By What Right?
In the past, the denial of Israel’s right to exist was voiced mainly in radical circles. Today, it is part of the broader academic discussion not only in Europe but also in the United States. How did this happen?
By Adi Schwartz
Published in
http://www.haaretz.co.il/
http://www.haaretz.co.il/
Date: 22nd January 2007
“No one does Israel a favor by recognizing its right to exist”, wrote Abba Eban in an article in The New York Times in November 1981. “Israel’s right to exist, like that of the United States, Saudi Arabia and 152 other countries, is axiomatic. Israel’s legitimacy is not hanging in space waiting for recognition by the Saudi Royal Family. Thus, the PLO has no legal standing to grant recognition to any country or to refuse it”.
The article by the former Israeli Foreign Minister, who was one of Israel’s most impressive spokesmen in the international arena, was written in reaction to Saudi King Fahd’s plan which proposed implied recognition of the right of Israel to exist as part of an initiative to end the Israeli-Arab conflict. “There is no country in the world”, Eban wrote in the article, “large or small, young or old, that would view the recognition of its right to exist as any sort of favor or a negotiable issue”.
In the 25 years since that article was written, the discussion of the right of Israel to exist has stopped being solely the province of elements in the Arab world – with which Israel is in conflict – and has become an element is the European and American dialogue. In the last several years, especially since the start of the second intifadah and the failure of the talks between Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat at Camp David, one finds more and more examples of discussions such as “Was it a mistake to have established the Jewish State in the first place”? or “Should action be taken to abolish Israel’s existence”?
No government in Europe, and certainly not the United States government, has ever supported such a position. Moreover, 25 members of the European Union declared in 2005 that any attempt to abrogate the Jewish People’s right to self-determination – for example by claiming that Israel is a racist initiative – is tantamount to antisemitism. However, this discussion, which in the past was the province of ephemeral elements in the international arena, has in recent years infiltrated into the mainstream and can be found in almost any Western country.
This phenomenon encouraged the organizers of the Herzlia Conference which opened on 21st January to include in its agenda a special session to discuss the denial of the right of Israel to exist. This session, to be held on 23rd January, will be chaired by Dr. Fanya Oz-Saltzberger of Haifa University who frequently writes on the subject for European and American newspapers. Those participating in the discussion will be Professor Irwin Kotler, the former Justice Minister of Canada, Nathan Sharansky, the American historian Richard Landes, Malcolm Hoenlein, Executive Vice President of the Conference of the Presidents of the Major Jewish Organizations and Abraham Foxman, Chair of the Anti-Defamation League.
“Israel: The Alternative”
One of the most blatant examples of denial of the right of the State of Israel to exist was the article by Tony Judt, a respected American-Jewish historian, published in the New York Review of Books in October 2003. Under the title “Israel: The Alternative”, Judt proposed to do away with the Jewish National State and to establish in its place a bi-national state in Western Palestine.
Judt’s main argument was that Israel is an anachronistic creation, even if only because it was established too late. According to him, the European national movements from which Zionism draws its sources, succeeded in establishing national states with the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the end of the World War I. However, “the dream of the Jewish national homeland had to wait three more decades until the retreat of the British Empire”.
While ignoring the opposite examples of many other states in the world (India, Pakistan and many of the states in the Middle East and the African continent) Judt wrote that Israel “had come into the world too late … The very idea of a Jewish State – a state in which Jewish and the Jewish religion would have privileges that would not be granted to non-Jews – has its source in another place and time”.
Throughout the article Judt needed a lot of logical sleight of hand in order to prove that Israel is a fascist, warmongering state. “The central stream of Israeli politics”, the Jewish historian writes, “is now in the ‘Likud’. The main component of that Party is Menahem Begin’s ‘Herut’, the heirs of the Vladimir Jabotinsky’s Revisionist Movement. This Movement was called “fascist” by its leftist rivals because of its total indifference to the law”. The conclusion that should be drawn from this, according to Judt, is that the Israeli leadership in 2003 is also fascist.
Judt’s article aroused a considerable storm in Israel and around the world, and in its wake the historian’s participation in editing the American magazine The New Republic was canceled. However, three years later, during the last Lebanese War, another article on the subject, even more virulent, was published, this time in Europe. The Norwegian intellectual Jostein Gaarder, the author of the bestseller ‘Sophie’s World”, wrote in Norway’s most important newspaper, Aftenposten: “We don’t recognize Israel anymore. The time has come for us to realize that Israel in its present form is history”. In an article with serious religious, eschatological and apocalyptical overtones, which looked more like a messianic prophesy, Gaarder wrote: “The State of Israel with its unscrupulous art of war and its gruesome weapons has slaughtered its legitimacy. It has systematically scorned international law, international agreements and an infinite number of United Nations resolutions. It has destroyed world recognition. But no fear! The problem will be resolved soon. The State of Israel has ravished world recognition. It will know no peace until it lays down its arms”.
Gaarder ended his article with an apocalyptic prophesy which predicts the destruction of Israel leading the Jews into another exile. “If the entire Israeli Nation sinks into its sins and part of it will be forced into exile, we say to its neighbors: ‘Be calm. Show them mercy’ It is an unforgivable sin to attack refugees and people who have no country”.
Jews Like These
The most fundamental and axiomatic defense of Israel’s right to exist was provided by Prof. Alan Dershowitz – who is to address this session via satellite from the United States – in his book “The Case for Israel”. In the book Dershowitz gives as an example of the negative attitude towards Jews the decision by the President of an American university in the 1920s to limit the number of Jewish students in the Law Faculty to no more than five. When he was asked why he had decided to do this he answered: “Jews copy”. “But non-Jews copy, too”, Jews countered bluntly. “Don’t change the subject”, the university President answered, “Now we’re talking about Jews”.
Dershowitz’s contention is that many times when Jews or the State of Israel are under discussion, a double standard is applied. When Israel is attacked for human rights violations, for example, the accusers tend to ignore parallel human rights violations – by its neighbors as well as in other countries. This perforce gives rise to the question of how is it possible that from among the 200 member states in the United Nations, Israel is the only one about whom the question is asked whether it has the right to exist.
The conclusion is that the denial of the right of Israel to exist says more about the denier and his motivations and less about the State of Israel itself. Oz-Saltzberger aggrees with this claim, and tries to categorize Israel’s sharpest critics. First and foremost she differentiates between “claims having to do with what Israel has or has not done – which could be legitimate criticism – and those that have nothing to do with what Israel does”.
The next stage on the “slippery slope”, as Oz-Saltzberger defines it, is that which views Israel as a single homogeneous entity with no difference between the population and the government, and with no differences among the various voices in it. “When the Germans attack the United States, for example, they differentiate between President Bush and the American People. They say that they have a problem with the present Administration, for instance with its decision to go to war in Iraq, but stress that they have no problem with the American People”.
“I have never seen any strong critic of Israel that has made such a differentiation. When they do not take into consideration the range of differences of opinion in Israeli society, it is a clear sign of an anti-Israel bias”. The various attempts to impose an academic boycott of Israel belong, in Oz-Saltzberger’s view, to this category.
The next stage on the way to denying the right of Israel to exist is the claim “It’s a shame that Israel came into being”. Oz-Saltzberger brings as an example of this the survey taken in Europe in 2003 which determined that Israel is the most dangerous country in the world regarding world peace, far ahead of Iran and North Korea. These claims could be against an antisemitic background, to which statements are added about the Jewish conspiracy (“The Jews control Hollywood”, “The Jews are working the Bush Administration like a puppet”). However, they may simply be anti-Israel and then they focus on the denial of the right of Israel to exist.
Dr. Richard Landes, who will also participate in this special session on 23rd January, came to deal with issues actually as a historian of the Middle Ages. “In my area of expertise”, he said, “I noticed a recurring pattern in which the greatest outbursts of antisemitism came in fact after a relatively positive period for the Jews, which could be called philosemitism.
“The best examples of this are the Crusades and the period of the Reformation of Martin Luther. Since 1945, especially in the United States and Europe, attitudes towards the Jews have been very good, and this is apparently the longest period in history like this. My assessment was that in the outburst would come from the direction of Christian fundamentalism, which had perhaps suffered some disappointment from the exaggerated expectations of the year 2000, but in the end it actually came from the direction of the secular left.
“The turning point was the Camp David Summit. Until then, there was a lot of talk in the American media about great optimism, about the feeling that all the problems could be resolved and the mankind was moving in the right direction. But then the talks failed, the intifadah broke out and Israel was blamed for all the troubles in the world”.
Guilt Feelings
Today, Landes maintains an Internet site that monitors reports in the Western media on events in the Middle East. “In the past, many voices were heard in the Arab world denying the right of Israel to exist, but in the last several years we find this in the West, too. The reasons for this are “Realpolitik”. No body challenges the right of Russia or China to exist although it is clear that they violate human rights far more that Israel does, in Chechnya or Tibet, but Israel is a small country, and one can definitely imagine a situation in which it will cease to exist”, Landes says.
“However, another explanation may be malicious joy, which comes from the direction of leftist, secular Europe. A lot of Europeans very much enjoy accusing Israel and claiming that it is the source of all the troubles, because that eases the feelings of guilt they have about the Holocaust. That in essence is the aim of the Europeans – to feel that they are no longer guilty or at least that their guilt is not so terrible. This resembles the feelings of children. It’s like a girl who feels that she cannot be thinner, so she hopes that her friend will be fatter.”
According to Landes, denial of Israel’s right to exist generally comes from leftist intellectual circles in the West (which he claims are encouraged by newspapers like Haaretz), who try at any price not to be categorized as “sinners”, as those who have been partners to injustices perpetrated against other Peoples. “But if Israel was born in sin”, Landes says, “then all the countries of the world were born in sin”.
Landes says with a smile that he does not dismiss out of hand the possibility that the United Nations Security Council will pass a resolution with a majority of votes determining that Israel has no right to exist. “On the diplomatic level, reference is to an alliance with the Arab world. Europe is trying to constitute a counterbalance to the United States in the world arena therefore it tries to be closer to the Arab world. This also has demographic implications that can be seen in every city in Europe. Europe’s difficult problem with the Muslims has made it turn Israel into a scapegoat. They view this as a convenient solution to the Muslim threat”.
