These arguments are closely related to the values and beliefs that I have described as forming part of the “American antithesis.” A resort to this value system—rather than liberal democracy—to provide arguments in favor of Israel may also be encouraged by the revolutions of the “Arab Spring,” which seem likely to bring to power a number of democratically elected Arab governments that at the same time are strongly hostile to Israel. This has already been true of Turkey since the election of a moderate Islamist government there.
Indeed, even the argument that Israel is a “bastion of democracy” is often paired with the spoken or unspoken view, more reminiscent of the nineteenth century, that it is also “an island of Western civilization in a sea of savagery.” Indeed, the use of “democracy” in this context sometimes seems more a contemporary version of the nineteenth century use of the word “civilization” than a reference to actual behavior.25
Arguments rooted in the American antithesis were admirably summarized in a speech to the U.S. Senate in March 2002 by Senator James Inhofe (R-OK) setting out seven reasons why “Israel alone is entitled to possess the Holy Land,” including the Palestinian territories. These views are widely shared among the other members of the Christian Right in the U.S. Congress. As described earlier, these make up a significant proportion of senators and congressmen, and a very powerful proportion of the Republicans. Their numbers include both of former Republican leaders in the House, Dick Armey and Tom DeLay, both of them very strong supporters of Israel. Thus, in May 2002, Armey, then House majority leader, called during a television interview for the deportation of the Palestinians from the Occupied Territories.26 Tom DeLay has also expressed unconditional support for Israel, without reference to Palestinian rights.27
Democracy was not among the arguments set out by Senator Inhofe; indeed, the only one that is compatible with U.S. official public values as presently understood, let alone with the official policies toward the issue in every U.S. administration, was that of “humanitarian concern” for the Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. Instead, the senator set out archaeological and historical arguments proving that the Jewish claim “predates any claims that other peoples in the region may have”—the same arguments so often used by nationalist intellectuals in the Balkans and Caucasus. In contrast, the Senator claimed that in 1913, “Palestinians were not there.” Two of Senator Inhofe’s reasons were realist ones: that Israel is a “strategic ally of the United States” and “a roadblock to terrorism.”
Other of his arguments concerned civilizational superiority: the idea that Israel took desert land that “nobody really wanted” from its supposedly nomadic native inhabitants, and made it bloom. Despite all the years since the conquest of the West, this is still an idea with great resonance for Americans from the Jacksonian tradition, or influenced by it. After all, both this belief and the explicit parallel between the American settlement of the New World and the Israelites’ occupation of Canaan go back to the first days of white settlement in North America.28 In the words of T. R. Fehrenbach concerning the Texan consciousness of Texan history (and remembering that Oklahoma borders Texas and was largely settled from there):
The Texan did not shed his history in the 20th century; he clung to it. Texas history was taught in Texas schools before the study of the United States began…This Anglo history was shot through with the national myths all such histories have; it had its share of hypocrisy and arrogance. Parts of its mythology made both ethnic Mexicans and Negroes writhe. But in essence, it rang true. We chose this land; we took it; we made it bear fruit, the Texan child is taught.29
Or in the words of John Wayne, “I don’t feel that we did wrong in taking this great country away from them [the Indians]…Our so-called stealing of this country from them was just a matter of survival. There were great numbers of people who needed new land, and the Indians were selfishly trying to keep it for themselves.”30 Leo Strauss, one of the intellectual fathers of the neoconservatives, made “theft of land” the basis for all states, while arguing that this unpleasant truth should veiled from the masses.31
In this vein, like so many American supporters of Israel over the decades, Senator Inhofe quoted a passage from Mark Twain about his travels through a desolate Palestine; and long-held views of Palestine’s backwardness before the start of Jewish settlement, and therefore the Palestinians’ inferiority, hark back directly to nineteenth-century attitudes.32
Senator Inhofe’s final argument also stems directly from another key strand in the American antithesis, set out at length in chapter 3. In his words,
this is the most important reason; because God said so. As I said a minute ago, look it up in the book of Genesis. It is right up there on the desk…The Bible says that Abram removed his tent and came and dwelt in the plain of Mamre, which is in Hebron, and built an altar there before the Lord. Hebron is in the West Bank. It is at this place where God appeared to Abram and said “I am giving you this land”—the West Bank. This is not a political battle at all. It is a contest over whether the world of God is true.33
Such an argument not only removes this critical issue from the sphere of negotiation, it removes it from any possibility of rational discussion based on universally accepted criteria. This argument in fact rejects the Enlightenment as a basis for political culture, and in doing so also rejects modern Western civilization. The rejection of the Enlightenment tradition is especially true of the millenarian Christians in the United States, who believe that the restoration of Israeli rule over the entire biblical Kingdom of David is an essential precondition of the apocalypse (a very old belief among Protestant fundamentalists, shared by Oliver Cromwell).34
As recorded by Donald Wagner, Grace Halsell, Gabriel Almond, and other leading students of this tradition, especially sinister are the links between these forces in the United States and the powerful mixture of fundamentalist and ultranationalist forces on the Israeli radical Right. The latter share the moral absolutism of their American Christian counterparts without necessarily sharing their commitment to democracy. Such Israelis are, of course, especially strongly represented among the settlers on the West Bank.
Israeli radical fundamentalists and nationalists are implacably opposed to a state for the Palestinians, and in many cases are committed to the most radical of all solutions to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, the ethnic cleansing (“transfer”) of the Palestinians from the occupied territories. According to opinion polls, in 2003 some 46 percent of the Jewish population of Israel in general also believed in this solution, with 33 percent calling for the deportation of even Arab citizens of Israel.35 In 2003 the possibility of future deportation was raised by a leading Israeli liberal historian, Benny Morris.36 Such a move would indeed mark a definitive break with “the democratic West” as this has been defined in recent decades, and a return to previous Western behavior of which Jews were among the greatest victims. If America were to support such a move, it would mark a historic triumph for the forces of the American antithesis over the American Creed.
Ian Lustick has written of this fundamentalist element in Israel—with fundamentalism defined as “political action to radically transform society according to cosmically ordained imperatives”—as forming “a key element on the Israeli side of the Middle Eastern equation.”37 In 1991 Ehud Sprinzak described how
one of the great successes of the [Israeli] radical right has been its ability to penetrate the Likud and the National Religious Party. Thus, approximately a quarter of the leaders and members of the Likud look at the world today through the ideological and symbolic prism of the radical right. The most outstanding example is cabinet member Ariel Sharon, a person with great charisma and a large following, who thinks and talks like the ideologues of the extreme right.38
Or in the simple words of the Reverend Jerry Falwell, “to stand against Israel is to stand against God.”39 Over the past decade unconditional support for Israel has become increasingly strong on the Republican Right, in tandem with
the rise of the Christian Right “from an irrelevant fringe into a centerpiece of the conservative movement.” This is a very marked change from the days of Eisenhower, and indeed of George H. W. Bush.40 As Inhofe’s and Falwell’s words indicate, the origins of this lie by no means only in the political opportunism analyzed by Novak, but also in profound religious, ideological, and cultural identification.
Hal Lindsey, the millenarian author whose Late Great Planet Earth still exceeds any other in sales in the United States (apart from the Bible itself) produced a book after 9/11 on Arabs and Muslims that repeats the same biblical and pseudohistorical arguments as those of Inhofe (quoting extensively from a work by Joan Peters purporting to “prove” that Arabs actually immigrated to Palestine in the nineteenth century). Lindsey adds a strong element of hatred and contempt for Islam and for “the nature and genetic characteristics of Ishmael and his descendants, the Arabs.” These he identifies with “the donkeys of the wilderness” mentioned by God in the Book of Job—in other words, rootless nomads with no attachment to place. He speaks of hate as a Muslim “religious doctrine.”41
A symposium of the Christian Coalition on Islam in Washington, DC, on February 15, 2003, which I attended (Daniel Pipes was among the speakers) was a phantasmagoria of hatred. One speaker declared that the reason why there would always be conflict between Christians and Muslims was that Muslims denied the truth of the resurrection. Don Feder said that “Islam is not a religion of peace. It is a religion which, throughout its 1,400-year history, has lent itself well to fanaticism, terrorism, mass murder, oppression and conversion by the sword.”42 By 2012 such language extended across the U.S. religious Right and permeated considerable portions of the Tea Parties.
Of course, such views represent a distinctly minority opinion in the United States as a whole concerning the Israeli–Palestinian issue. But the rise of the Christian Right within the Republican Party means that in this wing of U.S. politics, they are views that are becoming more and more significant. The Israeli Fundamentalist Right is even developing a closer relationship with more moderate sections of the Christian Right in the United States.43 Indeed, it would seem that since the mid-1990s Likud governments have come to rely more on the Christian Right than on “unreliable” liberal Jewish Americans in their attempts to mobilize support in the United States for its policies.44 Thus the Washington Times reported a series of visits to the United States by the Israeli tourism minister in 2003: “Israeli tourism minister Benyamin Elon has embarked on a ‘Bible Belt tour’ to exploit evangelical Christian enthusiasm for Israel, to lure Christian tourists back to Israel and to derail President Bush’s ‘road map’ to Middle East peace… ‘We either have to oppose the road map or oppose the Bible,’ says Mike Evans, founder of the Jerusalem Prayer Team, a coalition of 1,700 churches.”45
In almost any other truly vital area of U.S. international policy, such views would have few consequences for policy.46 But in the case of Israel, a variety of factors have made this impossible. These include the depth of American historical and cultural sympathy for Israel, the power of the Israeli lobby (which includes by no means just Jewish Americans, but the Christian Right and other forces as well), and the particular limitations on the discussion of Israel in the political arena and mass media.
Together these factions have made it impossible for liberal or realist forces in the United States—including portions of Jewish America—to isolate and overcome such ideas politically, however much they may argue against them in the educated media.47 It is not that the extremist ideas held by Inhofe, DeLay, and others are shared by anything resembling a majority of Americans. Rather, in the case of Israel, both the Democratic Party and the liberal intelligentsia have been disabled from presenting strong and coherent opposition to them, whether by sincere identification with Israel, or fear of being attacked by the Israeli lobby. As a result, there is in effect no real political alternative or opposition in the United States concerning the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and U.S. policies toward it.
In 2008 J Street was founded, a political action committee representing liberal Jews who support Israel, but oppose the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories, and call for a peace settlement on the basis of the borders of 1967. J Street is supported by numerous leading Jewish intellectuals and rabbis in both the United States and Israel, and it has gained some presence in portions of the educated media. J Street demonstrates that the hard-line Israel lobby cannot claim to speak for all American Jews, and that many Jewish liberals—while deeply and rightly committed to Israel’s survival as a state—reject Israel’s occupation of land beyond the borders of 1967 and support Israeli reconciliation with the Arab states. Compared to the unconditionally pro-Israel groups, however, as of 2012 J Street’s impact on politics, and especially Congress, remains minimal—as is all too clear from the latest congressional votes on Israel.48
Over the past four decades U.S. policy has become bogged down in a glaring contradiction between American public ideals and U.S.-financed Israeli behavior. On the one hand, America preaches to Arabs contemporary civic ideals of democracy, modernity, and the peaceful resolution of disputes. On the other, it subsidizes not only a brutal military occupation, but the seizure of land from an established population on the basis of ethnoreligious claims that in any other circumstances would be regarded by the U.S. government and a majority of public opinion as utterly illegitimate.49
The most truly tragic aspect of all this, as more and more Israelis and Jewish Americans have begun to argue, is that this kind of unconditional U.S. support, coupled with continued Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory, is also proving disastrous for Israel itself, and for the noble ideals that motivated the best elements in the Zionist enterprise. These critics include not just liberals, but senior retired military and security officials, like the four former directors of the Shin Bet domestic security service who, in November 2003, warned the Sharon government that if Israel does not withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, Israel’s very existence will ultimately be endangered. They also said that this withdrawal is necessary even if this leads to a clash with Jewish settlers.
According to one of the four, Avraham Shalom, “we must once and for all admit that there is another side, that it has feelings and is suffering, and that we are behaving disgracefully…We have turned into a people of petty fighters using the wrong tools.”50 In April 2011, a group of former Israeli generals and chiefs of the security services drafted a proposed peace settlement based on the principles set out in the Arab peace initiative of 2002. The Israeli generals’ plan backed President Obama’s call for a settlement based on the borders of 1967. It was rejected by the Israeli government and received no backing in the U.S. Congress.
In the words of former Knesset Speaker Avraham Burg:
The Zionist revolution has always rested on two pillars: a just path and an ethical leadership. Neither of these is operative any longer. The Israeli nation today rests on a scaffolding of corruption, and on foundations of oppression and injustice. As such, the end of the Zionist enterprise is already on our doorstep. There is a real chance that ours will be the last Zionist generation. There may yet be a Jewish state in the Middle East, but it will be a different sort, strange and ugly…We cannot keep a Palestinian majority under an Israeli boot and at the same time think ourselves the only democracy in the Middle East.
The Israeli lobby in the United States is well aware that the settlements—which have been condemned in principle by successive U.S. administrations—are by far the weakest element in its entire argument. Determined attempts have therefore been made to distract attention from this issue, described in one advisory paper as “our Achilles heel” in terms of wooing U.S. public support.51
Because of the way in which America and Israel are entwined—spiritually, politically, and socially—and because the Israeli–U.S. relationship is treated by so many other people in the world as a litmus test of U.S. behavior, the choices that Israel ma
kes will have very grave implications not only for the security of the United States and its Western allies like Britain, and for America’s role in the world, but also perhaps for the political culture of the United States itself.52
From an American point of view, Israel cannot be compared with Russia, China, or other authoritarian states that have waged even crueler wars against national secessionist movements. This comparison is made repeatedly by the Israeli lobby in an effort to prove that demands for U.S. pressure on Israel are hypocritical and/or anti-Semitic, since the authors of these demands do not ask that the United States apply similar pressure to states like Russia or China.
This argument, however, fails in both ethical and realist terms. What most U.S. and European critics of the U.S. relationship with Israel are asking is not that the United States should impose trade sanctions against Israel, or expel it from international bodies, but only that the United States should use its aid and support for Israel as a powerful lever to influence Israeli behavior, as these other states do not receive massive subsidies, military support, and diplomatic protection from the United States. Israel as of 2012 received more than one-quarter of the entire U.S. aid budget (excluding that for the reconstruction of Afghanistan). The figure for U.S. aid to Israel in 2012 was more than five times that provided to the entire desperately impoverished continent of Africa.
America Right or Wrong Page 31