-Caveat Lector-
>From http://antiwar.com/mcconnell/pf/p-mc010802.html
> How many Americans care so deeply about Israel's right to settle the
> West Bank and deny the Palestinians the state promised them by the
> relevant United Nations resolutions that they are willing to give up
> their own lives?
> The flow of Israeli immigrants to the United States is large and
> growing – and if the conflict with the Palestinians continues, is not
> likely to abate. He believes Israel would never carry out the Kach
> option.
}}}>Begin
Ground Zero
by Scott McConnell
Antiwar.com
January 8, 2002
War and the Intellectuals: Facts and Fantasies
The Truth about Israel and the Arab World
With the war against the Taliban winding down, the United States is
poised before two distinct crossroads. The clearly marked
intersection is the Iraq question – whether the United States should
use the 9-11 attacks as a pretext to overthrow a vicious dictator who
may one day threaten various regimes in the Middle East, but who
poses at most a very modest threat to the United States.
The other, less clearly marked but of at least equal portent, is
whether the United States ought to consider itself at war with the
Arab world as a whole, or indeed with the entire Islamic world. Now
that several months have past since 9-11, one can see emerging in the
leading neoconservative journals and elsewhere the enthusiastic
celebration of this expanded "war of civilizations."
A stunning new entry appears in the latest City Journal – a brightly-edited
neoconservative quarterly heretofore devoted to the (now comparatively mundane)
matters of urban governance and public morals. Victor Davis Hanso
n's excoriation of Muslim backwardness and gleeful anticipation of the coming struggle
bears comparison to the war fever that swept through the literary and ruling classes
of Europe in August 1914. Not for lack of trying
does Hanson fail to reach the standard of war enthusiasm set that fateful summer by
Walter Rathenau, Thomas Mann – and of course Rupert Brooke:
"Honour has come back, as a king, to earth
And paid his subjects with a royal wage;
And nobleness walks in our ways again;
And we are come into our heritage."
A CASE FOR TOTAL WAR?
Hanson's main point is that Muslim civilization is decidedly inferior to the West, it
can now invent and produce virtually nothing, and it will soon find that it has
created in the United States "a very angry and powerful
enemy that may be yours for a long, long time to come." To round out this picture,
City Journal adds a piece (by Peter Huber and Mark Mills) on the snazzy new digital
technologies will allow Americans to watch, track and
kill anything that moves, thus ensuring our victory over Muslim terror.
Hanson's arguments are not entirely groundless: there clearly is a Pan-Islamic malaise
– that of a once resplendent civilization which has in the past four centuries been
outstripped, first by the West and now by North As
ia, in every educational and technological measure. The result is a fair portion of
resentment, and whose extreme end is the cult of Osama bin Laden and jihad ideology.
The question is whether this resentment adds up to a case for total war – or, whether
(far more realistically) anti-Western sentiments coexist with admiration and a desire
for emulation. If so, that segment of Islamic res
entment which is actively terrorist can be surgically removed from the whole.
SUBMERGING SPECIFICS
Hanson's conclusion that the entire body of Islamic civilization is ill and terminally
hostile requires him to argue his way past a few inconvenient facts. According to him,
because the Muslim world is unwilling to admit
its civilizational "inferiority" it has to look about for excuses. Hence all those
tiresome complaints about Israel. In a key passage Hanson writes,
"If Israel did not exist, the Arab world, in its current fit of denial, would have to
invent it . . . For the Middle East to make peace with Israel would be to declare war
on itself, to admit that its own fundamental way
of doing business – not the Jews – makes it poor, sick, and weak."
The point here is to submerge discussion of specifics – Sharon, the Israeli
occupation, the intifada, the settlements, the lack of a Palestinian state – as if
they have nothing to do with anti-Americanism in the Arab worl
d. Arab concern with the Palestinians, Hanson claims, is but a mask.
You have to wonder whether anyone actually believes this. It would require believing
that Arab diplomatic expressions of frustration with America's one-sided support for
Israel are insincere, a lie, an "excuse." It requir
es believing that – after the Arabs have developed an independent mass media which
gives a disproportionate amount of coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian war – the
media's fascination with Palestine is not genuine, but a
sort of Freudian displacement. We are meant to accept that al-Jazeera broadcasts
programs that its producers don't care about and its viewers aren't interested in.
A FEW FACTS
In the latest New York Review of Books, Tony Judt sets down a few facts of the kind
which Hanson believes interest Arabs only because they don't want to face facts about
themselves.
Fact: since the beginning of the intifada in September 2000, there have been 172
Israeli civilian deaths, roughly half in Israel proper. 2194 Israelis have been
injured.
During that period, the Palestinians have suffered 592 civilian deaths, and 17,000
Palestinians have been wounded. The disproportion is noteworthy – especially perhaps
the wounded. The infliction of that much suffering on
a civilian population can only inspire hatred and rage.
The Israelis have carried out extra-judicial executions as a matter of policy. Thirty
Palestinian suspects were killed in the latest Israeli occupation of Palestinian
towns. Many of the Palestinians subject to the extra-j
udicial killings were suspected of involvement in the group that assassinated an
Israeli cabinet minister, Rehavem Zeevi. Zeevi had called for the ethnic cleansing of
the Palestinians from their homeland, and was the gove
rnment's main cheerleader for a racially pure "Greater Israel." Why such a figure was
appointed minister in the government commonly described as "America's main ally in the
Middle East" is a question worth asking. Were su
ch a figure a cabinet minister in any European government, the American response would
be first vitriolic condemnation, then sanctions.
OUT OF BOUNDS
As one who has spent an entire adult life in the conservative movement, it is vexing
that reasoned discussion of Israel and the Israel-American-Arab triangle is far more
likely to be found in the liberal journals like the
New York Review. In the conservative press, barring a few isolated exceptions, the
topic has been pushed entirely out of bounds. As a substitute, readers are fed
disquisitions on Muslim inferiority.
Last month the British papers were astir over published reports that the French
ambassador had said – regarding Israel – it would be terrible for the entire world to
be dragged into war because of that "shitty little coun
try." The scatological description of the Jewish state was callous and ugly, heedless
of Israel's considerable achievements.
But who – honestly – would disagree with the ambassador's underlying
thought? Any number of people have said to me that they have no
interest in becoming victims of terrorism related to the Israeli-
Palestinian conflict – a war in which they have no stake and little
interest in. Yet thousands of Americans have now been killed because
of that conflict – assuming that the rage that created and sustains
Osama bin Laden is partially fueled by it. How many Americans care so
deeply about Israel's right to settle the West Bank and deny the
Palestinians the state promised them by the relevant United Nations
resolutions that they are willing to give up their own lives?
Heretofore, such questions could not really be asked in conservative
circles. Perhaps that will change. A small sign: Ron Unz, the
California-based education activist (and sponsor of anti-bilingual
education referendums) and one of the least dogmatic figures on the
American Right, recently published a letter to the editor of
Commentary which was breathtaking in its readiness to challenge the
regnant taboos.
Duly noting that his grandparents helped found the state of Israel,
he presented a very pessimistic view of the conflict. Israel faced
two unsatisfactory choices – it could expel or exterminate the
Palestinians (the position of the outlawed Kach party, and roughly
that of the late minister Zeevi) or follow the pattern of the
Crusader kingdoms of the Middle Ages, last 70 or 80 years, and
gradually succumb as its citizens immigrated to more peaceful and
hospitable places. Unz correctly notes that the dominant raison
d'etre for Zionism has waned: Jews face serious anti-Semitism or
barriers to their own security and prosperity nowhere in the Western
world. The flow of Israeli immigrants to the United States is large
and growing – and if the conflict with the Palestinians continues, is
not likely to abate. He believes Israel would never carry out the
Kach option.
NOT WORTH IT
In my view, Unz is far too pessimistic about the prospects of a
negotiated two-state solution – a peace settlement that would give
the Palestinians a home and the Israelis a real shot at making
themselves accepted in a hostile region. But if I'm wrong and Unz is
correct, how terrible would it be if Israel collapsed? We could
assume the collapse was not the result of military defeat – virtually
unthinkable because of the Israeli nuclear arsenal – but followed
from the cumulative individual decisions of thousands of Israelis
that fighting the Palestinians over land in the Mideast is more
trouble than it's worth.
I'm not particularly in favor of transporting a good part of Israel's
population to the United States, but it depends what the actual
choices are. If that is the alternative to an unending war of terror
and counter-terror with the Arab world, nuclear bombs smuggled into
American cities, etc. – the war of civilizations with all the
trimmings that the neoconservatives pine for, Israel is simply not
worth it.
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