Israel’s Greatest Enemy: Israel

The energetic debate over Israel, American Jewry and the Holocaust that took place this spring was instructive in many respects. It began with the publication of Peter Beinart’s essay in The New York Review of Books, in which he scorned the American Jewish establishment for its twin failures to defend democracy in Israel and engage young liberal Jews in the Zionist project. It then exploded like a landmine when Israel raided the humanitarian flotilla bound for Gaza and ended with an absurd coda when now-former Hearst Newspapers columnist Helen Thomas told Israelis to “go back” to Poland and Germany.

Many people have noted that Beinart’s essay—while extremely well written—contained little new information. But it was also almost undeniably true. It bespeaks a narrative force-fed to millions of American Jews for decades. I had my bar mitzvah 37 years ago. Back then, if you had asked me to tell you the history of the Jewish people, I would have explained it roughly as follows: “Ever since the beginning of time, the goyim have been jealous of us and persecuted us because we are smarter than they are and good with money. No matter where we went or what we did the results were the same, culminating in the Holocaust. The only exception was America, God bless her, and even she did bubkes about the concentration camps. Once the world heard about what Hitler did, they felt guilty and voted to give us Israel. But the Arabs never got the message, so we had to kick their asses in a few wars. Today, the rest of the world—except America—got tired of feeling guilty and went back to hating us and pretending that the Arabs are right and Israel is wrong. So we might as well do whatever we want because the world is going to hate us no matter what. That’s what it’s like to be a Jew.”

A great deal has changed in the world in the 37 years since I killed with my haftorah. But when I hear Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu complain about the world’s reaction to Israel’s attack on the humanitarian flotilla—followed by the dittoheads of major Jewish organizations and the neocon punditocracy—I think, perhaps not so much. Neither Netanyahu nor his defense minister, Ehud Barak, has admitted any mistakes in the decisions and execution of a military raid that resulted not only in the killing of civilians but in a torrent of condemnation of Israel and the disruption of some of its most important strategic relationships, particularly the Turkish one.

But of course the raid was not only fatally botched in execution; it was crazy in conception. Israel had no reason to assume that the boats carried weaponry. It had no legal right to demand to board the boats in international waters. (Well, none I can see, anyway). And it had much more effective means to prevent the flotilla from landing supplies in Gaza if that was ultimately deemed to be so important despite the obvious costs that would ensue—as it demonstrated in the case of the Irish ship Rachel Corrie that followed. As it was, the combination of arrogance, lawlessness and incompetence gave enemies of both Israel and Jews perhaps their greatest pure propaganda victory in the state’s short history.

New York Senator Charles Schumer, speaking to the Orthodox Union, defended the Gaza blockade as a means of moral and political blackmail “to show the Palestinians that when there’s some moderation and cooperation, they can have economic advancement. When there’s total war against Israel, which Hamas wages, they’re gonna get nowhere.” In the meantime, Gazans, half of whom are under 15, suffer while Hamas only grows stronger. This is myopia with a capital M and pretty much impossible to defend from a moral standpoint. There remains a generation of American Jews, those whose parents or family members were victimized by the Holocaust, who might be expected to embrace the “logic” of Schumer and Netanyahu—provided one is willing to suspend one’s day-to-day moral judgments when it comes to Israel. But as Beinart points out, down that road lies the permanent disengagement of Israel from the coming generation of American Jewry and, quite possibly, America itself.

If Israel’s legitimacy were genuinely threatened in the United States, then Helen Thomas’ 57-year career would not have ended, literally overnight, when she decided to question it. Israel undoubtedly has genuine enemies in this world, and they are equipped to do real damage. But the most damaging injuries the Jewish state has suffered over the past few years—the Gaza invasion, the Dubai assassination, the flotilla raid—have been self-inflicted. As Shaul Goldstein, mayor of the Gush Etzion settlement bloc south of Jerusalem, said, “We really feel that the world is hunting us. It touches the deepest things in the Israeli narrative.” As for those perfectly secure, materially comfortable American Jews who enable Israel’s self-destructive myopia: What can possibly be their excuse?

Eric Alterman is a professor of English and journalism at Brooklyn College and City University of New York’s graduate school. His latest book is Why We’re Liberals: A Political Handbook for Post-Bush America.