Any condemnation of the pro-Israeli liberal intelligentsia of the United States, both Jewish and non-Jewish, must be tempered not only by the terrible impact of the Holocaust, but by an awareness of the extremely difficult ideological and ethical position in which they have found themselves since 1945, a position that is nothing short of a tragic dilemma. This stems in origin from the fact that for equally valid and legitimate reasons, Western Europe and the liberal intelligentsia of the United States on the one hand, and the greater part of the world’s Jewish population on the other, drew opposing conclusions from the catastrophe of Nazism. And this split ran straight through the individual consciousness of most of the Jewish diaspora intelligentsia. This is not an enviable situation to be in.
The Western European elites, and the liberal intelligentsia of the United States, essentially decided that the correct response to Nazism, and to the hideous national conflicts that preceded, engendered, and accompanied Nazism, was to seek to limit, transcend, and overcome nationalism. Hence the creation of common European institutions leading to the European Union, and the great respect paid in Europe, and by many liberal Americans, to the UN and to developing institutions of international law and cooperation. Given the strong past connections between chauvinist nationalism and anti-Semitism (even to a degree in the United States), and the role of nationalism in Fascism, most of the Jewish diaspora intelligentsia naturally also identify with these attempts to overcome nationalism around the world.
However, given the failure of the Western world (including the United States) in the 1930s and 1940s to prevent genocide, or even—shamefully—to offer refuge to Jews fleeing the Nazis, it is entirely natural that a great many Jews decided that guarantees from the international community were not remotely sufficient to protect them against further attempts at massacre. They felt that, in addition, a Jewish national state was required, backed by a strong Jewish nationalism. This nationalism embodied strong and genuine elements of national liberation and social progressivism, akin to those of other oppressed peoples in the world, and it was from this that Zionism drew its powerful elements of moral nobility, as represented by figures like Ahad Ha’am, Martin Buber, and Nahum Goldmann.73
Israel also developed a central importance for Jewish diaspora communities because of the decline of religious belief and practice, of ethnic traditions, and of the Yiddish language, concurrent with the steep rise in intermarriage. These trends meant that these communities themselves feared that they might be in the process of dissolution.74 Judaism had always been what Heinrich Heine called “the portable Fatherland of the Jews”; its eclipse threatened a form of soft extinction, unless a substitute could be found.75
Jacques Torczyner of the Zionist Organization of America declared during the Carter administration that “whatever the administration will want to do…the Jews in America will fight for Israel. It is the only thing we have to sustain our Jewish identity.”76 Or according to religious historian Martin Marty, “as other bases of Jewish identity continued to dwindle…Israel progressively became the spiritual center of the American Jewish experience.”77
But although the bases for this sacralization of the nation were specifically and tragically Jewish, the advancement of nationalism as a substitute for fading religion and the transmogrification of religious passions into nationalist ones also forms part of a wider pattern in nationalist history, and one that in the past has contributed to national and international catastrophes: “Our most blooming life for Thy most withered tree, Germany!”78
Unlike most other national senses of martyrdom, the Jewish one was truly justified—unlike that of France after 1871, or Germany after 1918. But that has not saved many Jews from the pernicious results of such a sense of martyrdom in terms of nationalist extremism and self-justification—any more than it has the Armenians, for example. It has produced an atmosphere that has shaded into and tolerated the religious–nationalist fundamentalism of Israeli extremist groups and different groups of ideological settlers in the occupied territories, and crude hatred of Arabs and Muslims.79
Furthermore, while Zionism originated in the late nineteenth century and is a classic example of the modern “construction” of a nation, the Jewish ethnoreligious basis on which it did so represents the oldest and deepest “primordial” national identity in the world. As demonstrated by a series of clashes within Israel over the definition of who is a Jew, who can become a Jew, and who has the right to decide these questions, this is a basis for nationalism that, if not necessarily completely antithetical to notions of civic nationalism based on the American Creed, certainly has a complex and uneasy relationship to them, and this too is perceived by Muslim peoples to whom the United States wishes to spread its version of civic nationalism.
An appeal to religious and quasi-religious nationalist justifications for rule over Palestine was also implicit in the entire Zionist enterprise. Given the large majority of Palestinian Arabs throughout Palestine—even at the moment of the declaration of Israeli statehood in 1948—the claim to create a Jewish state in Palestine could not easily be justified on grounds of national liberation alone. It needed also to be backed by appeals to ancient ethnic claims and religious scripts, and by civilizational arguments of superiority to the backward Arabs and “making the desert bloom.” These could not easily be assented to by other peoples around the world, and indeed made even many Western liberals think uneasily of their own nationalist and imperialist pasts.80
Following one original strand of Zionism, great Zionist leaders and thinkers like Nahum Goldmann originally dreamed that Israel would, like other civilized states, also be anchored in international institutions, and might even form part of a multiethnic federation with the Arab states of the Middle East, thereby resolving the dilemma in which Jewish diaspora liberalism found itself.81
Tragically, the circumstances in which Israel was created made any such resolution of the Jewish intellectual and moral dilemma exceptionally difficult, and would have done so for any group in this position. The intention here is not to condemn or vilify, but simply to point out the nature of the dilemma and the sad and dangerous consequences that have stemmed from it.
Amos Oz has written of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict that
Zionism is a movement of national liberation, which has no need of any “consent” or “agreement” from the Arabs. But it must recognize that the conflict between us and the Palestinians is not a cheap Western in which civilized “goodies” are fighting against native “baddies.” It is more like a Greek tragedy. It represents a clash between two conflicting rights. The Palestinian Arabs have a strong and legitimate claim, and the Israelis must recognize this, without this recognition leading us into self-denial or feelings of guilt. We are bound to accept a painful compromise, and admit that the land of Israel is the homeland of two nations, and we must accept its partition in one form or another.82
It cannot be emphasized too strongly that if the Palestinian Arabs in the 1930s and 1940s had agreed that a large part of Palestine—where they were still a large majority and had until recently been an overwhelming one—should be given up to form the state of Israel, they would have been acting in a way that, as far as I am aware, would have had no precedent in all of human history. And it is not as if intelligent and objective observers did not point this out at the time. As Hannah Arendt wrote in 1945, three years before Israeli independence, the war with the Arabs, and the expulsion of the Palestinians:
American Zionists from left to right adopted unanimously, at their last annual convention held in Atlantic City in October 1944, the demand for a “free and democratic Jewish commonwealth…[which] shall embrace the whole of Palestine, undivided and undiminished”…The Atlantic City Resolution goes even a step further than the Biltmore Program (1942) in which the Jewish minority had granted minority rights to the Arab majority. This time the Arabs were simply not mentioned in the resolution, which obviously leaves them the choice between voluntary emigration or second-c
lass citizenship. It seems to admit that only opportunist reasons had previously prevented the Zionist movement from stating its final aims. These aims now seem to be completely identical with those of the extremists as far as the future political constitution of Palestine is concerned…By stating it with such bluntness in what seemed to them an appropriate moment, Zionists have forfeited for a long time any chance of pourparlers with Arabs; for whatever Zionists may offer, they will not be trusted.83
Throughout history, even the great assimilating religious–nationalist movements and empires were only rarely able to incorporate new peoples without some violence, and—despite the dreams of Herzl and others concerning a multiethnic Jewish state—Zionism is very explicitly not a force for the assimilation of non-Jews. In other words, whatever one’s condemnation of the Palestinians and Arabs for their long delay in coming to terms with the reality of Israel, to blame them for initially resisting that reality is to engage in moral and historical idiocy. While condemning the Arabs as demons, it suggests that they should have acted as saints. The tragedy of 1948 is therefore not only of a clash of valid rights, but also that neither side in this conflict could have acted otherwise. Abba Eban said just as much, years later:
The Palestine Arabs, were it not for the Balfour Declaration and the League of Nations Mandate, could have counted on eventual independence either as a separate state or in an Arab context acceptable to them…It was impossible for us to avoid struggling for Jewish statehood and equally impossible for them to grant us what we asked. If they had submitted to Zionism with docility, they would have been the first people in history to have voluntarily renounced their majority status.84
Thus it is surprising that self-styled Western liberals, scholars, and intellectuals among Israel’s partisans go on using the Palestinian rejection of partition in 1948 as a form of permanently damning original sin. The reasons why most Americans have had such difficulty recognizing this, however, go beyond the desire to support Israel and edit out anything that might qualify that support or give any ammunition to the enemies of Israel. They are also related to features of American culture well summed up by T. R. Fehrenbach concerning the deep unwillingness of Americans to look seriously at the fate of the Native Americans: “The culmination of the Indian wars was a tragedy, with all the classic inevitability of tragedy, and against true tragedy the North American soul revolts.”85
Thus to his great credit, Saul Bellow, in the 1970s, joined Walter Laqueur, Leonard Bernstein, and other leading Jewish American cultural and intellectual figures in publicly opposing the establishment of settlements in the Occupied Territories (the then senator Abraham Ribicoff took the same line).86 In his memoir To Jerusalem and Back, Bellow acknowledged that “a sweeping denial of Arab grievances is an obstacle to peace.” At the same time, he agrees with Laqueur in saying of the Zionists that in seeking to establish a state “their sin was that they behaved like other peoples. Nation states have never come into existence peacefully and without injustices.”87
Yet these writers did not follow up with the obvious corollary, which is that the Palestinians too “behaved like other peoples” in fighting to hold on to their ancestral land where they were a large majority. Even Norman Mailer, while strongly criticizing present Israeli policies, has suggested that the Palestinians are at fault for not having welcomed Jewish refugees in the 1940s.
Instead, self-described liberals like Alan Dershowitz have explicitly used arguments of collective Arab and Palestinian guilt as a justification. This is not only false historically, but is also incompatible with contemporary liberal values, and feeds into American chauvinism toward Muslims and Arabs. According to Dershowitz, “the Arabs bore sufficient guilt for the Holocaust and for supporting the wrong side during World War II to justify their contribution, as part of the losing side, in the rearrangement of territory and demography that inevitably follows a cataclysmic world conflict.”88
Saul Bellow, for his part, in the passage cited above, immediately slips into familiar tropes about Arab hostility to Israel being akin to German cruelty toward the Jews, both of them reflecting a kind of “insanity,” and ends on a plangent note that simply sweeps away concrete issues of Israeli behavior and Palestinian suffering: “Israel must reckon with the world, and with the madness of the world, and to a most grotesque extent. And all because the Israelis wished to lead Jewish lives in a Jewish state.” Such statements, which in one form or another I have heard repeated again and again in conversations in the United States, laid the foundations for a view of “the world” itself as the mad and evil enemy of Israel and the United States.
In contrast, David Ben Gurion himself is reported (by Nahum Goldmann) to have asked in private:
Why should the Arabs make peace? If I were an Arab leader I would never make terms with Israel. That is natural: we have taken their country. Sure, God promised it to us, but what does that matter to them? Our God is not theirs. We came from Israel, it’s true, but two thousand years ago, and what is that to them? There has been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their fault? They only see one thing: we have come here and stolen their country. Why should they accept that?89
Together with the establishment of the Jewish state came the war of 1948 and the expulsion of most of the Arab population of Palestine from the territories of the new Jewish state. So intolerable to the liberal conscience was this action, and so deeply did it seem to call into question the legitimacy of the new state, that for two generations it had to be denied, with absurd arguments being advanced instead—in the face of logic and both Palestinian and Jewish testimony—that the Palestinians had somehow fled voluntarily on the orders of the Arab governments and their own leaders. Indeed, some leading Israeli partisans in the United States are in essence still arguing this.90
For my own part, though, I deeply regret the human suffering caused by the expulsions of 1948, but I have never been especially shocked by them—if only because the facts were largely available, from Israeli sources quoted in various books, long before Israeli revisionist historians “revealed” from the late 1980s on that the expulsion of the Palestinians was in large part a process deliberately planned by the Israeli leadership and accompanied by numerous atrocities.91 And with regret—and without in any way endorsing the infamous collective guilt argument advanced by Dershowitz and others—I must on the whole accept Morris’s recent arguments that this cruel process was necessary if the state of Israel was to be established and its Jewish population was to avoid renewed extermination or exile:
Ben-Gurion was a transferist. He understood that there could be no Jewish state with a large and hostile Arab minority in its midst. There would be no such state. It would not be able to exist…Ben-Gurion was right. If he had not done what he did, a state would not have come into being. That has to be clear. It is impossible to evade it. Without the uprooting of the Palestinians, a Jewish state would not have arisen here…There are circumstances in history that justify ethnic cleansing. I know that this term is completely negative in the discourse of the 21st century, but when the choice is between ethnic cleansing and genocide—the annihilation of your people—I prefer ethnic cleansing.92
This was, after all, the 1940s. At the end of World War II, some 12 million Germans were expelled from eastern Germany when those lands were annexed to Poland and Russia, and three million from Czechoslovakia, amidst immense suffering, atrocity, and loss of life. Hungarians were deported from Czechoslovakia and Rumania. And allied peoples also suffered. As Poles moved westward into former German lands, so millions were deported by Stalin into Poland from the Soviet Union to create more ethnically homogeneous populations in Soviet Lithuania, Byelorussia, and Ukraine. In 1947, a year before the creation of Israel and the expulsion of the Palestinians, more than 10 million Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims fled from their homes as a result of the partition of the British Indian Empire, amidst horrendous bloodshed. A generation earlier, Greece and Turkey had conducted a great exchange of pop
ulations after repeated national conflicts involving great atrocities on both sides.
Horrible though these events were, they did in some ways lay the ground for a future absence of war, which is difficult to imagine if these populations had remained mixed up together. Certainly it is difficult to imagine how a Jewish state could possibly have been established and consolidated with such a huge and understandably hostile Palestinian minority.93 Finally, Israel does have a legitimate case that the subsequent expulsion to Israel of hundreds of thousands of Jews from Arab countries did create a kind of rough justice between Israel and the Arab world.
Today it should also be quite clear that if one of the absolute preconditions for peace between Israel and the Palestinians is Israeli abandonment of many settlements in the Occupied Territories, the other is Palestinian abandonment of the “right of return” for those Palestinians who were expelled in 1948.94 I should add that I strongly support the Jewish “right of return” to Israel within the borders of 1967 as an ultimate fallback line in the event of a real return of anti-Semitism elsewhere in the world.
But while the expulsions may have been necessary for Israel’s survival, the lies that they have generated over the succeeding generations, and which continue to this day, have been extremely dangerous for both Israel and the United States. It would have been far better if Israel, and partisans of Israel in the United States, had—like Ben Gurion in private—accepted the truth of what happened in 1948 and then used it as the basis for thinking seriously about compensation and laying the foundations for future peace. Instead, the pro-Israel camp committed itself to an interlocking set of moral and historical falsehoods.95 Over time, the intellectual consequences of these positions have spread like a forest of aquatic weeds until they have entangled and choked a significant part of the U.S. national debate concerning relations not only with the Muslim world, but with the outside world in general, and have thereby fed certain strains of American nationalism.
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