An opinion piece the other day by former Spanish prime minister José María Aznar, originally in the London Times and being distributed everywhere, offers strong support for what he calls Israel’s role as a democratic bulwark of European culture and criticism of Muslim expansion. The Times is not accessible without registration, so here’s “If Israel goes down, we all go down” at the World Jewish Congress.
The piece arrived in an email in response to something I’d written criticizing a more vicious anti-Muslim screed that’s gone around the Internet for more than a year. This was on a private list of a couple of dozen people, some of whom I know from my teenage and young-adult Zionist days, which I’ve written about elsewhere. When I criticize some of the material that goes out, I routinely get at least a couple of appreciative emails from others on the list, a couple of whom have also objected at times. But clearly not everyone objects. In this case, someone else referred to Aznar’s piece as a “voice of reason.”
What follows is a slightly modified version of the email I sent back to the list after reading Aznar’s piece.
——-
Voices of reason often come from all sides. It’s easy to be reasonable, or at least to sound reasonable, when presenting just one side of an issue, as the Spanish ex-prime minister does. That’s the kind of thing that bothers me about much of the material passed around the Internet, including some of what (the original sender) has distributed. One-sided arguments can make perfect sense either to those who already accept the underlying assumptions or who know so little about the issue that anything that sounds reasonable seems persuasive.
One-sided arguments make much less sense to those who know there’s more than one side, whether they endorse a different side’s story or just understand the nature of competing narratives. Every side generally has its own mix of rationality and fantasy, moderates and extremists. I’m not suggesting that every narrative is equally accurate or justified, which is where I part company from those who think more dialogue and face-to-face interaction will fix things (I do think they might be worth doing anyway; I just don’t think they’ll lead to a just outcome). What I am suggesting, though, is that advocates who present one-sided arguments supporting Israel are comforting only themselves and persuading only the ignorant.
Aznar’s take on Israel’s role as a bulwark of Western culture and its defense of Israel’s democratic nature falls into this category. It ignores much of the relevant history, including work by Israeli historians and others calling into question much of what I, along with many people on this list, learned in Young Judaea 40 or 45 years ago. The story we got back then was also one-sided, though not always absolutely so; I’ve written elsewhere about Gidon Elad’s emphasis, while a shaliach [essentially, an educator] in New York in the mid-1960s, on how wrong Israel had gone in dealing with Arab countries and its own Arab citizens. Gidon’s hope was that an influx of Western Jews would help Israel live up to its publicly proclaimed humanistic, democratic ideals, and that Israel would become part of the Middle East rather than continue to think of itself as part of Europe.
When I saw Gidon’s widow a few years ago she told me she was glad he was no longer alive to see what Israel had become.
In 2006 I taught a short seminar on Psychology, Law, and Justice at Ben Gurion University in Beersheva. My students – Israeli Jews – had no trouble pointing out Israel’s failings as a democracy. Claims that Israel was “the only democracy in the Middle East” rang hollow to them; they knew the democracy claim was more propagandistic than accurate. It bothered them. They just didn’t know what to do about it.
On the other hand, as a cousin who spent six years in Israeli military intelligence once remarked using a phrase I’ve since heard over and over again, democracy is not a Jewish value. In a world where all that matters is tribe, conquest and resistance are both perfectly normal. Jabotinsky understood that very clearly. Maybe so did Ben Gurion. At least it’s honest, more honest I think than efforts to portray Israel as perpetually the innocent victim.
I’m not going to defend Islamist fundamentalism or any other fundamentalism, including that of my Haredi [ultra-Orthodox)relatives and those on both sides who know that God’s plan for them is more important than any plan he might have for anyone else. But using the rise of fundamentalism as the latest reason to support Israel is a red herring. Israel’s problems in the region arose well before this fundamentalism spread so far, with Israeli actions no doubt contributing to that spread. As for fear of Muslim immigrants invading Europe and North America, I suspect there would have been less of this if Western powers hadn’t done so much during and since colonialism to prop up tyrannical regimes complicit with Western corporate profit at the expense of ordinary people. That Muslims around the world want their interests heard, including their opposition to Israeli actions, is not that different from people all over the world who support their place of origin, using inevitably subjective criteria – including American Jews who mostly still internalize a pro-Israel worldview by ignoring any evidence to the contrary.
Part of my apparently naive attraction to Israel during my time in Young Judaea was the promise of it becoming a light unto the nations – not becoming like every other state, but putting in place a better society, humanistic and open and egalitarian; Israeli would demonstrate in practice how a just society develops and grows. Being Europe’s first line of defense, as Aznar claims, was not part of the plan. It was, though, part of Napolon’s plan, when in 1798 or so he proposed a Jewish state in Palestine as a bulwark of European colonialism, a historical event prominent in pro-Palestinian narratives that shows up not at all in Israel’s.
As I’ve explored this terrain over the past few years, I’ve been attacked by both sides for not being sufficiently one-sided. That does not comfort me, or make me think I must be right if both sides reject me, since I don’t often think being in the middle is the best place to be. I would instead say my commitment is to try to figure out where justice lies, regardless of which side is in the wrong.
Trying to sort out what seem to me the most reasonable general or universal standards more often than not does lead to a critical view of Israeli policy and goals. That’s been the hardest for me to get past, and is one of the reasons I waited decades to focus on this conflict. Defenses of Israel often come down to beginning with the conclusion that what counts most is what’s best for Israel. The same could be said of some defenses of Palestinians, but that’s not my concern here. For me the goal is to look at justice and fairness and history, and apply the same principles I’d use elsewhere. I don’t believe this is singling out Israel with a special rulebook, as R suggests, so much as applying a more general rulebook to Israel as I would to other states that claim to be democratic and peaceful and just. When I do that, I’m rarely happy about the outcome.
——
So far I’ve received two responses to this. One, to the list, said only “At the risk of throwing everyone into a frenzy I’d just like to see Israel survive,” which I think reflects what I was concerned about, that he bottom line is what’s best for Israel, not what justice requires.
The second response was just to me, thanking me.
Technorati Tags: Israel, Jewish State, justice, Palestine, Aznar
