Bruce Feiler - Where God Was Born, Abraham, Walking The Bible

End "Israel Right or Wrong"
Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Scott MacLeod makes some important points here at TIME.com about how strange it is to be an American living in Israel and hear Israelis loudly debating Israeli actions but not Americans.

Nicholas Kristof's NY Times Op-Ed today raises two valuable points: 1) there is too little debate in the U.S. about Israel's policies and American policy toward Israel; 2) Washington does Israel as a nation no favor by blindly supporting the policies of the Israeli government of the day.

There are many reasons for this, some legitimate, some not so much. American governments and politicians are hesitant to criticize a close strategic and political ally--in part, not to give succor to Israel's real enemies. America's elites--in politics and culture--are rightfully attentive to the suffering of the Jewish people through history and especially to the Holocaust of the not-so-distant past. The refusal of Arab and Islamic states for many decades to deal with Israel--and the indiscriminate terrorism unleashed against Israelis--strengthened the support of many Americans for Israel. There has been a perhaps instinctive, understandable tendency to equate criticism of Israel with anti-semitism or even sympathy with terrorism (and a desire not to be labeled as such).

But none of that gives Israel a free pass when it comes to Americans honestly debating Israel's policies or America's policies toward Israel; they would include, at the moment: Israel's willingness to negotiate with the new Palestinian unity government; attitude toward the 2002 Arab peace initiative; use of force against Palestinian civilians; illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank; undeclared nuclear weapons program. As Kristof suggests, there is far more discussion within Israel itself about all these issues than in the U.S.

There have been some signs that things are changing. Two American professors, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, stimulated a major discussion in the U.S. a year ago with their essay in the London Review of Books titled "The Israel Lobby" (view a debate held at New York's Cooper Union about it). Another more recent example is the debate former President Carter provoked with his book "Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid," which has been a New York Times bestseller for a couple months now (see Joseph Lelyveld's thoughtful review in the current New York Review of Books).

His colleague Phil Zabriskie (who actually lives in Israel, not Cairo, like Scott) goes even further:

I'd add that the lack of debate in America about Israel and the particulars Scott mentions--settlements, unforeseen consequences of policy initiatives, etc--can at times make it strange to be here as an American. I say this a week after numerous top politicians and 2008 candidates went to the AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee) convention and made sure to say all the "right" things. Being here, and hearing all that purposeful, largely unqualified, seemingly unexamined, completely un-nuanced (if that's a word) support coming out of that meeting from American politicians--who repeatedly displayed the tendency to judge the policies of the government here (and the U.S. government backing of the same) on some highly subjective and possibly imagined scale of morality, rather than actual effectiveness, rather than if they work or not--you can start wondering if you are looking at or talking about the same place. There are unquestionably things here worth supporting and defending. And of course it's not only the Israelis who have to really work if they are interested in making things better. The Palestinians first and foremost, along with Arab countries and others obviously have a huge role to play, and have to make some real decisions. But I'm not sure how one looks at how things have been going here over recent years--as the emphasis has moved from peace to security, which are different things, the first delivering the second but the second not delivering the first--and thinks it's working, or is even slightly satisfactory.

Labels: Middle East

Posted by B Feiler at 8:03 AM
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