Interesting speech from a member of the Jewish Left to the Jewish Left, challenging the notion that the Israeli problem can be fixed by improved self-criticism, without the need for improved Arab self-criticism. He calls this "masochistic omnipotence syndrome", the idea that if only I alone were pure enough, I could fix the world. I'd be very interested in your reaction. The speech is posted in two parts.
The Challenge of Israel to the Progressives (Part 1)
Richard Landes
Boston University
There is a frightening split that has grown within the Jewish community over the last decade, intensifying specifically in the wake of the Oslo collapse and the explosion of violence in word and deed, against Jews all over the world. Long before Americans woke up to the “new millennium” on 9-11-01, the Jews got their introduction in the fall of 2000 with the next round of the Intifada. On the one hand I meet (or talk with) people whom I greatly respect, thoughtful and committed people, who take positions on Israel and politics that I find difficult to swallow – a kind of hardline Republican, neo-conservative politics that runs the gamut from “liberals are soft-headed, self-righteous, suicidal fools,” to “anti-Semitism is inherent to goyim,” to an embrace of the principle of the economy of violence – brief, thorough violence will stabilize the situation – as a viable policy option. On the other hand, I meet (or talk with) people whom I greatly respect, thoughtful and committed people, who take positions on Israel that I find hard to swallow – a kind of hardline liberal-progressive politics that runs the gamut from “conservatives are war-mongers and racists,” to “if only Israel would return to the ’67 borders, then there’d be peace” to “this is not anti-Semitism, it’s understandable anger at Israel’s policies.”
We are a deeply conflicted people, as befits a people who want to do right and do well, in an impossible situation. If Israel were a child (in the life of sovereign nations she still is), psychologists would discuss the schizophrenogenic conditions in which she operated, and wonder how long before the patient will succumb to the impossible psychic conditions that most often lead to the paranoia and totalitarian violence. But as a result of her situation, Israel finds herself subject to all the pressures of violence – the strengthened voice of power-politics, the corrupting impact of weapons and power, the rage of frustration and injury – and we American Jews, doubly liberal by our secular values and our Jewish values find ourselves literally torn in two, and increasingly fearful for both the body and the soul of our beloved nation, Israel. The most terrible irony of this condition, the schizophrenic dimension demands that we choose between the body and the soul of Israel. It seems like we Jews have been given Sophie’s choice again: either you work to protect Israel the state, at any cost; or you work to protect the morality of the Jewish people, our role as a light to the nations. And for American Jews that is a particularly disorienting choice because, unlike the Israelis who live these schizophrenic decisions, we are at a distance, safe in our (still) well-protected liberal environment.
My thoughts tonight are inspired by many things, only some of which I can mention. Above all, an incident: Last April I went to the office troubled by the terrible wave of suicide bombings and a friend – a non-Jew but with no trace of anti-semitism that I could detect – asked what was wrong. When he commiserated, I added that what troubled me the most was that there was virtually no effective voice of moral outrage in the West, especially among the Left. He responded: “Well, what choice do they have?” I felt like I had been kicked in the stomach. Now I could fill the rest of this talk with how that statement is, consciously or not, racist about the Arabs for whom it shows a level of moral expectation similar to what we hold for wild animals, and anti-semitic about the Jews who, it presumes, have so mistreated these people with no way to escape that they have no choice, and finally morally lazy in that such terrible events did not even excite his curiosity. Above all his response – echoed widely, including by the well-meaning wife of Tony Blair – sent me into a cognitive tailspin. If a decent, highly intelligent man who was neither politically left nor hostile to Jews, could find “what choice do they have?” as a reasonable response to an agonizing question, what has happened? How could Israel have reached so low a nadir in public opinion that “What choice do they have?” seems like a decent answer and an intelligent outsider need look no further?
We start with self-criticism, that ever-elusive, ever difficult, ever illuminating strength that underlies any civil society and any learning curve. If you can’t admit your faults, you cannot do anything about them. Those who have heard me speak on such matters know that I consider the ability to self-criticize one of the most powerful and important aspects of Jewish culture, one of the things that makes the Bible so powerful a document, one of the pillars upon which our religion and its astounding ability to survive under the worst circumstances, stands. But self-criticism, like every strength, has weaknesses, including pathological variants. When a wife comes to believe that it’s her fault that her husband beats her, or children, that it’s their fault that their parents are divorcing, self-criticism has become self-destructive. I will come back to this point, and to what I will call MOS or Masochistic Omnipotence Syndrome anon. What I’d like to do now is to suggest that those most deeply engaged in “self-criticism”, namely those on the Left, have fallen deeply out of the habit of true self-criticism.
One might even define the left as the self-critical camp. It is on the left that we find people with the courage to remember Native Americans on Thanksgiving Day and the recall the genocide committed against them by European settlers; to acknowledge that American and European influence around the world has done immeasurable damage to other cultures; to admit that we still have racism and prejudice and that our jails are grotesquely filled with black people who have done no more than millions of free white people have done. And yet, and yet, there is something strange about the direction this criticism has gone. Anyone who reads genuinely leftist publications like The Nation knows that the criticism of one’s government has passed over into criticism of the “other.” They have made a break; they no longer identify with the political culture they oppose; they do not self-criticize, they attack an enemy.
One can understand such a reaction, of course. The government, even “progressive” governments have a depressing record of reneging on promises for social justice, and for turning blind eyes to dastardly deeds. At some point, one is tempted, if one would stay true to real values, to break with so corrupt – or at least corruptible – a criticism of the enemy. Such a break is particularly ominous, however, since self-criticism is aimed at improvement, and done out of love; criticism of the other aims at damaging a foe and risks being done out of hatred.
What happens to the self-critical capacities when such a break occurs? That is for us to explore.
But before I do, let me point out that there is another break that has been occurring, something that all those on the left need to consider, of Jews who, determined to stay loyal to real values, have broken with a Left that has become, in their minds, so destructive in its way of thinking and acting, that they now consider themselves on the right. They are the next wave of neo-cons who, just as the first wave was disgusted with the fellow travelers of the Stalinist era, ready to apologize for and deny what the communists were doing, now find themselves appalled by a left ready to apologize for and deny what the Palestinians are doing. For these people, Jewish Leftists are self-hating, self-righteous fools at best, engaged in self-destructive brown-nosing in a pathetic effort to win the moral “approval” of people who so clearly hate the Jewish people. For them, Noam Chomsky is the poster-boy of such self-hatred with his obsessive litanies of all the crimes the Israelis have committed, a man eagerly lionized by people with very vicious agendas. I have spoken with many such neo-neo-cons, sometimes to my despair. I have tried, no matter how I felt about the left never to break with the Left, nor to break with those disgusted by the Left. I consider both Dan Pipes and Michael Lerner on the same side.
This is not only because I find people on the left more interesting and enjoyable company, but also because I believe that advances in social justice come largely from the left, from the people who “speak truth to power”, who strive to help those who are powerless and to educate and empower the average person, to protect the rights of people to make as many choices as possible. This is what I understand it means to me to be a progressive, working for tikkun olam, and why I’m proud of it. And as a historian, my reading of the early literature of mankind indicates that the most eloquent leftists, the most passionate progressives in history published in the pages of the earliest journal, the TaNaCH. Judaism is the “left”-est, that is, most politically progressive religion in global history.
So that my criticism comes not as an outsider aiming to damage the enemy, as much as an insider wanting to strengthen the self; on the contrary, as an insider wanting to do some tochachah. The rabbis have many thoughts on how one does tochachah, admonishment, and if anyone wants to teach me in this matter I am your willing student. In any case, you can tell me hereafter, how well I’ve done in my tochachah of the Left.
The Fearful Ironies.
People on the left often remark, not without some quiet amusement, on the curious relationship of the Israeli and Jewish right with the Christian fundamentalists. This strikes leftists in particular as a bad, if not evil omen, an unholy alliance between the representatives of a secular modern government with some of the most regressive, anti-modern forces on the planet. Do these fools not know that Pat Robertson’s New World Order is patterned after the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and contains a world-conspiracy in which a Jewish people who do not convert are the enemies of mankind and its salvation and must perish in the coming apocalypse? And for those of you who came tonight, who love Israel but not Sharon, we could easily spend the evening going over in great detail all these ironies.
But tonight I want to focus on the other irony, the other unholy alliance in the fearful asymmetry that characterizes our political situation right now: that between the left and the Palestinians. There are few more fascist societies than Palestine right now. This is a society that systematically propagandizes its people, that drums into them in every way they can a mono-culture in which alternative opinions, especially on foreign affairs, are not tolerated, in which the strength of the united people in the conduct of a brave and valiant war that calls for immense sacrifice of individuals for the goals of the state are the main forms of public discourse, and in which the most sadistic and domineering personalities rise to the top of the political system. It is a culture pervaded by hatred and the demonizing of its enemies, which teaches its children to want to kill the children of their enemies, and expresses in both word and deed every desire to wipe out their neighbors.
And yet, of all the “national liberation” movements around the world, the Palestinian receives an inordinate amount of attention and favor. It’s not my job to chronicle it right now. If anyone wants to raise this in the question and answer session I’d be glad to run it by you. But the indictment of Oriana Fallaci last Spring, when European leftist joined the Muslims in an explosion of anti-Israeli sentiment around the world, of the appalling anti-Semitism of the Left may serve as a foundation to the discussion. When a gentile woman who is herself deeply immersed in the leftist culture of Italy and Europe sees the madness, who are we to ignore the warning? But my point tonight is somewhat different. Its not the madness of the far left that’s so troubling, it’s the general sense among people who are merely instinctively liberals, that Israel is the aggressor, and that the solution lies in Israeli withdrawal. Indeed, I hope this room is filled with people who think that that’s the solution. I am not here to get you to give up that conclusion; just to get you to realize how much really serious thinking and action must precede its successful execution.
The Cognitive Map:
I think one can sum up the kind of thinking that motivates most well-intentioned people when they try to understand the Middle East conflict is a natural sympathy for the oppressed. Who is suffering most? What can be done to alleviate their suffering? A fair observer, confronted with the situation, and wanting to help, naturally tends to view the weak as needing help and the strong – in this case, certainly since 1967, Israel – need to be “held back.” Thus we naturally hold Israel to a higher standard, demand from her behavior that we do not demand from the other side. One should neither underestimate the power of this sympathy, nor belittle of it. Compassion is yet another pillar of Judaism and the Left.
The problem, as I see it, is how does such sympathy for the oppressed distinguish between innocent victims – of which there are undoubtedly many – and frustrated aggressors? Nothing should trouble the left more today than the possibility that, having mistaken frustrated aggressors for innocent victims, they contribute to the continued victimization of the innocent. As the rabbis put it: He who is merciful to the cruel will be cruel to the merciful. And that, I will argue, is precisely what has happened, with catastrophic results.
So let me introduce my fellow liberals to our nemesis: the demopath. The demopath is our Achilles heel, our greatest vulnerability, and he preys on our most generous instincts. It is my contention that the problem of demopathy is one that civil society has yet to grapple with and must. The terrible dilemma of any compassionate and well-meaning liberal (I speak here of myself as well as, I hope, everyone else in this room), is how to deal with people who do not share our feelings and desires, indeed they despise them and want to destroy them. Normally we call those people enemies, and we defend ourselves from them. But what if our enemy speaks our language and hides behind the fine-sounding phrases of our own values – human rights, freedom, resisting oppression? What happens when you smile on your brother and he doesn’t smile back, or still worse, he smiles back insincerely and then tries to force you into behavior that will lead to your own harm?
Muhammed Atta is exhibit A of demopathy: the man goes into the office of the Dept of Agriculture and asks for a $600,000 loan to buy a crop duster fitted with outsized tanks so he can poison gas as many Americans as possible, and when refused, accuses the bureaucrat of racism. This man has no commitment to the kind of tolerance he demands; he is not impressed by our desire not to be racist. He sees it as a form of weakness to exploit. Does this mean we should cease trying to overcome unfair forms of intolerance – by no means! Does it mean that we need to become aware of the fact that there are people out there who use our values to destroy us, and that just because they have mastered the discourse does not mean that we should embrace them. Yes! And yet we, especially those of us on the Left, do not distinguish. Why? Because we’re afraid of being accused of discrimination?
The Pyschology:
For one thing, we don’t know how many there are. My example is the most extreme case of a suicide mass murderer, someone we now know was bent on destroying as many lives as possible. But what about Edward Said? Is he a demopath? How many spokesmen and women for the PLO are demopaths. How malevolent is the “other side” with whom we seek to make peace?
The first problem, it seems to me, is our tendency to deny how bad things are. We do this for a variety of reasons, many of which can be summed up in the comment by Leon Weiseltier in an important piece in the New Republic last spring, just as the ADL was sounding the alarm about worldwide anti-semitism, entitled “Hitler is Dead” In it he insisted that Jews stop being paranoid about a recurrence of Hitler and blowing things out of proportion, and then came to the conclusion: “to make comparisons between the Palestinians and the Nazis is not a historical argument, it’s really a political argument opposing negotiations.” In other words if you believe that the Arab leadership is genuinely dedicated to our destruction, you can’t talk, or, to paraphrase the line from “Peace Now,” you can’t make peace with enemies who want to destroy you, you can only make peace with enemies who are ready to make peace.” The attitude of the progressive camp, eager to make peace, has been to treat Arab hate speech as “mere rhetoric” to give a great deal of lee-way to their words and actions, to repeatedly hope that by mild and generous behavior, we could bring out a different kind of reaction among the Palestinians. When such efforts failed, the response was consistently more effort. What happens when you “smile on your brother”, when you “give peace a chance,” and he chooses war?
Unfortunately the response of the Left so far has been so great a level of denial that the “right” is rapidly filling with refugees from the left who cannot bear these levels. What Weiseltier didn’t mention – he is too smart and astute not to know it – is that the reverse of his argument also holds: “People who insist Hitler is Dead and that Palestinian political culture is not like that of the Nazis, are also making a political not an historical argument, about the possibility of negotiations.” If one is committed a priori to denying evidence for the sake of a cherished hope – the possibilities of peaceful negotiations, in this case – then one sets a stumbling block before the blind, oneself.
It makes perfect sense to be in denial about the level of hatred out there. With one billion Muslims in the world, it makes sense to hope that the vast majority of them do not sympathize with Al-Quaida who are really only a fringe movement, that Islam is a religion of Peace. Now I’m not saying –yet – that a billion Muslims are sympathizers with Al Quaida and Islam is a religion of war. And I’m certainly not saying that it is impossible that Al-Quaida can become a fringe movement and that Islam cannot be a religion of Peace. It’s just that we will not begin to understand what we are dealing with and deal with it effectively, as long as we are in denial about these matters. To paraphrase Gramsci, we need the optimism of the heart and the realism of the eye, not the optimism of the heart blinding the eye.
This denial, even as it contributes to our blindness, draws from a remarkable tradition of self-criticism. “Sure there is hatred on the other side,” it says, “but it is not causeless hatred, not pure malevolence, but rather the understandable reaction to the wrongs we have wrought upon these people.” As a remarkable Israeli woman, and deeply committed leftist, said in response to my assertion that until the Palestinians give up teaching their children hatred, no peace will come: “Why should they? After all we’ve done to them?” Now this woman would denounce the slightest bit of racism in Israeli educational curricula, but she hotly defended the Palestinian’s right to hatred. This doesn’t make sense to me.
The revisionist Israeli historiography of the past generation is, whether one considers it vicious or courageous or both, one of the most extraordinarily self-critical schools in the annals of historical writing. The point here is not so much that this self-criticism either weakens or strengthens us – it can do either and both – but that if it expects that, by admitting fault, we will elicit a similar self-critical response from the other side we need to think again. Instead we play into the hands of demonizers, we elicit cries of “I told you so! You were lying all along about our responsibility for the refugees! You are the criminals.” Does this mean we don’t self-criticize? No. But it does mean that we need to figure out how to communicate to a program like the recent one on NPR that put self-critical Israelis opposite demonizing Palestinians, that just because one side says “they did it,” and the other side says, “we did do it,” it’s not an open and shut case. On the contrary, it’s the opposite.
One of the most pervasive mistakes that we make, and here I speak of both the more ideological Left, but also of the standard American liberal, is to project our own mentality onto others who do not necessarily share it. As a historian, let me assure you that people who argue that tolerance is good, that everyone should benefit from equal treatment before the law, and that one should whenever humanly possible, solve problems by working them out peaceably, are a distinct minority in the political life of virtually any culture. To assume that others are “just like us” in embracing the values of civil society is at once a terrible underestimation of how great an accomplishment civil society is, but also a dangerous illusion that flies in the face of evidence that we cannot afford to ignore. The cherished hope of all liberals – certainly my cherished hope – is that, given the opportunity to chose some form of civil society (it need not be democracy), most people in most societies will so chose. But that opportunity is not like picking an item off a store shelf – civil society demands a level of training and commitment to these values that very few societies have developed. (The 40 years in the desert were precisely about acquiring the necessary training and fortitude.) Thus, establishing a civil society is neither as simple nor as easy a choice as we want to believe. And wanting does not make it so.
The current assumption, for example, so popular with most people, that if only Israel would leave the occupied territories, then there is a good chance for peace, assumes that the PA is a civil society waiting to happen. And it may be so, but to assume that it is, without considering the more ample evidence that it may indeed become a fascist state with a malignant nationalism that can only be happy by eliminating the nationalism of (at least one of) its neighbors, strikes me as profoundly irresponsible, not only because we are Jews, but because we want to strengthen not weaken civil society. When Palestinian spokesmen say “the occupation” is the root of the problem, do they mean the same thing as we do? Will they be satisfied with the WB and the GS? The Palestinian demopath will say: of course, all we want is our chance to build a state. More honestly – and this happened at a panel I was on Sunday night with two Palestinian panelists – they will say that the only “just” solution is a secular bi-national state that goes from the Jordan to the sea (and obviously is run by the majority).
Can we on the left distinguish between the demopaths and those who really want a peaceful settlement that tolerates an autonomous Jewish state and those who use the language of civil society to pursue tribal vendettas to restore lost honor? To dismiss those who warn of the “staged plan” for the destruction of Israel as a bunch of warmongers may allow us to remain true to our desires, but not necessarily to accomplish our goals. If nothing will get in the way of our desire to find a peaceful solution, that very desire may get in the way.
On the contrary, for many on the left, any talk of demopaths, warmongers, and people who want to destroy Israel among the Arabs borders of demonization and even racism. I recently witnessed an amazing exchange between one of the students in BUSI and a anti-globalization anti-war fellow. The BU student asked him: “do you think Saddam Hussein is in favor of civil society?” To which this fellow responded, “of course.” And he wasn’t kidding. Indeed he warned Manny that he was treading dangerous ground by suggesting anything else – it’s racist to suggest that anyone’s not in favor of civil society. Here we have an astounding willingness to attribute our values to anyone, indeed to suggest someone isn’t, is almost to accuse them of being subhuman. It reminded me of the time in my Israeli/Arab dialogue group that I complained about the moral depravity of suicide bombing and the appalling lack of a voice to oppose its celebration in street theatre and paper mache recreations on University campuses, and one of the Palestinians in the group accused me of de-humanizing him. There’s a big difference between human and humane. To hate, to do violence and celebrate it, is all too human; it is not liberal. But liberals must understand that, like the Jews, we are a minority, a minority in history and – at least among those who are in the ruling elites, a minority right now.
And yet it stands as one of the basic axioms of most “think-tank” analysis of the Middle East that Palestinians no longer want to destroy Israel. “Any Palestinian with an IQ of 100 knows that Israel is here to stay,” affirmed one expert on NPR, affirming what Dick Gordon and the other guest had both stated just before him. Now this is demonstrably false – presumably many members of Hamas have over 100 IQ and the destruction of Israel is in their charter. But even more it is both incredibly condescending – “I know Israel is here to stay, so surely they must” – and willfully blind to a whole powerful current of Palestinian thought which goes back to the origins of the conflict, and still carries weight. Those who believe that the occupation is therefore the main source of the problem must deny that such attitudes exist, or at least that they are significant. They want so much to believe that these irredentist attitudes are gone (so we can get on with negotiations), that they refuse to see them even when confronted with the evidence. “I do not believe that a Palestinian mother is any different than a Jewish mother, and does not want war,” professed an outraged Ted Koppel when told by an Israeli official after the collapse of Taba that the Palestinians want war. And this just before we have been assaulted with pictures of women praising their children for committing suicide mass murder. How much evidence before we read the writing on the wall?
The problem here, is that the writing is so depressing that we really are in denial about it. Most liberals, it turns out, are not nearly as optimistic as they seem. When confronted with the spectacle of a fascist, demonizing political and religious culture that puts the Nazis in the shade for its extensive use of modern media to spread a message of hatred, racism and genocide, they feel – appropriately – immensely depressed. If your strength lies in talking things out, in foregoing violence, how more impotent can you feel than when faced with someone who genuinely wants violence, and will do whatever he or she can to achieve that end. The liberal is at a complete loss of words before the demopath. We cannot allow ourselves to suspect people of being so bad.
Of course the main defense to this is to accuse the bearer of bad tidings of racism. I have a close friend who thinks I’m a racist. It’s an intelligent way out of a difficult dilemma. Sooner accuse your friend of racism than your foe. If you think that I’m headed into a demonizing rant about the Arabs, and that you need not listen to what I have to say, think again. I am far less racist, and far less condescending than you are. Not only do I take these people seriously and not project onto them values they despise, but I am constantly seeking ways to find people on the other side who really do share these values. The reason you insist on projecting your liberal values is because you don’t really believe that looking realistically will permit you to sustain your illusions. And in so doing, you become the dupe of the demopaths, who will manipulate you at every turn by playing the eager recipient of your projections. This is neither good for you, nor for the people that you really do care about – the people whom these demopaths are holding hostage.
At its best, this heartfelt blindness represents a kind of messianic fervor for civil society, a profound hope in the significant betterment of human life on this planet, and a belief that if only we are kind enough to others, they will respond favorably eventually. If your brother don’t smile back, smile some more, keep trying to love one another. But, as I’m trying to suggest here, that has become self destructive. How long do we keep smiling until we begin to feel not just like a fool, but a vulnerable fool?
There are other, less heroic reasons for the persistence of leftist denial about the ugliness to be found in the Arab world. |
