The Myth and The American Jewish Community

Until the 1930s, a sizeable portion of the U.S. Jewish community was skeptical, at best, about the Zionist project.  America was their promised land.   Knowledge of the Holocaust gave a great boost to support for a Jewish state.  But once that state was established in 1948, the passion for Israel subsided here.  In the 1950s, when sociologists asked Jews what made them different from gentiles, the answers they got rarely mentioned any special affinity for the state or land of Israel.  In fact, most people said that there was no special value or belief or behavior that made them different from their gentile neighbors.  The only thing that made them different was that their friends were Jews.  Being Jewish was mainly a social thing.  Jews hung out with other Jews.

These Jews did not complain a whole lot about anti-semitism either.  Many of them had experienced significant anti-semitism in the pre-World War II days.  They knew it was still around.  But they knew that things were far better than they had been, and they looked forward to even more social acceptance in the future.  So it made sense to overlook the vestiges of anti-semitism, to assume it would keep on diminishing until it gradually disappeared.

When did Jews begin to tell the myth of Israel that prevails today?  This is a rare situation where a historian of religions can point to a very precise time, in fact a precise week, when a new story became the official story of a community.  It was the second week of June, 1967, when Israel and its Arab neighbors fought a six-day war.  Jews flocked to their synagogues, not only to pray for Israel, but to inaugurate (though they did not know it) a new form of Judaism based on their new official story.  America’s most eminent historian of Judaism, Rabbi Jacob Neusner, has called this new form “the Judaism of Holocaust and Redemption.”  The “Holocaust” part represent the belief that anti-semitism is an eternal threat to Jews everyone.  The “Redemption” part represents the twin beliefs that Jews have a special relationship with the land of Israel and that only in Israel can they hope to be safe, redeemed from that eternal threat.

These beliefs, and the myth built upon them, were certainly not totally new.  All of the elements had been around for a long time.   Yet those elements had not been fused so tightly into a single integrated myth.  Nor had they been so central in American Jewish life before the six-day war.  Every history of American Jewish life describes this dramatic change.  So far, there is no commonly accepted theory to explain why it happened.  So I want to offer my own theory.

Several factors came together in June, 1967.  One was a kind of emptiness in American Jewish life, a sense that no one quite knew what special values Jews were supposed to hold just because they were Jews.  For most of them it was just a matter of socializing with other Jews.  Perhaps there was an unconscious sense that Judaism ought to mean something more than that.

Of course, 1967 was a time when many people in the U.S. were beginning to explore new possibilities for meaning and identity.  Issues of individual and group identity became more urgent than before.  Our whole society was entering a brief era when everything seemed open to question.  Remember, June, 1967, wasn’t only the time of the six-day war.   It was also the beginning of San Francisco’s summer of love.  For many Americans, it was a time of cultural confusion, a time when U.S. society seemed to be falling apart.  In such a time, it is quite common that individuals and groups will seize upon one particular story that gives them a highly structured sense of meaning.  If the story seems to answer their questions and make sense out of confusing times, they will cling to it tightly, no matter what happens.

For Jews, the question of ethnic identity was especially acute.  African-Americans were asserting their right to equality more powerfully than ever before.  Some Jews had expressed their Jewish identity by working with the civil rights movement.  By 1967, many of these Jews were disturbed, or even scared, by the rise of the black power movement.  They were no longer sure that the cause of racial justice had any place for white people.  Yet they could see that it was becoming acceptable in liberal circles to assert one’s ethnic identity.  African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, and native Americans were all standing up as oppressed people demanding their rights.

This placed the Jews in a real quandary.  As white people, they could easily be classed with the oppressors.  When tensions broke out in inner city ghettos, individual Jews were sometimes identified as oppressors.  This was an uncomfortable feeling, of course, especially for the many Jews who genuinely sympathized with the cause of people of color.

At the same time, the growing antiwar movement was raising another very disturbing question:  Perhaps the United States itself was not a force for freedom, but rather a force for oppression, in Vietnam.  If the U.S. was the oppressor in Vietnam, this would make all Jews, along with all other Americans, oppressors as well.  By 1967, a new story was emerging to shape the experience of all Americans as they watched the events of the day unfold.  This story said that every person was either with the oppressors or the oppressed.  In Camus’ terms, everyone was either an executioner or a victim.   It was the most fundamental moral choice, and no one could avoid making it.  So how could Jews be sure that, when oppression arose, they were on the right side?  How could they be sure they were victims and not executioners?

One possibility was to depict themselves as perpetual victims of anti-semitism.  However, American Jews did not want to believe that they would always be threatened by anti-semitism simply because they lived in the diaspora.  They hoped that anti-semitism was gradually fading away, allowing them to live fully and freely as Americans.  How could they feel fully accepted, yet still count themselves among the oppressed?

The events of June, 1967, solved that problem.  For Jews around the world, and here in the U.S., there was no doubt that the Arabs were the aggressors and Israel the victim.  By picturing Israel as a small, weak, victimized nation, and then identifying themselves with Israel, Jews could feel certain that they were among the oppressed.  They could see the U.S. as a place where Jews were increasingly accepted, but still view themselves as victims of persecution.  So American Jews “discovered” a special, almost mystical tie between every Jew and the holy land.  If they were tied to Israel, and Israel was being persecuted, they were being persecuted.  So they could not be among the persecutors.  There could be no doubt about which side of the moral divide they were on.  That question was laid to rest.

Six days later, however, a new problem had emerged.  The Israeli army had proven itself superior in every way to the Egyptians, Jordanians, and Syrians combined.  Israel now possessed not only Jerusalem, but all of the West Bank and Gaza.  In the Jewish community, it seemed obvious that this was something to celebrate.  Few people consciously addressed the problem, but it was obvious if you stopped to think about it.  How could such a triumphant military power call itself a small, weak victim?  If Israel was so powerful, could Jews still be sure they were on the side of the oppressed?

This problem was especially acute for American Jews, who could not express their tie with Israel in political terms.  Politically, they wanted to be 100% American.  They had to express their Jewishness as a religious or cultural identity.  So they had to make support for the political state of Israel a religious or cultural value.  For virtually all of them, that meant making support for Israel a moral and ethical value.  They could not celebrate Jewish power and military victory as good in and of itself.  They had to give it an ethical meaning.

Power could have an ethical meaning as long as it was used only to fight oppression.  Jews could give Israel’s power a moral value as long as they viewed Israel as a victim of aggression.   They could celebrate Israel’s military victory as long as they believed it a justified and necessary act of self-defense.  By identifying with Israel, they could participate in that act of power and feel perfectly moral at the same time.

Identifying with Israel meant making Zionism the center of Jewish life.  Few American Jews became Zionists in the full sense, since that would require actually moving to Israel.  For most, Zionism meant simply supporting both the concept and the reality of the Jewish state.  It meant equating the fate of Israel with the fate of every Jew, everywhere.

It is no coincidence that, just when American Jews “discovered” their unbreakable bond with Israel, they also “discovered” the unique importance of the Nazi Holocaust in every Jew’s life.  Until 1967, Jews did not talk a great deal about the Holocaust.  But the six-day war catapulted the memory of the Holocaust into the center of Jewish life.  The Holocaust was offered as crucial proof that anti-semitism is indeed eternal, that Jews are indeed perpetually threatened by irrational hatred and oppression.  This, in turn, became the supposed proof that all Arabs were motivated by the same hatred that had moved the Nazis to their murderous project.

Once this premise was accepted, there could be no doubt that Israel’s military victory was a necessary act of self-defense, and therefore absolutely morally justified.  This is why the Holocaust and Israel were linked so closely in what Neusner calls “the Judaism of Holocaust and Redemption.”  The memory of the Holocaust provided the crucial link between the perception of Jews as oppressed victims and the sense of pride in Israel’s achievements and its power.

Most Jews still do not have to live differently from their gentile neighbors, because too much difference might make them potential targets of stigma, discrimination, and oppression. Yet in order to sustain their new-found form of Judaism, Jews must exaggerate or overestimate their own experience of anti-semitism. Many seem eager to trade stories of anti-semitism and hear their leaders do the same, as if they enjoy hearing bad news.  That is how they convince themselves that Israel’s motives are always pure and innocent, which means that Jewish power is always morally justified—even when the facts on the ground (or, more precisely, viewed on television) seem to raise troubling questions about the morality of Israeli policies.

Within the terms of the dominant doctrine, every threat must be countered.  Fighting back is a way to prove both that Jews are being victimized and that Jews have power.  Since Israel has the most powerful military in the Middle East, when it responds to threat it usually uses major force.  Naturally, this evokes angry, sometimes violent, responses.  Jews take those responses as proof of threat and reason for even more forceful response.  Military conflict serves as a kind of ritual performance, a way to act out their beliefs and confirm their basic premise that Jews, the perpetual victims, always use their power in a morally justified cause.

Tragically, this performance is a ritual sacrifice in which far too many real people die. Most of them are Arabs. Some are Jews. This hardly makes Israel more secure.  On the contrary, it perpetuates the physical facts of insecurity.  Here in the U.S., as well as in Israel, it also perpetuates and exacerbates the psychological facts of fear, anxiety, and defensiveness in Jewish life.  It demands a sense of perpetual victimhood.  It creates a culture of victimization.  This is a high price to pay.

Yet many Jews have been, and still are, willing to pay that price.  Perhaps this tells us that human beings find security not in physical safety, nor in freedom from fear, but in beliefs that offer a firmly fixed, immutable, unquestioned sense of meaning and identity.  As long as “the Judaism of Holocaust and Redemption” gives them meaning and identity, Jews will cling to it and repeat its ritual performances, regardless of the price.

Since the early years of the 21^st century, a steadily growing number of Jews have been questioning—and some overtly rejecting—the myth of Israel’s insecurity with all that it entails. Whether this trend will continue, and if so how rapidly it will accelerate, is the great question for the American Jewish community.

Ira Chernus

Three Myths Of Israel's Insecurity

Why They Must Be Debunked 

Here are the Three Sacred Commandments for Americans who shape the public conversation on Israel:

1. For politicians, especially at the federal level: As soon as you say the word “Israel,” you must also say the word “security” and promise that the United States will always, always, always be committed to Israel’s security. If you occasionally label an action by the Israeli government “unhelpful,” you must immediately reaffirm the eternal U.S. commitment to Israel’s security.

2. For TV talking heads and op-ed pundits: If you criticize any policies or actions of the Israeli government, you must immediately add that Israel does, of course, have very real and serious security needs that have to be addressed.

3. For journalists covering the Israel-Palestine conflict for major American news outlets: You must live in Jewish Jerusalem or in Tel Aviv and take only occasional day trips into the Occupied Territories. So your reporting must inevitably be slanted toward the perspective of the Jews you live among. And you must indicate in every report that Jewish Israeli life is dominated by anxiety about security.

U.S. opinion-shapers have obeyed the Three Commandments scrupulously for decades. As a result, they’ve created an indelible image of Israel as a deeply insecure nation. That image is a major, if often overlooked, factor that has shaped and continues to shape Washington’s policies in the Middle East and especially the longstanding American tilt toward Israel.

It’s often said that the number one factor in that tilt is the power of the right-wing “pro-Israel” (more accurately, “pro-Israeli-government”) lobby. That lobby certainly is a skillful, well-oiled machine. It uses every trick in the PR book to promote the myth of Israel as a brave little nation constantly forced to fight for its life against enemies all around who are eager to destroy it, a Jewish David withstanding the Arab Goliath. The lobby justifies everything Israel does to the Palestinians -- military occupation, economic strangulation, expanding settlements, confiscating land, demolishing homes, imprisoning children -- as perhaps unfortunate but absolutely necessary for Israel’s self-defense.

No matter how slick any lobby is, however, it can’t succeed without a substantial level of public support. (How powerful would the National Rifle Association be without the millions of Americans who truly love their guns?) Along with its other sources of power and influence, the right-wing Israel lobby needs a large majority of the U.S. public to believe in the myth of Israel’s insecurity as the God’s honest truth. 

Ironically, that myth gets plenty of criticism and questioning in the Israeli press from writers like (to cite just some recent examples) Merav Michaeli and Doron Rosenblum in the liberal newspaper Haaretz, and even Alon Ben-Meir in the more conservative Jerusalem Post. In the United States, though, the myth of insecurity is the taken-for-granted lens through which the public views everything about the Israel-Palestine conflict. Like the air we breathe, it’s a view so pervasive that we hardly notice it.

Nor do we notice how reflexively most Americans accept the claim of self-defense as justification for everything Israel does, no matter how outrageous.  That reflex goes far to explain why, in the latest Gallup poll matchup (“Do you sympathize more with Israel or the Palestinians?”), Israel won by a nearly 4 to 1 margin.  And the pro-Israeli sentiment just keeps growing.

Our politicians, pundits, and correspondents breathe the same air in the same unthinking fashion, and so they hesitate to put much pressure on Israel to change its ways. As it happens, without such pressure, no Israeli government is likely to make the compromises needed for a just and lasting peace in the region.  Instead, Israel will keep up its attacks on Gaza.  In addition, if the Palestinians declare themselves an independent state come September, as many reports indicate might happen, Israel will feel free to quash that state by any means necessary -- but only if Washington goes on giving it the old wink and nod.

If American attitudes and so policies are ever to change, one necessary (though not in itself sufficient) step is to confront and debunk the myth of Israel’s insecurity.

Three Myths in One

Israel actually promotes three separate myths of insecurity, although its PR machine weaves them into a single tightly knit fabric. To grasp the reality behind it, the three strands have to be teased apart and examined separately.

Myth Number 1: Israel’s existence is threatened by the ever-present possibility of military attack. In fact, there’s no chance that any of Israel’s neighbors will start a war to wipe out Israel. They know their history. Despite its size, ever since its war of independence in 1948, the Israeli military has been a better equipped, better trained, more effective, and in virtually every case a successful fighting force.  It clearly remains the strongest military power in the Middle East.

According to the authoritative volume, The Military Balance 2011, Israel still maintains a decisive edge over any of its neighbors. While the Israeli government constantly sounds alarms about imagined Iranian nuclear weapons -- though its intelligence services now suggest Iran won’t have even one before 2015 at the earliest -- Israel remains the region’s only nuclear power for the foreseeable future.  It possesses up to 200 nukes, in addition to “a significant number” of precision-guided 1,000 kg conventional bombs.

To deliver its most powerful weapons, Israel can rely on its 100 land-based missile launchers, 200 aircraft armed with cruise missiles, and (according to “repeated press reports”) cruise-missile-armed submarines.  The subs are key, of course, since they ensure that no future blow delivered to Israel would ever lack payback.

Israel spends far more on its military than any of the neighbors it claims to fear, largely because it gets more military aid from the U.S. than any other Mideast nation -- $3 billion a year is the official figure, although no one is likely to know the full amount.

 The Obama administration has continued a long tradition of guaranteeing Israel’s massive military superiority in the region. Israel will, for example, be the first foreign country to get the U.S.’s most advanced fighter jet, the F-35 joint strike fighter.  In fact, Defense Minister Ehud Barak recently complained that 20 of the promised planes aren’t enough, though he admitted that his country “faces no imminent threat” that would justify upping the numbers. Israel is also beginning to deploy itsIron Dome mobile air-defense system, with the U.S. funding at least half its cost.

In sum, none of the nations that Israel casts as a threat to its very existence can pose an existential military danger. Of course, that doesn’t mean all Jewish Israelis are safe from harm, which brings us to...

Myth Number 2: The personal safety of every Jewish Israeli is threatened daily by the possibility of violent attack. In fact, according to Israeli government statistics, since the beginning of 2009 only one Israeli civilian (and two non-Israelis)have been killed by politically motivated attacks inside the green line (Israel’s pre-1967 border).  Israelis who live inside that line go about their daily lives virtually free from such worry.

As a result, the insecurity myth has come to focus on rockets -- the real ones launched from Gaza and the imaginary ones that supposedly could be launched from a future Palestinian state in the West Bank. Purveyors of the insecurity myth, including the American media, portray such rocket attacks as bolts from the blue, with no other motive than an irrational desire to kill and maim innocent Jews. As it happens, most of the rockets from Gaza have been fired in response to Israeli attacks that often broke ceasefires declared by the Palestinians. 

Those rockets are part of an ongoing war in which each side uses the best weapons it has. The Palestinians, of course, have access to none of the high-tech Israeli guidance systems.  Their weaponry tends to be crude and often homemade.  They shoot their rockets, most of them unguided, and let them fall where they may (which means the vast majority harm no one).

Israel’s weapons actually do far more harm. Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli assault on Gaza that began at the end of 2008, killed far more civilians than all the rockets Palestinians have ever launched at Israel. Despite (or perhaps because of) its grievous losses, the Hamas government in Gaza has generally tried to minimizethe rocket fire. When Hamas calls for all factions in Gaza to observe a ceasefire, however, the Israelis often ramp up their attacks.

Jewish civilians do run some risk when they live in the West Bank settlements. In the most recent horrific incident, a Jewish family of five was slaughtered at the Itamar settlement.  In response, Israeli Vice Premier Moshe Yaalon showed clearlyhow the deaths of individual settlers are woven into the myth of Israel’s “existential insecurity.”  “This murder,” he declared, “reminds everyone that the struggle and conflict is not about Israel’s borders or about independence of a repressed nation but a struggle for our existence.”

The logic of the myth goes back to the premise of the earliest Zionists: All gentiles are implacably and eternally anti-semitic. By this logic, any attack on one Jew, no matter how random, becomes evidence that all Jews are permanently threatened with extinction.

Most Zionists have been unable to see that once they founded a state committed to regional military superiority, they were bound to be on the receiving as well as the giving end of acts of war. It is the absence of peace far more than the presence of anti-semitism that renders Israelis who live near Gaza or in the West Bank insecure.

However, according to the myth, it’s not only physical violence that threatens Israel’s existence. In the last two years, right-wing Israelis and their supporters in the U.S. have learned to lie awake at night worrying about another threat...

Myth Number 3: Israel’s existence is threatened by worldwide efforts to delegitimize the Jewish state. Early in 2010, Military Intelligence Chief Amos Yadlin told the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, that the country was not “suffering from terror or from an immediate military threat” -- only to warn of a new peril: “The Palestinian Authority is encouraging the international arena to challenge Israel’s legitimacy.”

The “delegitimization” alarm was first sounded by an influential Israeli think tank and then spread like wildfire through the nation’s political and media ranks.

There are shreds of truth in it. There have always been people who saw the Jewish state, imposed on indigenous Palestinians, as illegitimate. Until recently, however, Israelis seemed to pay them little heed. Now, they are deemed an “existential threat,” as Yadlin explained, only because the old claims of “existential threat” via violence have grown unbelievable even to the Israeli military (though not to the government’s American supporters). 

It’s also true that challenges to Israel’s legitimacy are growing rapidly around the world and that the specter of becoming a “pariah state” does pose a danger.  The head of that think tank got it half-right when he warned that Israel’s “survival and prosperity” depend on its relations with the world, “all of which rely on its legitimacy.” Survival? No. After all, being a pariah state doesn’t have to be existence threatening, as North Korea and Burma have proved.

But prosperity? That’s at least possible. When the Israelis complain about “delegitimization,” they focus most on the boycott/divestment/sanctions (BDS) movement, which aims not to eliminate the state of Israel, but to use economic pressure to end Israel’s occupation and economic strangulation of Palestinian lands. (Nor is there any real evidence to back up the charge that this is some vast conspiracy coordinated by the Palestinian Authority.)

Were Israel to start behaving by accepted international moral norms, the BDS movement would fade from the scene quickly enough, ending the crisis of “delegitimization” -- just as the rockets from Gaza might well cease. But here’s the reality of this moment: The only genuine threat to Israel’s security comes from its own oppressive policies, which are the fuel propelling the BDS movement.

So far, however, “effects on the Israeli economy are marginal,” according to a popular Israeli newspaper. The BDS campaign, it reports, “has been far more damaging when it comes to the negative image that it spreads.” A growing number of foreign governments are criticizing Israel, and some already recognize an actual Palestinian state. In diplomatic terms, Israel’s legitimacy rests on the good will of its sole dependable ally, the United States.

More than any military need, that political need offers the U.S. powerful leverage in moving toward a settlement of the Israeli/Palestinian crisis. The triple-stranded myth of Israel’s insecurity, however, makes the use of such leverage virtually impossible for Washington.  Israel’s president put his country’s needs plainly in March 2010: "[Israel] must forge good relations with other countries, primarily the United States, so as to guarantee political support in a time of need.” So far, the U.S. has continued to offer its strong support, even though President Obama knows, as he recently told American Jewish leaders, that “Israel is the stronger party here, militarily, culturally, and politically. And Israel needs to create the context for [peace] to happen.”

But what if the American public knew the facts that Obama acknowledged? What if every solemn reference to Israel’s “security needs” were greeted not with nodding heads, but with the eye-rolling skepticism it deserves? What if Israel’s endless excesses and excuses -- its claims that the occupation of the West Bank and the economic strangulation of Gaza are necessary “for the sake of security” -- were regularly scoffed at by most Americans?

It’s hard to imagine the Obama administration, or any American administration, keeping up a pro-Israel tilt in the face of such public scorn.

Ira Chernus is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Read more of his writings on Israel, Palestine, and the U.S. on his blog. 

Rude Boys

Artist: Parov Stelar

The Zionist Myth of Insecurity

From a Jewish perspective, the earliest roots of the Israel-Palestine go back to the mid-19^th century, far away from the Middle East, in Russia and other lands of Eastern Europe. There some number of Jews looked westward and saw Jews in Germany and other Western European lands beginning to enjoy legal and social equality with their gentile neighbors. The Eastern European Jews hoped that the wave of modernization moving eastward would bring them the same equality. They were prepared to pay the same price their fellow Jews in the West had paid: giving up traditional Jewish beliefs and practices (what’s now called Orthodox Judaism) as a relic of the medieval past, which they associated with Jewish oppression and weakness.

These modernizing, secularizing Jews in Eastern Europe saw their hopes dashed in 1881, when a wave of Pan-Slavism—nationalism and chauvinism, accompanied by anti-semitism—swept across Russia and other eastern European lands.  This crushed the hopes of Jews who believed that their gentile neighbors would adopt the modern Western idea of tolerance and accept Jews as equals.  Some Jews left Russia. Some became revolutionaries.

But a small number took a different approach, articulated most famously in Leo Pinsker’s pamphlet “Self-Emancipation,” published in 1882.  Pinsker argued that as long as Jews lived as a minority in diaspora, they would always be “hated rivals” and victims of anti-semitism, no matter where they lived and no matter what they did. Pinsker told the Jews:  “You are foolish because you stand awkwardly by and expect of human nature something which it has always lacked—humanity.  You are contemptible, because you have no real self-love and no national self-respect.” The Jews would continue to hate themselves and embrace their own degradation, he wrote, as long as they remained as a minority living in exile.  Only when the Jews became normal, “a nation like the others,” would they find self-respect and “rise manfully to [their] full height.”

Theodore Herzl, who led the creation of a Zionist political organization, saw things much the same way. His Israeli biographer, Amos Elon, wrote that Herzl, a famous newspaper columnist, was motivated above all by “wounded pride”—being denied what he thought was his rightful place among the elite of European society simply because he was Jewish. Like virtually all the early Zionists, Herzl had no attachment to Jewish religious tradition. He was well aware that he was making national pride the sacred center of Jewish identity. So he urged the early Zionists to “turn the Jewish question into a question of Zion.”

Pinsker’s and Herzl’s views laid an enduring foundation for Zionism. For most Zionists, security was always more than a geopolitical and military category.  It was a psychological and even moral concept.  

Zionist theory held that, everywhere in the world, Jews would be threatened by the fatal combination of anti-semitism and self-doubt.  Jews had learned from centuries of oppression to feel vulnerable, inadequate, and incapable of standing up for themselves, the Zionists said. Therefore they would feel insecure and powerless before the gentile onslaught.  But It is shameful and contemptible to let oneself fall victim to inhumane persecution. Since gentiles would always be inhumane persecutors, Jews would always feel inferiority, shame, and self-contempt as long as live in Diaspora, ruled by gentiles.

There was only one remedy, Zionists argued: a nation of their own, a Jewish state.  As they looked at Western Europe, they saw modern political nationalism becoming the norm. The Greeks had won their independence from the Turkish empire. Germany and Italy were unifying. Every normal ethnic group, it seemed, had its own political state. Only nationhood would make the Jews normal, giving them the psychological security that comes from self-respect and leads to geopolitical security. This “normalization” was their guiding ideal. By making themselves a normal nation, like all the other nations, they expected to earn the world’s respect and be treated as equals in the family of nations.

Unfortunately it did not work out that way, because there were fatal flaws in the theory of “normalization.”  Any normal nation in late 19^thcentury Europe viewed it history as a seemingly endless conflict between “us” (and “our” allies) and “them,” the real or potential enemies.  A normal nation assumed that it would always have to be militarily prepared to defend itself against its foes. Being afraid of enemies was a part of being a normal nation.

So the earliest Zionists who left Eastern Europe to settle in the Turkish colony of Palestine were stuck in an impossible contradiction. Most of them assumed that gentiles would always harbor an irrational, implacable hatred of Jews, a hatred that the Jews had done nothing to create. So Jews could do nothing to remove or reduce it.  Jews could only escape the gentiles to create their own normal nation. 

In order to be normal, though, they would have to assume that, once they created their own nation in Palestine, they would still have enemies who hated them. Thus the early Zionist settlers brought with them a deep sense of vulnerability, a conviction that they were passive victims of historical forces beyond their control.

Even if they hoped that some day things would change, they were still trapped in a catch-22. In order to feel normal and secure they had to be free of anti-Semitic persecution. So their test of the success of Zionism was how well the Jewish state was received by the gentile world. Even if they broke free of the political grip of the gentiles, they would always be watching over their shoulders to see how the gentiles were viewing them. Thus they could never escape the sense that their self-worth depended on the judgment of others. Even if they got political freedom, they could never break from the feeling that they were passive victims of the gentiles in a social-psychological way.

What’s more, they did not have a very clear vision of the intermediate steps in their political progress.  Their dominant ideology suggested that they could would not have the power to shape their own fate until they had achieved the goal of statehood.  Until then, they would feel like passive victims.

In fact, from the very beginning, Zionists were agents of historical change.  They did whatever they could to achieve their ends by political, economic, and sometimes violent means: they bought land, built farms and villages, created political structures, and negotiated with the Palestinian Arabs about all sorts of things. The negotiations sometimes led to relatively amicable relations between Zionists and Palestinian Arabs.

Sometimes though, inevitably, there was conflict. Sometimes parties on both sides resorted to violence to get their way, which intensified the conflict.  A few Zionists saw that the Palestinians were responding to specific policies that the Zionist movement had chosen. A few understood that the Zionists had become part of a vast relational network of Middle Eastern peoples. In any such network, the words and actions of each actor impact all the others; no one is merely a passive victim of others’ choices.  In this particular network, some Arabs as well as Jews sought to emulate the secular nationalist model they saw dominating Europe. An Arab nationalist movement seeking independence from the Turkish empire was already well underway.

But most Zionists could not see this because they had become locked into, and blinded by, their dominant narrative. Their consciences did not want to admit that they were now empowered historical actors, because they would mean they bore some responsibility for eliciting enmity from others.  It was easier to charge the enmity to an irrational antisemitic hatred of the Jews, a hatred beyond their control. If their actions could neither evoke, intensify, or alleviate their enemy’s attitudes, then they could not bear any responsibility for the ongoing conflict. All they could do was to defend themselves by force. So it was appealing to interpret any Palestinian Arab resistance as evidence of sheer antisemitism.

However the tradition that started with Pinsker said that when Jews were attacked by antisemites, the insecurity and powerlessness they felt were evidence of their moral weakness, self-doubt, and self-hatred.  Every hint of weakness reminded the Zionists that they had not yet fully answered Pinsker’s call to stand up proudly and manfully.  So they fought back, not only to protect themselves physically but, even more, to protect themselves from their own self-doubts. Each time the Zionists asserted themselves against the Palestinians they could feel reassured that they were genuinely proud and self-reliant, that they were “rising manfully to full height.” At the same time, they could feel reassured that they were morally innocent victims of anti-semitism.

But that interpretation created more problems than it solved. If the Zionists were still victims of an anti-semitism beyond their control to influence, then they were not yet agents of their own history. They were insisting on their passivity, the very condition they had hoped to escape. So they only heightened their negative self-image, their sense of powerlessness and insecurity. That, in turn, heightened their doubts about their own self-worth, wondering whether they could ever be normal. The natural response was to take more actions that would assuage self-doubt. They had to go on showing that they were capable of exercising power, prove that they could hit back, like normal people.

Of course every time they hit back, the Palestinians were likely to hit back in response. The Zionists interpreted each new confrontation as further evidence of the Jews’ vulnerability, passivity, and insecurity, which only intensified their feeling of self-doubt.  And that, in turn, intensified their conviction that antisemitism was eternal, that they would always be insecure. The only possible response was to strike back again—which locked them more firmly into their narrative and generated ever more insecurity. This narrative became so basic to their movement that it functioned as their foundational myth. The Zionists were trapped in a myth of national insecurity.

This myth was already firmly in place during the early years of Zionist immigration to Palestine. (The first major wave of immigrants came around 1905.) It was cemented by the tragedy of World War I. In 1917 Britain’s foreign secretary, Lord Balfour, declared that his government would “view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people,” though he added that Britain would not want to “prejudice the rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.” At the same time, the British used T. E. Lawrence to promise the Arabs independence from the Turks in return for the Arabs’ help in fighting the war.  But after the war Britain itself took charge of Palestine under a League of Nations mandate. It is no coincidence that the first large scale violence between Zionists and Arabs broke out in 1919, fueled by the frustrations of seeing their nationalistic hopes dashed.

Throughout the British mandate period (1919 – 1947) most Zionists continued to interpret their own acts of force as the regrettably necessary actions of innocent victims. This gave them a satisfying conviction that all their actions were morally righteousness.  But it also reinforced the fundamentals of the Zionist myth of insecurity: Our enemies threaten our very existence; we are wholly innocent, having done nothing at all to evoke such enmity; we must inflict enough defeats on our enemies to prove to them—and ourselves—our indomitable strength.

An important difference developed among them, though. The mainstream of Zionism, led by David Ben Gurion, tried it best to appear moderate, willing to make compromises, and hoping to limit violence. A new group known as Revisionists, led by the Vladimir Jabotinsky, asked (in effect), Why bother even thinking about the world’s response? The world hates us anyway; nothing we do now can make the gentiles hate us more. Since we are surrounded by eternal enemies, the only way to insure our survival is to make it clear that we want all of Palestine, refuse any compromise, and maintain our strength and dominance Since the Arabs only understand force, we must use force to insure our control of Palestine, by any means necessary.

A third and much smaller group, led by the philosopher Martin Buber, preached that it was wrong to blame the Arabs, as if the Jews’ behavior had nothing to do with it. A central theme in Buber’s philosophy was the freedom, and the obligation, to make moral choices and take responsibility for one’s choices. He told the Zionists that the fate of their movement would be decided not by their opponents but by the choices they made.  “It depends entirely on us,” he said, “whether the Arabs treat us as welcome friends or hated enemies.” By the late 1930s Buber was leading a small group of Jews committed to creating a single bi-national state, giving equal rights and equal power to both Jews and Arabs.

The horrors of the Nazi Holocaust locked mainstream and Revisionist Zionists even more tightly into the myth of insecurity. By the mid-1940s, it seemed all too realistic to fear that the Jewish people might be, not just grievously harmed, but annihilated by antisemites. The Zionist premise of eternal antisemitism seemed much more convincing, too. The fear of antisemites and annihilation spurred the Jews to demand their own state. So their fear was deeply embedded in the foundations of the state of Israel, which declared its independence in 1948. Having a Jewish state did not bring any sense of real normalization. It merely created a new stage on which to play out the myth of insecurity.

Ira Chernus

Visiting Al-Aqsa Is 'Every Muslim's Right'

"Every other Muslim has the right to come here as well. I, and every other Muslim, have the right to pray at the mosque as well."

[Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) Secretary-General Iyad Madani]

Wish I Was Here

Starring: Zach Braff, Josh Gad, Ashley Greene, Kate Hudson, Joey King, Mandy Patinkin

Islam Struggles For Unity and Independence From The West

Since the Ottoman Empire’s collapse in the First World War, Arab Islamic civilization has been deep in a crisis that can only be resolved from within. Its character is both political and religious and might be compared with the Thirty Years’ War in Europe that ended in 1648 in the Westphalian Settlement, which created a new international system of national sovereignties and, in religion, acceptance of the Augsburg principle (1555) of cuius regio, eius religio. Roughly speaking, these terms have prevailed in the West to the present day, notwithstanding a sinister 20th-century totalitarian interlude.

The unexpected appearance of what claims to be the new Islamic Caliphate—sweeping all before it, its atrocities demonstrating its power and ruthlessness, its avowed destiny the restoration of an Islamic Golden Age—should not be seen as anything new in imperialist and post-imperialist history. 

It is astonishing that the debate in Western circles on what (or what not) to do about ISIS has seemed largely innocent of history and indifferent to the pattern of consistent futility and failure in the West’s efforts to impose its will on the non-Western world. 

A new movement that claims to restore the lost power and glories of Islam, is actually the ultimate stage in the crisis that has afflicted the Arab Muslim civilization since its loss of unity in the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, the last political manifestation of a united Islam.

One is constantly told that history must be consulted in order to understand the present, but in practice that rarely is done with an open mind.

The rise of a radical popular movement demanding that a lost golden age be restored to a fragmented and culturally distraught society occurred at least twice in 19th-century China (the Taiping and Boxer rebellions) and in colonial India (the so-called Sepoy Mutiny) and Sudan (with the Mahdi Mohamed Ahmed, to take only the best known instances of such uprisings against imperial powers.

The phenomenon has appeared in post-colonial Africa: what else is the terrible Lord’s Resistance Army of children in Uganda, or other radical movements such as Boko Haram, classified in Western capitals as merely “terrorist”? Their power lies in that they are motivated by versions or perversions of religion.

All are political expressions of probably the most important recurrent phenomenon of history itself: the search for the key to the Millennium, common to sophisticated as well as simple societies throughout history. What do people think Communism was, and in fragmented forms remains today? It proposed a method for engineering what Communists—the Comintern and the Soviet and other governments—promised, and indeed believed: the coming of the Great Day when virtue incarnate would manifest itself in a transformed future condition of permanent happiness conferring justice and happiness upon an afflicted people. It is secular religion.

This is a modern phenomenon. In the West during the medieval Age of Religion the promised paradise was held to exist outside of time and would only be opened at the end of the dolor of earthly existence by the arrival of the Messiah. The Millennium marked the end of secular time, when human history would have run its course and the “Thousand Years” of heavenly reign begun—as promised in the Book of Revelation. 

Marxism was the secular translation of that religious promise, promulgated by the new prophets: Marx himself, Engels, Mao Tse-tung. A secularized prophecy was necessary because God had been assassinated in the European Enlightenment.

The contemporary crisis of the Arabs began following the Great War when the winners, the principal European imperial powers of the time, disposed of the remnants of the Ottoman Empire, using their new instrument, the League of Nations, to issue mandates of supervisory control over the new monarchies and other territorial authorities recognized in the war settlements. The quest nonetheless persisted to reunite the people of Islam, united by the Koran and by the Arabic language in which the Koran was written and still is read.

The Ottoman system that had replaced the great Arab Caliphates was destroyed in the 19th and early 20th century by resistance within the Slavic European parts of the empire and then by the collision of the Ottomans with modern, industrial Europe in the World War. 

Following 1918, ageless, Islamic but non-Arab Egypt remained a monarchy, but under British “protection.” Persia, also non-Arab, another ancient independent monarchy, had fallen under an informal British ascendancy after the discovery there of oil to fuel the Royal Navy. Syria, Iraq, and Transjordan had Hashemite Arab monarchs bestowed upon them—Iraq to be ruled by Faisal, who had led the “Arab Revolt” with T.E. Lawrence as his British military counselor, and who was initially made king of Syria until displaced by the French colonial authorities.

Syria and Transjordan were made mandated states by the League of Nations, respectively under French and British control. Palestine—as everyone knows—was also placed under British Mandate but with no provision made for fulfilling Britain’s wartime promise to establish a Jewish National Home there (on condition, as the Balfour Declaration specified, that the rights of the existing non-Jewish communities of Palestine would be respected).

What at the time was tribal Arabia was in the course of being conquered by Ibn Saud, his conquered territories being proclaimed independent “Saudi Arabia” in 1932, while present-day Yemen remained under tribal rule.

The European colonial governments were accustomed to rule “lesser” peoples beyond Europe’s frontiers and beyond the seas in what they considered to be their subjects’ as well as their own best interests. Now they did so under the unimpeachable authority of the “international community,” as the League of Nations would be considered today, destroying the expectation the Arab peoples had of unity and genuine independence.

The new monarchies in Iraq and Syria fell to nationalist or military movements in the 1920s and 1930s. The modernizing and secular pan-Arab Baath party eventually took power in both countries. The closest thing to the pan-Arab ideal—an “Arab Nation”—was achieved after 1953 by Col. Gamal Abdel Nasser, who introduced “Arab Socialism” into Arab politics and achieved ephemeral unions of Egypt with Syria and Yemen. 

Three decades after the Great War’s armistice, the newly created United Nations, a Western institution dominated (as still is the case) by the United States, partitioned British Mandated Palestine in order to establish the Jewish National Home promised in the British government’s Balfour Declaration of November 1917, thus creating a permanent conflict with the Palestinian possessors of the land. Since then there has been a constant struggle between American-backed Zionists and the existing Arab occupants of Palestine. 

This has inflicted a politico-psychical transformation upon the general Arab consciousness, reanimating the sensibilities of the Crusades, the great Caliphates, and the Ottoman period when Muslims ruled Balkan Europe from Greece to Vienna. 

On both sides, the Palestinian conflict has acquired the quality—to borrow the adjective contrived by Israeli politicians—of an “existential” struggle. Death to the loser.

In this political climate of Arab national failure and, as it seemed, irresolvable Israel-Palestinian conflict, the United States determined that it was capable of imposing a new order. This had been implicit in America’s overall wartime and postwar world policy. 

There were two foreign-policy objectives to achieve in the Middle East: 

The first was to assure American access to energy supplies. This had been done in a wartime agreement between Franklin Roosevelt and Arabia’s Ibn Saud, directly exchanging permanent access to Saudi oil for permanent U.S. protection. 

The second was to find an Arab-Israeli solution. Had Washington been willing to impose one in the 1950s—the creation of two permanent states underwritten by the United States—the region would have been spared 60 years of war, open and covert. That was not done. 

Israel was eventually confirmed in its impulse to possess all of the Holy Land, at whatever cost to the Palestinians, initially dismissed in Israeli propaganda discourse as an insignificant body of wandering tribesmen. 

A permanent obstacle to American regional success arose in Iran in 1951, when a popularly elected populist prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, nationalized British oil interests against the will of the Shah. The Shah fled. But in 1953, a coup overthrowing the prime minister by street agitation, mustered by British and American intelligence agencies, restored the Shah. The Nixon administration later anointed him America’s ally and order-keeper in the Gulf region. However in 1979, after another period of internal disorder, he was forced to flee a Shia fundamentalist religious coup d’état, which included capture and internment of the U.S. Embassy staff and humiliation of the United States government. This produced the enmity towards Iran that has motivated American policy ever since.

The major result was Iraq’s subsequent attack on Iran, concerning territorial issues, which enjoyed unspoken American support. The war lasted eight years, and its savagery has been compared with that of the First World War. In 1990 Iraq invaded Kuwait—another territorial claim—and a U.S.-led coalition liberated Kuwait and its oil in the so-called Gulf War. The United States then resolved to keep permanent bases in Saudi Arabia, despite Saudi objection to the presence of such installations near the Muslim holy places. 

After its 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, the al-Qaeda movement, explicitly stated that its motive had been to impose God’s wrath upon the blasphemies of the United States in the Middle East. President George W. Bush reciprocated with his assertion that the jihadists of al-Qaeda embodied Evil.

The American invasions of Afghanistan and Arab Iraq were animated by revenge for the 9/11 attacks and rationalized by a fiction about nonexistent weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and by the self-serving American chimera of “democratizing” those two societies and eventually the rest of the region’s Arab and Central Asian Islamic states—assumed to be candidates for integration into a Washington-dominated liberal regional system.

The “New Middle East,” officially proclaimed by NATO at the end of 2003, has conspicuously failed to appear, but it remains a goal of the expansionist neoconservative visionaries among the makers of American policy. 

In Bush’s government, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice wrote in Foreign Affairs in 2008, “Democratic state-building is now an urgent component in our national interest” reflecting a “uniquely American realism” teaching that it is America’s job “to change the world,” and in its own image. 

President Obama has declared that the jihadism of the new “Islamic State” is itself an incarnation of evil that must be deterred and destroyed. 

The two sides in this renewal of George W. Bush’s War Against Global Terror—Jews and Christians in the West and their Arab enemies—both consider themselves “people of the Book” and descendants of the Prophet Abraham. They have now become in their own minds actors in the apocalyptic destiny described in the Book of Revelation. 

Many American Evangelical Protestants have convinced themselves that contemporary American foreign policy can only be understood in such a context.

Obstacles to success in Washington’s renewal of war in the Middle East are that the American political model is no longer widely convincing or respected in the region; quite the opposite is true. 

Moreover, Washington’s conduct since 2001 has undermined or deliberately subverted institutions of international order to which, in the past, the United States was a leading contributor. 

The codes of international justice and morality, developed in the Western community of nations since the 17th century, have when expedient been disregarded or rejected, with demands that the United States be exempted from the jurisdiction of international law and even from what until recently were accepted norms of international morality concerning human rights and national sovereignty.

Thus the foreign policies of the United States have been stripped of a vital part of their assumed original moral content. 

An assimilation of modern totalitarian influences, values, and practices occurred in the United States after 2001, with state assassinations, selective drone killings, disregard of due process, torture, and permanent incarceration without trial justified by American leaders in their conduct of what has amounted to a war, not really of religions, as such, but between absolutisms, the one religious, and the other, ours, a political culture of extreme and solipsistic millenarian nationalism.

One recalls the theory Samuel Huntington announced late in his career that the “next world war” would be a war of religions rather than states. The present writer dismissed this at the time as a simple projection into the future of 20th century experience and the conventional American foreign-policy thinking of the 1990s, notably that promoted by the aggressively anti-Islamic Washington neoconservatives.

The theory’s implausibility was augmented by its argument that China (regarded in Washington, then as seemingly even now, as a future enemy) was to be part of a “Confucian-Islamic military connection… to counter the military power of the West”—an alliance, if it were indeed to exist, one would think of no great use to China, a nation with a scattered and ill-treated Muslim minority of less than 3 percent of its population and little to gain from involving itself in Muslim conflicts with Washington.

The main effect of the Huntington thesis at the time it was promoted in the United States was to increase anti-Arab prejudices, especially among friends of Israel. It contributed to a climate among policymakers that made the Bush administration’s vengeance for the 9/11 attacks seem an inevitability. 

It had an even more significant influence in Islamic intellectual and ideological circles and among Arab governments because of its Harvard provenance, the eminence of Professor Huntington himself, considered the dean of the American academic specialty of political science (which emerged in the 1930s out of the behaviorist movement) and for years a leading academic influence on Washington policy-making. Was he proposing a Western attack against the Muslim world? 

While Chinese-Arab military alliance seems hardly a threat today, the Huntington thesis of a new religious war has been taken seriously in some quarters since the 9/11 attacks. 

In 2014, within days of the proclamation of the new Islamic State, the new Caliphate, the drumbeat demand had begun in congressional and think-tank Washington for an attack upon ISIS (or ISIL, or the new Arab Caliphate, or in Arabic DAESH, as it is variously known), together with criticism of Barack Obama for his initial reluctance to act. 

But why? The previous interventions in the Middle East have proven futile and damaging to both sides. 

Americans have attempted to make themselves oligarchs of the modern Arab Islamic world, introducing invasions and wars whose actual effect has been to envenom an immense part of the Arabs of the Middle East and validate the vengeance they and their leaders have sought to inflict on us. 

This is a war essentially within Islamic civilization, with religious, ideological, and political causes sprung from inside that society, as well as from the external provocations it has endured.

It can only be settled by the people of that civilization. Another foreign military intervention is the last thing it needs. 

The first of the post-1918 imperial interventions by Britain and France shattered Islamic unity as it had existed in the late Ottoman period when the Sublime Porte was a major European as well as Mediterranean power. The major nations parceled the region up until after the Second World War, when successive Arab efforts to recreate the visionary ideal of the Arab Nation were thwarted.

The American attempt to make the Shah of Iran its plenipotentiary and his state the agent of American power in the Middle East ended in provoking a fundamentalist Iran that became the most important American enemy in the region. 

The American invasions of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and Sunni-ruled Iraq turned both into ruined and corrupt puppet regimes. 

One might think any new American strategy to reform the Middle East would universally be regarded as folly, even in Washington. 

What the previous attempts accomplished was destruction and the generation of seething hatred of the United States in much of the Islamic world. 

Washington has now appointed itself leader of still another and predictably unsuccessful military intervention, in which tens or hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, if this continues, may eventually die.

By joining the United States in a coalition to battle the New Caliphate, Saudi Arabia and the rest of its Arab members have once again announced their dependence upon a foreign and interventionist power to defend their own integrity, an admission of impotence to restore to the Arab Islamic world the wholeness and integrity it possessed during the Ottoman period, a confirmation of their capitulation to partition and imperialism in the 20th century, as well as their unwillingness or inability to restore the unity of the past Islamic civilization.

William Pfaff