I have met Peter Beinart once or twice. While he seemed like a good
guy, I was disturbed by his unsettling combination of youth and
smarts. I prefer my young commentators on the rise to be more easily
dismissible. Unfortunately, even when I disagree with his views, I
find he's one of those voices that is hard to shrug off.
That's
particularly salient at the moment given his recent piece in the New
York Review of Books that has stirred up such a fuss over its (hard to
deny) arguments that many among the younger generation American Jews
have turned away from Zionism in part because major
"pro-Israel" Jewish organizations embraced hard-line policies that were in
conflict with younger Jews' "liberal" values. ("Pro-Israel" is in
quotes because I find it hard to describe policies as pro-Israel that
are actually in the long-term damaging to Israel... and the policies to
which he refers fall into that category. "Liberal" is in quotes
because I have no idea what that means anymore.)
I think
Beinart is on to something. But I think it is only part of the
equation. Something larger and deeper is at work here: the passage of
time, specifically that potent cocktail that is the combination of
history and demographic change.
Even comparatively young older
folks like me and, for example, my former graduate school roommate who
is now the Israeli Ambassador to the U.S., were 11 or 12 when the 1967
war took place. And we and those older than us starting their careers
at the time (the really grey heads today) were heavily influenced by
it. (My former roommate, Mike Oren, even wrote the definitive history
of the war, a truly great account.)
The story of tiny Israel,
surrounded by enemies, greatly outnumbered, fighting for a haven
against a world that had only two decades before completed a period of
unimaginable atrocities against the Jewish people, was incredibly
heroic and compelling. For my father's generation of course, Holocaust
survivors and those who lived through that dark era, the story was
even more trenchant and Zionism was an even more natural impulse.
Thus
for the generations that have dominated the U.S. political and policy
scene since the days of the Second World War through 1967 and beyond,
that narrative -- Israel fighting against the odds to redress millennia of
injustices -- was an inspirational subtext that not only influenced our
views but colored countless news stories and government policy
decisions not just in Israel but in the U.S. and elsewhere. Of course,
there were many other reasons that Israel and the U.S. forged a strong
alliance. Many -- like America's strategic interests in the Middle East
and the need for strong allies in the context of the Cold War -- were more
important than the narrative, but the narrative was very important in
selling them and in explaining the U.S.-Israeli special relationship in
terms that helped to justify it.
The problem for Israel and
Israel's current leadership however, is that even if that old narrative
seems as compelling as ever to them, it is increasingly falling on deaf
ears in the United States. Indeed, it is clear that many of the
problems that exist not only in the Israel-U.S. relationship at the
moment but also in Israel's broader relations with the world are
associated with a failure to recognize the sea-change in perceptions of
Israel and its situation that has taken place.
Let me frame it in terms that are easy to understand.
When
the Six Day War took place, Barack Obama was 4. He was just entering
elementary school at the time of the Yom Kippur War. The first major
regional conflict that could have entered his consciousness and had a
major impression on him took place when he was just finishing his
junior year of college. It was a year after he had gone on family
trips to Indonesia, India and Pakistan. I don't say this to pander to
the vile baiting of the fringe elements of American far right, but
rather to help set the stage for the intellectual coming of age of the
current U.S. president.
In June 1982, the First Lebanon War
began. Not only was the war the first major Middle Eastern conflict of
Obama's adult years, it was also the trigger for a change in how Israel
was viewed internationally that has defined the past three decades.
Lebanon was where Israel gave up the moral high ground in its conflict
with its Arab neighbors. The massacres at the Sabra and Shatila
refugee camps in September 1982, although conducted by Phalangists
seeking retribution for not only the assassination of the Lebanese
president but also for past blows inflicted on them, were widely seen
as being enabled by the Israeli troops that surrounded the camps and
stood by while the massacres were taking place.
Within five
years of the massacres, the Palestinian leadership initiated an
extraordinarily effective strategy of confronting the Israelis via
intifada, uprisings that seemed one-sided to the advantage of the
Israelis militarily but were in fact, one-sided to the advantage of the
Palestinians politically and strategically. Because the Palestinians
recognized long before the Israelis that the balance of power in modern
conflicts often lay with those who won the television war for support,
those who claimed the narrative. Poor Palestinian boys throwing rocks
at Israeli tanks snatched the "against-the-odds" narrative from the
State of Israel and brilliantly turned it against them.
During
the 1980s, as a consequence, the tide began to turn toward the
Palestinians among the American left -- from academia to
politicized Hollywood. (It is worth noting that if the Jews do control
the media as conspiracy theorists love to suggest, they sure haven't
done much to help the image of Israel over the past several decades.)
In
the two decades since, a series of other developments have taken place
that have transformed the U.S. political environment in terms of
support for Israel and in particular in terms of support for the kind
of joined-at-the-hip policies that seemed to define the relationship
during the sixties, seventies and early eighties.
Each of these
changes has had a profound impact which is amplified in its
significance by the fact that many in the Israeli leadership seem
somewhere between being baffled and in complete denial by them. They
include:
The Shift from the Strategic Center, Part I: The End of the Cold War
During
the '60s and '70s and '80s it was easy to make the case that America
needed a strategic ally in the Middle East. Our oil came from there.
It was on the southern flank of our great enemy. And that great enemy
was cosy with a lot of Israel's enemies in the region. The Cold War,
however, ended and as it did, Israel began to drift away from being
strategically central to the United States.
The Shift from the Strategic Center, Part II: The Aftermath of 9/11
In
the eyes of many Israelis, the attacks on the World Trade Center and
the Pentagon should have drawn the U.S. and Israel closer. But quite
the opposite has happened. Because Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan
become more central to the U.S., and because the U.S. put troops on the
ground in those countries, we were less in need of a tiny foothold, in
fact, we might be building long-term presences in those countries and
in the Gulf that make Israel less important relatively speaking. Furthermore, we began to see threats from terrorists or loose nukes in
Pakistan as more important to us than the Israeli-Arab tension. Indeed, as American General David Petraeus has observed-representing an
increasingly popular view-America's ties to Israel and the unresolved
nature of their conflict with the Palestinians may be exacerbating our
problems with terrorists and potential supporters throughout the
greater Middle East. Not only has our center of attention in the
region shifted Eastward, our ties in Israel are seen not as an
advantage re: U.S. interests there but as quite the opposite.
The Rise of Partisanship: The Curse of the Neocons and the Realist Corollary
Making
matters worse is the fact that the unpopular U.S. invasion of Iraq was
seen in part as the product of efforts by a small group of neocons who
popular fiction has associated with advancing Israeli interests. Thus,
many Democrats blame the war in Iraq on a group of people seen to be
sacrificing U.S. interests to advance an Israeli agenda. Whether this
is true, an exaggeration or a facile misreading of the facts, this
viewpoint has helped partisanize this issue. Polling data shows that
Republicans are more willing to associate themselves with strong
support of Israel and Democrats are more inclined to see a change in
the policies. That's not to say Israel is unpopular. It is more that
Democrats increasingly seek to distinguish their policies as being more
"balanced" toward Palestinians and moderate Arab states.
The American Retreat and the Advance of the BRICs
On
top of the above, America is burdened by domestic economic problems and
the economic as well as the human cost of the wars in the region has
greatly diminished the country's appetite for further such
entanglements. Indeed, the only way the president could justify adding
troops in Afghanistan was promising at the same time a firm date for
withdrawal. America is not going to get deeply involved in other
conflicts in this part of the world if it can avoid it. The bad actors
in the region know it. Do the Israelis? At the same time, as the U.S.
seeks multilateral solutions for the big diplomatic problems in the
region, other players are increasingly important such as the BRICs (see
the Iranian issue below). They are almost universally of a school of
thought that is skeptical of the Israelis and closer to the moderate
Arab states in the region. Since the U.S. is disinclined to go it
alone, these new players' views become much more important.
The Shift from the Strategic Center, Part III: The Iranian Nuclear Problem
Nowhere
is this shift more clear than with the Iranian nuclear stand off. This
is the first major conflict in the region in which the most important
international player was not the U.S. but the Chinese. Why? Because
if the Chinese don't go along with sanctions, there just can't be
effective sanctions. They know it. We know it. And that's why there
aren't sanctions today. This also means it is almost certain that Iran
will end up being nearly nuclear or nuclear and that the world will be
forced to accept it. Israel, anxious for years to get the U.S. to
focus on Iran, may regret getting what they wished for. Because once
there is a nuclear Iran, the issue becomes containment. And if that's
the issue, moderate Arab states are a key part of the strategy. They'll want to go along... but they will want the U.S. to pressure
Israel more on reaching a solution with the Palestinians in exchange.
Of
course, Israel bears a great deal of responsibility for this. They
have utterly disregarded these developments as they took place and have
recklessly failed on the public diplomacy front. Today, they are
perceived as the aggressor and the bias against them is so acute in the
media that when Palestinians launch thousands of missiles against
Israel and Israel responds, the world thinks of Israel as the aggressor
or when a couple of years ago a missile threat from Lebanon provoked an
effective Israeli response, world public opinion concluded both that
Israel started the conflict and lost it despite the fact that neither
assertion is actually true.
The Israelis are in denial and the
clock is ticking. Rather than addressing the question of how to return
to strategic centrality for the U.S. or how to reclaim the moral high
ground in the conflict and thus win back international support, they
play the settlements game, a needless and for all the above reasons,
dangerous distraction from the real business at hand.
My own
view is that they ought to lean into the peace process and do whatever
else they must to reclaim the moral high ground and the narrative they
need to underpin the strong U.S.-Israel relationship that is critical
to their future. If they fear that this might me concessions that are
too great to the Palestinians, I say, it is worth the risk because the
alternative is eroding support at critical places in the international
foundations of their security.
My sense is this is a lower
risk proposition than many hard-liners might think. Because I think
that ultimately the Palestinian will cede the moral and political high
ground in this fairly easily given their chronic dysfunctionality. As
for the issue of restoring strategic centrality, the Syrians and
Hezbollah and Iran seem to be working overtime to restore the narrative
that it still is tiny Israel against very hostile neighbors who seek
regional hegemony rather than to redress the grievances of the poor
displaced Palestinians (about whom history shows they care not at all
except for what utility they may have as pawns in a greater Middle East
chess game.) Lean into peace, show more restraint than is comfortable,
win the battle of the Internet and the cable news networks and talk
radio because that is the one that is most critical to restoring the
political support of the kind Israel needs.
If you wish to argue
the specifics of the preceding point, fine. But let's agree on one
thing: What will be fatal is waiting and hoping for the good old days
to return. Skepticism and the search for a new paradigm -- see the
President's Cairo speech for clues -- are not going to retreat. Neither
is time, demographic change or history. Things will not go back to
normal. This is the new normal. Israel must deal with it or fall
victim to it.
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