ISRAELI ROULETTE

Jerry Harkins

As President of the World Jewish Congress, Ronald S. Lauder has long been a strong American supporter of Israel and a friend and political ally of its current Prime Minister Benjamin “Bibi” Netanyahu.  Yet, on March 19, 2018, he published an Op-Ed essay in The New York Times which was nothing less than a cri de coeur.  He wrote:

But the Jewish democratic state faces two grave threats that I believe could endanger its very existence.  The first threat is the possible demise of the two-state solution…The second two-prong threat is Israel’s capitulation to religious extremists and the growing disaffection of the Jewish Diaspora.

Mr. Lauder’s reasons for these beliefs are clearly and persuasively articulated but they are not new and are unlikely to influence Israeli policy, American policy or Middle Eastern events. More interesting are two things he does not say.  First, he politely ignores the fact that the architect of the current one-state strategy is none other than Benjamin Netanyahu.  Bibi will deny this often and loudly but, like Donald Trump, he is an inveterate liar, a practitioner of Big Brother’s Big Lie.  Second, Mr. Lauder makes no reference to the fact that the Israeli electorate has given Netanyahu and the religious extremists a clear mandate on every occasion the question has come before them.  Since the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, Israeli politics have been dominated by corrupt, fanatical ideologues disdainful of all traditional Judeo-Christian values.

Israeli Jews are entitled to their obsession with national security.  They are, after all, the descendants of the victims of the Holocaust, history’s most profound evil.  Moreover, for seventy years, they have been surrounded by enemies sworn to their destruction.  They are not paranoid.  The world – or at least most of it – is against them as witnessed by hundreds of anti-Israel votes in the United Nations over the years.  The UN and its various agencies believe that Zionism is a form of racism, not of self-preservation.  The Security Council has condemned Israel 225 times although most of these resolutions were vetoed by the United States occasionally joined by its allies.  The General Assembly has condemned Israel 78 times and the Human Rights Council 45 times.  The survival of Israel under all these adversities is due to two main factors, the genius and determination of a people committed to ensuring their own future and the consistent support of the United States.

In spite of all this history and massive amounts of military and economic aid, Israel does not trust the United States.  It frequently feels compelled to remind us that it is our only friend in the Middle East which may or may not be true.  But most of the time and on most issues the United States is Israel’s only friend in the entire world.  President Harry Truman extended de facto recognition to Israel eleven minutes after it declared its independence on May 14, 1948 and America has worked ceaselessly since to help it achieve peace and prosperity.  Israel has most often responded by disparaging the American government and people. The Israeli consensus seems to be that all Americans are fat, ugly, soft and stupid.  Mr. Netanyahu and some of his predecessors have conducted extensive, highly professional espionage on the U.S. government and American companies in the technology, military and financial sectors.  When caught, they have first adopted the Big Lie and then resorted to threatening politicians with electoral retaliation.  The Israelis torpedoed the Wye River Peace Conference at the last minute by demanding the release of the American-Israeli master spy Jonathan Pollard who had been convicted of selling military secrets to Israel.  Israel had not only used Pollack’s stolen information but had sold it to Russia in exchange for the release of a number of Russian Jews.  Nor was the Pollard case an isolated matter.  In 2005, Lawrence Franklin, a Department of Defense analyst, pleaded guilty to passing top secret information to two executives of AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying group.  He was sentenced to 13 years in prison.  In spite of his public confession, he continued to insist he had been “railroaded” by the government.  He then agreed to cooperate with on-going investigations of Israeli misbehavior and his sentence was reduced to eight years and 100 hours of community service. AIPAC, of course, denied everything. Vigorously.  Big Brother would have been proud.

Like every petty crook and every master criminal, the Israeli government seems to think, “They’ll never catch us because we’re too smart for them.”  On the evidence, they’ve been right more often than wrong. Maybe not because they’re too smart but rather because our own politicians believe their electoral threats. To a very large extent, Israel has enjoyed significant influence over U.S. foreign policy for decades.  That is as it should be among friends but it is a two-way street.  Indeed it is close to the definition of friendship and it is not surprising that both sides protest eternal love and respect for one another.  Sadly, for many years, that has been a sham to cover up a relationship based on fear on one side and arrogance on the other.

Establishing or perhaps repairing a productive alliance between the United States and Israel will not be easy especially while the principals are Donald Trump and Bibi Netanyahu. Both are beset by the Oedipal complex described by Freud in the Interpretation of Dreams:  “It is the fate of all of us [i.e., all males], perhaps, to direct our first sexual impulse towards our mother and our first hatred and our first murderous wish against our father.” Both have a tenuous grasp on their jobs as well as their sanity;  Trump may be headed for impeachment and Netanyahu for jail.  In any case, voters in both countries may tire of the constant drama of governments unable to govern and politicians unable to work together. If they do not, we must all bow to the basic premise of democracy and accept with regret that the will of the people is the supreme value.  Either that or both countries must give up on democracy in favor of dictatorship. Under Netanyahu and his ultra-orthodox partners, Israel is already half-way there.  Under Trump, the U.S. is not far behind.

It is true that every nation gets the government it deserves.  In Israel, the ultra-orthodox Haredim account for less than 19% of the population.  Incredibly, most of them believe that Israel has no right to exist until the Messiah arrives.  At least one such sect makes common cause with Israel’s most determined enemies.  Yet the electorate has decided to grant them absolute control over many facets of family and civic life.  Their boys and men are allowed to spend their lives studying Torah and other religious texts while their families are supported by state welfare. Together  with Netanyahu’s Likud party, they constitute what is, on paper, a parliamentary democracy but is, in fact, a theocracy very much like that of Iran. Sadly, this is precisely what Israeli citizens want.  In the most recent national elections, voter turnout was a remarkable 72%.  The most extreme parties suffered minor losses but the overall conservative vote was decisive and Likud’s plurality increased by 8 seats in the Knesset which has a total of 120 seats.

In America, the situation is somewhat different.  The religious right is every bit as reactionary as that of Israel but it is riven by fractious quarreling over such basic issues as whether or not to participate in politics in the first place.  After more than four decades of intense engagement, many evangelicals seem to be withdrawing from the worldliness of partisan politics and ideology, which is to say from the world they themselves largely created.  They are being replaced on the right by disenchanted working class voters whose lives have been adversely affected by economic forces beyond their control.  This has become fertile ground for  a dramatic rise in xenophobia at home and jingoism in foreign policy.  The result has been a dangerous fanaticism in political rhetoric and a paralysis in government and governance.  In recent years, we have been witnessing a disturbing variation of Gresham’s Law.  Twenty-four hundred years ago, Aristophanes noted that, just as debased money made of brass drives out coins of gold or silver, “So with men we know for upright, blameless lives and noble names / These we spurn for men of brass.”

Degeneration, a sort of law of political entropy, may be a natural tendency of democracies or maybe of all governments.  It may also be cyclical and may wane as we learn to ameliorate the dislocations and discontents that come with change.  It took two hundred years for the United States to adjust to the Industrial Revolution. On the other hand, it is arguable that France never fully accommodated itself to its own 1789 Revolution, Spain has yet to adjust to the Peninsular War of 1808 and Italy is still trying to reconcile itself with unification, Risorgimento, that came about between 1815 and 1871.  After a century and a half of consolidation, the world is currently turning toward separation and disassociation, much of it being pursued with violence.  Long-established friendships and alliances among nations are succumbing to religious, ethnic and economic divisions.  The Soviet Union is one with Nineveh and Tyre and organizations like the United Nations and the European Union are on the brink of irrelevance.

Israel is a nation of 8.6 million people, roughly the size of New York City.  The population includes 1.7 million Arabs, 82% of whom are Muslims. It is surrounded by enemies formally sworn to its destruction:  Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Sudan, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen.  These total almost 460 million souls and do not include Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and, of course, Palestine.  Israel is outnumbered by at least 53 to 1.  It has survived for 70 years through the wit and grit of its people and, most importantly, through the implacable support of the United States.  Much as it might hate to admit it, the simple fact is that it cannot survive without that support.  In the light of this reality, Bibi is playing Russian Roulette with Israel’s existence and his Haredim partners would be perfectly content to see its destruction.  Bibi knows this because the Haredim have made no secret of it.  Admittedly, they are fantasists but he is hearing the same warning from Mr. Lauder and other sober-sided Jews and non-Jewish friends of Israel.

Fortunately, the Trump administration has not yet been tempted to abandon Israel but counting on it to maintain its forbearance is a fool’s game.  It would be well for the Israelis to note how casually Mr. Trump jettisons alliances of longstanding strategic and emotional importance.  In 2012, Mr. Netanyahu campaigned vigorously against Barack Obama and four years later he joined Russia and Wikileaks in an effort to defeat Hillary Clinton.  It was a stupid and arrogant gambit in both instances, very much like the more recent Russian electoral interference except that Mr. Putin was smart enough to maintain at least a semblance of deniability.

Mr. Lauder is right:  Israel is confronting an existential threat largely of its own making. A two-state solution is the only way it can avoid disaster but the prospect of such a resolution recedes with every passing day.  The key constituency for such an outcome now resides in the American Jewish community which is handicapped by two obstacles.  First, it is coping with its own divisions and, second, the Americans have no standing with the Haredim who refuse to recognize their Jewishness or their social values. Netanyahu courts the diaspora for its financial support and as pawns in his games of intimidation but otherwise spurns them.  Their attachment to Israel is strong which is another barrier to any intervention that might be seen as hostile.

The outlook must be classed as bleak.  When one tries to imagine events leading to Israel’s destruction, the horror and despair are unbearable.  Before hope can be restored, however, the Israeli government and citizenry would have to radically revamp some of their basic assumptions, among them those regarding the legitimacy of the Palestinians’ aspirations and the value of America’s friendship.  The American government and American Jews must recognize that their unquestioning support for Israel has been counterproductive for all parties.  And the Arab/Muslim world must come to see Israel as a permanent and valuable neighbor.  Its right to exist may be tragic from their point of view but it is the ineluctable result of the decay of the Caliphate and the Ottoman Empire coupled with the even greater tragedy of two world wars.  Short of divine intervention, none of these changes will come about easily but the simple reality is that there are no alternatives that do not involve copious bloodshed.

Note

Any criticism of Israel these days is sure to be met by outraged cries of "Anti-semitism!" by those who try to conflate politics and religion.  This is a primitive logical fallacy but one made easier by the theocratic nature of the Israeli state.  Like all nations, Israel is a work in progress.  If it is to survive, it  will necessarily evolve to an ever-closer embrace of the values its religious philosophy did so much to create and give to the rest of the world.  In the meantime, if it is not open to criticism, it will become a dead letter not worth saving.