A VIEW FROM HERE
by deb weiss
every tuesday
A Tiny Splinter
December 4, 2001
Of all the possible reasons for supporting the state of Israel, I choose the one most consistent with everything else I believe in with all my heart: I support Israel because it is a tiny splinter of civilization in a sea of barbarism.
EMAIL: DEB WEISS
For all its sins (and even its most passionate friends cannot claim it as any sort of Utopia, at least not with the same straight face Nation magazine staffers adopt when they talk about Cuba, say), Israel is a piece of the West. It embodies the values and institutions of the West, including a fiercely healthy impulse toward capitalism, civil libertarianism, democracy, individualism.
It is a modern state, dynamic, progressive in the best sense of the word, strikingly civilized in a region where slavery, hideous poverty, corruption, and the crude oppression of women are commonplace. (Whatever the Good Lord may have in store for us in the next life, I'd just as soon spend this one in thoroughly Westernized surroundings.)
The American elite does not on the whole share my sensibility. Most clever people - academics, journalists, Social Critics - despise Israel passionately. Indeed, for half a century, give or take, it's been practically mandatory in certain circles to despise Israel passionately. By now, most clever people are so accustomed to despising Israel passionately that they hardly comprehend how it all began, before most of them were even born.
It's a sort of political atavism, a quaint Cold War hangover, part of the Groupthink inheritance of the Baby Boom. Israel had sinned grievously, especially in 1948, by throwing its lot in with the capitalist imperialist West. This should have come as no surprise to anyone, even American intellectuals, since the founders of the modern state of Israel were Western in both culture and outlook, but it was regarded as exceedingly bad form just the same. In the event, this vast, politically-correct disapproval of Israel lingered long after the political moment itself was gone.
Meanwhile, as the Second World War drew to a close, and with their former German chums on the ropes, Arab factions began to glide effortlessly into the Soviet sphere of influence. Such enlightened states as Iraq, Syria and Yemen were already writing the bloody future history of the region when they devised the Alexandria Protocol in the autumn of 1944: the Protocol, despite its progressive veneer, was a retrograde and virulently anti-Zionist document.
With two sides to choose from - one cosmopolitan, Western and democratic, the other tribal, bigoted, brutal, and anti-democratic -- Pro-Soviet American intellectuals didn't have to think twice (they never did, alas - sometimes not even once, especially with Moscow to tell them who was naughty or nice). As usual, they chose wrong.
To be sure, the intellectual left's loathing of Israel had a more primal source as well. Right-wing kooks are not the only Jew-haters on the planet, and the left has its own complement of anti-Semites (a fact that comes as something of a shock to those right-wing kooks who are stubbornly convinced that all left-wing intellectuals ARE Jews). In recent years, these subterranean hatreds have fattened on the Democratic Party's politics of race, which have obliged Party strategists to tolerate, if not actively exploit, black anti-Semitism, including the egregious Jew-baiting of such luminaries as Jesse Jackson and Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney.
Of course, there's more than enough posh, white liberal anti-Semitism to go around. During the Gulf War, for instance, when Israeli cities were targeted by Iraq, ABC's notoriously Israel-unfriendly newsreader, Peter Jennings (himself quite a clever fellow), created a minor flurry - though only on the right - when he sneeringly suggested that courageous Israeli concert-goers who refused to leave their seats during an air raid were merely trying to "get their money's worth".
Little wonder Arab radicals have found it both fun and profitable to play to Western political elites, and especially the American press, with English-language protest signs and sound-bites so neatly tailored to fit the current journalistic fashions that you half expect to see Paul Begala lurking at the elbow of the latest PLO spokeswoman, feeding her phrases cunningly focus-tested on the editorial board of The New York Times.
Still, in the wake of last weekend 's Hamas terror, you felt a shift, a shivering of the political karma.
Despite the best efforts of James Carville and Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, it seems we have not yet altogether forgotten September 11th. We have our own dead, too, now - ordinary people, slaughtered senselessly and without warning by madmen who hate us because we are who we are. All at once, it does not become us to counsel restraint in the face of terror.
Yesterday's White House affirmation of Israel's right of self-defense was a remarkable break with the delicate 'equivalency' dance that has been the posture of American politicians of both parties and all political stripes for much too long. Although the Pavlovian press is salivating to denounce Israel for acts of 'retaliation' (the press expects Israel to be a peacemaker in much the same way it expects Republicans to be bipartisan), it cannot, it really cannot -- not with the smug zest it would have displayed on September 10th.
We have come to understand this much: Western civilization really is at risk - including that one tiny splinter of it, locked in a sea of barbarism.http://www.drudgereport.com/Weiss/120401.htm |
