My soft spot for Israel

How can a liberal be for Israel? one might ask. Israel has better weapons, their country was created by imperialist oppressors, their opponents, in general, have darker skin. It's the perfect set-up for a knee-jerk support of all things Palestinian. And, in general, America's "Left" lines up, always the uneasy (and pampered) supporters of the "little guy."

But in truth, I've never followed the leftist desertion of Israel. I can recall, back in 1967 when I was a student at Cal, that things were not so one-sided. Then it was felt that Israel had the right to defend itself. Was that because we had a Democratic President at the time? I think there's something to that: the more closely Israel's fortunes have become connected to American Neoconservatism, the more alienated Israel has become from the (to me, tiresome) doctrinaire Leftists in this country. You can read their diatribes anywhere you look. Some of the more virulent are themselves Jews (Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein.) A very complicated situation.

I always try to simplify the analysis (and identify who it is I'm talking to) by asking the preliminary question: Does Israel have the right to exist at all? I also think this is the final question on the subject, for more complex reasons. But the first question greatly simplifies all that follows. For one thing, it tells you whether your interlocutor is a student of history. Are they aware of the centuries of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust? This at least establishes a framework. Do they favor the ceding of all American land back to its Native Americans? (Sometimes when I drive through Fremont in the East Bay, or even along the Bayshore on the Peninsula south of San Francisco, I think this would be a very good idea, by the way.)

I operate on this fairly simple analysis: had there been no Suez Crisis of 1956, or wars in 1967 or 1973, or the Lebanese problem of 1982, nor any Palestinian intifadas nor terrorist attacks against Israel (which became routine prior to erection of the security walls), then the amount of sectarian, Israeli-Arab violence in the region would have been approximately 1% of what it has actually been. Virtually all of the violence has been of one of two kinds: Arab violence designed to destroy the Israeli state (the wars), terrorism by Arabs against targets in Israel (cafes, discos, weddings, buses, the streets) or delegitimize Israel; or Israeli response to one of the above.

I think that's the big picture. The success of Palestinian propaganda has been to isolate, in the public mind, the response of Israelis to Arab violence as if it existed free of any provocation. I don't quite understand how that has worked. I would concede, of course, that in any long history of more or less constant violence there are going to be a fair number of instances (on both sides) of overreaction, excessiveness and needless killing. Such are the coarsening effects of war and retaliation. It's why violence and terrorism are bad ideas in the first place.

Which takes us to the current "rupture" in U.S. - Israel relations. Netanyahu's brother called Obama an anti-Semite because Obama apparently became upset that Israel took the occasion of Joe Biden's visit to announce the granting of 1,600 building permits for Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem. So it would have been better to wait till he left? I'm not sure what significance the timing has. But it does bring up the question of the West Bank and the "1967 borders." I've done a fair amount of reading about the border issue and about the question of whether Israel's continued presence in (and development of) the West Bank constitutes an illegal occupation. The arguments get very, very involved, and sometimes turn on the construction of little words ("all" "of","the" etc.) in accords and agreements signed at the conclusion of the 1967 war and the United Nations resolutions on the subject. Well, it's kind of interesting actually, so take a look at Resolution 242 yourself:

(i) Withdrawal of Israel armed forces from territories occupied in the recent conflict;

(ii) Termination of all claims or states of belligerency and respect for and acknowledgment of the sovereignty, territorial integrity and political independence of every State in the area and their right to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force." ^[3]

Clear, huh? Well, not if you're in my line of work. It doesn't say, in the English version, "all of the territories occupied" in the 1967 war. It says withdrawal from "territories occupied." Surprisingly, there are Jewish lawyers also, and they noticed the same thing. It was a deliberate ambiguity, because the law of war ordinarily imposes a penalty on the aggressor, and there can't be any serious question that Jordan (which controlled the West Bank prior to the war) was practically begged by Israel to stay out of Nasser's Pan-Arabic troublemaking (Nasser killed far, far more fellow Arabs in his various wars around the region than were ever killed by Israel from 1948 to the present).

That's why, instead of the usual map of the West Bank, I present the post-Potsdam Conference map of Germany. Germany gave up 25% of its total land area as the result of its aggression in World War II. No one I've ever heard (except maybe the German high command) ever said this was unfair or inappropriate. Yet returning to Jordan, or Palestine or whatever we want to call the area, the same land which was used to launch an attack 17 kilometers from the Mediterranean (about an 11 mile stretch, which if conquered, cuts Israel in half) is considered Israel's minimal obligation.

I guess my point is that ordinary ways of thinking just never seem to apply to Israel, and I suppose that has to do with the hidden agenda that most people, consciously or not, bring to the discussion. They don't really want to go back to 1948, but that's where they go without saying so. They don't like the idea of a state based on theocratic ideas, whether it's a democracy or not, and they particularly don't like the idea of a Jewish state.

Yet we've done everything we can to establish a state based on Sharia principles in Iraq, where Article II of its constitution specifically prevents any law from being passed which is not consistent with Islamic principles. But it's still full of good things, such as the rights of its citizenry to regain citizenship lost under the Saddamist regime, and the right to dual citizenship. For everyone except Israelis, of course.

So What Should Israel Do?

To read the discussions of Israel's retaliation against Hamas in Gaza is to experience something akin to the feeling one has on arriving late at a movie and trying to understand the sequence of events unfolding on screen.  The film's been running for awhile, let's say, and a guy who needs a shave walks into a seedy bar, pulls a gun and shoots another guy sitting on a stool apparently minding his own business, who turns in the last instant to face his assailant and registers surprise at seeing him.

That's all you know.  The modern Leftist sentiment, which is anti-Israel, would focus on these factors: the killer had a gun and the victim didn't.  It was unexpected.  The victim died and the killer walked away.  Everything must be done to stop this senseless bloodshed, preferably by way of UN Resolution.

Most Leftist criticism of Israel operates at about that level.  The questions that are not answered, or even addressed, are these: In the absence of Palestinian provocation (firing rockets indiscriminately into towns such as Sderot), would there be any Israeli military action at all?  Second question: if the Israeli response is "disproportionate," what level of response would be effective so that Hamas stops shelling civilian populations in Israeli towns near the Gaza border?

If Leftist critics deign to deal with such questions at all, the responses usually run along these lines: Israel's attacks are a "massacre" of innocents and a form of "collective punishment" for the attacks directed by Hamas, the civilian government in Gaza. As to the second question, certainly some form of retaliation is justified under international law, but whatever it is that Israel is doing, it's too much.  

If one then points out that firing rockets into towns such as Sderot is also a form of "collective punishment," since the town folk there are not the same thing as the Knesset in Tel Aviv, the movie is rewound a little bit to introduce a new element.  It turns out that the Hamas rocket attacks are actually justified by the blockade (land, sea & air) of Gaza by the Israelis.  Naturally, pro-Israeli advocates will point out that this blockade was the very sort of "non-military" sanction or "retaliation" which Leftist American sentiment is now demanding in place of the military attacks, to which Israel resorted because the blockade failed to stop the rocket attacks, and the blockade was the sort of "non-occupying" tactic employed by the Israelis after they pulled all military from Gaza (as the American Left demanded).  Hamas then used the power vacuum to stage rocket attacks from Gaza free from Israeli interference, in order to provoke Israel into a retaliation which can be condemned by the American Left, who like condemning Israel.  And so it goes, as Kurt Vonnegut used to say.

The movie, it turns out, has been running much, much longer than you dreamed possible when you first took your seat.  While it's true that the Israeli blockade was a measured response to a violent program of indiscriminate rocket attacks and Hamas anti-Israel agitation generally, the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, and its expansion of borders generally since the Six Day War of 1967, are the actual proximate and justifying causes of the Hamas rocket attacks.  In turn, the Israeli partisans (who never lack for historical scholarship on such matters) point out that the Six Day War, and the retention of "strategic depth" since 1967, were themselves reactions to Arab attacks on the integrity (and survival) of Israel.

Which brings us back to 1948, when the movie actually started running.  This is why I find it's always easier just to start there and find out from the person who directs such criticisms at Israel whether he/she simply disputes Israel's right to exist.  That's actually the fulcrum point.  If someone supports Israel's right to exist, then of course it doesn't take long to reach agreement that Israel has the right to retaliate against military attacks against its own people.  One might argue about specific tactics, or the extent of appropriate retaliation, or whether some pacifistic party in control in Tel Aviv might produce a better result with less bloodshed -- these are all legitimate points of discussion.  But the kneejerk condemnation of Israel for doing anything at all would not be the main focus of the argument.

Yet that's precisely the focus of the discussion which emanates from the American Left.  Sometimes I think this irrationality can best be explained by a form of high-flown anti-Semitism: a persistent anti-Jew feeling dressed up in the rarefied dialectic of international relations.  Another possibility, more Freudian and perhaps complementary to the first point, is that the fairly recent emergence of Israel as a country in world history allows the liberal intellectual an opportunity to discharge a gnawing point of discomfort and cognitive dissonance.  Israel was "imposed" on a native Arab population.  Sure, maybe for altruistic and compassionate reasons at the time, but still an act of European colonial imperialism.  And the Left hates Euro-American colonial imperialism.  The only problem is that the USA itself was founded through just such an "imposition;" indeed, an imposition a great deal worse, since there were no pre-Columbian Europeans living for thousands of years among the Native Americans at the time of the Western usurpation.

Well, we aren't going to do anything about the Apache or Navajo or Seminole or Algonquin or Cherokee Indians.  But by golly, we'll stand up for the Palestinians because, hell, that's so easy! It's not like deeding my own extensive real estate back to Ishi and the Coastal Miwok, or giving People's Park back to the Costanoans, as the old Berkeley radicals wanted to do (see? they were principled and walked the walk, not like modern American leftist dilettantes.)  We'll be in solidarity with them because they're the low-tech side of the military confrontation, and anyway, the Bush Administration supports Israel, so they can't be right.

One thing I'm pretty sure of: one will never understand the hail of criticism directed Israel's way by rules of logic applicable everywhere else.  Israel's people are attacked; they respond in kind.  Seems simple enough, but only because you left to get some popcorn at a critical moment.