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ОглавлениеThey’ve lost control of the debate,” historian Tony Judt told the Observer’s Gaby Wood in February 2007, discussing the Jewish American organizations that had worked to marginalize his criticisms of Israel. “For a long time all they had to deal with were people like Norman Finkelstein or Noam Chomsky, who they could dismiss as loonies of the Left. Now they’re having to face, for want of a better cliché, the mainstream: people like me who have a fairly long established record of being Social Democrats (in the European sense) and certainly not on the crazy Left on most issues, saying very critical things about Israel.”
Although Judt spoke confidently, the rancor generated by his outspoken statements on the subject of Israel had clearly affected him deeply. Earlier in the interview, he explained how a talk he was scheduled to give at the Polish consulate in New York the previous October, entitled “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” had been cancelled at the last minute due to pressure from those same groups that—though they may have lost control of the debate—still had the power to restrict where it could take place. “They do what the more tactful members of the intelligence services used to do in late Communist society,” Judt remarked of the Anti-Defamation League. “They point out how foolish it is to associate with the wrong people. So they call up the Poles and they say: did you know that Judt is a notorious critic of Israel, and therefore shading into or giving comfort to anti-Semites?”
The possibility of being classified as one of those “wrong people” has increased markedly for commentators like Tony Judt over the past decade, as well as for Jews who would once have been exempt from such labeling. Whereas organizations like the Anti-Defamation League once concentrated their efforts on professed anti-Semites, they now seemed more preoccupied with finding Jews who claim not to be anti-Semitic while fostering support for anti-Semitism. Although Judt’s analogy between such organizations and the enforcers of totalitarian states is compelling, they might be more aptly compared to the Red-hunting of the McCarthy era. What people like Judt have experienced is an attempt— however muted its public expression—to blacklist.
That’s why the Jewish press in New York referred to the controversy over the cancellation and its aftermath as “l’affaire Judt,” conjuring the late-nineteenth-century Dreyfus affair in which a French officer of Jewish descent was accused of treason. The fact that over 100 intellectuals (many of whom disagreed with Judt on key points) found it necessary to sign an open letter of protest on his behalf underscores the significance of an episode that under other circumstances might have attracted little attention.
Published in the November 16, 2006, edition of the New York Review of Books, the letter excoriated the Anti-Defamation League for working behind the scenes to have Judt’s talk canceled, and then denying its role in the affair. “In a democracy,” the letter declares, “there is only one appropriate response to a lecture, article, or book one does not agree with. It is to give another lecture, write another article, or publish another book.” The letter’s conclusion underscores the gravity of the situation, noting that despite the many differences of opinion held by its signatories “about political matters, foreign and domestic, we are united in believing that a climate of intimidation is inconsistent with fundamental principles of debate in a democracy.”
Predictably, the Anti-Defamation League’s National Director Abraham Foxman answered the letter with outrage, also in the New York Review of Books, complaining that its coauthors Mark Lilla and Richard Sennett had not bothered to get the organization’s side of the story before going public: “What is so shocking about this letter is that a group claiming to be defending fundamental values of free expression in a democratic society—values that ADL has worked to ensure for decades—employs techniques which completely debase those values.” Although Foxman was aware that some of the letter’s signatories, including Lilla himself, could hardly be considered progressives, his reply nevertheless managed to artfully conjure the specter—rooted in the student radicalism of the 1960s—of a Left more intolerant than its antagonists. “Their behavior is a much subtler and more dangerous form of intimidation than the baseless accusations conjured up against ADL.”
The most striking part of both this exchange and l’affaire Judt generally was its lack of civility. The speed with which each side resorted to implicating the other in totalitarian tactics clarifies how threadbare the sense of common identity and purpose had become within the Diaspora by the mid-2000s. Whereas previously one could have imagined heated debates about Israel cooling off into the impression of solidarity, in this case any resolution seemed impossible. In a sense—to play off of Judt’s formulation—everyone had lost control of the debate. The American Jewish Committee raised the stakes even further when they published an essay by Holocaust scholar Alvin Rosenfeld asserting that the position on Israel held by Judt and other progressive Jews like American playwright Tony Kushner and British literary theorist Jacqueline Rose is functionally anti-Semitic. Suddenly everyone in the Diaspora seemed to be talking about issues that in the old days no one wanted to discuss.
In his Observer interview, Judt explained to Wood that this reticence had been secured by fear: “All Jews are silenced by the requirement to be supportive of Israel, and all non-Jews are silenced by the fear of being thought anti-Semitic, and there is no conversation on the subject.” Though it seems deeply ironic that the fear of more vigorous silencing would inspire people to speak freely, this shift is one that Judt—a former translator for the Israel Defense Forces—clearly welcomed, concluding the interview on a hopeful note: “I think one could say that after the Iraq War, for want of a better defining moment, the American silence on the complexities and disasters of the Middle East was broken. The shell broke and conversation—however uncomfortable, however much slandered—became possible. I’m not sure that will change things in the Middle East, but it’s changed the shape of things here.”
For better or worse (or, more precisely, for better and worse), discussion of Israel has shifted markedly in the wake of the attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001. Trends that began to emerge at the conclusion of the Cold War are now fully manifest. As l’affaire Judt amply illustrates, rancor has supplanted reasoned exchange as the dominant mode of discourse. Even when people are on the same general side, they find ways to treat each other as opponents. The polarization of the debate has made people who want to find solutions despair of making progress. But it has also provided an opportunity to rethink the way Israel is regarded both within its borders and beyond. What we need in the midst of all the heated polemics on Israel is a way to perceive the gray in both black and white.
That’s my primary goal here. I want to bring depth to conversations that have been flattened into reflex. In this chapter and the ones to follow, I focus on specific examples from recent debates in the media. Frequently, I connect them to the history that preceded them. But this is not a history book. What concerns me, as I suggested in my introduction, are not the facts of modern Israel’s existence, but the way people have marshaled those facts in the service of polemics, whether in the United States, Europe, or the Middle East. Although denouncing arguments for their rhetorical sleights of hand may feel good, it does little to advance the cause of peace. Just as it becomes harder to generalize about members of a particular ethnicity or religion when you get to know some of them personally, it’s more difficult to judge positions in a debate after you study them in depth, with as much attention to their nuances as their broad strokes. But that’s a challenge I take up eagerly, as the only way for us to make progress in an ideological debate is to challenge our certainties.
PREOCCUPIED TERRITORIES
Visiting New York in February 2007, I got into a conversation with a Jewish gentleman in his sixties who wanted to discuss what Israel had achieved in the Six-Day War of 1967. Because I was born in that year and grew up in a context where Israel’s stunning victory remains so crucial to understanding contemporary Jewish attitudes toward the country, I’m always eager to talk about it, and have become accustomed to Americans rationalizing the necessity of the occupation, in one form or another, as a means of ensuring Israel’s security, as though they were justifying the defense of their own country. But what this man said unsettled me more than usual. He only seemed able to countenance the war’s impact on American life.
Israel’s transformation into a state with military muscle and the imperial conquests to prove it was significant, he explained, because it completed the process of Jewish integration in the U.S., helping us secure the level of equality we experience in America today. From his perspective, what the Six-Day War meant to Americans outweighed the changes it caused in the Middle East. The war cleansed the Jewish American population of the stigmas it had borne, and was evidently worth the stigmatization that the occupation of formerly Arab lands had ultimately inflicted on both Israelis and Palestinians. It’s hard to imagine a purer example of the figure of Israel taking precedence over “actually existing” Israel.
One of the biggest issues confronting Jews today is the way Israel gets “constructed” by both its proponents and opponents in America. When Tony Judt explained that he wasn’t sure whether the controversy that Jewish critics of Israeli policy in the United States have provoked “will change things in the Middle East,” but that “it’s changed the shape of things here,” he made a revealing comment about Israel’s role in American political life. It seems that Israel has become a staging ground for conflicts that, while bearing on its special relationship with the United States, are first and foremost internal struggles. The same goes for debates about Israel elsewhere within the developed world, particularly Western Europe. But given both the size of the Jewish community in the U.S. and the extensive media network devoted specifically to its concerns, the intensity and scope of those struggles is frequently magnified within an American context.
This helps explain the vehemence with which some fellow Jews have attacked people like Judt. Even if he is right that debates within the American Diaspora may not directly impact Israel, the belief that they could matter elevates the significance for their participants. And when liberal journalists like Philip Weiss write about the formation of a new Jewish Left, as he did in a blog entry for the New York Observer on February 7, 2007, they only add fuel to the fire. Acknowledging that U.S. organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace still have a relatively small amount of influence, he found sufficient evidence to assert, “The formerly marginalized progressives are movin’ in.” This kind of analysis is typically sustained by a healthy dose of wishful thinking that reflects both progressives’ thirst for an expanded profile and journalists’ professional desire to perceive a balance of powers within the ideological conflict over Israel. But when repeated often enough, Weiss’s analysis has the capacity to transform its exaggerations into reality. Once the Diaspora Jewish Right feels sufficiently threatened, it’ll respond in a way that produces precisely what it fears. That’s the ironic state of affairs that Judt had in mind when he declared, “They’ve lost control of the debate.”
It’s also what prompted Dan Sieradski, in an entry he posted to his former abode, the progressive blog Jew-school, to make the bold leap of calling this ideological struggle in the Diaspora a “Jewish civil war.” Although Sieradski was skeptical of Weiss’s claim that a unified Jewish Left was making its presence felt—implying that this “movement” only appears like a coordinated force to its opponents—he argued that progressives should aspire to such a goal. While Sieradski admitted that this wasn’t likely to happen, he insisted that the outcome of his “civil war” would determine the future of world Jewry, whether fought by one army—the Zionist Establishment—or two.
Sieradski’s peculiar fusion of sober realism and incendiary idealism—there is no unified Jewish Left, and yet we need a unified Jewish Left to make the “Jewish civil war” a fair fight—shows how difficult it is for members of the Diaspora to rein in the sense of self-importance that animates their ideological moves. If you see yourself as a soldier in a war that will determine the fate of millions, you’re bound to be at least a little politically and culturally myopic. No matter how pure their motives, those who get caught up in events like l’affaire Judt end up behaving much like those who act out their private lives with role-playing games—eventually the distinction between fantasy and reality starts to blur.
REMEMBER, THEY’RE AMERICANS
Or so I would tell myself during my years as the managing editor of Tikkun magazine, one of the most influential and controversial Jewish publications to come out of the progressive Diaspora. Both my childhood in the Middle East and Europe and conversations with my family helped put the ideological struggles between American Jews over Israel that I encountered while working at the magazine into proper perspective, if only because the Israel of my upbringing seemed so much more tangible than the abstraction I would later encounter. To put it bluntly, they reminded me not to make mountains out of molehills. But that’s hard to remember when your attempts to close an issue of the magazine keep getting delayed by the angry outbursts of individuals who haven’t yet had their worldviews decentered.
Because my position exposed me to a steady flow of vitriol, many of those rants blur together. But a few stand out, whether for their extremity, absurdity, or both. I remember one time when the latest issue of Tikkun had only been on newsstands for two days, and negative reactions from our readers were already starting to roll in.
“How could you engage in such lashon harah (shit-talking)?” yelled one particularly irate reader on my voice mail. “I can tell by your last name that you must be Israeli. If so, even more shame on your self-hating soul.”
Dealing with impassioned responses comes with the territory in the publishing industry. But this particular outburst proved illuminating for me. The beautifully crafted article that inspired such rage—written by former Time Jerusalem bureau chief and erstwhile crime novelist Matt Rees for our September/October 2005 edition—steered well clear of the usual hot-button topics of Israel coverage. Rees’s piece examined the failure of Israel’s public health care system to properly look after the country’s mentally ill Holocaust survivors. It was one of those rare gems that every editor who’s serious about social justice dreams of acquiring. Tikkun published it nearly two years before Prime Minister Ehud Olmert found himself besieged by elderly Israeli survivors in concentration camp uniforms protesting his government’s offer of an estimated twenty-dollar-per-month stipend in exchange for keeping their plight out of circulation in the United States.
Yet the article elicited a reaction that I was familiar with from our coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but had mistakenly believed would be less intense in this case. As I can now see more clearly, the caller was so incensed because he believed that both the British journalist who wrote the damaging exposé and Tikkun itself were questioning Israel’s very right to exist. From his perspective, we were disguising our anti-Zionism by commissioning negative social coverage of Israel.
The editor in me was tempted to chalk up this reading of Rees’s article to the legacy of ill will among conservative Jews that Tikkun had accumulated in the nearly twenty years prior to my hiring. But as an Israeli I recognized that the lessons of this interaction extended much further. My experiences at the magazine up to that point should have clued me in that many of our readers approached our content with suspicion and even hostility. In a sense, they expected to have their buttons pushed, and not just by stories about the West Bank. Incidents like this taught me that a significant portion of American Jewry didn’t want to hear about Israel’s failings, period. Because the article so obviously dealt with the ineptitude—or, as some would argue, the callousness—of the Israeli state in caring for its most vulnerable citizens (indeed, precisely those for whom the state was rhetorically created), it struck the same chord as would have a feature on a “break-their-bones” anti-demonstration policy or artillery strikes on refugee camps in Lebanon.
This was the editorial conundrum I repeatedly confronted throughout my tenure at Tikkun. How could I, as an Israeli citizen, take American Jews seriously if they cared so deeply about Israel’s existence, yet so little about its actual functioning? Had their desire to discredit Arab and Palestinian claims to the country impaired their ability to empathize with other Jews? Or was there a magic narrative formula that would let me capture the plight of Israelis while working around the paranoid stance that any discussion of Israeli social justice issues was anti-Zionist code?
I find myself confronting this problem constantly as I try to balance my present life in the Diaspora with my past as a person who had no choice but to identify with Israel. It seems that I’m being displaced from the Israel I know and, yes, love—the way you love your family despite all the things it has done to mess you up—by the Israel of American imaginings. This is an uncomfortable acknowledgment because I recognize all too well that my sense of “occupation” is a metaphor that’s incommensurable with the deprivations experienced by the Palestinians for whom the meaning of that term is a matter of flesh and blood. But I’ve learned that it’s better to be attentive to my conflicted feelings than to ignore them. I’ve had the privilege of living most of my adult life in the relative freedom of the affluent and liberal city of San Francisco. If I feel bound by American fantasies of Israel, how must those Israelis feel who live elsewhere in places less amenable to a diversity of perspectives?
In a sense, Israel’s punishment for failing to live up to the idealized notions held by American Jews is to be imaginatively conquered by them, suffering a peculiar form of imperialism that overlooks the land’s “natives”— whatever their religion or ethnicity—in much the same way that the original Zionist immigrants to Ottoman Palestine regarded their new home as a wild and empty place. Paradoxically, contemporary political discourse about Israel in the United States—even as it hinges on the opposition between Jews and Muslims, Israelis and Palestinians—ends up collapsing the very distinctions it seeks to sustain in its preference for the figure of Israel over the reality of Israel.
ISRAEL IS EVERYWHERE
In theory, a population as worldly and educated as most Jewish Americans should understand the predicament that Israelis find themselves in, since the U.S. itself suffers under the burden of stereotypes. The years since 9/11 have made painfully clear that people in other parts of the world have a difficult time distinguishing between fantasy and reality where Americans are concerned. Given the United States’ imperial ambitions and unquestioned military superiority in recent decades, this misperception can’t easily be transmuted into a feeling of being “occupied.” But Americans who venture abroad commonly experience the sensation of only being seen for what they’re expected to be, rather than for who they are as individuals. Why then is it so hard for even the most sophisticated participants in American political discourse about Israel to see through the figure of the country to the reality concealed beneath it?
The answer lies in the nature of the Diaspora’s complex political identity. Since the founding of the Israeli state in 1948, all Jews have been considered its citizens, no matter where they live or what they believe. The extension of this right has consistently strengthened Israel economically and socially over the years and prevented Jews from being hopelessly outnumbered by the Arab population still living within the nation’s borders. But it has also given Jews who have no intention of ever living in Israel a political stake in the nation’s affairs. As critics of the U.S. government’s support for Israel have stressed for decades, this psychological investment from the Diaspora Jewish community has translated seamlessly into a financial investment. But those critics often fail to see the degree that this support—which initially came with relatively few strings attached—has recently been accompanied by a growing desire for a specific kind of influence. Whether conscious of this desire or not, members of the Diaspora have increasingly shown that they want more for their time and money than the mere satisfaction of knowing that Israel continues to exist.
The most striking aspect of debates like l’affaire Judt is the way they underscore the collapse of traditional distinctions between Israel and the Diaspora. Already prevalent on the Jewish Right, this confusion of boundaries has spread in the wake of 9/11 to the Left as well. The significance of automatic Israeli citizenship, and the ways in which Jews experience this “birthright” (to invoke the name of the increasingly derided Zionist educational program), have been changed to such an extent that news in Israel at times ceases to be classified as “foreign affairs.” Because non-Israeli Jews are encouraged to feel involved in Israel’s life, some tend to assume they can participate in its politics the way they do in their own home countries, whether that be Germany, the United Kingdom, Australia, or the United States. Instead of this attachment compelling them to immigrate to Israel, many members of the Diaspora are content to participate in the nation’s politics from abroad.
For members of the foreign Jewish Left, this sense of citizenship neatly parallels the strong identification with the Israeli state among conservatives in the Diaspora. In place of veneration for Jerusalem, the holy places, and the Jewish character of the Israeli state, we find on the Left a similar attachment to Israeli media and culture, and the high level of public debate that takes place in Israeli society over issues involving religion, gender, citizenship, and economics. And while both of these Israels are more figurative than literal, the material consequences of this psychic involvement are profound.
Take, for example, what many on the Right have chosen to champion as the paradigmatic instance of progressive positions on Israel: “Left anti-Semitism.” Though its promotion by conservatives is motivated in part by a desire to discredit peace advocacy, the phenomenon itself is entirely real. Attributed to progressives sympathetic to Islamist and nationalist Arab criticisms of Israel and Zionism, this genre of anti-Semitism is the least understood form of prejudice against Jewry. When viewed as opportunist in its support of Islamic and right-wing Arab views of Jews and Zionism, as a means of disguising racism as anticolonialism, left-wing anti-Semites can almost be considered false progressives who don the multicultural mantle of the Left in order to be openly prejudiced.
Jews are incited against not because they practice an inferior culture or religion, but because a key object of their faith is a state that discriminates against non-Jews—specifically, Muslims. Since the concept of the state is so integral to their religious identity, Jews are seen as being inherently biased against non-Jews. The foundational importance of the Zionist state, as an exclusively Jewish state, is often viewed by such progressives as an iconographic instance of the core politics of Jewish identity.
In short, Judaism is a synonym for racism because behind it hides Israel. Progressives aren’t supposed to like Judaism for two principle reasons: first, because Israel stands for the indivisibility of religion and state; and second, due to Israel’s official practice of discrimination against Palestinians on the basis of their ethnicity. Though Judaism is found by many progressives to be deeply problematic, both historically and theologically, the notion of returning to a promised land is less troubling than how this is understood to function as a cover for the theft of Arab lands.
In addition to collapsing the distinction between Judaism and the Israeli state, this perspective can oftentimes appear so totalizing that it denies the possibility that there might be other ways to be politically Jewish—even if Jews acknowledge the imbrication of nationalism and religion in their spirituality. Indeed, it is an unsophisticated and at times vulgar critique of Judaism that harkens back to the most primitive Marxist critiques of religion. Unfortunately, this is not the version of progressive anti-Semitism taken to task by Jewish conservatives like Alvin Rosenthal. Yet it is one of the more impoverished, but real, consequences of the global Left’s anger at Israel.
ADOPTING PALESTINE
When it was primarily the Right that identified with Israel politically, debates like l’affaire Judt were both less frequent and less intense. Although progressives began to grow increasingly skeptical of Israel in the wake of the Six-Day War, they did so under the banner of a self-conscious internationalism, so their criticism seemed abstract. The cause of the Palestinians was packed together with so many other causes in the portmanteau of the Left that it became diffuse, one instance of a worldwide problem.
As those other causes—including the peace movement, the antinuclear movement, and the women’s movement—began to lose focus, attention on Israel in-creased, particularly following its invasion of Lebanon in June 1982. But it wasn’t until the tumultuous period that followed the end of the Cold War that Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians became one of the chief preoccupations of the American Left.
Even as the first intifada (1987–1991) began to decrease in intensity, its impact in the United States started to be felt more strongly. No longer having to worry so deeply about the prospect of mutually assured destruction, news-minded Americans found themselves with more time to reflect on smaller-scale conflicts around the world. The eruption of civil wars in the former Yugoslavia reminded people in the developed world how easily the veneer of civilization can wear off in the face of historically grounded ethnic antagonisms. At the same time, the tide was turning in South Africa, as the international effort in the ’80s to overturn apartheid at last seemed to be having the desired effect. Finally, the first Gulf War, waged by a multinational coalition led by the United States, brought a wide range of unfinished business in the Middle East back into the headlines.
While perhaps not a perfect storm for Israel’s political establishment, these developments overlapped in the media in a way that let potential critics connect the dots about the deeper implications of Israeli government policies, which even the good news of the 1993 Oslo Accords did little to alter. All of a sudden, in every televised image of a Palestinian teenager wielding a slingshot against an Israeli tank, many progressives took the opportunity not only to conclude that Israel was now Goliath to the Palestinian David, but also to elevate that realization into a principal political concern. Instead of continuing to be seen as a special case of widespread global problems, Israel now found itself in the bull’s-eye of an American Left that had historically neglected the Middle East.
Israel’s occupation of Lebanon, the West Bank, and Gaza provided an ideal point of entry for an ideological stance on the region in a way that the crude economism of the petropolitics associated with the Gulf War—NoBlood for Oil—had not. By acting the part of a confident imperial force at a time when the former Soviet empire was disintegrating and the United States was unsure of its role as the sole remaining superpower, Israel helped the Left to maintain its intellectual focus. The overlapping of religion and racism in the actions of a state unapologetically committed to the project of colonization permitted the redeployment of traditional forms of political critique, imparting a desperately needed sense of continuity amid a world transformed by unexpected ruptures. In other words, focusing on Israel became the means of demonstrating that the principle ideological concerns of the Left prior to 1989 were as valid as ever.
INTRODUCING THE MIDDLE EAST
We can more fully understand recent debates about Israel within the Diaspora when we keep the immediate post–Cold War era in mind. Although technically still recent history, the 1990s are difficult for someone living in the post–9/11 era to comprehend as anything other than the “before” to our “after.” The global political landscape changed so radically in the first years of the new millennium that it seems as though the previous decade got locked in a time capsule to be exhumed in a future where people will find it easier to identify broader trends. Yet we need to examine that period closely if we’re serious about grasping how Israel has changed.
For one thing, the allegations that Alvin Rosenfeld and others have made about “Jewish anti-Semitism” depend upon the existence of organizations on the Left that either date from the 1990s or were formed by individuals active in campaigns against the Israeli government at that time. Although rising resistance to the Bush administration agenda, particularly the war in Iraq, sharpened progressive critiques of its Israeli allies, the foundation for them was laid before 9/11. It’s true that organizations like J Street, Brit Tzedek v’Shalom, Americans for Peace Now, Israel Policy Forum, and Jewish Voice for Peace take into account how radically the American presence in the Middle East has expanded since the war in Afghanistan. But they’re principally concerned with long-standing matters of Israeli government policy over which the United States, despite its support, has limited influence.
September 11 had considerably less impact on Israelis than it did on Americans. While Israel has worked more closely with the U.S. military since the attacks, the problems it faces both within and beyond its borders haven’t changed a great deal since Americans woke up that day to a new world order. While America regarded 9/11 as a “day that will live in infamy,” many in Israel saw it as confirmation that the reality of everyday life—where constant vigilance has long been the price of freedom—had been successfully exported to its benefactor. This isn’t to imply that all Israelis were overcome with schadenfreude after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, even though certain Israeli politicians, such as current Prime Minister Benja-min Netanyahu, have repeatedly stated that the attacks were of value to Israel.
The intensity of debates like l’affaire Judt within the Diaspora derives less from changes in Israel or the peace movement than from the decidedly subjective perception, emerging from the foreign policy of the Bush administration and its staunchest allies in the United Kingdom and Australia, that threats must be handled differently than they were in the ’90s. Just as the onset of the Cold War led to changes in how America treated its Left—with the grudging tolerance of the 1930s replaced by the frenzy of McCarthyism—9/11 gave both conservatives and more mainstream Jewish leaders a reason to pay attention to the Jewish progressives like Judt, and the “loony Left,” that they’d previously dismissed as being unworthy of engagement.
GOING NATIVE, ABROAD
These discussions in the Diaspora are so confusing in large part because they occur within that imaginary Israel in which both conservative and progressive Jews are so invested. The failure of both the Right and the Left in the Diaspora to see Israel as it actually is constitutes a subtle but pernicious form of intellectual imperialism. To the degree that American Jews perceive Israel as both extant at the pleasure of the U.S. government and dependent on its support (a conclusion belied, as I’ll argue later, by Israel’s complex relationship with Europe), they convince themselves that their position on Israeli policies must be heeded, even when that position is hopelessly colored by fantasy.
This self-delusion is even more of a problem on the Left than the Right. Whereas conservatives of the post– 9/11 era have generally advanced an ideological agenda that champions idealism over realpolitik (there’s no other way to understand the Bush administration’s Middle East policy short of degenerating into conspiracy theory), progressives tend to believe they can see facts that others overlook. Noam Chomsky, a secular American Jew and one of the most prominent critics of the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians since the Six-Day War, is a prime example. Chomsky consistently points out how the ruling powers in both the U.S. and Israel hide the truth about what has really transpired since the occupation of the territories in 1967. Although younger peace activists may not agree with Chomsky on many points (and may resent the way his stature draws attention from their efforts), they generally agree that they’re fighting a struggle for revelation. The trouble is that they’re actually maneuvering within a political field in which too much is already in plain view.
This confidence in the power of truth telling reflects a positive conception of Israel that circulates within the Diaspora Left. Whereas conservatives love the coupling of religion and power embodied in the Israeli state, progressives often fetishize the Israeli public sphere, and they contrast the intensity and openness of the debates it fosters with the “censorship by the bottom line” that’s come to prevail in the United States.
While conservatives generally regard this tendency on the Left as another way in which anti-Zionist Jews seek to undermine Israel, they’d do well to consider the matter more carefully. As critical as progressives may be of Israeli government policies, they share with their con-servative counterparts an investment in the continuation of the political reality that makes such debates possible; progressives sense that the very presence of open discourse is inextricably bound up with the positive aspects of Israeli society, and wish to see those elements constitute a more inclusive, truly multiethnic Israeli democracy.
WHEN THE LEFT BANK REPLACED THE WEST BANK
Israel’s tradition of self-criticism—by its liberal civil servants and left-wing activists, and by specific internationally distributed representatives of its media—has become a shining beacon of political virtue to many non-Israeli Jewish liberals. In a sense, these critics embody the political and moral conscience that the Israeli government and its foreign policy seem to have lost in the years following the Six-Day War. While valuing these aspects of Israeli life ultimately mirrors in some respects the conservative fetishization of Israel in the Diaspora, there’s still something redemptive about this strange coinvestment in the Jewish state, even if it’s based in a preference for the figure of Israel over the reality of Israel.
As confused as the Diaspora Left may appear, its vision of reforming Israel as a state is real. The Left retains an admirably optimistic desire to correct Israel’s deficits in accordance with the standards of a European-style, multicultural social democracy. Diaspora Jews may not agree completely on whether a one-or two-state deal solves the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, or whether a market-based or government-dominated public sector can adequately redress the country’s high levels of social inequality. But they all seem to assume that reform can indeed be created within—or perhaps despite— Israel’s highly overdetermined and confining historical context.
When the Jewish Right goes after people like Tony Judt or the less provocative peace organizations on the Left, it risks ruining the remaining basis for solidarity within the Diaspora—the belief that a better Israel can be made from the current one. That’s not to imply that the Right’s fears are groundless. The emergence of a new Jewish Left in the Diaspora warrants some of the sensational rhetoric meted out by conservatives in media and academic environments. When taken to their logical conclusion, the political concerns of progressives do indeed contradict every defining feature of the Israeli status quo: religious traditionalism, racism, social inequality, and colonialism. That’s why, as Occupied Minds author Arthur Neslen explained in a January 2007 interview in Tikkun, ending Israel’s occupation of its remaining Palestinian territorial assets is a much bigger deal than simply withdrawing from the land itself.
Advocating withdrawal from the Occupied Territories calls into question the character of the modern Israeli state and everything that comes along with it. You don’t change your character simply by taking a few steps backward. But it is crucial to remember that those features of the status quo, which have become more prominent in the four decades since the Six-Day War, are still not set in stone. The reality of contemporary Israel is more complex than that. And, while there is ample ground for despair, there’s also reason to hope. So much of the increasing polarization of debate is generational. Change is coming, no matter how fiercely some resist it.
The question is whether this change is able to successfully manifest itself in an Israeli context.
LOOKING OVER THE WALL
