- Towers sway. Seismic jolts rattle the realm. A mainstream
epiphany is at hand: the extent of ideological and operational "twinning"
of Israel and the United States. The diversionary benefits of an attack
on Iran become ever more compelling--but Iran looms large in the epiphany.
The blarney still runneth over, but it runneth scared.
-
- Vintage Zionist bravado was uncorked by Benjamin Netanyahu
during his closed-door meeting last month with American contributors to
an Israeli military recruitment program targeting ultra-religious Jews.
The American-educated former Israeli Prime Minister, now hardline opposition
leader and magnet for the right, has called for a pre-emptive nuclear
strike against Iran. Netanyahu was the original recipient of the neo-con
expansionist "clean break" blueprint in the nineties, which
was eventually recycled back in the U.S. as the Program for a New American
Century.
-
- While appreciative of anticipated largesse, Netanyahu
told the visiting heavy hitters that their vessel was sinking. With intermarriage
and assimilation swamping the good ship Diaspora, there is "no future"
for Jews living outside Israel. Journalists immediately took embarrassing
note that the last Israeli politician to give public voice (in 2000) to
that hoary backroom chestnut was President Moshe Katsav, currently accused
of rape.
-
- While survival is a thematic staple in Jewish organizational
discourse, there's a certain comic-opera quality to anointing Israel
as guarantor of Jewish identity and well-being at a time when the state
is sliding into quasi-pariah status on the international stage. But Israeli
triumphalism cannot be laughed away. With an estimated 200+ nuclear weapons
at its disposal, this graustark-on-steroids could threaten to unleash
chaos if it felt unacceptably squeezed, the worst-case scenario involving
the suicidal "Masada option."
-
- Israel's own internal viability was called into question
later in the month by the Israeli American mathematician and game-theory
guru who won the Nobel Prize in economics last year. Professor Robert
(Yisrael) Aumann, who moved to the United States half a century ago, told
an audience at the College of Judea and Samaria, in occupied Ariet, that
long-term continued existence of Israel is at risk due to insufficient
appreciation of its uniqueness, aggravated by excessive sensitivity to
war casualties.
-
- Of course, triumphalism finds its natural home in religion,
and the new chief rabbi of the Israeli military, Rabbi Avi Ronsky, is
so confident of divine support, he's willing to write off the earthbound
kind. "I am not sure", he sniffed, when an interviewer asked
if there is such a thing as secular zionism. Meanwhile, from his base
on seized Palestinian land in the northern West Bank, extremist Rabbi
Yousef Falay provided the always salutary reminder that fundamentalist
fever is an equal-opportunity affliction, with his call for Palestinian
males to be "exterminated" if they refuse to flee Palestine.
And, indeed, the "transfer" option has to be considered very
much back on the table now that expulsion advocate Avigdor Lieberman has
been brought into the Israeli cabinet.
-
- Back in the United States, the pro-Israel lobby can feel
the ground moving beneath its feet. Certainly, it can boast of continued
success in maintaining the gloss on Israel's public image while airbrushing
embarrassing warts. 81% of Americans believe Arabs' real goal to be the
destruction of Israel, not the return of occupied land, according to a
poll by the American Jewish Committee. The same poll also showed that
for three out of four American Jews, concern for Israel is an integral
part of their Jewish identity, although that sense of identification is
dropping sharply with each succeeding generation.
-
- But the lobby itself is blinking in an unaccustomed spotlight,
its coy wink-nudge invisibility at an end. That its very existence--let
alone its machinations--has come under public scrutiny is due largely
to debate generated by the report published earlier this year (now being
turned into a book) by Professors Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer, of
Harvard and the University of Chicago, respectively. The lobby's sway
has received a public thumping by no less than Zbigniew Brezinski, national
security advisor under Jimmy Carter (himself the author of a new book
conflating treatment of Palestinians with Apartheid). Brezinski told a
New America Foundation dinner: "Bush should say, either I make policy
on the Middle East or AIPAC does."
-
- AIPAC, lobby linchpin, finds itself center stage in the
unfolding (and unsurprisingly under-reported) espionage trial of Steve
Rosen and Keith Weissman, former AIPAC policy director and an AIPAC Middle
East analyst, respectively. As part of his plea-bargain, Pentagon staffer
Larry Franklin admitted passing the documents (reportedly concerning Iran)
to the AIPAC staffers. And the presiding judge, T.S. Ellis of the US District
Court in Alexandria, Virginia, has ruled there existed "ample probable
cause to believe" that the defendants were acting as "foreign
agents" when the government wiretapped them. (In a congressional
spinoff, the FBI and Justice Department are investigating claims of collusion
between AIPAC and Rep. Jane Harman of California, ranking Democrat on
the House Intelligence Committee. In return for lobby support for her
reappointment, Harman allegedly agreed to press the government to go easy
on Rosen and Weissman.)
-
- Meanwhile, Israel goes on creating unilateral "facts
on the ground." Just as the mainstream media were starting to wrap
their minds around the devastation undergone by the physical and social
landscapes of Lebanon, and the time-release followup of unexploded cluster
bombs, Israel chose to run amok in Gaza, and Beit Hanoun joined the ranks
of war-crime discourse. In these internet- facilitated times, the obscene
disparity between Israel's high- minded rhetoric and its depraved practice
is too flagrant to be concealed. In most of the rest of the world a backlog
of pent-up indignation is building to a breaking point.
-
- Israel's unconditional defenders hunker down in sulky,
solipsistic denial, and more "liberal" Zionists squirm with
increasing discomfort. But from the outset, Zionism has evoked conscientious
disavowal in both secular and religious Jewish circles around the world,
a relatively unknown dissident tradition embraced by many "recovering
Zionists." This tendency achieved notable expression in the United
States in the months following initiation of the first Palestinian Intifada.
In February 1988, eighteen professionally and intellectually prominent
American Jews published "Time To Dissociate From Israel" as
a full page ad in The Nation (the statement had picked up hundreds of
additional signers by the time it was republished in the New York Review
of Books). Listing particulars of Israel's "tragically misguided
approach" and "racialist ideology", the signers of the
statement affirmed: "We can no longer condone or be associated with
such Israeli behavior, nor, do we believe, should our country." Similar
statements have appeared sporadically in the intervening years.
-
- As always, the current surge in criticism of Israel will
be countered by accusations of antisemitism, especially when prickly
questions are raised about the dual American-Israeli citizenship of a
number of pivotal neocons. And, eventually, the fallback of last resort,
the Holocaust, will be invoked as all-sheltering dispensation for Zionist
and Israeli misbehavior. However, this figleaf is overdue for closeup
examination, something along the lines of the privately commissioned inquiry
begun in 1980 and headed by Arthur Goldberg, former Supreme Court justice
and ambassador to the UN. A hornet's nest was stirred by this retrospective
look at shortcomings in the way American Jewish organizations responded
to the needs of Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler, and the project collapsed
in rancor after a year. The wider and deeper issues of German Zionism's
symbiotic relation with the Nazi regime have been masterfully explored
in Lenni Brenner's groundbreaking Zionism in the Age of the Dictators
(inexcusably out of print but available online by Googling up the title).
-
- Given the fabled tangle of Jewish fractionalism, it's
often been said that the only thing holding American Jews together is
Israel. What would it take for Israel to fall definitively from the graces
of its putative overseas constituency? The mind shudders at the implied
order-of-magnitude escalation necessary to overshadow everything that's
been perpetrated to date.
-
- A collateral question suggests itself: What would fill
the identity vacuum? Obviously, religious believers could embrace some
form of traditional Jewish observance. But for the rest of us, what touchstone
of Jewish spiritual identity could evolve after the "molting"
process?
-
- Many social justice secularists consider prophetic haranguing
as some kind of quintessentially Jewish spiritual vector. And today it
bumps up against a different spiritual vector that has made capacious
headway among North American Jews, namely, the practice of Asian-derived
systems of self-cultivation.
-
- Can prophetic wrath coexist with transcendence of ego?
-
- Could Amos and Buddha jam on Get Over Yourself?
-
- _____
- Dave Himmelstein is a writer and editor in Montreal.
- http://www.counterpunch.org/himmelstein11202006.html
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