Esther was there too, talking on the phone to a friend. She sounded exasperated, repeating over and over in Hebrew, “Bemet, Rut … ha Aravit, Sadat, hu be ha Knesset!” (“Really, Ruth … Sadat, the Arab, is in parliament!”) But Ruth didn’t seem convinced. The absolute truths of our nation’s turbulent history had suddenly been revealed as relative. If this could happen, what might be next?
I rubbed the sleep of nostalgia from my eyes. No, I wasn’t in London. The man on my TV screen was a different sort of nemesis, one who the people of my other homeland, the United States, had voted into office for a second term in 2004, despite ample evidence that he was well on his way to becoming one of the worst presidents in the nation’s history. And the unnerving sense of possibility that had resonated through my parents’ voices that stunning day of November 20, 1977, had turned into the weary conviction that hope was too much to hope for.
Still, it was clear that something inside me wanted to remember a past that would make the present seem less grim. Despite the hostility I harbored toward President Bush, I yearned for a temporary détente. I didn’t believe for a moment that he had Israel’s interests at heart. But the parallel between 1977 and 2007 was too apparent to miss. Both speeches followed a decade of bloodshed: Sadat’s address came after both the major Arab-Israeli wars of 1967 and 1973, and nonstop fighting between Israelis and Palestinians from Tel Aviv to Munich during the intervening years; Bush’s address came amid a comparably vexing sequence of events—Israel’s 1999 withdrawal from its security zone in southern Lebanon, the al-Aksa Intifada that began in 2000, and the second Lebanon war of 2006.
This isn’t to imply that the events of the last decade mirror the ones that led to Sadat’s successful 1977 trip to Jerusalem, because they don’t. No matter how much I might have wanted to find hidden historical patterns that tie these two time periods together, I couldn’t. A peaceful outcome to the present strife along the lines of 1979’s Camp David Accords remained highly unlikely, and even if President Bush were to have brought one about, it would have been very different from the agreement President Carter helped broker between Begin and Sadat.
No, my imagined connection between 1977 and 2007 was based on a superficial and erroneous analogy— the sort that psychoanalysis teaches us to discern in dreams—between Bush and Sadat. Despite Bush’s insistence throughout his presidency that strong support for Israel must lie at the foundation of America’s Middle East policy, I still wanted to perceive him the way I remembered Sadat—as a former foe seeking to make peace with Israel. After all, despite Bush’s steadfast declarations of support for Israel, his administration’s strategy in the Middle East had done more damage to the nation than Sadat at his most belligerent.
This realization troubled me throughout the 2007 Annapolis Conference. Although it had been convened to restart the work of peacemaking between Israel and the Palestinians, I couldn’t shake the impression that, because its stated goal was so obviously lacking in credibility, it was really an attempt to reconcile Israel with the United States. That was what I found so interesting about the event and why, unlike a lot of my fellow analysts, I was not willing to take a position on its declared purpose. To me, it was clear that the conference was about something else entirely.
It was with considerable bemusement, then, that I watched my colleagues argue with each other about how to react—as though formulating the proper response, whatever that might be, was as important as the mission of the conference itself. Do we support it, despite the fact that we don’t like Bush? Do we boycott it because we don’t trustBush? So conditioned had they become to the disappointments of the peace process that, taking its futility for granted, they had stopped thinking about the reality of the conflict. Instead, many in the media worried about staking out the correct position on the inevitable failure of the latest talks.
I’ve grown exceptionally tired of this cynical posture. It only leads to the dead end of intellectualism, in which writing precisely calibrated editorials takes the place of working for real change. Americans, in particular, appear to take comfort in the reinforcement of familiar roles that events like the Annapolis Conference bring about. Even if they disagree vehemently with the policies of the current Israeli or American governments, they welcome being confirmed in their political and professional identities through these kinds of rituals.
The lack of meaningful progress during Bush’s years in office compelled me to adopt another kind of disposition to events of this sort. The Annapolis Conference was interesting, but for entirely different reasons than the pronouncements made there or the threadbare journalistic conventions that framed them. I solicited opinions from friends, read countless wire reports, and watched as much video footage of the conference as I could, until I felt that I had something worthwhile to say. When it finally came, it wasn’t what I had expected.
I realized that what mattered most to me were my concerns about Israel’s lack of independence from the United States, especially evident during the 2006 Lebanon war, when the notion that Israel might be a proxy for American interests in the Middle East came into play more than ever. In hosting this conference, the United States was no longer the distant mediator it had been in 1979 when Carter brokered the first peace agreement between Israel and Egypt, nor even the nation tasked with enforcing Iraq’s infamous no-fly zone and simultaneously hosting repeated peace talks between the Israeli government and the PLO in the early 1990s. No, this was a United States that had gone local, one that had finally become a part of the Middle East. The Iraq War had transformed the United States into one of Israel’s neighbors. American investment in the Middle East—which has conditioned Arab-Israeli relations since colonial Great Britain and France largely pulled out of the region in the 1960s—was now grounded in a physical proximity to Israel, which, unlike the limited military force that occupied Lebanon in the early 1980s, had lost the aura of temporary engagement.
This crucial change in the region’s political landscape combined with my personal history to shape a fundamental intuition: Israel can’t make peace with its neighbors unless it first makes peace with the United States. Having spent my entire life split, both literally and psychologically, between the two countries, my demand for reconciliation has reached a fever pitch. As the child of a man whose family was among the first to settle in Palestine in 1882—predating not just the creation of Israel but also the British colonial authority that came before it—I have no choice but to live and breathe Israel.
Yet I am no less an American. Although she spoke to my dad in French half the time, my mother, whom my father first met as a child in Jerusalem, was as much a product of New York as my father is of Tel Aviv. I spent a good part of my adolescence and most of my adult life in the United States. For me, dual citizenship isn’t merely a by-product of my Jewishness, but a condition that defines my outlook on the world and punctuates my identity as a self-described Israeli American. Whether the divide between Israel and the United States is augmented or diminished, I feel every change as a fluctuation in my soul.
MASH DOWN BABYLON
Writing this book has posed a huge challenge for me. So many people have gotten Israel wrong that the demand to get it right is almost unbearable. But the more I worked on this project, the more I came to realize that the only way to get it right is to stop trying to “get it” at all. Reality always has a way of eluding our grasp. In the case of Israel, though, the problem is absurdly magnified by the fact that the reality of Israel is, in large measure, a projection of fantasies, both by those who want to love the place and those who are consumed with hatred for it.
It’s not helpful, particularly for someone like myself, that the United States remains the standard for building a nation from scratch. From John Winthrop’s image of a “city upon a hill” through the idealism of the Founding Fathers, the prehistory of American politics was dominated by the desire to realize a dream, regardless of what stood in its way. Indeed, the dispossession of North America’s native peoples seems like a perverse model for Israel’s development. Had the territory of either the United States or Israel been empty prior to their settlement,
