America Right or Wrong

by Lieven, Anatol;

  Accusations that authors like Mearsheimer, Walt, and myself are guilty of “anti-Semitism” have formed part of a much wider campaign suggesting that the threat from anti-Semitism in the world is greater than at any time since the 1930s—or even as bad as then. Thus Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League states, “I am convinced we currently face as great a threat to the safety and security of the Jewish people as the one we faced in the 1930s—if not a greater one.”117 Phyllis Chesler wrote that “I fear that the Jews may again be sacrificed to a world gone mad and in search of a sacred scapegoat.”118 Representatives of the Christian Right in the United States joined in these warnings.

  This language is itself more than a little mad. Despite the rise of China, America as of 2012 remains the world’s only superpower and a stable liberal democracy. It is committed to support and defend Israel. Unlike the situation of the defenseless Jews of Europe under Nazi rule, Israel not only exists as a haven for Jews fleeing persecution, but possesses nuclear weapons and has repeatedly shown its willingness and ability successfully to defend itself against attack. Unlike in the 1930s, the American political classes are overwhelmingly opposed to anti-Semitism in any form. The major European states are also stable and successful democracies, in which Jews enjoy the same rights as all other citizens. With very rare exceptions like Austria, anti-Semitic parties are tiny, marginal, or even illegal. Among the larger extreme right-wing parties, like the National Front in France and the Liberal Democrats in Russia, anti-Semitic feeling is now dwarfed by hatred of Muslims. In fact, Muslim minorities seem to have pretty definitively taken on the role of the alien and disliked “other” in European right-wing thinking. It is overwhelmingly thugs from these Muslim minorities who are carrying out physical attacks on Jews in Europe, while these communities are themselves being targeted by right-wing thugs from the majority European populations. This is worrying, and disgraceful, but it is not the 1930s.

  The leaders and main political parties in these countries for their part have repeatedly denounced anti-Semitism, and their programs or ideologies bear no resemblance whatsoever to those of the Nazis or the other extreme Rightist movements before 1945. Indeed, the entire European project, including the enlargement of the EU to the former Soviet bloc, has been explicitly based on a repudiation of those past crimes and errors. Although there is a historical strain of anti-Semitism in certain sections of the European Left, the absolutely overwhelming majority of mainstream left-wing critics of Israel in Europe—among whom are many Jewish Europeans—would never contemplate the introduction into their own states of even the mildest of the anti-Semitic measures of the past. Such steps as restrictions on entry into universities, exclusion from leading social institutions, or banning from the civil service and officer corps would be utterly alien to their traditions and ideology, which stress openness and equality for people of all races, ethnicities, and religions.

  Thus in the course of vilifying the contemporary French Left as anti-Semitic, American critics have forgotten that it was the Left that defended Dreyfus, that three Socialist premiers of France have been Jewish, and that though there certainly were anti-Semites on the Left, the defining hostility of the French Left historically was not anti-Semitism, but anticlericalism. Whatever writers like Gabriel Schoenfeld may allege, there is in fact no “clear fit between…anti-Jewish hatred and the general ideological predispositions of the contemporary European Left.”119

  Russia, of course, is not a stable democracy, but even there the government has condemned anti-Semitism and sought good relations with Israel (leading to excellent relations between Vladimir Putin and Natan Sharansky, for example), and Jews hold leading positions in the state and economy. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, no less than three Russians of Jewish origin have been prime minister of Russia: Sergei Kiriyenko, Yevgeny Primakov, and Mikhail Fradkov. How on earth can this situation be rationally compared to the world of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and Antonescu?

  Such charges are in part natural and spontaneous, stemming from the ghastly history of Jewish persecution culminating in the Holocaust. Seymour Lipset notes that in 1985, according to a poll, a majority of Jewish Americans in San Francisco were sincerely convinced that no Jew could be elected to the U.S. Congress from San Francisco—when in fact all three members of Congress were Jewish Americans, plus the two state senators and the mayor!120

  In the words of Irving Howe, which also have relevance for the wider feelings of hereditary defeat and persecution among many Americans described in chapter 3:

  Haunted by the demons of modern history, most of the immigrants and many of their children kept a fear, somewhere in their minds, that anti-Semitism might again become a serious problem in America. By mid-century, it was often less an actual fear than a persuasion that they should keep this fear, all past experience warranting alertness even if there was no immediate reason for anxiety…It is crucial to note here that even in the mid-twentieth century many American Jews, certainly a good many of those who came out of the east European immigrant world, still felt like losers. Being able to buy a home, or move into a suburb, or send kids to college could not quickly dissolve that feeling. Black antagonism…was linked in their minds with a possible resurgence of global anti-Semitism and the visible enmity of Arabs towards Israel. And who could easily separate, in such reactions, justified alarm from “paranoid” excess?121

  Accusations of anti-Semitism are also being used consciously and deliberately as part of a strategy to try to silence critics of Israel. This was in effect admitted in a backhanded way by Norman Podhoretz, Nathan Perlmutter, and Irving Kristol, who urged that anti-Semitic statements on the part of Christian conservatives like Pat Robertson should be forgiven because they are supporters of Israel: “After all, why should Jews care about the theology of a fundamentalist preacher when they do not for a moment believe that he speaks with any authority on the question of God’s attentiveness to human prayer? And what do such theological abstractions matter as against the mundane fact that the same preacher is vigorously pro-Israel?”122 Or in the words of Perlmutter: “Is it good for the Jews? This question satisfied, I proceed to the secondary issues…Jews can live with all the domestic priorities of the Christian Right on which liberal Jews differ so radically because none of these concerns is as important as Israel.”123

  The Israeli lobby, like the American nationalist Right, pays special attention to U.S. academia, which is the one major portion of U.S. society where a genuine debate on this subject does take place.124 Now it should be noted that, as in Europe, left-wing and Arab groups on campus do all too frequently engage in rhetoric and actions that are not only excessively anti-Israeli but also on occasions anti-Semitic.125 As David Friedman accurately writes of this wing of American academic politics, “many of the speeches have a mindless quality which repels the listener. The speakers are loud in their denunciations of American and Israeli policy, but they lose moral force and political effectiveness by maintaining a tight-lipped silence about terrorism and dictatorship in the Middle East and elsewhere.”126

  American teachers and administrators on campuses where such propaganda is prevalent have a duty to combat it and where appropriate to suppress it. However, it should be noted that however revolting, the forces guilty of these rhetorical excesses are utterly powerless beyond the narrow confines of some U.S. university campuses, and of course not dominant even there. In the world of politics, lobbying, and think tanks in Washington, DC, they are, in my experience, virtually nonexistent. They do not even remotely begin to compare in influence on American society, politics, and government with the Israel lobby.127 Moreover, it must be emphatically stated that Mearsheimer and Walt are certainly not guilty of whitewashing Muslim crimes in order to attack Israel.

  Indeed, it often seems that their most important role is to be used by partisans of Israel in the West as “straw men” whose extremist arguments can be both easily demolished and used as a diversionary tactic to avoid engaging with the ser
ious arguments of Israeli liberals and patriots like Avraham Burg, Amos Oz, Yossi Beilin, or General Shlomo Gazit.128 For in the words of Akiva Eldar, in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz:

  It is much easier to claim the whole world is against us than to admit that the State of Israel, which rose as a refuge and source of pride for Jews, has not only turned into a place less Jewish and less safe for its citizens, but has become a genuine source of danger and a source of shameful embarrassment to Jews who choose to live beyond its borders. Arguing that it takes an anti-Semite to call the Israeli government’s policies of 2003 a danger to world peace is a contemptible cheapening of the term anti-Semitism.129

  The campaign to brand critics of Israel as anti-Semites, and to portray a monstrous and terrifying wave of anti-Semitism in Europe and the world, has effects on the United States that go far beyond the specific issues concerned, effects that directly strengthen the forces of the “American nationalist antithesis” described and analyzed in this book. This campaign contributes to wider American hostility toward the outside world, made worse by the levels of ignorance described in chapter 2. To judge by the comments of university teachers with whom I have spoken, for all too many American students the entire history of France has been reduced to the Dreyfus Case and Vichy, the whole history of Germany before 1945 to the Holocaust, and the whole history of Tsarist Russia to Cossacks and pogroms.

  In the Muslim world and among Muslim immigrant groups in Europe, hatred of Israel certainly has spilled over into hatred of Jews in general, and this hatred is being fed by recycled anti-Semitic myths from the darkest pages of Europe’s past. This tendency must be combated as part of general efforts to bring peace to the region, to improve its level of education and public discourse, and to lay the foundations for democracy and help it develop in other ways—and in Europe, to help integrate Muslim immigrants into Western society.130

  However, to use these vile beliefs as a means of absolving Israel of any responsibility for its actions is just as wrong—and just as bad for Israel—as to suggest that the existence of anti-Americanism in the world means that it does not matter what the United States does. All the evidence suggests, for example, that the flare-up in anti-Semitic violence by Muslims in France stemmed directly from what they saw as Israeli atrocities against the Palestinians. Granted, their views of these atrocities were exaggerated, but equally, their criminal response was a response to events as well as the product of a warped intellectual background.

  It is entirely clear that while Muslim prejudice against Jewish and Christian “infidels” (though to a much lesser extent than against Hindu and other “heathens”) existed historically, modern anti-Semitism in the Muslim world stems overwhelmingly from the creation of Israel and its real or perceived crimes against the Palestinians. In answer to charges by Dershowitz and others that it was the other way around, and that Muslim anti-Semitism led to anti-Israeli feeling, Brian Klug has proposed the simple counterfactual question: What if a state had been established in Palestine by Christian European settlers, as in French Algeria? Would the Muslim world not have opposed it just as fiercely? And in these circumstances, would there have been any strong degree of anti-Semitism in the Muslim world?131

  Equally, if as a matter of just compensation for the Holocaust Germany east of the Oder-Neisse line had been given to Jews for a state in 1945 rather than being divided between Poland and the Soviet Union, would Muslims or anyone else in the world (other than Germans and some Poles) have denounced this as unjust or a Jewish crime? In this case, could there conceivably have been a wave of anti-Semitism among Muslims?

  As Klug argues, hostility toward Israel in the developing and former colonial world (leading to repeated votes in the UN condemning Israel, and the infamous—and later reversed—equation of Zionism with racism), although it is colored by anti-Semitism, stems fundamentally from anticolonial feeling related to hostility toward Western colonists and the circumstances of Israel’s gestation under British imperial rule.

  Of course, much of this left-wing anticolonial attitude toward Israel may well be wrong, cynical, and even wicked. For that matter, this is true of a good part of “anticolonial” politics and rhetoric in general, both in the past and today. But the repellent and cynical use of such rhetoric by Robert Mugabe or the rulers of Burma is not generally held to compromise the positive, enlightened, state-building anticolonialism of a Nehru or a Mandela; and the failure in the U.S. mainstream to understand the anticolonial roots of hostility toward Israel in much of the world has wider effects in fuelling a contempt for world public opinion. It also contributes to an American blindness to the reasons why many former colonies and dependencies around the world that are by no means instinctively anti-American are nonetheless deeply hostile to the idea of American (or Western) military intervention in other states, and to any hint of new Western “civilizing missions.”

  But the damage done by much of the present discourse in the United States concerning anti-Semitism goes beyond its results in terms of increasing hostility toward Muslims, Europeans, and others, and thereby undermining the “war against terrorism.” It also corrodes American political culture in general, by increasing nationalist paranoia, arrogance, hatred, and irrationality. When people can be anti-Semites without even knowing it and without proposing or believing anything that would have been regarded historically as anti-Semitic, when highly decorated Israeli soldiers become traitors and “self-hating Jews,” when anti-Semitism itself loses all historical or cultural context and becomes a kind of free-floating miasma, drifting unchanged down the centuries, when it is argued that “Arab pre-Islamic persecution of the Jews began as early as the third century BCE,” then rational debate is at an end.132 This discourse has contributed to the atmosphere on the American Right as part of which—as described in previous chapters—President Obama has been accused of being a Muslim, a traitor, a non-American, and a sympathizer with terrorists.

  In the words of Arendt in 1945, which remain entirely true in 2012: “The Zionists likewise fled the field of actual conflicts into a doctrine of eternal anti-Semitism governing the relations of Jews and Gentiles everywhere and always, and mainly responsible for the survival of the Jewish people. Thus both sides [i.e., the Zionists and the Assimilationists] relieved themselves of the arduous tasks of fighting anti-Semitism on its own grounds, which were political, and even of the unpleasant task of analyzing its true causes.”133

  Because by their nature such charges of anti-Semitism, unbacked by concrete evidence, can be neither proved nor disproved, they lead discussion away from the clearly lit arena of rational public discussion and toward the dark corridors of paranoia and conspiracy theories, evil spirits, and demonic possession—regions of the mind that in the past have been precisely the breeding grounds of anti-Semitic madness. In this way, parts of the U.S. discourse on Israel feed into the irrational and fanatical elements of the American nationalist antithesis in ways that endanger the United States, Israel, and indeed the world.

  Conclusion

  Gnothi Seauton (“Know Thyself”)

  —Epigraph in the Temple of Delphi

  The American Creed, American civic nationalism, and the American democratic system they sustain have been a great force for civilization in the world. Within the United States they have, in the past, provided what might be called America’s self-correcting mechanism, which has saved the United States from falling into either authoritarian rule or a permanent state of militant chauvinism.

  Periods of intense nationalism, such as the panic leading to the passage of the Alien and Sedition Acts in the 1790s, the Know-Nothings of the 1840s, the anti-German hysteria of World War I, the anti-Japanese chauvinism of World War II, and McCarthyism in the 1950s, have been followed by a return to a more tolerant and pluralist equilibrium. Chauvinist and bellicose nationalism, though always present, has not become the U.S. norm and has not led to democratic institutions being replaced by authoritarian ones. Moreover, imperialist tendencies in th
e United States have been restrained by the belief, stemming from the creed, that America does not have and should not have an empire, as well as by isolationism and an unwillingness to make the sacrifices required.

  Given the power of the American Creed in American society, there are good grounds to hope that this self-correcting mechanism will continue to operate in future. Indeed, even by the middle of 2004 the wilder ambitions of the Bush administration had already been considerably reduced as a result of public disquiet over the aftermath of the war in Iraq, and of the fundamental rationality of the greater part of the American establishment; and the Bush administration was succeeded in 2008 by that of President Obama, who, while he certainly sought to maintain U.S. predominance in the world, did so by far more restrained, multilateral, and intelligent means than those of Bush and his team.

  However, there are also grounds for concern that in the future this self-correcting mechanism may fail and America may be drawn in a more and more chauvinist direction. The reasons for this can be summed up by saying that in the past the United States went out to shape the world, while being itself protected from the world. Militarily, it was protected by the oceans; economically, it was protected by the immense strength and dominance of the American economy. This combination led in no small part to the unique American combination of power, omnipresence, innocence, and ignorance vis-à-vis the rest of humanity.

  The first change is obviously that like most other countries in the twentieth century, the American heartland is now at risk of terrible attack with no precedents since the French-backed Indian menace disappeared after 1763. The Soviet nuclear menace was obviously a terrifying one, and had a seriously disturbing effect on U.S. politics, but no attack ever actually occurred. Throughout the cold war, not one American was ever killed by Communism on American soil. In contrast, a monstrous terrorist attack on the U.S. mainland occurred on September 11, 2001. It whipped aspects of American nationalism into a fury, and this fury was then directed by a U.S. administration and its domestic supporters against quite different targets.