Victor Rosenthal – Friedman’s Lens and Sisyphean Mud & The Doctrine of the Strong Jew
Friedman’s Lens and Sisyphean Mud
Matti Friedman explains what should be obvious when he says that there is no Israeli-Palestinian conflict:
There isn’t an Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the way that many outsiders seem to think, and this perception gap is worth spelling out. It has nothing to do with being right-wing or left-wing in the American sense. To borrow a term from the world of photography, the problem is one of zoom. Simply put, outsiders are zoomed in, and people here in Israel are zoomed out. Understanding this will make events here easier to grasp.
Zoom out and you will see, Friedman explains, that only a minority of Israel’s enemies, historically and currently, are Palestinian Arabs. Egypt, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and even Yemen joined with the Palestinians in an attempt to snuff out the newly-declared State of Israel in 1948. Today Iran and her Shiite proxies – Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Iraqi militias entrenching themselves in Syria are Israel’s most formidable enemies, with Hamas, the Qatari-financed offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, playing a secondary role.
Compared to the Palestinians, Israel looks strong, Goliath to their David. But in the context of the overall Muslim Middle East, Israel, with its relatively small population and lack of strategic depth, is threatened.
And this, says Friedman, is why the peace processors don’t get it. Clinton, Bush, and Obama were all “Zoomed in” on Israel and the Palestinians, while not understanding the broader context. Although we haven’t heard Trump’s proposal yet, it will likely have the same defect.
Friedman is right, as far as he goes. He doesn’t mention the reason that five Arab armies invaded the new state of Israel in 1948, or the reason the “peace” agreements with Egypt and Jordan are cold, pragmatic deals that greatly benefit the autocratic regimes of those countries, while not moving a centimeter in the direction of the normalization of everyday relations between the nations that was supposed to follow. It certainly isn’t because these countries care about the welfare of Palestinians. The invaders of 1948 did not turn over the areas that they controlled to Palestinian Arabs, and indeed treated them quite cruelly. It was Israel, not Jordan, that created the autonomous Palestinian Authority, and it was Israel, not Egypt, that turned over control of Gaza to the Palestinians.
Of course there are the usual geopolitical explanations for the broader conflict, but they are not sufficient to explain its persistence or its virulence. While it’s clear that Iran is hostile toward Israel for geopolitical reasons – Israel is seen as an outpost of American power in the region that Iran wishes to dominate – there is also a special degree of hatred that is reserved for Israel above other Iranian opponents. Iran does not threaten to destroy Saudi Arabia, a closer and more immediate rival. Iranian demonstrators rarely if ever chant “death to Saudia.”
I believe that the ultimate source of this enmity is the principle – literally an “article of faith” in the Muslim Middle East – that a sovereign Jewish state in the region is an abomination to Allah, and it is their religious duty to destroy it. This religious/racial principle is sometimes expressed verbally by saying “Israel is a cancer” that must be excised from the Middle East, a sentiment expressed both by the Iranian regime and in Palestinian Authority media. This is Muslim rejectionism.
But I think even this analysis doesn’t go far enough. Resentment and hatred of Jews, deeply ensconced in Christian tradition, is found throughout post-Christian Europe. While in most of Europe the moral principles of Christianity have been transmuted into a kind of universalist humanism (much like Reform Judaism), the visceral hatred of the Jew that “killed their God” hasn’t disappeared; it’s just been turned toward the Jewish state, today the bearer of the guilt of Judas, with the suffering Palestinians taking on the role of the crucified Savior. Of course the irony in this is that the Muslims that are besieging Europe today are as almost as hostile to non-Muslim sovereignty there as they are against the Jewish variety in the Middle East (ordinary Europeans are beginning to understand this, although many of their leaders don’t seem to get it yet).
I suggest that to really understand the conflicts surrounding Israel since its coming into being, one needs to zoom out even further than Friedman does. One needs to take into account that not only Arabs and Muslims are viscerally opposed to the concept of Jewish sovereignty, many Europeans and even some circles in America are too. Although they might not go as far as to compare Israel to a malignant tumor, they are quite comfortable saying that the creation of Israel was a mistake. Friedman’s lens must be widened to include not just the greater Middle East, but much of the Western world.
And this enables us to understand why the “peace” proposals based on Israeli concessions to the Palestinians keep coming, despite the fact that they have repeatedly been shown incapable of ameliorating the real problem, Muslim rejectionism of Jewish sovereignty. Even those in the West who do not completely reject the right of the Jewish people to self-determination in a sovereign state, adhere to a milder form of rejectionism: they may accept the idea of a Jewish state, but they firmly believe that the conflict surrounding it is a result of its being an alien element that doesn’t belong in its neighborhood. Therefore the solutions they choose always involve Israel adapting herself to the region and not the opposite. And this always means Israel meeting the demands of her neighbors. Of course, those demands will never end until there is no more Israel.
I can’t leave Friedman’s article without noting one jarring paragraph, possibly written as it was at the request of his NY Times editor:
When I look at the West Bank as an Israeli, I see 2.5 million Palestinian civilians living under military rule, with all the misery that entails. I’m seeing the many grave errors our governments have made in handling the territory and its residents, the construction of civilian settlements chief among them.
Suddenly we are back to “settlements” and “military rule” (actually, this is incorrect, since around 95% of the Palestinians in Judea/Samaria live in areas controlled by the Palestinian Authority). Friedman, who has shown himself capable of understanding the strategic imperatives of Israel’s military control of the land, is nevertheless still stuck in the Sisyphean mud of the “2-state solution” (just like my fictitious Uncle Max two Passovers ago). Is Friedman himself guilty of the mild rejectionism that demands that Israel should pay the price for her neighbors’ violent racism?
Despite this – the obligatory mea culpa of every Jewish liberal or centrist writer on the subject – we should take Friedman’s advice and zoom out to see the conflict in its true, worldwide and historical context. And stay out of the mud.
The Doctrine of the Strong Jew
Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day. It was established by the United Nations, the most important representative of the enemies of the Jewish people in the world. In its 2005 declaration to establish the annual event, the UN condemned “all manifestations of religious intolerance, incitement, harassment or violence against persons or communities based on ethnic origin or religious belief, wherever they occur.” The hypocrisy of the UN, which has engaged in intolerance and incitement against Israel and condoned violence against her since her victory in the 1967 war – an attempt by the Arabs to repeat the Nazi genocide against the Jews – needs no elaboration.
Historian Benny Morris says that the Turks perpetrated a “30-year genocide” against Christians – Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks – murdering between 1.5 and 2.5 million between 1894 and 1924. If the UN were consistent, there would be an international day marking this genocide as well. But of course it wouldn’t do this, nor would it take action against the increasing persecution of Christians and other non-Muslims in the Middle East.
Israel, where the majority of the survivors of the Holocaust and their descendants live, has Yom haShoah on 27 Nissan, which falls in April or May on the civil calendar. We don’t need another day of remembrance, and especially not one established by the UN.
I am sure that whoever had the idea to do this had only good intentions. But it serves no worthwhile purpose.
As I’ve written, Holocaust education for Jew-haters just tends to encourage them. It provides ideas and examples, as well as vicarious satisfaction. And for those who don’t hate us, the emotional catharsis provided by crying over the horrors of 75 years ago helps them keep their eyes shut to what is happening today.
We are not going to bring back our murdered grandparents (and great-grandparents, by now), with international observances. We are also unlikely to reduce antisemitism, particularly the kind that comes dressed up as anti-Zionism, by explaining that any kind of racial or religious hatred is reprehensible. Everyone knows this by now, except that their particular hatred is justified.
It doesn’t help improve the worldwide situation of the Jews or other persecuted minorities. The message transmitted by most international observances is that the Nazis killed a lot of people for bad reasons. They murdered Jews for racial reasons, and several million Poles and other Slavs for what could be called “national” reasons, and massacred Russian POWs because they were Russians. They also “euthanized” disabled and mentally ill people, and murdered thousands of Roma, homosexuals, and others. Killing people for reasons like these, says the UN, is wrong. Don’t do it, says the UN.
But the connection to current events seems to be missing. Antisemitism and anti-Zionism everywhere are as bad or worse than they were at any time since the end of WWII. The Iranian regime continues to make genocidal threats on an almost daily basis. The Palestinian Arabs, are taught by their dual regimes in Gaza and the Palestinian Authority that murdering Jews is not just permissible, it’s admirable. The PA in effect pays a bounty for dead Jewish civilians, and refuses to stop doing so even when threatened by its largest donor.
In Continental Europe and Britain, anti-Jewish attitudes – especially centered on Israel – are more pervasive than ever, while a study of antisemitic violence from 2005-2015 found that violent incidents are most likely to be perpetrated by Muslims. In the US, serious violence is more likely to come from neo-Nazis or “white nationalists” like the one who invaded a Pittsburgh synagogue and murdered eleven people inside. But especially on college campuses, increasing Jew-hatred tends to be linked to anti-Israel attitudes popular with Muslim or extreme left-wing students and faculty. There also seems to be a greater prevalence of black antisemitism, including violent incidents, although it might just be that it has been noticed more by the media in recent months.
I have a theory about Jew-hatred. An important component of it is contempt for Jews as physical beings. Antisemites think of Jews as powerful in occult ways, but they also see us as weak, not capable of asserting ourselves physically and fighting back. The more a Jew tries to behave in an ingratiating way, the weaker he looks, and the more the antisemite hates him. So a good way to reduce antisemitism is to fight the enemies of the Jewish people aggressively. This works in the schoolyard with antisemitic bullies, but it also works in the realm of geopolitics, where it is called “establishing deterrence by disproportionate response,” or The Doctrine of the Strong Jew.
Recent history shows that when the doctrine has been properly applied, it’s been successful. Other approaches, such as restraint, appeals to common interests (we really don’t have any with our enemies), payment of tribute, or appeasement are certain to fail, with unpleasant practical consequences, as well as bringing about an increase in antisemitism. One advantage of applying the doctrine is that not only does it teach your immediate enemy a lesson, not only does it broadcast to the world in general that acting on one’s Jew-hatred doesn’t pay, but it strikes a blow against one of the ideological pillars of Jew-hatred, the image of the weak Jew.
Of course you need to win your battles. Starting fights that you will lose is not a good idea, as Ehud Olmert found out in Lebanon in 2006. But the alternative approach – taking the stance of the Weak Jew – is guaranteed to make the situation worse. Oslo, the withdrawal from South Lebanon, the withdrawal from Gaza, the policy of restraint in the face of Hamas’ arson balloons – all of these are examples of the Weak Jew. On the other hand, Netanyahu seems to have adopted the Strong Jew Doctrine toward Iran.
So let’s go back to International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Although I doubt it, supposing that the idea was to actually reduce antisemitism, and make another Holocaust less likely. Then I can think of a much better use to put all the money that will be expended on this exercise.
Give it to the one organization that, over the years, has been the most effective of all in fighting antisemitism: the Israel Defense Force.
