Part 2 of The Challenge of Israel to the Progressives
Embarrassment: it is immensely painful for Jews raised in the heady liberal air of post-60s to see Jews, Israelis act in ways we would hate to behave or have our children behave. I remember the embarrassment I felt in 1967 when the Israeli soldier who was accompanying our kibbutz volunteer group thru Hebron started bargaining with a glass-blower for me. His aggressiveness, his intimidation of the Arab pained me; I preferred to pay what the Arab wanted rather than go there. Now it’s hundreds of times worse – Jewish soldiers who enjoy humiliating Palestinians, who are proud of killing the enemy (could you ask for a better definition of goyim nachas?), who are torturers. The pain we feel, and still more the embarrassment we feel before our liberal friends who are not Jewish is palpable. I would say that a good deal of the visceral hostility to Sharon – “I’m all in favor of Israel… but Sharon! Sharon!…” – comes from the liberal horror of backing a man so ready and capable of using violence.
Desire to be appreciated and loved: Behind the embarrassment lies another dimension of the Jewish messianic soul – to be loved. Finally, in modern society, we have a chance to play by their rules, to achieve a kind of acceptance within a system that gentiles themselves have established. The people whose progenitor, Abraham, was promised that through him all the families of the earth would be blessed, feel most fulfilled when most loved. It is a sign of a great and generous soul; but it can also produce tragedies like the collapse of Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig’s dialogue with their German Christian Liberal colleagues when the Nazis came. “But,” protested the Jews. “We were talking with you to convert you, but you didn’t; don’t expect our sympathy…” replied their dialogue partners. Granted America is different. But not because it is immutably different. We need to do this round differently. And right now the Jewish Left looks a lot like those who found themselves abandoned by their leftist gentile allies when the anti-semites took over in Austria. And if you don’t know the story, and you’re on the left, you need to do some reading. In the meantime, those Israelis and Jews willing to attack Israeli fascism publicly, those who refuse armed service, those who publish revisionist works about how the Israelis kicked out and massacred Palestinians are lionized by the Left. The Israeli leftist academics get invited to the diplomatic parties, get interviewed on the radio, get welcomed on lecture tours in Europe and the US.
Moral Purity: Here we come to the core of the HRC delineated by Charles Jacobs. This concern with one’s own moral purity has taken on alarming proportions. When we hear of every injured child on the West Bank and nothing about 10 million Africans in southern Sudan murdered while their surviving women and children are sold into slavery, somethings very wrong. It can be summed up in the cry “Not in my name!” When I asked a Chomsky acolyte at MIT what she thought about the Sudan, she answered, “How many helicopters have we sold them?” The same woman willing to demonize the US government to prevent a war where we might kill innocents, had no interest either in places where far more terrible things were happening, but no interest in destroying so terrible a tyrant as Saddam Hussein. The core of the argument for divestment centers on this concern – why single out Israel? Because it gets the most American foreign aid. Again, like so much on the left, the impulse is good, but when it spills over into an obsession with our sins and a complete indifference of the sins of others, we edge towards CISS (Cultural immuno-suppression syndrome), a point to which I shall return in concluding.
Aggression against the self: So far we have been dealing with admirable if naïve traits. Now we have to delve into the more unpleasant realms of our psyche. I have already referred to MOS, masochistic omnipotence syndrome. Let me explain. When those who wants peaceful dialogue at any cost confronts foes that wants violence at any cost, they rely on their strengths to disarm their foe: self-criticism, confession, repentance, concessions. “For all the suffering we have inflicted upon your people, we are truly sorry.” And anyone on the decent left is sorry for this. I certainly am. But surely they have things to apologize for; surely at some level of their humanity, the Arabs must know that they have not treated the Jews as fairly as they insist on being treated by the Jews.
But demopaths don’t self-criticize and they don’t apologize, and they view confession and concession as signs of weakness and invitations to further aggression. And if we don’t pay attention to such reactions, we run grave risks. The dangerous path, in such situations is to conclude that if those on the other side still hate me, then it must be because I have still other things to admit, and more concessions to make. Rather than even consider that the hatred on the other side might be the problem, the true believer takes on still more responsibility. Ultimately we reach a kind of masochistic self-flagellation that covers a submerged and bizarre sense of omnipotence: everything is my fault, and if I could only improve myself, I could change the world. Again this has an important element of truth, indeed it is typically Jewish – mipnai chataeinu galinu meartzenu, because of our sins you have exiled us from our lands. It is one of the elements of Judaism that the more pietistic forms of Christianity adopted and intensified. “Turn the other cheek… forgive seven times seventy… love your enemy as yourself.” Again, admirable on one level, deeply counter-productive on another. Between Demopaths and those in the grip of MOS lies the most destructively dysfunctional relationship currently active in the global community.
Identification with the aggressor: The most dangerous direction for people who have radically renounced aggression is an unconscious identification with an aggressor. Having forbidden violence, the only way that such impulses can surface is through an identification with an aggressor and with violence that is “not in my name.” This tendency is, I think, far more active in the gentile left than the Jewish, but nonetheless important to mention. Identification with the aggressor deals with forbidden impulses. Here we find a guilty pressure in urging on another’s aggression while remaining “innocent” of that behavior. Of course if the aggression is directed against oneself, then the innocence is all the more pure. I have no aggression, it says, indeed I am so beyond aggression that I will suffer that of another without resistance. I find it difficult to understand the profoundly self-destructive eagerness with which the Left, especially in Europe, encourages Muslim and Arab Jew-hatred without working with this concept. Indeed it is based on an identification with the most violent of Palestinian attitudes: they identify with their outrage at Jewish aggression. Similarly, someone like Noam Chomsky, who virulently denounces Zionist massacres while writing an introduction to a book denying the holocaust and siding entirely with political forces that regularly engage in massacres, strikes me as a textbook case of the problem. Herein lies the romance with revolutionary violence, the love of (someone else’s) violence.
Moral Schadenfreude: Finally, in this survey of psychological dimensions of Leftist thinking, I come to the one I think most important in understanding the immense hostility of the Left for Israel. It also resolves to my mind the terrible conundrum of Leftist anti-semitism, since in my book antisemitism is essentially a form of right-wing hostility at the leftist impact of Jews on gentile society.
Schadenfreude is the opposite of everything the generous liberal aspires to, the pleasure one takes in seeing others suffer. In this case we are talking about people who get great pleasure from seeing the Jews as offenders, as war criminals, as aggressors. This expresses itself most clearly in the phrase, “Ah those Jews, 2000 years of being oppressed and, no sooner do they have the power to do so, than they oppress others.” And what better proof than the occupation of Palestine? Now why do I consider this Schadenfreude rather than merely an accurate observation about a painful truth? Because I’m an historian, and I can fairly safely state that no nation in recorded history has shown so much concern for its enemies than Israel.
But let me take that one step further, because it sheds a particularly fierce light on why davka so many Leftists enjoy this Schadenfreude, why this phrase comes so trippingly off their tongues. The Left, historically, has a terrible record with power. Every Leftist revolution, with the exception of the US and Israel, has, once in power, succumbed to the paranoia of egalitarian experimentation and gone through totalitarian terrors. The French in 1793, the Russians after 1917, the Maoists, the Khmer Rouge, the Nicaraguans. In some cases these episodes were relatively short, in some exceedingly bloody, in all, they meant that the new “state” sacrificed the individual to the collectivity, it meant the collapse of the democratic experiment, even for insiders, now viewed through the paranoid lens of revolutionaries drunk on vision and violence. Not only did those with political power behave badly, but those with intellectual power did as well, serving as complicit allies in a staggering performance of denial and outright lies about the terrible deeds of their revolutionary heroes.
Israel’s commitment to democracy at a very high level – so high people hold it to the peacetime standards of the relatively “mature” West – through a period of intense anxiety about being wiped out stands as a unique accomplishment in the history of leftist revolutions. That, under current conditions, Israel has “held out” so long against the paranoia of revolutionary power, so long in her commitment to freedom of expression, to tolerating even Arab legislators who identify with the state’s enemies, constitutes a political “record” that puts even Joe Dimaggio’s hitting streak in the shade. There’s an irony here worth pointing out.
It may seem strange to argue that the Jews resisted paranoia the most, since it is a commonplace to argue that Jews are paranoid (Weiseltier’s dismissive wave of the hand: stop being paranoid, Hitler is dead.) But the Jews, in my reading of history, are the least paranoid people on the planet. Why do I say so? Because if any other culture or nation had as much reason to think that people were out to destroy her, they’d be basket cases. Paranoids can’t empathize, they can only demonize; paranoids can’t build, they can only plan destruction; paranoids can’t share, they can only take.
How does the left respond the Zionist anomaly? Does it engage in self-criticism? Does it pore over the histories of early Zionism to understand what remarkable elements of Israeli culture permitted it to avoid tearing itself apart in the narcissism of small differences, in the hatreds and paranoias of visionaries convinced that they knew the way? Is there a vast literature among the Left on how, in case of future revolutions, not to tread the path of terrorism? No. It redefines Zionism as a right-wing colonialist imperialism that has nothing to do with them, and ignores all the elements of the tale that represent its truly anomalous character. And at the same time, excuses the terrorism of those who attack the Jews as legitimate resistance. In a film on Jenin done by a Palestinian advocacy group from the Left, we see a member of International Solidarity Movement, a Palestinian non-violent organization painting a banner that says “Resistance is not Terror!” When I asked the member of ISM present how he can consider such a statement non-violent, he responded “non-violent resistance is not terror.” For such platitudes I see no need for signs.
Why this reaction? No intellectual move is more destructive of liberal values than to romanticize “revolutionaries” that don’t share the egalitarian ethos even in the early stages of the movement, while demonizing the revolutionaries that struggle so valiantly to maintain them. As far as I can understand, the move has a sad but effective payoff. The Left believes – and I agree – that it espouses the most moral of political ideologies. This moral Schadenfreude, then, protects their own sense of self, their own sense that “We are the most moral.” But in order for this self-indulgence to work, Israel, the only clearcut case that we might learn from, the only people to try the Leftist experiment and not go mad, not abuse power the way we have so often done, must lie at the bottom of the moral universe, far too distant for anything to call into question our moral superiority. As the French would say, “Nous n’avons pas de leçons à apprendre.” As one French intellectual commented to Thomas Friedman as the reports of massacres at Jenin swept Europe, “The Israelis have killed more in Jenin, than the French in Algeria.” Rather than strive to make sure no one commits another genocide against a people one’s own culture has so long and violently hated, and never understood, these people prefer to trample Israel under foot, implicitly reducing the guilt of the Holocaust, since the victims were not so innocent, but really aggressors in waiting. Those afflicted with a combination of HRC and moral Schadenfreude can thus say, “Nie weider! Never again will a European Christian massacre millions of Jews. But we will understand if someone else does it.”
This Schadenfreude is particularly noticeable in the comparison of Israel with the Nazis. Nothing could be farther from the truth, although I don’t have the time to delve into why I say that or why I think it is so. And it takes on a particularly vicious turn when done in the context of a struggle of the first Jewish state in 2000 years with a political culture that openly admires and adopts the language, literature, and tactics of the Nazis. No group has ever openly embraced genocide as a desired goal – not even the Nazis – except the Arab League in 1947-8 and again in 1967, and now on PA television at the beginning of the third millennium CE. Certainly nothing could be more painful for Jews to hear, especially since so much of our ethical striving centers on the principle that one does not do onto others what they, or someone else has done to us. It is a sadistic comparison, and it borders on masochism to find a “painful truth” in it. It’s popularity should stand a shibboleth of distinguishing between the decent and the indecent Left.
Enough bashing of the excesses and failures of my own ideological camp. Let me move on to a quick restatement of our dilemma as Leftists and Liberals, and some suggestions of where to go from here.
The problem: The terribly destructive embrace of MOS with Demopaths
Denial is dangerous in any case; especially in time of war when that denial concerns the intentions of the enemy. Liberals and Jews don’t like to think they have enemies, and they want to use the values they most admire – self-criticism, empathy, and generosity – to solve problems. I heartily agree. But we are thereby particularly susceptible to manipulation by demopaths, who appeal to our fondest hopes to destroy us, who as they manipulate us into sympathizing with them, have nothing but contempt for us. We come to a kind of mobius interaction: generosity is greeted with aggression. This is not true always. I’m not arguing that “they only understand violence.” But how do we recognize it when it is the case? If we cannot, if our liberal commitments to a belief that all people are good inside and just need a little TLC to blossom as liberals mean that we deny the very existence of demopaths, then we fall victim to CISS, Cultural Immuno-suppression syndrome. We cannot defend against enemies; worse, we embrace them.
This particularly dangerous interaction not only threatens our existence, it harms the primary victims of demopaths, their own people. Whatever the Israelis did in contributing to the refugee problem of 1948, it is the Arab demopaths who imprisoned that population in refugee camps and insisted on their remaining in miserable conditions so that they could at once teach them hatred and play on the liberal sympathy of the West. The first victims of Arab and Muslim Jew-hatred and Zionophobia are the Palestinians, a designated victim people in a war of extermination. Similarly the greatest victims of the HRC obsession with Jewish and white perps are the Sudanese, the Tibetans, the Kurds, the Iraqis, and all the other people who have the misfortune of having “people of color” as their oppressors, and whose voices are drowned out in our own self-indulgent drive for moral purity. When “Not in my name!” trumps “No to genocide and slavery” the oppressed of the world will suffer still more. One of the ironies of the Palestinian problem is that no national liberation movement has received more world-wide sympathy, and none has done worse by its own people. If we on the left want to engage in some MOS, how about taking responsibility for the victimization of the Palestinians since we have so long lionized their demopathic oppressors. We are the enablers of the worst victimizers of the Palestinian people – their own leadership. Those with MOS are co-dependents on an Arab and Muslim addiction to hatred.
And at the same time, we punish those who work for civil society. The first summer I spent in Israel, I was on a secular kibbutz. I loved the Israelis on the kibbutz, but I found their style more aggressive than I, future child of the 60s, liked. But one day I got my most important lesson in Judaism from a young soldier who had fought in the 6-day War. We were talking about how the Western press and especially the left wing were so critical of the Israelis. “How do you sustain your commitment to restraint when you get accused of exactly what you work so hard not to do?” I asked. “We don’t do it for public appreciation. We do it because that is what we must do and who we are.” I realized at that moment how much my behavior was a function of getting others to approve, and what real integrity was about. Now you may say, “But this is the HRC! I must behave well no matter what!” To which I answer, correct, but an admirable example of it, someone on the front line, someone with the power to and every reason to violate others’ rights, who tries hard not to. What we do in heaping abuse on Israel for the Jenin operation is to undermine the very thing we most admire. We punish those trying hard to maintain civil virtues, and reward those who attack them.
Why do we do this? I think it has to do with a fear that if we were to congratulate the IDF on their behavior – something that would obviously make us look bad in the eyes of our liberal friends – we think it would somehow undermine the effort to improve it. How do you encourage people to work harder for democracy when you congratulate them on how remarkable their commitment to democracy has been so far? Better to accuse them of not having a democracy because of their unequal treatment of Arabs. In the mid-80s, the Nobel Peace Committee considered giving Peace Now the prize; they decided not to because they couldn’t find an equivalent on the other side. So not only did they not recognize how exceptional it was to have so vigorous a peace movement even though they had no partner, but they refused to acknowledge them lest they hurt the feelings of the other side.
The thinking reminds me of my uncle Jud’s story about how he graduated from Rochester University with high honors and prizes, and his father, who came to the graduation said nothing, no congratulations, no encouragement. When he later complained to his mother, she said, “Oh dear! He’s been bragging to everyone about you!” “So why couldn’t he say something to me?” “He didn’t want it to go to your head,” she replied. Now my uncle Jud is a brilliant psychotherapist, but he’s also a psychological basket case. His problems have made him housebound, and unable to use his prodigious talents to do anything valuable for society.
This is not the way to treat our own people. It bespeaks an appalling lack of trust, an underlying belief that if we don’t scream, object and denounce, then the Israeli armed forces will run amuck. It is self-defeating. So let me come to the first challenge I think that we liberals must address: how do we engage in tochachah of our own people? How do we criticize constructively and not destructively? How can we acknowledge strengths without feeling that we are undermining the drive to improve?
The ways out:
Confronting Denial: The realism of the eye, the optimism of the heart: it takes a great deal of energy and imagination to be an intelligent optimist. When you hear someone – like me, for example – talking about Arab Jew-hatred, or about the Arab political elites victimizing their own people and wanting war, if you shut down, if you write them off, as did a well-meaning Jewish girl on Sunday night, as “demonizing” and “war-mongering” and “paranoid,” think again. You may be the racist, you may be the person working for war. You may be making the assumption that if we face these matters we have to go to war, which you consider anathema. What I’m trying to say to you is that if we don’t face these things we strengthen the forces of war by ignoring them. Denial does not help. As Rabbi Abraham Twersky put it so succinctly: “It’s not nice to lie to others, but it’s stupid to lie to yourself.” The liberal imagination needs to face reality and come up with solutions, not deny and cling to “solutions” that make us feel morally pure and empower the demopaths.
I do not want war; I do not want to send my children or any Jewish child to war. Just because I agree with Daniel Pipes’ analysis doesn’t mean I agree with his solutions. It is the liberal imagination, freed of its blinders, that can come up with alternatives, not dupes of demopaths who daily swell the ranks of those in the Pipes camp and the Sharon camp who are not in denial.
I look at these issues square in the face not because I’m a racist and a warmonger, but precisely because I want to confront racism and avoid war, because I believe that if the Arabs and Muslims were confronted with their problems, they would begin to confront them themselves; and if, in an act of unconscious moral racism, we give them a pass, they will most certainly not change. I don’t think they’re moral idiots and animals who can’t learn, can’t change, can’t grow. I’m not the essentialist here. I believe that we discourage any growth by pretending they – and here I specifically mean the elites controlling the political culture both secular and religious – are “already there”, already lovers of peace and civil society. Those who deny the gravity of the situation are the essentialists. They are the ones who cannot acknowledge disgusting behavior on the other side because secretly they’re afraid that it can’t be changed.
If you don’t like the “fascist” response of “right-wing” parties in the West who foment anti-immigrant sentiment, who fan the flames of Islamophobia, then you have to come up with more intelligent ways of defending civil society, rather than welcoming its enemies and scolding those who, without any guidance, but not blinded by denial, see and smell an enemy. The fear of this reaction indicates how little people on the Left trust our own society’s instincts. Why are they so trusting of the Arabs?
Which leads me to my second challenge to the liberals. How do we engage in the tochacha of the Arabs? How do we begin to probe and question the statements that they make, to draw attention to their inconsistencies, to the terrible things done in their name, without either demonizing them or making them feel worthless. I come back to what my Palestinian interlocutor said when I denounced suicide bombing. You’re dehumanizing me. Now I could get into a Dennis Miller rant about how often he and his demonize the Zionists. About how one minute it’s all Israel’s fault, and then when we say, “Yeah, but what about this and this that the Arabs have done, the answer is “Oh, so it’s all my fault!” But I won’t. I’ll say, “okay, what do we do here?” The only answer I’ve seen in my dialogue group so far has been, “let’s not make you uncomfortable by attacking you.” I want something else. The decent left must come up with a way to lead the Arabs into self-criticism, to an awareness of their own self-destructive ways. “You don’t make yourself look bigger by making others look smaller,” my father taught me. How do we draw attention to a moral chasm without so doing? And denial is not the answer because it makes us dupes of demopaths. If a liberal wants the experience of speaking truth to power, let him try confronting an Arab with the hatred in his world. Then you’ll find out how unpleasant things can get.
And finally, I come to my last challenge: tochachah of the Left. You can tell me how well I’ve done, how many of you I’ve “lost” in my rant about the Left and the Arabs, how many of you will walk away tonight not inspired to introspect, but to dismiss me as an essentialist, racist, war-monger. But then let me ask you not only to tell me where you think I’ve failed, but to come up with your own solutions to the problem, your own introspection about the moral failures of the indecent left and the self-destructiveness of liberal innocence. |
