The notion may be difficult to imagine, but yes, the public discourse in the US is discernibly shifting the ground from under the very feet of those who continue to promote the conventional thesis that Israel is the injured party in the dispute between itself and the Palestinians. And the shift is making it exceedingly difficult for those promoters to sustain their claims credibly.
Let’s do a bit of rewind here, back to January 1974, when it was hell on earth for a commentator to voice the slightest criticism of Israel’s excesses. That was a time when you put, if not your life, certainly your career, on the line for suggesting that the holy cow was not really all that holy after all. And in that regard, I’ll indulge a recollection.
On a wintry afternoon that month, I was member of a panel at an academic conference in Washington sponsored by the Arab American University Graduates Association, where the question of Palestine was under review. One of the panelists was Father Daniel Berrigan, then a nationally revered human rights champion and anti-war activist.
In his presentation on the panel, Father Berrigan criticized Israel, ever so mildly, for its expropriation and colonization of Palestinian land and for its treatment of Palestinians in the occupied territories.
The next day all hell broke loose and the Jewish community, via its press — helped along by a segment of the mainstream media — dismissed the man as an outright anti-Semite. Arthur Hertzberg, president of the influential American Jewish Congress, described the presentation as “old-fashioned anti-Semitism,” presumably a more dreadful version than its then fashionable counterpart. Subsequent to that, you never heard a beep from the renowned Catholic cleric about Palestine or Palestinians. He chose to keep his views to himself.
But that was four decades ago. And the times have changed. Those supporters of Israel, fanatics one and all, who could silence critics by hurling the anti-Semitic epithet at them, have had in recent years to contend with serious research, produced by serious scholars, political analysts, journalists and even a former president, that exposed these supporters’ puerile Israel-is-the-victim stance.
The most recent example of this trend is the book, Thirteen Days In September: Carter, Begin and Sadat at Camp David, released in August, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and contributing writer to the New Yorker magazine, Lawrence Wright In Wright’s meticulously researched and sprightly written narrative about the 1979 Egypt-Israel Peace treaty, Sadat comes across as a sympathetic character willing to accommodate and compromise, while Begin is portrayed as an obdurate expansionist and an insufferable sourpuss.
President Jimmy Carter, who sponsored the negotiations, went on to write several books about the Middle East, including his most controversial, Palestine Peace Not Apartheid (tellingly, a New York Times bestseller). In it the former president wrote, “Israelis believe they have the right to confiscate and colonize Palestinian land and try to justify the sustained subjugation and persecution of increasingly helpless and aggravated Palestinians.”
You will agree, no doubt, that this kind of language, a mere decade or two earlier, would have been considered incendiary, and earned the author the anti-Semite moniker. Not in 2006, though, when the book was published.
The following year, the academics John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, respectively of the University of Chicago and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, published their ground-breaking The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy, which brought outrage by Israel’s supporters but “cheers of gratitude,” by those who had been too scared to speak up, that someone out there was challenging what had been a taboo subject — that America’s massive aid to Israel cannot be fully explained, let alone justified, on either strategic or moral grounds.
And so it goes with other books by a significant number of critics who have come forward to suggest that it is time that the conventional wisdom about Israel be thrown out the window. Were he alive today, Thomas Kuhn, who in 1962 wrote his seminal work, Structure of the Scientific Revolution, that originally advanced the notion of “paradigm shifts” in culture, would unquestionably nod.
To be sure, official Washington, in Congress and in the White House, continues to repeat the same, old mantra: We support Israel, which is defending itself, right or wrong. But in civil society, the shift is evident. Consider this: In 2010, when President Obama locked horns with Benjamin Netanyahu on the question of colony expansion in the occupied territories (but later ate humble pie and knuckled under), a Zogby poll asked registered Democrats their view on a statement that read: “Israeli (colonies) are built on land confiscated from Palestinians and should be torn down, and the land returned to Palestinian owners.” The response was 63 percent in favor.
And that, I say, would have been unthinkable 10 or 20 years ago, let alone 40 years ago, when Father Daniel Berrigan was made to feel like a racist for mildly, very mildly, criticizing Israel’s excesses at the time. 63 percent of Democrats taking that entity to task does not represent a majority, but it does represent a shift, and the shift may not be as dramatic as the one that has taken place in Europe in recent years, but it is decidedly a discernible one.
