Final Thoughts on the discussion around Finkielkraut’s essay.
History and Its Role in Evaluating the Conflict
Much of this discussion dealt with the past, even the distant past. As a historian, I obviously think the past matters. But let me suggest some criteria for determining whether something from the past deserves our consideration. Above all, if the present still contains the clear marks of this past, then we must take it into account. This does not mean that we have to accede to the “memory” or what the guardians of that memory claim. It means we have to evaluate it.
For example, Jewish memories to a previous and culture-defining experience in this land, that took place over the last 3000 years, deserves to be evaluated. Is there independent evidence for this historical claim? Were the Israelites and Jews present millennia ago? Was that presence part of the kind of self-determination that we — as modern liberal Westerners like Jeff B — so prize? How was that memory carried to the present — under what conditions and in which ways was the memory of and attachment to the land carried over the intervening millennia?
Similarly for the Palestinians. Out of the hundreds of millions of refugees created during and in the aftermath of the second world war, the Arabs who fled Israel are remarkable in the sharpness of their collective memory and demand for a return to their land. Virtually no refugees from this period maintain their identity of refugees into a second (much less, now, a third) generation. How did this specifically “Palestinian” identity take shape and get passed on among this population? Who fostered it and how?
Thus, I would argue both identities — narratives if you will — deserve to be heard. In that, I am definitely post-modern in my openness. But they are not equal narratives in that they must be submitted to rigorous criticism. What is the evidence for Palestinian claims to descend from the Canaanites? Is there any evidence from the third millennium BCE? Is this connection corroborated or contradicted by the evidence that Arab presence comes from a imperial/colonial conquest that literally obliterated all but the most tenacious earlier cultures (Jewish and Christian)? We don’t say, “Oh, they both claim to go back millennia,” and then leave it with an agnostic, even-handed shrug.
Similarly, how did the Palestinians remember their past catastrophe and diasporic event? Was their identity built around what united them in a commitment to a culture that would and could survive the loss of (the illusion of) self-determination? Or was it build primarily around a teaching of grievance, a negative identity built around the accusation of a crime and the passionate hatred of the criminal? On what is their claim to the land based: on their desire to live free? or their desire for revenge?
Another historical issue: What do we make of the reason why the Arabs are the majority in the land? Is this just a given of history (as it seems to be for Jeff B who seems to think Occam’s razor slices this issue off)? Or is this 15 century old history a relevant variable. Those who adhere to the HJP argue that this history deserves close attention because it still lives in the hearts and minds of Arabs and Muslims throughout the area — they are still profoundly attached to the social, religious and cultural contours of an imperial colonial system in which they dominate, and much of their anger and hatred derives from the frustration of this need to dominate (women, minorities, non-Muslim dhimmi, heretics, dissidents, Beta males). For those who wish to forget history, the cognitive egocentrism of PCP makes sense: they are like us; they want freedom like us; they are willing to live and let live with their neighbors like us. For those with any sense of the millennium and a half of Arab dominion in this area, the power of the very imperial impulse — libido dominandi — that, according to Jeff B, any moral human in the 21st century must instinctively oppose, continues to motivate much if not all Arab and Muslim behavior towards Israel and the West.
Finally, when assessing the claims of people to want autonomy, self-determination, to live in dignity — the progressive ideal — I think one of the most critical clues to the authenticity of the claims lies in how the leadership who articulate both the identity and the claims treat the people they claim to represent. Indeed, the very mark of a civil society comes from the ability of the elite to empower and hold themselves accountable to their commoners. If the leadership consistently treats their own people’s lives with contempt, immiserates them, makes choices that prolong their suffering rather than ameliorates their condition, then I think it’s up to us to suspect their claims… to consider the possibility that their passions derive not from their stated intentions, but from other, less legitimate (by progressive standards) sources.
Finkielkraut’s Analysis of the Left’s Fatal Attraction for the Palestinian Cause
As for Finkielkraut’s essay, I think that even if he only partially answers it, he raises a fundamental question. Why would the “Left” make adherence to the Palestinian cause a virtual shibboleth of adherence, and this specifically when the Palestinians had turned to perhaps the most morally revolting tactic of recruiting and sending out children to be suicide terrorists? Why, when on every scale of progressive values — social work, human rights, no death penalty, freedom of the opinion, emancipation of women, environmental concerns — the Israelis rank far higher than the Palestinians/Arabs, do leftists show such exceptional attachment to one of the ugliest moral cultures on the planet?
Here I’d like to offer a two-part explanation. First, we need to explain why the Left in both countries compromised by their cooperation with the Nazis — continental Europe — and in countries that consistently resisted — England, the USA, Canada — should be united in a policy that Finkielkraut attributes in large part to Holocaust guilt. He does this, primarily by pointing out how central to the anti-Zionist discourse the invocation of the Holocaust:
“An excruciating memorial highway,” writes Alain Brossat, “leads directly from Auschwitz to Jerusalem via Deir Yassin, Hebron, Beirut, and Shatila.” Nothing demonstrates the relationship between the universality of the Palestinian cause and the genocide of the Jews more clearly than the directness of this highway, and the correlative definition of state Zionism as that which converts the “capital of victimhood” into the “capital of power and violence.”
It is the astonishing and ludicrous baptizing of Jerusalem as the “capital of power and violence” when places like Sudan, Iraq and Algeria bathe in real blood, suggests the symbolic importance of that “move.” In order to play its role in the imaginative universe of the progressive moral thinker, Jerusalem has to be the “capital” of everything that’s bad, especially now that it’s in the hands of the people who suffered the most from “everything that’s bad,” namely the Jews at the hands of genocidal Nazis. It’s a way of exercising some kind of imaginative control over the moral universe. On the one hand, it affirms the sad observation that “no sooner does a victim become capable, but he turns into a victimizer,” and on the other, it specifically permits particular vituperation against the people who should most have resisted the call of “power and violence”… the Jews.
But the move is at once inconsistent and dishonest. Even if empowered victims do consistently turn into victimizers, they do so at variable rates and with variable intensity. French revolutionaries became first terrorists then imperialists within a decade of their initial liberation (1789-99). Communists in Russia and China turned from liberating to devouring their own people — to the tune of over a hundred million between the two of them — within years of their revolutions. And in the case of Palestinian “revolutionaries,” there is not even the pretence to treating the “other” fairly or with respect. They make it explicitly clear that their intention is to subject the Jews who survive their victory massacre according to an age-old formula of Dhimmitude. So the move from a) to b), from bemoaning the sad tendency of man to speak of fairness only when he’s weak, to preferring the Palestinians over the Israelis is doubly dishonest.
Under conditions of threat far more serious and existential than that faced by either the Chinese or Russian people, the Israelis have sustained a people’s democracy for half a century longer than any earlier “liberation” movement that took power through violence. The treatment of Palestinians which the “progressive left” so bitterly denounces today — checkpoints everywhere, the “apartheid” wall, the closing of the territories to Palestinian labor — do not date from the early “occupation,” but to the period after the second Intifada. It was a long time coming; and no matter how bad it might be — this is a war-zone, let’s not forget — it’s better than the Arabs treat their own people. So to make Israel the emblem of this moral failure rather than appreciate how, under extremely difficult conditions, Israel has resisted the call of totalitarianism and terror better than any other nation/liberation movement in her position, suggests a serious historical deficiency on the part of the “Left” that deserves attention.
Furthermore, it seems completely counterindicated to then turn and idolize the Palestinians, who show every sign of representing the worst in human nature, the burning rage to take vengeance, the eagerness to demonize scapegoats rather than self-criticize, to turn the violence and subjection around against the “oppressor.”
The virulence of “progressive” criticism of the Zionists — comparing them readily to Nazis and accusing them of genocide — strikes me as an expression of moral Schadenfreude. That is to say, the Left takes a particularly intense pleasure in being able to attack and demean Israeli morality. Indeed, the desire — need? — to so assault Israel morally seems so powerful that nothing will stand in its way. To acknowledge historical and contemporary information that robs one of this pleasure is more than most seem able to resist. I suspect that some of the frustration that commentators experienced in their debate with Jeff B derives from his impervious attitude toward the evidence they proferred. What seems important to them cannot make a dent in the libido accusandi that self-proclaimed “progessives,” enemies of imperialism, feel.
So what’s going on? My explanation runs as follows.
The “Left”‘s animus towards Israel is not a direct result of Holocaust guilt. It is the result of moral competitiveness. Because it turns out that if anything in history illustrates the rapidity with which a liberation movement turns into an oppressor, the Left offers the worst and most terrifying examples. In comparison with the behavior of other “leftist” movements of the 20th century — the communist revolutions, the experiments in communal living, the ability to self-criticize — the Zionists stand out as the most faithful to the progressive principles that put them into power, the most resistant to the intoxication of power. Every excuse that the Left proffers for its icons — Robespierrians, Soviets, Maoists, Cubans, Salvadorans — focuses on the threat to the revolution. Repression was necessary; paranoia understandable. By those standards, the Zionists, for whom both the revolution and the people were at risk of annihilation, had every reason and excuse to go totalitarian and imperialist.
But they didn’t. They have resisted the siren call of totalitarian paranoia and imperial conquest for almost 6 decades now, a record that no other leftist revolution can match, or even approach. What do they get for their accomplishment? The praises of the left — finally a revolution we can be proud of, one that sustained freedom and democracy even in the most dire dangers?
No. Quite the contrary. In order to avoid the embarrassing comparison, one that might call for a serious level of self-criticism and moral modesty on the part of the non-Zionist “left,” they prefer to go into high moral dudgeon, shrilly denouncing the Zionists as a “right-wing” imperialist, colonialist movement. And they systematically abuse and manipulate the poor leftist Zionists who, addicted as they are to prophetic rhetoric and self criticism, cannot take enough responsibility for the world’s ills on their own broad shoulders.
And in so doing, the “Left” engage in precisely the kind of bad faith that marks the greatest failure of the Western Left in the 2oth century — their tireless apology for the moral monsters their own ideology had spawned — Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot. It is this, not the Holocaust, that drives “progressive” rage against Israel. Only with this righteous (and simplistic) indignation can the Left continue to pose as the moral cutting edge of humanity — their apparent raison d’être. And it is with this indignation that the Left not only fails to live up to its progressive values — including the one they so demand from Israelis, self-criticism — but unleashes the most regressive, genuinely oppressive, imperialist forces in the world. We view, therein, one of the most appalling cases of the “narcissism of small differences” that has so plagued leftist politics from its earliest stages.
As for Holocaust guilt, the Nazi crime with its terrifyingly wide range of collaborators and sympathizers and indifferents, casts its shadow over all subsequent history. The appeal of assaulting Israel to those who feel conscious or unconscious guilt for their own or their culture’s terrible failure to oppose it — Finkielkraut’s explanation — gives this Leftist moral vendetta with the Zionists a broader, even a world-wide appeal. It makes it possible to jump from their own envious brooding into a wider market. And as a result, the Left reproduces the very “sin” they so wish to deny. Once again they apologize for, justify, conceal, and ultimately encourage the death cults that they presumably oppose with every fibre of their moral being.
To paraphrase Eliyahu eloquently-put farewell comment to Jeff B: “If anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools, then anti-Zionism is the anti-imperialism of fools.” A folly we can little afford these days.
Alas for everyone!