America Right or Wrong

by Lieven, Anatol;

  68. Benvenisti, “The Turning Point in Israel.”

  69. Leon Uris, Exodus (New York: Bantam Books, 1959). The conflation of images of the American and Israeli settler in American iconography is rather amusingly illustrated by the cover, showing the Star of David and the ship Exodus flanked by two blonde, blue-eyed, square-jawed supposed Jewish fighters in Palestine—the very image of American pioneers from a Hollywood B-movie. See also Christison, Perceptions of Palestine, 103–104.

  70. Cf. Tony Smith, Foreign Attachments: The Power of Ethnic Groups in the Making of American Foreign Policy (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 16ff; Mitchell Geoffrey Bard, The Water’s Edge and Beyond: Defining the Limits to Domestic Influence on US Middle East Policy (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1991).

  71. Cf. Lind, “The Israel Lobby”, Prospect Magazine, London, April 20 2002, at. http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2002/04/theisraellobby/.

  72. Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument with Historical Illustrations (London: Pelican Books, 1980), 81–85, 216–220, 304, 310n, where the war and expulsions of 1948 and the nature of Israeli military rule over the Occupied Territories are both ignored; and Exodus and Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 1985). This highly interesting work, with its sober and moderate rereading of the lessons of the Bible, is certainly an argument against Israeli extremism. However, it devotes only 3 pages (pp. 141–144) out of 149 to the dispossession and massacre of the Canaanites as described in the Old Testament, and so contorted is the language that after three readings its meaning—if any—for contemporary events and policies is still not clear to me. The words “Palestinian” and “Arab” do not appear.

  73. For the philosophy and views of Ahad Ha’am, see Shlomo Avineri, The Making of Modern Zionism: The Intellectual Origins of the Jewish State (New York: Basic Books, 1981), 112–124; for Ha’am’s views on Jewish treatment of the Arab population of Palestine, see Feuerlicht, The Fate of the Jews, 225–226.

  74. Nahum Goldmann, Autobiography: Sixty Years of Jewish Life, trans. Helen Sebba (New York: Holt, Rhinehart and Winston, 1969), 332–333.

  75. For the centrality of the Divine Presence and His worship to the Jewish diaspora communities and traditions, see Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, A Letter in the Scroll: Understanding Our Jewish Identity and Exploring the Legacy of the World’s Oldest Religion (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 122–180; Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers: The Journey of the East European Jews to America and the Life They Found and Made (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 11–14.

  76. Jewish Observer and Middle East Review, June 10, 1977. Quoted in Feuerlicht, The Fate of the Jews, 170; Howe, World of Our Fathers, 628; cf. also Goldmann, Autobiography: Sixty Years of Jewish Life, 315.

  77. Martin Marty, Pilgrims in Their Own Land: 500 Years of Religion in America (New York: Penguin, 1985), 462–463; see also Kenneth D. Wald, Religion and Politics in the United States (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003), 153.

  78. Cf. Carlton J. H. Hayes, Nationalism: A Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1960); Hans Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism (New York: Macmillan, 1945), 574ff.

  79. Cf. Oz, In the Land of Israel.

  80. Concerning Israel’s overall achievements as a state and society—and, like him, leaving aside for the moment Israel’s record in the Occupied Territories—I would endorse the glowing assessment by Professor Amnon Rubenstein quoted in Alan Dershowitz, The Case for Israel (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2003), 225; and indeed expressed, albeit in more wry and ambiguous terms, in Amos Elon’s portrait of Israel, The Israelis: Founders and Sons.

  81. Goldmann, Autobiography: Sixty Years of Jewish Life, 299–300.

  82. Amos Oz, “From Jerusalem to Cairo: Escaping from the Shadow of the Past,” in Israel, Palestine and Peace: Essays (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994), 36–37.

  83. Hannah Arendt, “Zionism Reconsidered,” Menorah Journal 33, no. 2 (Autumn 1945): 213–214.

  84. Abba Eban, Personal Witness: Israel Through My Eyes (New York: Putnam, 1992), 49–50.

  85. Fehrenbach, Lone Star, 529.

  86. Cf. Feuerlicht, Fate of the Jews, 174.

  87. Saul Bellow, To Jerusalem and Back: A Personal Account (New York: Viking, 1976), 158, 160–163.

  88. Dershowitz, The Case for Israel, 60; for the amalgamation of the Palestinians and Nazis in Israeli and Israeli lobby rhetoric, see Christison, Perceptions of Palestine, 119ff. Concerning the terrible results of such assumptions of collective guilt, see, e.g., Thomas Friedman, From Beirut to Jerusalem (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1989), 163, on how the common Israeli elision of the words “Palestinian” and “terrorist” led to indifference to the Sabra and Shatila massacres. For a warning of this risk in the American “war against terrorism,” cf. William Pfaff, “As Captor, the US Risks Dehumanizing Itself,” International Herald Tribune, January 30, 2002.

  89. Quoted in Nahum Goldmann, The Jewish Paradox (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1978), 99.

  90. Cf. Dershowitz, The Case for Israel, 78–90.

  91. Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–49 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), and the account of the 1948 conflict in his Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–2001 (New York: Random House, 1999), 191–258. For a discussion of his work and this issue by Israeli and Palestinian scholars, see the essays in Eugene L. Rogan and Avi Shlaim, eds., The War for Palestine: Rewriting the History of 1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). For earlier descriptions of this issue, see the Israeli reports and eyewitness accounts of the expulsions and the terrorization and oppression of the Palestinian population quoted in Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch, 136–143; Avnery, Israel Without Zionism, 223ff; Feuerlicht, Lone Star, 242–267; and Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Times Books, 1979), xxxvii, 83–114.

  92. “Survival of the Fittest,” Benny Morris interviewed by Ari Shavit, Ha’aretz, January 9, 2004.

  93. Cf. Anatol Lieven, “Divide and Survive,” Prospect (London) (May 1999).

  94. Cf. Anatol Lieven, “Peace Cannot be Fudged,” Financial Times, September 10, 2003.

  95. For a recent denial of the expulsions, coupled with an accusation that talking about this had weakened the national will of Israeli liberal intellectuals and contributed to their futile search for peace in the 1990s, see Efraim Karsh, “Revisiting Israel’s ‘Original Sin’: The Strange Case of Benny Morris,” Commentary 116, no. 2 (September 2003).

  96. Sunday Times, June 15, 1969, quoted in Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch, 264. The important point is not, however, whether there was a fully self-conscious Palestinian nationality in 1948—which is indeed a highly debatable question. Rather, the point is twofold: that in 1948 there was a majority people in Palestine that was well aware that it was different from and threatened by the Jews, and that by 1969 it was already obviously wrong to deny that the Palestinians had developed a clear national identity; in 2004 this would be madness.

  97. Quoted in Lanouette, “The Many Faces of the Jewish Lobby in America.”

  98. For example, Shlomo Avineri’s magisterial study of the intellectual bases of Zionism (see above, note 27) contains no reference to “Palestinians.” The index entry for Arabs under “Palestine” reads “Palestine: Arab problem in.”

  99. Said, Question of Palestine, 51.

  100. Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (1909; repr., Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1989), 75; for a kind of distillation of the Israeli lobby’s presentation of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict—with no mention of the expulsions of 1948 or of any Israeli atrocity—see Phyllis Chesler, “A Brief History of Arab Attacks Against Israel, 1908–1970s,” in her The New Anti-Semitism, 44–52.

  101. Lind, “The Israel Lobby.”

  102. Arnaud de Bochgrave, “Democracy in the Middle East,” Washington Times, March 5, 2004.

  103. Cf. Thomas L. Friedman, “An Intriguing Signal from the Saudi Cro
wn Prince,” New York Times, February 17, 2002; editorial, “A Peace Impulse Worth Pursuing,” New York Times, February 21, 2002; editorial, “Support for the Saudi Initiative,” New York Times, February 28, 2002.

  104. Cf. “Israel and the Occupied Territories: Country Report on Human Rights Practices—2003,” released by the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labor, U.S. Department of State, February 25, 2004, http://www.state.gov/j/drl/rls/hrrpt/2003/27929.htm.

  105. For the establishment of the settlements and their role in preventing full diplomatic exploitation of the Sadat initiative, see Bernard Avishai, Tragedy of Zionism: How Its Revolutionary Past Haunts Israeli Democracy (New York: Helios Press, 2002), 272–296; see also Meron Benvenisti, Intimate Enemies: Jews and Arabs in a Shared Land (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 30–37, 52–71; Bernard Wasserstein, Israel and Palestine: Why they fight and can they stop? (London: Profile, 2003).

  106. Cf. William Safire, “Post-Oslo Mideast,” New York Times, June 27, 2002; editorial, “Those Arab Peacemakers,” Washington Times, May 20, 2002; Victor Davis Hanson, “Our Enemies, the Saudis,” Commentary (July–August 2002); for liberal Jewish American responses in favor of the Saudi offer, see Richard Cohen, “Kristol’s Unwelcome Message,” Washington Post, June 11, 2002; and Henry Siegman, “Will Israel take a Chance?” New York Times, February 21, 2002.

  107. Daniel Pipes, “Does Israel Need a Plan?,” Commentary 115, no. 2 (February 2003); Yaacov Lozowick, Right to Exist: A Moral Defense of Israel’s Wars (New York: Doubleday, 2003); cf. also Daniel Ayalon (Israeli ambassador to the United States), “Israel’s Right to Be Israel,” Washington Post, August 24, 2003.

  108. Newt Gingrich, “Barack Obama’s Morally Confused Mideast Policies Endanger Israel,” June 21, 2011, http://www.jta.org/news/article/2011/06/21.

  109. Henry Siegman, “Israel: The Threat from Within,” New York Review of Books 51, no. 3 (February 26, 2004); cf. also Oz, “Whose Holy Land?,” in Israel, Palestine and Peace, 91.

  110. Elon, The Israelis: Founders and Sons, xiii.

  111. Cf. Benvenisti, “The Turning Point in Israel.”

  112. For the background to the failure of the negotiations in 2000–2001, see the debate in the New York Review of Books between various participants in the talks: Robert Malley and Hussein Agha: “Camp David: the Tragedy of Errors,” August 9, 2001; the exchange of letters with Dennis Ross and Gidi Grinstein in the same issue; Benny Morris’s interview with Ehud Barak in the New York Review of Books 49, no. 10 (June 13, 2002); Malley and Agha’s reply in the same issue, and the further exchange on June 27, 2002. For the role of settlement expansion in the 1990s in undermining Palestinian faith in the peace process, see Christison, Perceptions of Palestine, 300ff. See also Deborah Sontag, “Quest for Middle East Peace: How and Why It Failed,” New York Times, July 26, 2001.

  113. Manfred Gerstenfeld, “Anti-Semitism: Integral to European Culture,” in Post Holocaust and Anti-Semitism 19 (April 1, 2004), published by the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs; cf. also Nidra Poller, “Betrayed by Europe: An Expatriate’s Lament,” Commentary (March 2004); Marc Strauss, “The New Face of Anti-Semitism,” Foreign Policy (November/December 2003).

  114. Jonathan Tepperman, “The Anti-Anti-Americans,” New York Times Book Review (December 12, 2004): I would like to express my enduring gratitude to the late Ambassador Bill Maynes and others who wrote to defend me against this repulsive attack. For my own response to Tepperman, see the letters pages of the New York Times, January 2, 2005.

  115. John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007). For an attack on the book by a leading representative of the Israel lobby, which attempts to link them to traditional anti-Semitism, see Abraham Foxman, The Deadliest Lies: The Israel Lobby and the Myth of Jewish Control (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). For a critical view of Foxman’s leadership of the ADL, see James Traub, “Does Abe Foxman Have An Anti-Anti-Semite Problem,” New York Times Magazine (January 14, 2007).

  116. Jimmy Carter, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007).

  117. Foxman, Never Again? 4.

  118. Chesler, The New Anti-Semitism, 3.

  119. Gabriel Schoenfeld, “Israel and the Anti-Semites,” Commentary 113, no. 6 (June 2002); see also Paul Berman, Terror and Liberalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 186–189; Hillel Halkin, “The Return of Anti-Semitism,” Commentary 113, no. 2 (February 2002); Robert S. Wistrich, “The Old-New Anti-Semitism,” National Interest 72 (Summer 2003); Edgar Bronfman and Cobi Benatoff, “Is Darkness Falling on Europe Again?” Financial Times, February 19, 2004; Ruth R. Wisse, “Israel on Campus,” Wall Street Journal, December 13, 2002.

  120. Seymour Martin Lipset, American Exceptionalism: A Double-Edged Sword (New York: W. W. Norton, 1976), 172.

  121. Howe, World of Our Fathers, 630–632; see also Roberta Feuerlicht’s depressing account of how the Holocaust surfaced as a reason given for Jewish fears of blacks during discussions with blacks in New York in the 1970s, to the stupefaction and fury of moderate black representatives; Feuerlicht, The Fate of the Jews, 206–215.

  122. Irving Kristol, “The Political Dilemma of American Jews,” Commentary (July 1984); see also Michael Lind, Up From Conservatism: Why the Right Is Wrong for America (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 99–120; David H. Bennett, The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Right in American History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 423–425.

  123. Nathan Perlmutter, The Real Anti-Semitism in America, quoted in Halsell, Prophecy and Politics, 154–155. See also Shindler, “Likud and the Christian Dispensationalists”; and David Frum, Dead Right (New York: Basic Books, 1994), 159–173.

  124. Cf. the booklet issued by the America Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC): Jonathan S. Kessler and Jeff Schwaber, The AIPAC College Guide: Exposing the Anti-Israel Campaign on Campus, AIPAC Papers on U.S.–Israel Relations no. 7 (1984).

  125. For an excoriating and often justified critique of left-wing attacks on Israel during the cold war, see Conor Cruise O’Brien, The Siege: The Saga of Israel and Zionism (New York: Touchstone Books, 1987).

  126. Cf. David Corn, “The Banning of Rabbi Lerner,” February 10, 2003, http://www.thenation.com/blog/156018/banning-rabbi-lerner; Michael Lerner, “The Antiwar Anti-Semites,” Wall Street Journal, February 12, 2003, David Friedman, “Democracy and the Peace Movement,” Tikkun, (May/June 2003); see also the response by Joel Kovel, “Anti-Semitism on the Left and the Special Status of Israel,” Tikkun 18, no. 3 (May/June 2003).

  127. Cf. Joshua Micah Marshall, “The Orwell Temptation: Are intellectuals overthinking the Middle East?” Washington Monthly (May 2003).

  128. For the use of “straw men” by propagandists for the Israel lobby, see Dershowitz, The Case for Israel. This book is structured around a variety of propositions, some of them apparently carefully selected for the ease with which they can be refuted (like “Did Israel start the Six-Day War?” and “Is Israel the prime human rights violator in the world?”). Of these propositions, 12 are by Edward Said and 8 by Noam Chomsky. One is by Leonid Brezhnev—not, as far as I am aware, one of the leading voices today in the debate over Israel and Palestine. Apart from four by the Israeli peace activist Ilan Pappe, none are by Israelis. The names of Amos Oz, Meron Benvenisti, or any of the other centrist liberal critics of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip appear nowhere. Although one proposition is given to Rabbi Michael Lerner, none are given to other leading American liberal critics of unconditional U.S. support for Israel, as represented in the New York Review of Books, for example—people who, like Oz in Israel, are strong supporters of Israel’s right to exist and defend itself within the borders of 1967. The question of Palestinian rejection of the Barak–Clinton peace proposals is put in stark black-and-white terms (“Was Arafat right in turning down the Barak–Clinton peace proposal?”) as is the question given to Chom
sky, not to Ambassador Robert Malley or the other U.S. and Israeli moderates who have sought to elucidate this question. The overall effect is, of course, to create an impression of hysterical malignance toward Israel, unqualified by support or sympathy. This is the approach of a ruthless advocate in a court; whether it is appropriate behavior for a professor of law at one of America’s leading universities is another matter.

  129. Akiva Eldar, “From refuge for Jews to danger for Jews,” Ha’aretz, November 3, 2003. See also M. J. Rosenberg, “Confusing Criticism with Anti-Semitism,” Israel Policy Forum, February 6, 2004; Judith Butler, “No, it’s not anti-Semitic,” London Review of Books, August 21, 2003; Henry Siegman, “If Israel’s Policies are Unjust, We Should Say So,” Financial Times, February 10, 2004.