On Pilgrims and Zionists
Why I'm thankful America didn't turn out like Israel.
* - By - Rosa Brooks <http://newamerica.net/user/397>, - New America
Foundation *
It's Thanksgiving, which means it's time to think about Israel.
That's not as nonsensical as it may sound. The Pilgrims who established our
American Thanksgiving ritual thought about Israel a great deal: both they
and the larger group of Puritan settlers who followed them a decade later
saw themselves as New Israelites, forced into the wilderness by religious
persecution.
Given that history, Thanksgiving is a good time to contemplate the
parallels between the United States and Israel. After a week of front-page
news about Israel and the violence that has increasingly come to define it,
this is also a good time to count our blessings -- for despite many
parallels, the United States is, thankfully, not Israel. Not yet.
"Empty Land"
Tradition tells us that the first Thanksgiving feast took place in the
autumn of 1621, as the Pilgrims celebrated their first harvest. On December
12, 1621, Robert Cushman preached the earliest surviving sermon to the
Pilgrims. God, said Cushman, had opened "a way...for such as have wings to
fly into this Wilderness," so that "as by the dispersion of the Jewish
church through persecution...a light may rise up in the dark." A New Israel
had sprung up in New England.
If the early American setters saw parallels between themselves and the
ancient Israelites, we modern Americans can also find parallels between the
American Pilgrims and the Jewish Zionists who settled in Palestine between
the late 19th and mid-20th century.
After all, America and Israel share similar origin tales: the Pilgrims who
set sail from Plymouth, England in 1620 did so against a backdrop of
European religious wars, massacres, and persecution; while the Jews who
founded the modern state of Israel fled centuries of European anti-Semitism
and the unprecedented horrors of the Holocaust.
Each of the two groups imagined themselves to be settling a mostly empty
wilderness: "We found the place where we live empty, the people being all
dead and gone away," reported Cushman in 1621. Three hundred years later
and almost 5,000 miles away, Jewish Zionists sought "a land without a
people, for a people without a land." Palestine "remains at this moment an
almost uninhabited, forsaken and ruined Turkish territory," enthused Israel
Zangwill, an early Zionist, in 1902. He later realized his mistake
("Alas... The country holds 600,000 Arabs"), but by then the idea of a
Jewish homeland in Palestine had picked up unstoppable momentum.
Both the Pilgrims and the Zionist settlers -- separated as they were by
centuries and miles -- underestimated the staying power of the local
inhabitants. In the "New Israel" of New England, Cushman observed that the
natives who initially appeared were "very much wasted of late, by reason of
a great mortality that fell amongst them three years since." (Though
Cushman probably didn't know it, the "great mortality" stemmed from
smallpox, typhoid, and other diseases unwittingly brought by European
fishermen.) With regard to the "poor heathens," wrote Cushman, "Our care
hath been to maintain peace amongst them."
The Native Americans turned out to have opinions of their own about the
European "errand into the wilderness," however, and over the next decades,
European encroachment onto Native American land increasingly led to
conflict. New England saw the Pequot War of 1637, for instance, followed by
King Phillip's War of 1675-6, which killed hundreds of settlers and
thousands of Native Americans.
The Zionists who settled in Palestine found themselves similarly mired in
conflict. As the region's Jewish population increased from just over 10
percent in the early 1920s to about 33 percent after World War II, tensions
with the Arab majority went up as well. By the late 1930s, attacks on
Jewish settlements by Arab militants were matched by retaliatory attacks on
Arabs by Jewish paramilitary groups.
Diverging paths
Here, however, Israel's path began to diverge from that of early America.
The Native Americans were already badly weakened by epidemic disease and
internecine conflict by the time European settlers arrived in force.
Although bloody skirmishes between Europeans and Native Americans continued
until well into the 20th century, by the mid-1700s the native population
had ceased to pose an existential threat to the European colonists, and the
emerging nation could turn its attention to other matters. To the
colonists, all this was a sign of God's providence. To the Native
Americans, it was just a tragedy.
In Palestine, things were different: the Arab inhabitants declined to die
out of their own accord, leaving the Jewish settlers surrounded by
displaced, aggrieved locals. Escalating attacks and counter-attacks
embroiled the Israelis in a cycle of violence and retaliation. In 1948,
when David Ben-Gurion declared the establishment of a Jewish state, war
immediately broke out with Egypt, Syria, Transjordan, and Iraq. Israel
prevailed -- but in the nearly seven decades since then, Israel has
remained in a state of intermittent war.
Israel's cycle of war and escalation broke out yet again last week, as
Israel retaliated against Hamas rocket attacks by pounding Gaza from the
air. In this conflict -- as in all of Israel's past conflicts -- Israel's
military superiority (much of it thanks to U.S. weapons sales and aid) has
made it a lopsided fight: as of Tuesday, five Israelis and 130 Palestinians
had been killed. In the last Gaza conflict -- Operation Cast Lead in 2008
and 2009 -- 13 Israelis and 1,400 Palestinians died during the three weeks
of fighting. During the 2006 Israeli-Lebanon War, Lebanese casualties
exceeded Israeli casualties by a factor of ten.
But Israel's immense military superiority has produced only illusory gains.
What good is winning when winning only sows the seeds of the next conflict,
one following another in rapid succession?
As Janine Zacharia, former Jerusalem bureau chief of the *Washington Post*,
wrote last week, "Israel's response to these ongoing rocket attacks is
justified. But being justified isn't the same thing as being smart. The
truth is Israel has been engaged in a low-grade war with the Hamas
leadership in the Gaza Strip for five years now, with no plan besides a
misguided military strategy for how to end it.... To be sure, Israel will
once again achieve many of its short-term tactical goals...[but] in the
end, Israel will be no safer, although it will surely be more alone in the
world and living in a neighborhood that is less tolerant of its aggressive
countermeasures."
Once, Israel represented a dream or freedom, safety, and peace for Europe's
persecuted Jews. But decades of on-and-off war, suicide bombers, and
rockets attacks have left Israel isolated, imperiled, and in danger of
losing its soul. Each new round of asymmetric attacks from Palestinians or
neighboring states triggers an outsized Israeli military response, which
buys a few years of relative quiet, until the violence escalates again. And
meanwhile, Israel has become a permanent garrison state, defined almost
solely by its embattled status and losing, each year, a few more of its
democratic traditions.
"Everyone is sad"
This isn't an "attack upon Israel." Suicide bombs and makeshift rockets are
weapons of the weak, but they have left a trail of mangled, broken bodies
all the same, and the Holocaust still casts a long shadow. By now, the
grandchildren and great-grandchildren of Holocaust survivors are fighting
the grandchildren and great grandchildren of Arabs displaced or killed by
the Jewish settlers who created the state of Israel. Everyone's a victim,
and everyone has become a perpetrator.
Slate's Dahlia Lithwick recently wrote the best essay I've seen yet on
living in Israel during the current conflict: "[T]he harrowing accounts of
burnt-out basements and baby shoes on each side of this conflict don't
constitute a conversation.... Scoring your own side's suffering is a
powerful way to avoid fixing the real problems, and trust me when I tell
you that everyone -- absolutely everyone -- is suffering and sad, and yet
being sad is not fixing the problems either.... Bombing the other side into
oblivion is no more a solution than counting your dead children in
public.... Please don't judge. Work toward solutions. Because everyone on
every side of this is desperate. This isn't a way to live and we all know
it."
In the Arab-Israeli conflict, there is a stronger side and a weaker side,
but there is certainly no "right" side.
There but for the Grace of God
This Thanksgiving, I'm thankful for all the mundane but vital blessings:
happy children, a loving husband and family, work that I love, the health
to enjoy it. I'm also thankful that we Americans still live in relative
peace and prosperity. And this year, I'm particularly thankful I don't live
in Israel, that America is not Israel, and that America's path long ago
diverged from Israel's.
That it did so is hardly to our credit, since the American Republic was
built upon the virtual destruction of the Native Americans. Our peace and
prosperity owe much to happy accidents of geography -- how lucky to have
oceans on two sides! -- and more to the suffering of others (slavery, too,
casts a long shadow).
But we should not assume that America is exempt from Israel's fate. Stunned
by the 9/11 attacks, in 2001 the United States began a blind lurch towards
the Israeli path, ultimately embroiling ourselves in two bloody wars of
occupation. With our temporary embrace of torture, we came perilously close
to losing our own national soul.
Although we have now repudiated torture, we continue to find the Israeli
path tempting. Indefinite detention has become an accepted reality for
America, along with an aggressive, expanding surveillance state. Before
9/11, the United States condemned Israeli "targeted killings" of alleged
terrorists. Now, targeted killings have become the American weapon of
choice.
Like the Israelis, we're increasingly playing counterterrorism whack-a-mole
-- and as with the Israelis, each drone strike may pull us that much
further into an endless cycle of attack, retaliation, counter-attack, and
counter-retaliation, with nothing gained at the end of the day but dead
bodies on all sides.
Israel is what the Pilgrims imagined themselves to be building, and if we
are not both lucky and wise, Israel is what we may yet become -- but not in
the way our forebears imagined.
On Wednesday, August 27, 2014 1:15:43 PM UTC-5, Travis wrote:
>
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> DON’T BS THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ABOUT IRAQ, SYRIA, AND ISIL
>
>
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> Brian Fishman August 20, 2014 ·
>
>
>
>
> http://warontherocks.com/2014/08/dont-bs-the-american-people-about-iraq-syria-and-isil/#_
>
>
>
> The apparent beheading of American journalist James Foley by the Islamic
> State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) is a stark reminder of the group’s
> terrible brutality and the seriousness required to counter them.
> Unfortunately, much of the political discourse about the Islamic State of
> Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) is counterproductive to good policy. Many of the
> basic facts are wrong and the arguments—whatever the merits of the policies
> they prescribe—tend to be political, overly personal, and hyperbolized.
> President Obama’s policies in the Middle East have failed in numerous ways,
> but he is right that the paucity of our political debate is the greatest
> threat to our global standing.
>
>
>
> One cannot credibly argue that the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in 2010
> contributed to the rise of ISIL without also acknowledging that the U.S.
> invasion in 2003 did the same. The former without the latter is a political
> argument, not a policy position. The same goes for airstrikes in Syria and
> arming the Syrian rebels. It’s a reasonable hypothesis that supporting the
> Free Syrian Army earlier might have blunted ISIL, but that’s a pretty
> hollow position if one also gives Syrian rebel factions a pass for
> tolerating and even embracing ISIL and Jabhat al-Nusrah through late 2012.
> As a long-time analyst of jihadism in the Middle East, it was clear to me
> in the summer of 2011 that the Islamic State of Iraq was well-positioned to
> capitalize on what was then a largely peaceful Syrian protest movement. And
> it was just as obvious that the group—whose brutality, extremism, and
> grandiose political aspirations were well-documented long before the Syrian
> uprising—would later turn on the Syrian rebels whose cause they claimed to
> champion. The same should have been obvious to the Syrian rebels, their
> external supporters, and pretty much anyone interested in the Syrian
> uprising and the overthrow of Bashar al-Assad.
>
>
>
> Retired U.S. Army Col. Pete Mansoor is a serious man, but his assessment
> that the mission against ISIL will require 10,000-15,000 troops does not
> match up with the policy the President has chosen. Mansoor’s troop numbers
> are based on a policy “to roll back ISIL”, when the President has carefully
> limited his policy to “stopping the current advance” and aiding refugees.
> Reading most of the media coverage over the last few weeks, you’d be
> forgiven for thinking President Obama was seeking to defeat ISIL in detail,
> but had chosen ineffectual means. But that is not his goal, even
> considering the coordinated U.S., Iraqi, and Kurdish effort to retake the
> Mosul Dam from ISIL. It is fair to criticize the President’s policy as too
> limited or vague (I think it is both), but it is not to roll ISIL back and
> should not be measured on that basis. That distinction makes a difference,
> because as Doug Ollivant and Ken Pollack have both pointed out, airpower is
> much more effective against an army massing for an offensive than on troops
> settling in to govern in urban areas.
>
>
>
> The larger problem with Mansoor’s vision is that “rolling back” ISIL is an
> unstable and untenable policy at this time. The Islamic State is a threat
> to U.S. interests because of the safe haven it creates and the instability
> it fosters; the exact location of its borders is not the most important
> factor. And so a policy of pushing them into a smaller box does not solve
> the problem; it is a temporary fix, an open-ended commitment, an invitation
> for mission creep, or all of the above. If destroying ISIL becomes the
> near-term policy goal—which seems the likely outcome of saying you are
> going to “roll back” the group—then 10,000-15,000 troops vastly understates
> the true commitment, which will actually require years, direct military
> action on both sides of the Iraq/Syria border, tens (if not hundreds) of
> billions of dollars, and many more than 15,000 troops. ISIL is an
> inherently resilient organization—look how far they have come since getting
> “rolled back” during the Surge in 2007 when 150,000 American troops were
> occupying the country.
>
>
>
> One thing is clear about President Obama: right or wrong in his decisions,
> the guy does not want to be fed a bunch of bullshit. And many of the
> arguments made about ISIL, Syria, and Iraq these days are spurious —even
> when used to advance reasonable policy recommendations. The arguments to
> “roll back” ISIL fall into this category. Obama recognizes his critics are,
> intentionally and unintentionally, trying to back him into mission creep
> and he intends to avoid that outcome. As a result, he does less than he
> should (and maybe would) if he could manage the domestic politics and the
> U.S. Congress better. Whatever Obama’s mistakes, it is hard to blame him
> for being gun-shy politically after watching the Benghazi shenanigans for
> two years. If Obama’s political opponents talk impeachment over an incident
> like Benghazi, what would they say if U.S. weapons provisioned to Syrian
> rebels wound up in the hands of ISIL, as is almost certain to happen to
> some degree with a large scale weapons delivery program?
>
>
>
> This is why politics should stop at the water’s edge: partisan tussling
> makes for bad national security policy and makes us less safe.
>
>
>
> No one has offered a plausible strategy to defeat ISIL that does not
> include a major U.S. commitment on the ground and the renewal of functional
> governance on both sides of the Iraqi-Syrian border. And no one will,
> because none exists. But that has not prevented a slew of hacks and wonks
> from suggesting grandiose policy goals without paying serious attention to
> the costs of implementation and the fragility of the U.S. political
> consensus for achieving those goals. Although ISIL has some characteristics
> of a state now, it still has the resilience of an ideologically motivated
> terrorist organization that will survive and perhaps even thrive in the
> face of setbacks. We must never again make the mistake that we made in
> 2008, which was to assume that we have destroyed a jihadist organization
> because we have pushed it out of former safe-havens and inhibited its
> ability to hold territory. Bombing ISIL will not destroy it. Giving the
> Kurds sniper rifles or artillery will not destroy it. A new prime minister
> in Iraq will not destroy it.
>
>
>
> Please do not step in here with the fly-paper argument: that the conflict
> will attract the world’s would-be jihadis to one geographic area where we
> can target them all and thereby solve the problem. Notice that no
> authorities on jihadism ever make this argument. That is because they
> understand that war makes the jihadist movement stronger, even in the face
> of major tactical and operational defeats. The conflicts in Syria and Iraq
> strengthen ISIL because war is the only force terrible enough to hold
> together a broad and extreme enough Sunni coalition to be amenable to ISIL.
> Abu Mus’ab al-Zarqawi recognized this in 2004 and built a strategy of
> provoking Shia militias in order to consolidate fearful Sunni groups. The
> concept was sound so far as brutal jihadi strategies go, but Zarqawi’s
> organization was just too weak relative to his opposition (U.S. troops and
> Shia militias) to execute it. Zarqawi picked a fight he could not
> win—provoking attacks on Sunnis without being able to defend them. At the
> same time, he was moving into Sunni turf and infringing on tribal
> prerogatives. This had the effect of alienating his would-be allies.
>
>
>
> But the balance has shifted. ISIL has more strength than al Qaeda in Iraq
> ever did and its enemies on the ground are weaker. Without war, ISIL is a
> fringe terrorist organization. With war, it is a state.
>
>
>
> So long as it exists, the Islamic State’s borders will always be bloody.
>
>
>
> This is where I am supposed to advocate a brilliant strategy to defeat
> ISIL by Christmas at some surprisingly reasonable cost. But it won’t
> happen. The cost to defeat ISIL would be very high and would require a
> multi-year commitment. I wish, very much, that the United States had taken
> ISIL and its predecessors more seriously after the Surge in 2007—but we did
> not, and that represents both a political and analytical failure. In a
> post-Benghazi world, looking toward the 2016 Presidential election, the
> political consensus to incur the risks and costs of destroying ISIL is
> tremendously unlikely. And even then, success hinges on dramatic political
> shifts in both Iraq and Syria that under the best of circumstances will
> require years. (Despite a new Iraqi Prime Minister, there is no short-term
> prospect for credible governance across either Iraq or Syria.)
>
>
>
> It would be irresponsible to support a national security policy dependent
> on infeasible military operations or ludicrous assumptions about an enemy’s
> shortcomings. War is a matter of matching ends, ways, and means – including
> political and popular support. It would therefore be irresponsible to
> support a policy that would require a level of commitment that our
> political institutions do not possess. Our discourse is too broken. Short
> of a major terrorist attack, our leaders do not have the ability to produce
> consensus. And without real national consensus to sustain a strategy, there
> is no viable mechanism to defeat ISIL.
>
>
>
> Advocating the defeat of ISIL over the short-term without acknowledging
> what will be necessary to achieve that end is a recipe for mission creep.
> Mission creep is a recipe for policy failure because the American people
> will not allow sustained investment in a policy they did not commit to
> originally.
>
>
>
> This is the most important strategic lesson from Iraq: Don’t bullshit the
> American people into a war with shifting objectives (even if those goals
> are important) because they will not put up with that commitment long
> enough for those goals to be achieved. This is not a call for pacifism; it
> is a call for fighting to win, which requires sustained commitment, which
> requires forthrightness in our discourse about whether to choose war. We
> should only fight if we are fighting to win, and we will only win when we
> commit as a country—not 51 percent, or the viewers of one cable news
> station or another, or because one party or faction has managed to back a
> president into a political corner. The country must be ready to accept the
> sacrifices necessary to achieve grand political ends. Until then, any call
> to “defeat ISIL” that is not forthright about what that will require is
> actually an argument for expensive failure.
>
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> Brian Fishman is a War on the Rocks Contributor and a Fellow at the New
> America Foundation.
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>
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