Things That Matter: Three Decades of Passions, Pastimes and Politics

by Charles Krauthammer

  • Camp David, 2000. At a U.S.-sponsored summit, Prime Minister Ehud Barak offers Yasser Arafat a Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza—and, astonishingly, the previously inconceivable division of Jerusalem. Arafat refuses. And makes no counteroffer, thereby demonstrating his unseriousness about making any deal. Instead, within two months, he launches a savage terror war that kills a thousand Israelis.

  • Taba, 2001. An even sweeter deal—the Clinton Parameters—is offered. Arafat walks away again.

  • Israel, 2008. Prime Minister Ehud Olmert makes the ultimate capitulation to Palestinian demands—100% of the West Bank (with land swaps), Palestinian statehood, the division of Jerusalem with the Muslim parts becoming the capital of the new Palestine. And incredibly, he offers to turn over the city’s holy places, including the Western Wall—Judaism’s most sacred site, its Kaaba—to an international body on which sit Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

  Did Abbas accept? Of course not. If he had, the conflict would be over and Palestine would already be a member of the United Nations.

  This is not ancient history. All three peace talks occurred over the past decade. And every one completely contradicts the current mindless narrative of Israeli “intransigence” as the obstacle to peace.

  Settlements? Every settlement remaining within the new Palestine would be destroyed and emptied, precisely as happened in Gaza.

  So why did the Palestinians say no? Because saying yes would have required them to sign a final peace agreement that accepted a Jewish state on what they consider the Muslim patrimony.

  The key word here is final. The Palestinians are quite prepared to sign interim agreements, like Oslo. Framework agreements, like Annapolis. Cease-fires, like the 1949 armistice. Anything but a final deal. Anything but a final peace. Anything but a treaty that ends the conflict once and for all—while leaving a Jewish state still standing.

  After all, why did Abbas go to the United Nations last week? For nearly half a century, the United States has pursued a Middle East settlement on the basis of the formula of land for peace. Land for peace produced the Israel-Egypt peace of 1979 and the Israel-Jordan peace of 1994. Israel has offered the Palestinians land for peace three times since. And been refused every time.

  Why? For exactly the same reason Abbas went to the United Nations last week: to get land without peace. Sovereignty with no reciprocal recognition of a Jewish state. Statehood without negotiations. An independent Palestine in a continued state of war with Israel.

  Israel gave up land without peace in South Lebanon in 2000 and, in return, received war—the Lebanon war of 2006—and 50,000 Hezbollah missiles now targeted on the Israeli homeland. In 2005, Israel gave up land without peace in Gaza, and again was rewarded with war—and constant rocket attack from an openly genocidal Palestinian mini-state.

  Israel is prepared to give up land, but never again without peace. A final peace. Which is exactly what every Palestinian leader from Haj Amin al-Husseini to Yasser Arafat to Mahmoud Abbas has refused to accept. Which is why, regardless of who is governing Israel, there has never been peace. Territorial disputes are solvable; existential conflicts are not.

  Land for peace, yes. Land without peace is nothing but an invitation to national suicide.

  The Washington Post, September 29, 2011

  BORAT THE FEARFUL

  Borat is many things: a sidesplitting triumph of slapstick and scatology, a runaway moneymaker and budding franchise, the worst thing to happen to Kazakhstan since the Mongol hordes and, as columnist David Brooks astutely points out, a supreme display of elite snobbery reveling in the humiliation of the hoaxed hillbilly.

  But it is one thing more, something Brooks alluded to in passing but that requires at least one elaboration: an unintentionally revealing demonstration of the unfortunate attitude many liberal Jews have toward working-class American Christians, especially evangelicals.

  You know the shtick. Borat goes around America making antisemitic remarks in order to elicit a nodding antisemitic response. And with enough liquor and cajoling, he succeeds. In the most notorious such scene (on Da Ali G Show, where the character was born), Borat sings “Throw the Jew Down the Well” in an Arizona bar as the local rubes join in.

  Sacha Baron Cohen, the creator of Borat, revealed his purpose for doing that in a rare out-of-character interview he granted Rolling Stone in part to counter charges that he was promoting antisemitism. On the face of it, this would be odd, given that Cohen is himself a Sabbath-observing Jew. His defense is that he is using Borat’s antisemitism as a “tool” to expose it in others. And that his Arizona bar stunt revealed, if not antisemitism, then “indifference” to antisemitism. And that, he maintains, was the path to the Holocaust.

  Whoaaaa. Does he really believe such rubbish? Can a man that smart (Cambridge, investment banker and now brilliant filmmaker) really believe that indifference to antisemitism and the road to the Holocaust are to be found in a country-and-western bar in Tucson?

  Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world.

  With antisemitism reemerging in Europe and rampant in the Islamic world; with Iran acquiring the ultimate weapon of genocide and proclaiming its intention to wipe out the world’s largest Jewish community (Israel); with America and, in particular, its Christian evangelicals the only remaining Gentile constituency anywhere willing to defend that besieged Jewish outpost—is the American heartland really the locus of antisemitism? Is this the one place to go to find it?

  In Venezuela, Hugo Chávez says that the “descendants of the same ones that crucified Christ” have “taken possession of all the wealth in the world.” Just this month, Tehran hosted an international festival of Holocaust cartoons featuring enough hooked noses and horns to give Goebbels a posthumous smile. Throughout the Islamic world, newspapers and television, schoolbooks and sermons are filled with the most vile antisemitism.

  Baron Cohen could easily have found what he seeks closer to home. He is, after all, from Europe, where synagogues are torched and cemeteries desecrated in a revival of antisemitism—not “indifference” to but active—unseen since the Holocaust. Where a Jew is singled out for torture and death by French-African thugs. Where a leading Norwegian intellectual—et tu, Norway?—mocks “God’s Chosen People” (“We laugh at this people’s capriciousness and weep at its misdeeds”) and calls for the destruction of Israel, the “state founded … on the ruins of an archaic national and warlike religion.”

  Yet, amid this gathering darkness, an alarming number of liberal Jews are seized with the notion that the real threat lurks deep in the hearts of American Protestants, most specifically southern evangelicals. Some fear that their children are going to be converted; others, that below the surface lies a pogrom waiting to happen; still others, that the evangelicals will take power in Washington and enact their own sharia law.

  This is all quite crazy. America is the most welcoming, religiously tolerant, philo-semitic country in the world. No nation since Cyrus the Great’s Persia has done more for the Jews. And its reward is to be exposed as latently antisemitic by an itinerant Jew looking for laughs and, he solemnly assures us, for the path to the Holocaust?

  Look. It is very hard to be a Jew today, particularly in Baron Cohen’s Europe, where Jew-baiting is once again becoming acceptable. But it is a sign of the disorientation of a distressed and confused people that we should find it so difficult to distinguish our friends from our enemies.

  The Washington Post, November 24, 2006

  JUDGING ISRAEL

  Jews are news. It is an axiom of journalism. An indispensable axiom, too, because it is otherwise impossible to explain why the deeds and misdeeds of dot-on-the-map Israel get an absurdly disproportionate amount of news coverage around the world. If you are trying to guess how much coverage any Middle East event received, and you are permitted but one question, the best question you can ask about the event is: Were there any Jews in the vicinity? The paradigmatic case is the page in the International Heral
d Tribune that devoted seven of its eight columns to the Palestinian uprising. Among the headlines: “Israeli Soldier Shot to Death; Palestinian Toll Rises to 96.” The eighth column carried a report that 5,000 Kurds died in an Iraqi gas attack.

  Whatever the reason, it is a fact that the world is far more interested in what happens to Jews than to Kurds. It is perfectly legitimate, therefore, for journalists to give the former more play. But that makes it all the more incumbent to be fair in deciding how to play it.

  How should Israel be judged? Specifically: Should Israel be judged by the moral standards of its neighborhood or by the standards of the West?

  The answer, unequivocally, is: the standards of the West. But the issue is far more complicated than it appears.

  The first complication is that although the neighborhood standard ought not to be Israel’s, it cannot be ignored when judging Israel. Why? It is plain that compared with the way its neighbors treat protest, prisoners and opposition in general, Israel is a beacon of human rights. The salient words are Hama, the town where Syria dealt with an Islamic uprising by killing perhaps 20,000 people in two weeks and then paving the dead over; and Black September (1970), during which enlightened Jordan dealt with its Palestinian intifada by killing at least 2,500 Palestinians in ten days, a toll that the Israeli intifada would need ten years to match.

  Any moral judgment must take into account the alternative. Israel cannot stand alone, and if it is abandoned by its friends for not meeting Western standards of morality, it will die. What will replace it? The neighbors: Syria, Jordan, the PLO, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Ahmed Jabril, Abu Nidal (if he is still around) or some combination of these—an outcome that will induce acute nostalgia for Israel’s human-rights record.

  Any moral judgment that refuses to consider the alternative is merely irresponsible. That is why Israel’s moral neighborhood is important. It is not just the neighborhood, it is the alternative and, if Israel perishes, the future. It is morally absurd, therefore, to reject Israel for failing to meet Western standards of human rights when the consequence of that rejection is to consign the region to neighbors with considerably less regard for human rights.

  Nevertheless, Israel cannot be judged by the moral standards of the neighborhood. It is part of the West. It bases much of its appeal to Western support on shared values, among which is a respect for human rights. The standard for Israel must be Western standards.

  But what exactly does “Western standards” mean? Here we come to complication No. 2. There is not a single Western standard, there are two: what we demand of Western countries at peace and what we demand of Western countries at war. It strains not just fairness but also logic to ask Israel, which has known only war for its 40 years’ existence, to act like a Western country at peace.

  The only fair standard is this one: How have the Western democracies reacted in similar conditions of war, crisis and insurrection? The morally relevant comparison is not with an American police force reacting to violent riots, say, in downtown Detroit. (Though even by this standard—the standard of America’s response to the urban riots of the ’60s—Israel’s handling of the intifada has been measured.) The relevant comparison is with Western democracies at war: to, say, the U.S. during the Civil War, the British in Mandatory Palestine, the French in Algeria.

  Last fall Anthony Lewis excoriated Israel for putting down a tax revolt in the town of Beit Sahour. He wrote: “Suppose the people of some small American town decided to protest federal government policy by withholding their taxes. The government responded by sending in the Army.… Unthinkable? Of course it is in this country. But it is happening in another … Israel.”

  Middle East scholar Clinton Bailey tried to point out just how false this analogy is. Protesting federal government policy? The West Bank is not Selma. Palestinians are not demanding service at the lunch counter. They demand a flag and an army. This is insurrection for independence. They are part of a movement whose covenant explicitly declares its mission to be the abolition of the State of Israel.

  Bailey tried manfully for the better analogy. It required him to posit (1) a pre-glasnost Soviet Union, (2) a communist Mexico demanding the return of “occupied Mexican” territory lost in the Mexican War (Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada and California) and (3) insurrection by former Mexicans living in these territories demanding secession from the Union. Then imagine, Bailey continued, that the insurrectionists, supported and financed by Mexico and other communist states in Latin America, obstruct communications; attack civilians and police with stones and firebombs; kill former Mexicans holding U.S. government jobs (“collaborators”) and then begin a tax revolt. Now you have the correct analogy. Would the U.S., like Israel, then send in the army? Of course.

  But even this analogy falls flat because it is simply impossible to imagine an America in a position of conflict and vulnerability analogous to Israel’s. America’s condition is so radically different, so far from the brink. Yet when Western countries have been in conditions approximating Israel’s, when they have faced comparable rebellions, they have acted not very differently.

  We do not even have to go back to Lincoln’s Civil War suspension of habeas corpus, let alone Sherman’s march through Georgia. Consider that during the last Palestinian intifada, the Arab Revolt of 1936–39, the British were in charge of Palestine. They put down the revolt “without mercy, without qualms,” writes Middle East scholar Fouad Ajami. Entire villages were razed. More than 3,000 Palestinians were killed. In 1939 alone, the British hanged 109. (Israel has no death penalty.)

  French conduct during the Algerian war was noted for its indiscriminate violence and systematic use of torture. In comparison, Israeli behavior has been positively restrained. And yet Israel faces a far greater threat. All the Algerians wanted, after all, was independence. They were not threatening the extinction of France. If Israel had the same assurance as France that its existence was in no way threatened by its enemies, the whole Arab-Israeli conflict could have been resolved decades ago.

  Or consider more contemporary democracies. A year ago, when rioting broke out in Venezuela over government-imposed price increases, more than 300 were killed in less than one week. In 1984 the army of democratic India attacked rebellious Sikhs in the Golden Temple, killing 300 in one day. And yet these democracies were not remotely as threatened as Israel. Venezuela was threatened with disorder; India, at worst, with secession. The Sikhs have never pledged themselves to throw India into the sea.

  “Israel,” opined the Economist, “cannot in fairness test itself against a standard set by China and Algeria while still claiming to be part of the West.” This argument, heard all the time, is a phony. Israel asks to be judged by the standard not of China and Algeria but of Britain and France, of Venezuela and India. By that standard, the standard of democracies facing similar disorders, Israel’s behavior has been measured and restrained.

  Yet Israel has been treated as if this were not true. The thrust of the reporting and, in particular, the commentary is that Israel has failed dismally to meet Western standards, that it has been particularly barbaric in its treatment of the Palestinian uprising. No other country is repeatedly subjected to Nazi analogies. In no other country is the death or deportation of a single rioter the subject (as it was for the first year of the intifada, before it became a media bore) of front-page news, of emergency Security Council meetings, of full-page ads in the New York Times, of pained editorials about Israel’s lost soul, etc., etc.

  Why is that so? Why is it that of Israel a standard of behavior is demanded that is not just higher than its neighbors’, not just equal to that of the West, but in fact far higher than that of any Western country in similar circumstances? Why the double standard?

  For most, the double standard is unconscious. Critics simply assume it appropriate to compare Israel with a secure and peaceful America. They ignore the fact that there are two kinds of Western standards and that fairness dictates subjecting Israel to the standard o
f a Western country at war.

  But other critics openly demand higher behavior from the Jewish state than from other states. Why? Jews, it is said, have a long history of oppression. They thus have a special vocation to avoid oppressing others. This dictates a higher standard in dealing with others.

  Note that this reasoning is applied only to Jews. When other people suffer—Vietnamese, Algerians, Palestinians, the French Maquis—they are usually allowed a grace period during which they are judged by a somewhat lower standard. The victims are, rightly or wrongly (in my view, wrongly), morally indulged. A kind of moral affirmative action applies. We are asked to understand the former victims’ barbarities because of how they themselves suffered. There has, for example, been little attention to and less commentary on the 150 Palestinians lynched by other Palestinians during the intifada. How many know that this year as many Palestinians have died at the hands of Palestinians as at the hands of Israelis?

  With Jews, that kind of reasoning is reversed: Jewish suffering does not entitle them to more leeway in trying to prevent a repetition of their tragedy, but to less. Their suffering requires them, uniquely among the world’s sufferers, to bend over backward in dealing with their enemies.

  Sometimes it seems as if Jews are entitled to protection and equal moral consideration only insofar as they remain victims. Oriana Fallaci once said plaintively to Ariel Sharon, “You are no more the nation of the great dream, the country for which we cried.” Indeed not. In establishing a Jewish state, the Jewish people made a collective decision no longer to be cried for. They chose to become actors in history and not its objects. Historical actors commit misdeeds and should be judged like all nation-states when they commit them. It is perverse to argue that because this particular nation-state is made up of people who have suffered the greatest crime in modern history, they, more than any other people on earth, have a special obligation to be delicate with those who would bring down on them yet another national catastrophe.