I told Andre: Don’t worry, I have no intention of marrying your sister. And no, I hastened to add, I’m not an anti-Semite. Honest.
It might seem strange to have to say that to somebody you have just met at a social gathering. But these are strange times we live in, and when an American Arab meets an American Jew, they dance around each other a while before civility kicks in.
Andre, a lawyer who lives in Washington, is not unlike a great many American Jews these days who feel that Israel is "under assault" and thus any criticism of its policies, however justified, is a betrayal of one’s ethnic roots and the duty it is incumbent upon one to back one’s people, right or wrong, come what may.
As Israel moves more and more to the fascist right, American Jews face a dilemma: What to do in these difficult times when Israel, as they see it, is fighting a "terrorist infrastructure" and its Arab enemies remain hell-bent on its "destruction."
Never mind that the "terrorist infrastructure" is a homegrown phenomenon of Israel’s own creation as an occupying power, or that these enemies, given their limited military prowess, are about as dangerous to Israel’s existence as secondary smoke.
What matters to the overwhelming majority of American Jews is that Israel is in crisis, its actions repudiated by the international community, and now is the time for all hands on deck.
As a dispute over funding for settlements in the occupied territories erupted in the Israeli Cabinet last week, with six Labor ministers quitting the government, Ariel Sharon turned to the usual suspects in the fascist fringe and the Orthodox parties to form a new coalition.
Israel’s former Army Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Shaul Mofaz, who had earned his credentials in overseeing the crackdown on the intifada over the last two years, and in going on record as favoring the expulsion of the entire Palestinian population from the West Bank and Gaza (an ethnic cleansing project known locally as "trucking," as in, trucking Arabs out of their homeland), was offered the job of defense minister. The fanatic Benyamin Netanyahu was being offered the foreign affairs portfolio, formerly held by Labor’s Shimon Peres.
The party that kept Sharon’s government afloat was the ultrantionalist (the polite term in journalistic parlance used to mean fascist) Israel Beituna, whose members were instrumental in giving Sharon his margin of victory in a no-confidence vote early this week.
Beituna’s leader, Avigdor Lieberman, said in an interview with an Israeli magazine last Friday that he favored "blowing up Yasser Arafat’s headquarters in Ramallah — with Arafat inside." Then he went on to say that Palestinians who live in East Jerusalem should be treated as terrorists, which he claimed means Israel should act "to destroy their homes, to confiscate their identity cards and to expel them from the country."
So everybody is in great shape here. And where does that leave American Jews? Well, it leaves them still supportive of Israel, as we say, right or wrong, come what may.
To be sure, not all American Jews think alike. The Jewish community in the United States, like any other community anywhere, is imbued with a great many ideological currents and political sensibilities. But traditionally, when it comes to Israel, or to a time when Israel is perceived to be in crisis, these folk circle the wagons. Take what happened in the wake of the Gulf War in 1991, when President Bush Sr. attempted to force Israel to abandon settlement activity in the West Bank before he would approve house-loan guarantees to the Shamir government.
Beyond AIPAC on the Hill were the angry pundits in the media, with the likes of William Safire, George Will, Charles Krauthammer, A.M. Rosenthall and Marty Peretz in the vanguard, accusing Bush of all manner of malfeasance not only for his inability to appreciate "Israel’s security concerns" but for flirting, in Safire’s words, with "political anti-Semitism (presumably a more sinister expression of it than traditional anti-Semitism).
During the height of the settlement versus loan guarantees controversy, the president of the United States of America had said that he was nothing more than "one lonely little guy" standing up to "something like a thousand pro-Shamir lobbyists on the Hill working the other side of the question."
Then it was leaked that then Secretary of State James Baker had allegedly said, at a Cabinet meeting: "(expletive) the Jews, they didn’t vote for us anyway."
That’s when the pro-Israel punditocracy went into action, a punditocracy whose influence in political culture, according to Eric Alterman, an expert on the issue, far exceeds the voting power of any ethnic minority, Jews included.
"Reports of the comment," wrote Alterman in his book, Sound and Fury, "provided something of a final nail in the administration’s political coffin."
In pursuit of the goal of fighting on behalf of Israel’s interests in the media, these pundits have taken on the responsibility of the ideological policing of the press, leveling criticism, unparalleled in bile and venom, against those who dare take Israel to task.
Back in the 1980s, for example, critics like I. F. Stone, Anthony Lewis, Edward Said and others were savaged within an inch of their professional reputations. (Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, believes that "the role of Jews who write in both Jewish and general press is to defend Israel.")
Israel right or wrong, come what may. That’s what it all boils down to.
In its move to the extreme right, Israel today makes Menachem Begin’s hard-line government in the late 1970s and early 80s seem like an enlightened rampart of liberalism. Not only Israeli supporters in the US, but Israelis themselves, appear to have blinded themselves to the significance of that fact.
This is dangerous for the entire region. It can be argued, with a great deal of supporting sociological evidence, that once the elaborate machinery of demagoguery in society slips into full gear, that society slips into a kind of automatism: In this case, the idea of war, accompanied or followed by "trucking," becomes normal, ideal and irreversible. (Note how the European conflict of 1915, that had started as limited warfare, turned into unforeseen slaughter.)
When fashions of perceptions shift, as they are decidedly doing in Israel today, with the likes of Netanyahu and those other yahoos holding the reigns of power, then corresponding changes take place across the board in political life. Forces of the rational, explicit world, as we know them, become ungovernable.
It is clear that in Palestine there are dreadful times ahead.
7 November 2002
