But the fact of those people who saw no reason to voluntarily abandon their ancestral homes made it impossible.
We all know this. Just as the most blindly patriotic American knows deep down that the U.S. exists because it displaced the people who had lived there before the conquest, every Israeli knows that his or her country could never have come into being without making room for its citizens at the expense of the area’s longtime residents. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying. The question is what to do with this knowledge.
Because Israel’s sixty-plus years of existence have fallen within the era of mass media, it’s commonly believed (particularly within the Diaspora Left) that its misdeeds can still be undone, in much the same way that iconographic racisms of this period—segregation in the Southern U.S., the apartheid regime in South Africa— were dismantled. The difficulty, of course, is the ultimate reach of such desires. Only the lunatic fringe claims that the United States should be returned to preconquest inhabitants. But a great many people advocate that Israel be reduced in size, if not outright erased, to make up for the suffering of the Palestinians it has displaced.
No matter how irrational, this impulse to turn back the clock still colors the discourse of otherwise sensible individuals. This isn’t surprising, since it echoes the nineteenth-century Zionist dream of transforming time into space, as if the physical geography of Palestine could compensate for the destruction of the homes that stood there thousands of year before. In a way, some dream of a pre-Israel Palestine in the same way that others dream of a pre-expulsion Israel. Of all the paradoxes that haunt the Middle East today, this one may be the most poignant.
It’s crucial that we pay close attention to these dreams in all their nuances when we tackle the subject of Israel, even as we recognize their fundamental perversity. There’s no going back, because no matter how much some of us might want to, we’re still propelled into a future filled with the rubble left behind by our dreaming. When we try to make such dreams reality, we refuse the existence of people whose presence renders those dreams impossible. True hope lies in world-views that don’t reduce human beings to the status of underbrush that must be cleared away before starting afresh. Forgetting the lesson of the Holocaust sullies the memory of the millions of lives it took—and that applies to everyone with a stake in the future of Israel, regardless of their history.
Where Israel is concerned, real progress demands that we hold tightly in check any impulse to refuse the existence of a given group of people. People, whatever their origin, are not in the way. They are the way. Banal as that may sound, like some slogan from a UNICEF card, it remains the only political philosophy that upholds the promise of true freedom. For though Martin Luther King Jr. called it his “dream,” he knew all too well that it represented the reality that people would grasp if they could only be woken from the nightmare of history.
GOING BACK TO MOTHERLAND
While it’s no longer fashionable to seek the truth in our fantasy lives, I’m convinced that we limit our definition of what matters at our peril. My conflation of Bush’s Annapolis address with Anwar Sadat’s visit to the Knesset, reality-based or not, helped me realize what I might otherwise have overlooked: although the physical territory of the United States is thousands of miles from Israel, the two countries had become more “neighborly” than ever before. In the wake of the U.S. invasion of Iraq, it wasn’t simply American money and weaponry that now populated the Middle East, but a large military force (and its civilian auxiliaries that had been there for years).
Throughout the following chapters, I move back and forth between the sort of analysis that a historian or journalist might produce and a self-analysis more akin to intellectual autobiography. I do this not only because—as in the case of my Annapolis daydream—I sometimes get further by following my intuition rather than the “objective” information provided in news reports, but also to model a way of thinking about Israel that’s become all too rare in this era of entrenched positions and strident rhetoric. If we’re to break the ideological stalemate that chains both Israeli and Palestinian futures (not to mention their American counterparts), we must learn to see ourselves in the way we see others, even when it’s uncomfortable or embarrassing to do so.
This reflection is especially helpful for thinking about the relationship between Israel and the United States. As I’ve already suggested, the two nations are bound together by their shared history as promised lands. From the beginning, both nations have been torn between the desire for renewal that led to their founding and the resistance posed by the facts standing in the way of that dream. The religious persecution that prompted early American colonists to cross the Atlantic may pale next to the abuses Jews have faced over the course of European history. But the Puritans, Catholics, Huguenots, and other Christian sects that sought refuge in what would become the United States shared with Israel’s founders the conviction that their faith could only survive if there was sufficient political will to protect it. Whether they aspired to create a theocracy or its opposite, they all recognized the need to mind the role of the state in religious affairs.
Because I spent my undergraduate and graduate years reflecting on religion in the modern world and devoting much attention, as both a writer and a musician, to the rise of the Christian Right in the U.S. during the 1980s and 1990s, I’m particularly attuned to the way Americans think about Israel. But my regular visits home to Israel to see my family, and the journalistic work I’ve done over the years there, consistently remind me that the pull of the United States is as strong in Israel as it is amongst American Zionists and Israel’s newest so-called friends, Evangelical Christians. This reciprocal attachment exists for many reasons, not least due to the flow of money between the two countries. But its foundation is psychological. Because the U.S. and Israel were both imagined long before they could be realized, neither has successfully freed itself from the realm of abstraction. The two nations are in fact haunted by their failure to transcend fantastical origins.
I know from personal experience how effortlessly conversation about Israel can slide from the literal to the figurative. While Israel is as real as any other place on the map, the fact that it was conjured during a time when it literally had no place emboldens both its friends and enemies to treat it as a trope. The “Israel” invoked in reggae songs and the “Israel” invoked in think-tank white papers are far closer to each other than most people realize.
My goal for this book is therefore twofold. On one hand, I want to reflect on how Israel figures in contemporary political discourse. On the other, I want to pull back the curtain on the reality of Israel by showing what that discourse leaves out. I can’t stop Israel from being used as a figure of speech—it makes no sense to try—but I’d like to make it easier to see when and why Israel is used that way. While we may still invest the name with hopes and fears, we can better understand that those constructions originate in a concrete reality rather than an otherworldly realm in which we’re powerless to intervene.
Even though this is first and foremost a book about Israel, it’s also about the United States. The special relationship between these two nations invites a scrutiny that moves beyond the nuts and bolts of political and economic policy. As I hope to show, perhaps the best way to rethink Israel is by rethinking the United States at the same time.
BOXING UP BUSH
The week of January 19, 2009, was a momentous one in American history. On Monday, the nation celebrated the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr. On Tuesday, Barack Obama became the first African American president. And on Wednesday, he rapidly moved to put his own stamp on domestic and foreign policy, seemingly intent on undoing most of what George W. Bush had wrought during his final months in office. Even though I was living in London at the time, the historical significance of this conjuncture was still keenly felt in the predominantly Caribbean neighborhood of Brixton where I rented an apartment. Whatever would transpire in the months ahead, with the global economy on the verge of collapse, it became clear that the political consciousness of the American people—and, indeed, beyond the nation’s
