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Onward,
Alexander, Jeffrey, Becky and Deva
November
20, 2006
Netanyahu and the End Times
Ziodämmerung
By DAVE HIMMELSTEIN
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.
Reachable through chebrexy@hotmail.com
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