 |
| Volume IX, June 2002, Number 2 |
| |
| Editor's Note |
| |
When last I wrote, pundits were trying to interpret what the term "axis of evil" might mean for U.S. Middle East policy. One implication was that neoconservatives were well along in their campaign to commit the Bush administration to their pet project: subduing Iraq. But this incendiary rhetoric now seems a world away. It has been eclipsed by the escalating terror and counterterror in Israel and Palestine; the quixotic Cheney attempt to focus Arab leaders on the potential threat to regional stability from Iraq rather than the actual threat from the contagious inhumanity of the Israeli occupation; Crown Prince Abdullah's vision of a just peace and the Arab League's endorsement of it; and Israel's vengeful offensive against the infrastructure and inhabitants of the Palestinian state that the United States now recognizes must be born. Finally, and partly as a result of Prince Abdullah's visit with President Bush at the end of April, a few steps have been taken to extricate the parties from impasse in Ramallah and Bethlehem. Too late to save Palestinian lives and property; perhaps too late to save the Palestinian Authority and the reputation of the United States; definitely too late to save Israel from itself.
The asymmetrical warfare in monotheism's Holy Land has spawned an asymmetrical response worldwide: Israel, backed by its superpower patron, versus everyone else. If Israelis think the world is against them on this one -- and most apparently do -- they are for once perceptive and right. Does this mean the axis of evil is growing, fueled by a reflexive antisemitism? As this is written, Israel is imitating Iraq by stiff-arming a U.N. investigative team on the grounds that no such body, however distinguished its members, could hope to split the difference correctly between the bulldozer and the crushed. The Sharon government is openly concerned that facts found in the rubble might underscore the impression that Israel used excessive force on a captive population -- and then refused to allow rescue workers in to alleviate suffering (or journalists to document it). Such a finding would open the officers and men who rampaged through Jenin and other Palestinian towns to lawsuits abroad based on charges of war crimes. An Israeli official was quoted as saying that at least his army hadn't leveled the place, as the Russians had Grozny. Previously, Israel aspired to the civilized standards of Western Europe and America. Now, some in the Israeli government would apparently be happy to be seen as no worse than Russia.
Jews of conscience, in both America and Israel, are torn between supporting the morally insupportable or subjecting themselves to slanderous attacks by their Israel-first coreligionists and the Christian Right. As Michael Lerner put it in the April 28 Los Angeles Times, "Far from being self-hating, Jews are affirming the highest values of their culture and religion when they conclude that being pro-Israel today requires pushing Israel to end the occupation and break the cycle of violence on both sides." But those who, like General Sharon's government, do hateful things should not be surprised when they are hated. Hardliners in Israel and the United States may cry, "The antisemites are coming!" but that will not wash anymore. In an editorial in the April 26 English edition of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, David Landau warns of dangers the majority refuse to acknowledge:
|
the ideological hooliganism . . . and the false messianism that now shape Israel's policies . . . seek to drag the Jewish people outside of history, sending it reeling backward into the realms of the meta-historic. There, it is not a state's power -- nor the limits of its power -- that dictate its fate. Nor do strategy or diplomacy govern in those realms. Those are the realms of the irrational, the supernatural, the miraculous, and the metaphysical; the realms of evil spirits, hatred, fanaticism -- and anti-Semitism . . . . And that is where the post-Zionist, nationalist-religious camp wants to take the Jewish people.
With macabre timing, on the day that Le Pen restored dark and irrational French anti-Semitism to its former glory, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, drunk with his victory over Jenin, proclaimed that he would never dismantle a single settlement. Not even the most isolated and indefensible of them. Nor would he ever discuss the subject in his government. Forever and ever, until eternity. Amen."
|
| |
This is a dark vision, but Israelis still have a choice. So do Americans. The administration may be shifting away from designing a process to creating real peace. Arguably, incrementalism is even more likely to fail than it did before. There can no longer be any substitute for substance. Now that Sharon has realized his dream of burying Oslo by pulverizing the Palestinian Authority -- in his words, "destroying the terrorist infrastructure" -- a different approach suggests itself: first the state, then the negotiations. This is not yet U.S. policy, but it may be emerging as the new Track One.
In a time of transition, there is reason for hope as well as fear. An essay conveying that message was published in the April 23 New York Review of Books (read the full text at www.nybooks.com). Tony Judt, director of the Remarque Institute at New York University, had the following advice for the three parties:
|
The first stage of any solution in the Middle East . . . is for the United States to abandon its self-defeating rhetorical obsession with a war on terrorism, which has put U.S. foreign policy into Ariel Sharon's back pocket, and start behaving like the great power it is. Instead of being blackmailed into silence by the Israeli prime minister, Washington must require of him and any Palestinian representatives who have survived his attentions that they begin talking . . . .
The Israelis, of course, will ask how they can speak to men who have condoned suicide bombings of Israeli civilians. Palestinians will retort that they have nothing to say to those who claim to want a permanent peace but have built thirty new colonial settlements in the past year alone. Both sides have good grounds for mistrust. But there is no alternative; they must both be made to talk. And then they will have to start forgetting . . . . There is no magic moment when the walls come down, but the sequence of events is clear: first comes the political solution, typically imposed from outside and above, often when mutual resentment is at its peak. Only then can the forgetting begin . . . .
The present moment, with Ariel Sharon about to set in motion a long cycle of death and decay across the region, may be the eleventh hour, as the American president has belatedly acknowledged. It surely is for Israel. Long before the Arabs get their land and their state, Israel will have decayed from within. The fear of seeming to show solidarity with Sharon, which already inhibits many from visiting Israel, will rapidly extend to the international community at large, making of Israel a pariah state. Bad as he is for the Palestinians, they will survive Sharon. The prospects for Israel are less sure. For the rest of the world the Middle East crisis represents an enhanced risk of international war, and a likely guarantee that America's war on terror, however described, will fail. |
| |
It is, just possibly, not too late.
Anne Joyce, May 2002
|
| |
|
