stop trying to “get it” at all. Reality always has a way of eluding our grasp. In the case of Israel, though, the problem is absurdly magnified by the fact that the reality of Israel is, in large measure, a projection of fantasies, both by those who want to love the place and those who are consumed with hatred for it.
It’s not helpful, particularly for someone like myself, that the United States remains the standard for building a nation from scratch. From John Winthrop’s image of a “city upon a hill” through the idealism of the Founding Fathers, the prehistory of American politics was dominated by the desire to realize a dream, regardless of what stood in its way. Indeed, the dispossession of North America’s native peoples seems like a perverse model for Israel’s development. Had the territory of either the United States or Israel been empty prior to their settlement, the two nations might have succeeded in their aspirations to become places of true liberation. But the fact of those people who saw no reason to voluntarily abandon their ancestral homes made it impossible.
We all know this. Just as the most blindly patriotic American knows deep down that the U.S. exists because it displaced the people who had lived there before the conquest, every Israeli knows that his or her country could never have come into being without making room for its citizens at the expense of the area’s longtime residents. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. The question is what to do with this knowledge.
Because Israel’s sixty-plus years of existence have fallen within the era of mass media, it’s commonly believed (particularly within the Diaspora Left) that its misdeeds can still be undone, in much the same way that iconographic racisms of this period—segregation in the Southern U.S., the apartheid regime in South Africa— were dismantled. The difficulty, of course, is the ultimate reach of such desires. Only the lunatic fringe claims that the United States should be returned to preconquest inhabitants. But a great many people advocate that Israel be reduced in size, if not outright erased, to make up for the suffering of the Palestinians it has displaced.
No matter how irrational, this impulse to turn back the clock still colors the discourse of otherwise sensible individuals. This isn’t surprising, since it echoes the nineteenth-century Zionist dream of transforming time into space, as if the physical geography of Palestine could compensate for the destruction of the homes that stood there thousands of year before. In a way, some dream of a pre-Israel Palestine in the same way that others dream of a pre-expulsion Israel. Of all the paradoxes that haunt the Middle East today, this one may be the most poignant.
It’s crucial that we pay close attention to these dreams in all their nuances when we tackle the subject of Israel, even as we recognize their fundamental perversity. There’s no going back, because no matter how much some of us might want to, we’re still propelled into a future filled with the rubble left behind by our dreaming. When we try to make such dreams reality, we refuse the existence of people whose presence renders those dreams impossible. True hope lies in world-views that don’t reduce human beings to the status of underbrush that must be cleared away before starting afresh. Forgetting the lesson of the Holocaust sullies the memory of the millions of lives it took—and that applies to everyone with a stake in the future of Israel, regardless of their history.
Where Israel is concerned, real progress demands that we hold tightly in check any impulse to refuse the existence of a given group of people. People, whatever their origin, are not in the way. They are the way. Banal as that may sound, like some slogan from a UNICEF card, it remains the only political philosophy that upholds the promise of true freedom. For though Martin Luther King Jr. called it his “dream,” he knew all too well that it represented the reality that people would grasp if they could only be woken from the nightmare of history.
GOING BACK TO MOTHERLAND
While it’s no longer fashionable to seek the truth in our fantasy lives, I’m convinced that we limit our definition of what matters at our peril. My conflation of Bush’s Annapolis address with Anwar Sadat’s visit to the Knesset, reality-based or not, helped me realize what I might otherwise have overlooked: although the physical territory of the United States is thousands of miles from Israel, the two countries had become more “neighborly” than ever before. In the wake of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, it wasn’t simply American money and weaponry that now populated the Middle East, but a large military force (and its civilian auxiliaries that had been there for years).
Throughout the following chapters, I move back and forth between the sort of analysis that a historian or journalist might produce and a self-analysis more akin to intellectual autobiography. I do this not only because—as in the case of my Annapolis daydream—I sometimes get further by following my intuition rather than the “objective” information provided in news reports, but also to model a way of thinking about Israel that’s become all too rare in this era of entrenched positions and strident rhetoric. If we’re to break the ideological stalemate that chains both Israeli and Palestinian futures (not to mention their American counterparts), we must learn to see ourselves in the way we see others, even when it’s uncomfortable or embarrassing to do so.
This reflection is especially helpful for thinking about the relationship between Israel and the United States. As I’ve already suggested, the two nations are bound together by their shared history as promised lands. From the beginning, both nations have been torn between the desire for renewal that led to their founding and the resistance posed by the facts standing in the way of that dream. The religious persecution that prompted early American colonists to cross the Atlantic may pale next to the abuses Jews have faced over the course of European history. But the Puritans, Catholics, Huguenots, and other Christian sects that sought refuge in what would become the United States shared with Israel’s founders the conviction that their faith could only survive if there was sufficient political will to protect it. Whether they aspired to create a theocracy or its opposite, they all recognized the need to mind the role of the state in religious affairs.
Because I spent my undergraduate and graduate years reflecting on religion in the modern world and devoting much attention, as both a writer and a musician, to the rise of the Christian Right in the U.S. during the 1980s and 1990s, I’m particularly attuned to the way Americans think about Israel. But my regular visits home to Israel to see my family, and the journalistic work I’ve done over the years there, consistently remind me that the pull of the United States is as strong in Israel as it is amongst American Zionists and Israel’s newest so-called friends, Evangelical Christians. This reciprocal attachment exists for many reasons, not least due to the flow of money between the two countries. But its foundation is psychological. Because the U.S. and Israel were both imagined long before they could be realized, neither has successfully freed itself from the realm of abstraction. The two nations are in fact haunted by their failure to transcend fantastical origins.
I know from personal experience how effortlessly conversation about Israel can slide from the literal to the figurative. While Israel is as real as any other place on the map, the fact that it was conjured during a time when it literally had no place emboldens both its friends and enemies to treat it as a trope. The “Israel” invoked in reggae songs and the “Israel” invoked in think-tank white papers are far closer to each other than most people realize.
My goal for this book is therefore twofold. On one hand, I want to reflect on how Israel figures in contemporary political discourse. On the other, I want to pull back the curtain on the reality of Israel by showing what that discourse leaves out. I can’t stop Israel from being used as a figure of speech—it makes no sense to try—but I’d like to make it easier to see when and why Israel is used that way. While we may still invest the name with hopes and fears, we can better understand that those constructions originate in a concrete reality rather than an otherworldly realm in which we’re powerless to intervene.
Even though this is first and foremost a book about Israel, it’s also about the United States. The special relationship between these two nations invites a scrutiny that moves beyond the nuts and bolts of political and economic policy. As I hope to show, perhaps the best way to rethink Israel is by rethinking the United States at the same time.
BOXING UP BUSH
The week of January 19, 2009, was a momentous one in American history. On Monday, the nation celebrated the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. On Tuesday, Barack Obama became the first African American president. And on Wednesday, he rapidly moved to put his own stamp on domestic and foreign policy, seemingly intent on undoing most of what George W. Bush had wrought during his final months in office. Even though I was living in London at the time, the historical significance of this conjuncture was still keenly felt in the predominantly Caribbean neighborhood of Brixton where I rented an apartment. Whatever would transpire in the months ahead, with the global economy on the verge of collapse, it became clear that the political consciousness of the American people—and, indeed, beyond the nation’s borders—had been powerfully transformed. The message of King’s famous speech from the 1963 March on Washington, in which he articulated the dream of a nation where the country’s inhabitants would be judged by the “content of their character” rather than the color of their skin, might not have been achieved completely—but it no longer seemed like a shot in the dark.
Not surprisingly, the feelings of hope stirred up by Obama’s improbable success in the 2008 presidential race had many of us, both within the United States and abroad, eager to move forward instead of looking back. Obama himself had repeatedly articulated this desire, even to the extent of implying in the weeks leading up to his inauguration that he was not keen on seeing the Bush administration held accountable for its perceived misdeeds. However honorably motivated, though, this was a perilous impulse. Regardless of whether it would prove fruitful to pursue the Left’s long-simmering desire to see criminal charges brought against Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and other White House officials, it was crucial to make sense of the past eight years, lest we continue unwittingly down the path they had laid for us.
It is no accident that the Israel Defense Forces’ incursion into Gaza, heavily protested in Europe and the United States, came to a halt on the eve of Obama’s assumption of the presidency. Whatever other motivations Israeli leaders may have had for launching their assault, the timing of the attacks indicates that they were desperate to use political capital that might no longer be available after Bush vacated the White House. While many commentators indeed noted that they were taking advantage of a lame-duck American president, the quid pro quo nature of this action went largely unnoticed. To those few experts on Israel not blinded by their own feelings, it was obvious that Israel was redeeming credits it had earned by reluctantly accommodating the Bush administration’s agenda in the Middle East. In other words, the concentrated force of the assault on Hamas and the Palestinian civilians who were unable to flee from its strongholds was another legacy of the Bush era.
Although it is never easy to put recent history in perspective, the scope of that legacy has proved particularly difficult to comprehend. George W. Bush’s detractors are fond of claiming that he was one of the worst presidents in American history. Yet unlike the predecessors to whom they typically compare him, such as Warren G. Harding and Franklin Pierce, Bush accomplished a great deal while in office. The statement he made in his last presidential address—that he had been willing to “make the tough decisions”—was an attempt to remind everyone that his term had been defined not by hesitancy but activism. And, for better or worse, he was right. For the most part, though, it was a message that people were unwilling to hear. In their eagerness to break new ground, they failed to acknowledge the degree to which the Bush administration reshaped the entire political landscape.
If this is true wherever the Bush administration intervened, from its refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol to its radical curtailment of domestic civil liberties, it is particularly obvious in the Middle East. Even if Barack Obama were to make good on his campaign pledge to pull American troops out of Iraq as rapidly as possible, the long-term effects of their presence will last for decades. Simply put, the presidency that so many people are practically willing themselves to forget is one that we must force ourselves to remember. For my part, the insight that Bush was not really the unequivocal friend of Israel that he claimed to be, but rather an enemy of its best interests, is one that I worked hard to sustain in the heady first days of the Obama administration. In this regard, it is important to think critically about the way that the 2008 presidential campaign was received in Israel, for the perceptions formed then, while the Bush administration still held sway, are bound to condition the relationship between the United States and Israel in the years to come.
OBAMA MEANS MUSLIM IN HEBREW
By the time Barack Obama locked up the Democratic nomination to run for president in June 2008, the relationship between the United States and Israel was shaping up to be of unprecedented significance in the American political process. Despite Obama’s effort to cultivate the impression that he was as pro-Israel as the next Democrat, the suspicion that he might bend where previous American leaders had stood firm still permeated the Jewish community. All manner of rumors circulated about him: He was a Muslim. He was part of Chicago’s large Palestinian community. He was a leftist bent on punishing Israel. He was beholden to an African American community notorious for its anti-Semitism. He was a foreigner who wanted to undermine the United States from within.
Not coincidentally, these were the same rumors being spread on the Right. The fears articulated by Jewish voters, particularly among senior citizens, mirrored the sort of comments being floated by conservative talk-show hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham. To an unprecedented degree, their brand of hyperbolic conjecture was being targeted at a community that had long been a pillar of the Democratic Party. And, in the weeks during which she refused to concede the nomination to Obama, Hillary Clinton seemed to have no qualms about letting the attention being paid to Jewish voters work to her advantage. For a good while, it seemed as if the resistance they expressed toward Obama’s candidacy might help derail his campaign for president.
Because Barack Obama ended up winning 78 percent of the Jewish vote, outperforming John Kerry’s 2004 results in many places, and won the crucial swing state of Florida with surprising ease, liberal political analysts breathed a huge sigh of relief. Many made arguments about how the loyalty of traditionally Democratic Jewish voters was far more steadfast than Republican strategists had realized. What these optimistic assessments overlooked, however, was the highly unusual combination of circumstances that helped propel Obama into the White House. Had the price of petroleum products not skyrocketed and then collapsed, had the stock market not plunged precipitously, had the housing crisis been contained, had terrorism loomed larger in the autumn news, Republican nominee John McCain might well have prevailed. As a number of conservative commentators noted, Republicans had faced a “perfect storm” in the campaign and still managed to avoid the sort of landslide defeats experienced by Democrats like Walter Mondale and George McGovern. From this perspective, Karl Rove’s contention that the United States remains an essentially conservative nation may not be mere wishful thinking.
Similarly, in the aftermath of the election, many of Obama’s cabinet nominations and the comments he made about international affairs in general (and the Middle East in particular) suggested that he remained acutely aware of how close he came to being defeated by wild rumors about his identity and motives. It was telling that upon taking the oath of office on the same Bible that Abraham Lincoln had used, right-wing conspiracy mongers immediately claimed that the massive book was a Koran. Even if Obama had wanted to reprimand Israel for its incursion into Gaza, political prudence demanded that he move forward without paying the assault too much attention. Just as the nation’s financial crisis had limited his freedom of movement on domestic policy, Obama’s political autonomy had been sharply restricted by both the Israeli offensive and the Bush administration policies that had, in effect, inspired it.
It is important to be mindful of the fact that this quandary was not only the product of the Bush administration’s previous policies, but of a specific effort to put Obama on the spot. In his May 15, 2008, address to the Knesset in celebration of Israel’s sixtieth anniversary, Bush went out his way to develop the Republican Party line that the McCain-Palin ticket would later deploy in the fall:
Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared: “Lord, if only I could have talked to Hitler, all this might have been avoided.” We have an obligation to call this what it is—the false comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by history.
Although careful not to name Obama directly, Bush’s clear allusion to statements the candidate had made early in the Democratic primary season about being willing to talk with the leaders of countries like Iran and North Korea was powerfully reinforced by the example of that “American senator” who had so laughably underestimated Hitler. Obama responded accordingly, calling out the president for his veiled attack, only to have the Republican nominee, Senator John McCain, pick up Bush’s lead in response.
The problem was magnified by the fact that even after it had become clear that she couldn’t secure the Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton kept reminding people about the demographics where she had polled far better than her opponent, including within the Jewish community. Thus, Obama had his work cut out for him when he addressed the annual meeting of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the most influential pro-Israel organization in the United States. Predictably, he went through the same motions as so many candidates before him, indicating that he was firmly committed to maintaining the special relationship between the United States and Israel, and would use military action to do so when necessary.
The speech was by most accounts very well received, despite the earlier skepticism circulating in the audience. But that didn’t prevent formerly Democratic Senator Joseph Lieberman—according to some accounts John McCain’s first pick for a running mate—from trying to steer anxious Jewish voters in the direction of the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. The point of contention was Obama’s forceful assertion that Bush administration policy in the Middle East had actually weakened Israel’s security:
I don’t think any of us can be satisfied that America’s recent foreign policy has made Israel more secure. Hamas now controls Gaza. Hezbollah has tightened its grip on southern Lebanon and is flexing its muscles in Beirut. Because of the war in Iraq, Iran—which always posed a greater threat to Israel than Iraq—is emboldened, and poses the greatest strategic challenge to the United States and Israel in the Middle East in a generation.
Rather than explore the possibility that Obama was sincerely articulating a new way for the United States to support Israel, Lieberman was content to echo the charge of appeasement that Bush had made to the Knesset. “Iran is a terrorist, expansionist state,” the Jewish Telegraphic Agency quoted Lieberman as saying, confirming that the political shorthand of the Republican Party line was still in sync with its Israeli counterpart. Interestingly, although the Jewish Telegraphic Agency’s story gave Lieberman’s point of view, it also provided enough content to refute it:
“This is a new approach,” said Steve Rabinowitz, a Democratic consultant whose communications firm also does work for many Jewish organizations. “Two years ago many thought it would be difficult to persuade people that George W. Bush had not been good for Israel, even dangerous to try it. It’s not only a case that can be made now, it’s also true.”
In retrospect, Rabinowitz’s confidence seems to have been justified, given Obama’s performance among Jewish voters. Despite the constraints he was operating under, it appeared that Obama wanted to make it clear that he would not simply pick up where the Bush administration had left off with regard to American-Israeli relations. During the process of selecting his cabinet and formulating policy objectives, he consulted with liberal Jewish peace advocacy organizations such as Brit Tzedek v’Shalom, J Street, and the Israel Policy Forum. That he also talked with the conservative groups that have historically served as the “voice” of the Jewish community, such as AIPAC and the arch-rightist Zionist Organization of America, however, indicated the caution with which he had to proceed. While those groups had suggested to varying degrees that Obama would be no friend to Israel, he lacked the standing to leave them out in the cold. Still, the fact that the Obama team was listening to anyone beyond the usual mouthpieces was of note, even though many liberals in the U.S. remained skeptical that his selection of Hillary Clinton as secretary of state would lead to any fundamental changes in American foreign policy.
While it makes sense that Israelis of all political preferences would prepare for the possibility of a shift in American policy, the positive attention given to the idea of a “new approach” suggested a willingness in both Washington and Jerusalem to rethink the rituals of the special relationship. Besides, even the pro-Israel bias displayed by the Clinton administration was, at its worst, more engaged in the effort to create some kind of solution than the Bush administration. As a left-wing Israeli peace activist once told me, “For all of the horrible problems with Clinton’s approach, in retrospect, it may have been better for Arafat to have accepted it all, and stage another intifada later, because at least he would have been working with more than the Palestinians will start with when the next round of peace negotiations inevitably are forced upon them.”
THE POLITICS OF BOREDOM
The day before President Bush addressed the Knesset back in May 2008, he spoke at Israeli President Shimon Peres’s first annual Facing Tomorrow Conference. Three quarters of the way through his talk, Bush’s mouth seized up, as though he were about to say something important that he just couldn’t figure out how to put into words. I waited and waited, but the expression remained on his face. My computer had frozen.
This is Bush’s moment of truth, I chuckled to myself, the momentthat he realizes his failure to say anything new. It was hardly the first time I’d had a laugh at the president’s expense. Although progressives around the world were reduced to a meager diet of hope in the seemingly interminable years of his leadership, we were also able to sustain our spirits on empty calories of irony. It wasn’t satisfying fare, to be sure, but still preferable to the grim alternative of submitting to the status quo. Even with a speech in hand, Bush seemed to be rendered functionally speechless by his administration’s failure to make any concrete progress in the Middle East. His now-notorious landing on a U.S. Navy aircraft carrier in May 2003 to declare “Mission accomplished” had come to stand for his entire presidency.
Unlike the Anwar Sadat of my imagination, Bush had declared war, not peace, in Israel’s chief legislative body—and not on Israelis, but on the leading contender for his successor, Barack Obama. Bush acted that day as though Israel’s parliament was American territory, implicitly comparing Obama to appeasers like Neville Chamberlain, the late British prime minister who had attempted to pacify Hitler by allowing him to invade Czechoslovakia. Despite the drama, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert exemplified the overwhelming sense of tedium during Bush’s address by nearly dozing off, while Deputy Prime Minister Eli Yishai shifted around in his seat like a bored and impatient school kid. Although the speech provided comfort to Jews, both in Israel and the United States, it was the sort of comfort that accompanies sleep, not action.
When my father shouted, “But he’s a brownshirt!” back on November 20, 1977, he was expressing amazement that Menachem Begin—a fiery religious nationalist who advocated the concept of a “Greater Israel” stretching from British Mandate–era Palestine to the Occupied Territories and what is today Jordan—could break with precedent. The hope his exclamation conveyed in the process—that change can be brought about by the peaceful initiatives of individuals rather than the collective sacrifices of war—was largely abandoned in the waning years of the second Bush administration. Yet that hope shows signs of returning in the willingness of Barack Obama and other Democratic Party leaders to push for a new approach to the problems of the Middle East, despite facing significant political risk in doing so.
* During the 1920s and ’30s, the Sturmabteilung (Nazi paramilitary force) wore brown shirts. For many years, the term “brownshirt” was used as a synonym for fascists.
