Notebook

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August 15, 2002

Life support

Cathy P. challenged my statement that "The U.S. has never offered 'unconditional' support to Israel." She said:

Really? What actions of Israel's have caused the US to withdraw economic, military, or diplomatic support?

Cathy's bias here is transparent, but it still needs to be addressed. When she says "unconditional support," she means "The US basically singlehandedly enables Israel to exist." (Her words, farther down in the post.) Should the U.S. not enable Israel to exist? Are we to assume that the rest of the world should be only too happy to let Israel cease to exist? Why in the world would a Unitarian Universalist embrace such a view?

Cathy, do you want the U.S. to abandon Israel as an ally and to isolate it economically and militarily? I don't think that would help anybody. It certainly wouldn't help the Palestinians. Israel could easily be much more brutal if it didn't have to take its allies' concerns seriously. (And don't think for a minute that its neighbors somehow operate by some higher moral standard. We're uncomfortable because we think of Israel in many ways as like us, and so its repressive and violent activities shock us. Try life in Syria, Saudi Arabia, or Iraq. I'd really hate to be an oppressed minority there.) And without its contacts in the larger world, the influence of Israel's most paranoid and militant factions would grow even stronger. Israel would have nothing to lose, and many more Palestinians would surely die. Why? Because Israel's most isolationist factions are also the ones most committed to keeping the occupied territories. Israel's moderates and liberals need to know that we'll stand by them, or they'll never have enough strength to face the threat from Israel's own right wing.

But let's assume that Cathy was only using strong language to make a subtler point. It's true that the U.S. has not shown sufficient or consistent interest in helping Israel withdraw safely. There are many reasons for this, among which is American isolationism, which our leaders conveniently indulged until September 11 forced us to start thinking about foreign policy again.

More importantly, though, Israel itself avoided making crucial choices for 35 years because of divisions in its own political culture. Labor and Likud both found it easier to indulge or encourage the settlement of the occupied territories than to challenge it. Why? Because Israelis preferred not to confront how unsustainable occupation really was. It's not clear to me how Americans could have altered this internal political dynamic in Israel. Thomas L. Friedman's assessment in From Beirut to Jerusalem is that the Palestinians could have made themselves "undigestible" to Israel through general strikes and non-lethal resistance, which sprang up during the first intifada, if the Palestinian leadership had been more resourceful and less corrupt. But the Palestinians needed to work, and their leaders didn't have a viable plan. Now they are trying to make themselves indigestible through a paroxysm of martyrdom — but their leaders still don't have a viable plan. That, too, is a big part of this tragedy.

I am deeply troubled by Israel's short-sightedness over the last 35 years. But, honestly, I'm even more troubled by the extreme measures Palestinians have embraced. Suicide bombing of arbitrary civilian targets for the purpose of spreading terror is an atrocious innovation in politics. Nothing justifies it. There are many oppressed people in the world, but few have ever adopted a means of "resistance" this ghastly. I salute every brave Palestinian who has publically condemned its use. I salute every Arab and Muslim organization in the U.S. and elsewhere that has explicitly condemned such tactics and cut off funding to groups that engage in such activities. It will be a terrible day when suicide bombing looks like an effective way to achieve political goals.

UUsMiddleEast 8.15.02