Let’s Close the Window on 1938

The lesson of these last years is that history is a fickle teacher. There’s an ocean of data behind you and no mark to tell you where best to drop your anchor.

If it weren’t so pernicious, it would be downright silly. Wherever you go these days, Jews are on the point of panic: “It’s 1938 again,” meaning, as Bibi Netanyahu has been insisting, that Iran is Germany, Ahmadinejad is Hitler, and unless we take strong action, appeasement à la Munich awaits.

True, history can be a helpful teacher. But which yesterday should we choose to guide us? Is it September 29, 1938, the day the Munich agreement was signed, or is it September 13, 1993, on the south lawn of the White House where the Oslo accords were signed, or November 6, 1995, the day Yitzhak Rabin was buried?

Upon accepting the Nobel Prize for Peace, 10 months before his assassination, Rabin argued that “the claim that the ‘whole world is against us’ has dissipated in the spirit of peace. The world is not against us. The world is with us.” And the best evidence that Rabin was right was the fact that 22 presidents, 22 prime ministers, 20 foreign ministers, five crowned heads and a flood of senior officials, representing 80 countries in all—including Egypt, Jordan, Qatar, Oman and Morocco—showed up in Israel at his funeral to show their respect for the man and for the peace he had pursued.

Israel in 1995—just a dozen years ago—was neither excoriated nor vilified. It was a full-fledged and even widely admired member of the family of nations. It was neither a convenient cover for anti-Semitism nor a nation-state deemed more dangerous than any other.

It is important to ask what happened between 1995 and 2007 to change so dramatically the views of the world and also our own world view. What happened to reignite the hatred of others and to extinguish our own rising optimism? What happened: Oslo crumbled, and Camp David failed.

Israel’s unilateral withdrawals from South Lebanon and from Gaza didn’t accomplish what they were meant to accomplish. The second intifada erupted, Arafat is gone and so, effectively, is Sharon. Hamas was swept into power. More than 25,000 new housing units for Jews went up in the West Bank and the Jewish population of the West Bank grew by 109,000. A security fence was begun and is moving toward completion.

9/11 happened. The war in Lebanon raged on last summer. Most consequential of all, America has been at war in Iraq, a willful war born of a lie, a war of terrifying cost in life and limb and treasure and honor, a war that was meant to strike a deadly blow against terrorism but that has, instead, trained a whole new generation of terrorists, and that has damaged America’s credibility as a guarantor of the freedom and safety of its allies, including Israel.

These days there is a widespread sense that we are confronted by a rise in anti-Semitism world-wide. There’s the ongoing scandal over the United Nations Human Rights Council, ostensibly reformed but still obsessed with condemning Israel; there’s the vexing issue of Muslim anti-Semitism in France; there’s Israel’s low estate, as confirmed in a recent international survey that identifies Israel as the most dangerous nation on earth.

As caution, the invocation of 1938 is entirely reasonable. There are many differences among experts about whether Iran is seeking nuclear weapons and when it may actually have the capability to manufacture them but neither we nor the Israelis can run the risk of turning a deaf ear to ominous assessments. That said, the mantrification of 1938 is hardly an adequate foundation for a policy. It doesn’t tell us whether to make ready for war or to seek more intensive and extensive negotiation. It implies sticks but is silent on carrots. And it fails to note that the America of 2007 is not the America of 1938. We are now a nation practiced in intervention, and the thought of this nation abandoning Israel to a fiery fate is both base and baseless.

More generally, the lesson of these last years is that history is a fickle teacher. Look backward, and there’s an ocean of data behind you and no mark to tell you where best to drop your anchor. Landfall is just over the horizon, but if you don’t face forward, you will not see it. And that, of course, is the point: Those who forget tomorrow are condemned to deny it.

The window that Rabin saw 12 years ago would, he thought, remain open only so long as Iran was not yet a major power in the region. It now, therefore, appears that the window is about to be closed, and not just to Israel but to China and the United States, to Jordan and Saudi Arabia and to the United Nations itself.

Ironically, precisely because of Iran’s rising power, another window appears to be opening with the Arab League initiative—the conditional offer for the full normalization of relations with Israel by almost every Arab country. Shall that potential not be examined? Or shall Abba Eban’s oft-quoted line that “the Palestinians never miss a chance to lose an opportunity” now perversely come to describe the Jewish state as well?

If we do not probe what lies beyond the windows that are open, those windows will close and we will have only fetid air to breathe. We will have hung history like a concrete slab around our neck and allowed ourselves to be dragged toward perdition.

Leonard Fein was the editor of Moment from 1975 to 1987.