found themselves with more time to reflect on smaller-scale conflicts around the world. The eruption of civil wars in the former Yugoslavia reminded people in the developed world how easily the veneer of civilization can wear off in the face of historically grounded ethnic antagonisms. At the same time, the tide was turning in South Africa, as the international effort in the ’80s to overturn apartheid at last seemed to be having the desired effect. Finally, the first Gulf War, waged by a multinational coalition led by the United States, brought a wide range of unfinished business in the Middle East back into the headlines.
While perhaps not a perfect storm for Israel’s political establishment, these developments overlapped in the media in a way that let potential critics connect the dots about the deeper implications of Israeli government policies, which even the good news of the 1993 Oslo Accords did little to alter. All of a sudden, in every televised image of a Palestinian teenager wielding a slingshot against an Israeli tank, many progressives took the opportunity not only to conclude that Israel was now Goliath to the Palestinian David, but also to elevate that realization into a principal political concern. Instead of continuing to be seen as a special case of widespread global problems, Israel now found itself in the bull’s-eye of an American Left that had historically neglected the Middle East.
Israel’s occupation of Lebanon, the West Bank, and Gaza provided an ideal point of entry for an ideological stance on the region in a way that the crude economism of the petropolitics associated with the Gulf War—NoBlood for Oil—had not. By acting the part of a confident imperial force at a time when the former Soviet empire was disintegrating and the United States was unsure of its role as the sole remaining superpower, Israel helped the Left to maintain its intellectual focus. The overlapping of religion and racism in the actions of a state unapologetically committed to the project of colonization permitted the redeployment of traditional forms of political critique, imparting a desperately needed sense of continuity amid a world transformed by unexpected ruptures. In other words, focusing on Israel became the means of demonstrating that the principle ideological concerns of the Left prior to 1989 were as valid as ever.
INTRODUCING THE MIDDLE EAST
We can more fully understand recent debates about Israel within the Diaspora when we keep the immediate post–Cold War era in mind. Although technically still recent history, the 1990s are difficult for someone living in the post–9/11 era to comprehend as anything other than the “before” to our “after.” The global political landscape changed so radically in the first years of the new millennium that it seems as though the previous decade got locked in a time capsule to be exhumed in a future where people will find it easier to identify broader trends. Yet we need to examine that period closely if we’re serious about grasping how Israel has changed.
For one thing, the allegations that Alvin Rosenfeld and others have made about “Jewish anti-Semitism” depend upon the existence of organizations on the Left that either date from the 1990s or were formed by individuals active in campaigns against the Israeli government at that time. Although rising resistance to the Bush administration agenda, particularly the war in Iraq, sharpened progressive critiques of its Israeli allies, the foundation for them was laid before 9/11. It’s true that organizations like J Street, Brit Tzedek v’Shalom, Americans for Peace Now, Israel Policy Forum, and Jewish Voice for Peace take into account how radically the American presence in the Middle East has expanded since the war in Afghanistan. But they’re principally concerned with long-standing matters of Israeli government policy over which the United States, despite its support, has limited influence.
September 11 had considerably less impact on Israelis than it did on Americans. While Israel has worked more closely with the U.S. military since the attacks, the problems it faces both within and beyond its borders haven’t changed a great deal since Americans woke up that day to a new world order. While America regarded 9/11 as a “day that will live in infamy,” many in Israel saw it as confirmation that the reality of everyday life—where constant vigilance has long been the price of freedom—had been successfully exported to its benefactor. This isn’t to imply that all Israelis were overcome with schadenfreude after the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, even though certain Israeli politicians, such as current Prime Minister Benja-min Netanyahu, have repeatedly stated that the attacks were of value to Israel.
The intensity of debates like l’affaire Judt within the Diaspora derives less from changes in Israel or the peace movement than from the decidedly subjective perception, emerging from the foreign policy of the Bush administration and its staunchest allies in the United Kingdom and Australia, that threats must be handled differently than they were in the ’90s. Just as the onset of the Cold War led to changes in how America treated its Left—with the grudging tolerance of the 1930s replaced by the frenzy of McCarthyism—9/11 gave both conservatives and more mainstream Jewish leaders a reason to pay attention to the Jewish progressives like Judt, and the “loony Left,” that they’d previously dismissed as being unworthy of engagement.
GOING NATIVE, ABROAD
These discussions in the Diaspora are so confusing in large part because they occur within that imaginary Israel in which both conservative and progressive Jews are so invested. The failure of both the Right and the Left in the Diaspora to see Israel as it actually is constitutes a subtle but pernicious form of intellectual imperialism. To the degree that American Jews perceive Israel as both extant at the pleasure of the U.S. government and dependent on its support (a conclusion belied, as I’ll argue later, by Israel’s complex relationship with Europe), they convince themselves that their position on Israeli policies must be heeded, even when that position is hopelessly colored by fantasy.
This self-delusion is even more of a problem on the Left than the Right. Whereas conservatives of the post– 9/11 era have generally advanced an ideological agenda that champions idealism over realpolitik (there’s no other way to understand the Bush administration’s Middle East policy short of degenerating into conspiracy theory), progressives tend to believe they can see facts that others overlook. Noam Chomsky, a secular American Jew and one of the most prominent critics of the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians since the Six-Day War, is a prime example. Chomsky consistently points out how the ruling powers in both the U.S. and Israel hide the truth about what has really transpired since the occupation of the territories in 1967. Although younger peace activists may not agree with Chomsky on many points (and may resent the way his stature draws attention from their efforts), they generally agree that they’re fighting a struggle for revelation. The trouble is that they’re actually maneuvering within a political field in which too much is already in plain view.
This confidence in the power of truth telling reflects a positive conception of Israel that circulates within the Diaspora Left. Whereas conservatives love the coupling of religion and power embodied in the Israeli state, progressives often fetishize the Israeli public sphere, and they contrast the intensity and openness of the debates it fosters with the “censorship by the bottom line” that’s come to prevail in the United States.
While conservatives generally regard this tendency on the Left as another way in which anti-Zionist Jews seek to undermine Israel, they’d do well to consider the matter more carefully. As critical as progressives may be of Israeli government policies, they share with their con-servative counterparts an investment in the continuation of the political reality that makes such debates possible; progressives sense that the very presence of open discourse is inextricably bound up with the positive aspects of Israeli society, and wish to see those elements constitute a more inclusive, truly multiethnic Israeli democracy.
WHEN THE LEFT BANK REPLACED THE WEST BANK
Israel’s tradition of self-criticism—by its liberal civil servants and left-wing activists, and by specific internationally distributed representatives of its media—has become a shining beacon of political virtue to many non-Israeli Jewish liberals. In a sense, these critics embody the political and moral conscience that the Israeli government and its foreign policy seem to have lost
