Israel 55 Years Later

Among the hottest of hot buttons in public discussion is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Unlikely alliances are formed and friendships broken over the position one takes. It has been that way for more than half a century, and today only more so. The ill-fated Oslo Accords of a decade ago supposedly settled the question of whether Jews are legitimately at home in Israel. But the Palestinians and their supporters continue to insist on the “right of return” for all refugees, which would reduce Jews to being an imperiled minority in Israel and is not, in fact, all that much different from the older Arab call”still heard today”to “drive them into the sea.” It would be the end of Israel, certainly the end of Israel as a Jewish state.

At the same time, Israel’s settlements policy and the threat of permanently taking over Palestinian territory poses the same problems of a non-Jewish majority. If, in that case, Israel remained a democracy with universal franchise, the Jews would soon be swamped. The alternative would be to abandon democracy and establish a regime comparable to apartheid. It is a dreadful and continuing conundrum for which it seems nobody has a convincing answer. Perhaps a year or so from now the aftermath of the Iraqi regime change will vindicate the Bush Administration’s hopes for a democratic insurgency in that part of the world that will make a real peace between Israel and its neighbors possible. Meanwhile, among most non-Jewish intellectuals in this country, and much more so in Europe, sentiment is strongly on the side of the Palestinians.

Reviewing L’Imparfait du Présent by Alain Finkielkraut, a French intellectual of controversially independent views, in the Times Literary Supplement, Henri Astier says, “The public-spirited citizen of today is at heart a prosecutor: his aim is to punish evildoers. As Finkielkraut observes, his model is Robespierre, the scourge of tyrants.” It is hard to depict Palestinians, and easy to depict Israelis, as the oppressing tyrant. Terrorism, including the horror of suicide bombings, is employed to underscore the desperation of the dominated. There is disagreement about just how, but there is no doubt that the poison of anti-Semitism is a significant part of the anti-Israel line. Astier writes, “Finkielkraut has no sympathy for Israeli hardliners—they too stand in the way of peace by refusing to share the land. He repeatedly laments their barely concealed gloating over the breakdown of the Oslo process. But while European progressives condemn Israeli intransigence, they gloss over Palestinian radicalism. What name, Finkielkraut asks, should be given to this ‘inextinguishable animosity’ against Israel? Here Finkielkraut’s analysis indirectly sheds light on a recent transatlantic misunderstanding. American conservative commentators, such as Charles Krauthammer, have pointed to the vilification of Israel across Europe and to recent attacks against synagogues, particularly in France, accusing Europeans of returning to their old, anti-Semitic ways. Is this fair?

“Finkielkraut points out that the new anti-Semitism is very different from the old type. Progressive anti-Semites condemn Israel not in the name of a racist ideology, but in the name of anti-Nazism. In their minds, the Jews have turned into their former oppressors. Finkielkraut quotes a French commentator referring to Israel’s ‘push to the East’—a reference to Hitler’s Drang nach Osten. He could also have quoted the Portuguese writer and Nobel Laureate José Saramago, who invoked the ‘spirit of Auschwitz’ in depicting the horrors inflicted by Israel. Finkielkraut is right, Krauthammer wrong: today’s anti-Semitism is not fascist. It speaks the language of the oppressed, not of domination—and it is all the more fervid for it.”

More fervid than Nazi anti-Semitism? That seems doubtful. Moreover, as Krauthammer understands, the old anti-Semitism also exploited the language of the oppressed—e.g., the German majority allegedly oppressed by a relatively small minority of Jews. The Nazi goal was not to dominate but to eliminate the Jews. Finkielkraut and Astier are right about the way in which today’s public citizen understands himself as a Robespierre—like scourge of tyrants, and how that leads to favoring the Palestinians against the Israelis. But Krauthammer is right that the specifically anti-Semitic component of that view is an old and familiar enemy.

The state of Israel was formally established on May 14, 1948. Whatever one may think of the justice or injustice of its establishment fifty-five years ago, there will be no secure peace in the Middle East until its neighbors accept Israel as an irreversible fact. It is possible they never will, or at least will not in the next fifty or seventy-five years. In which case it is possible that a battle-wearied and demoralized Israel will not endure. If that happens, I believe the record will show that those in the West who kept alive the idea of the reversibility of 1948 did so by nurturing and exploiting the anti-Semitism that precipitated the creation of Israel in the first place.