The harrowing reality of what happened in Mumbai reinforced a lesson from my childhood, showing once again the dangers that confront Jews outside of Israel, even in a historically welcoming place like India, the crown jewel of Israeli hippie culture. From the crematoriums of Auschwitz to the raves of Goa, life in the Diaspora hadn’t changed as much as I had hoped. In this context, I thought it significant that no one seemed willing to highlight the parallels between the 1972 kidnapping and murder of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics and the events in Mumbai; Indian Special Forces, like their German predecessors, had failed to rescue the Jews they were charged with protecting. Indeed, given many Jews’ predilection to see Islamists and jihadis as inheritors of the Nazi legacy—or, more dramatically, to regard the entire Muslim world as a reincarnation of Germany in the 1940s—I had expected the media to at least invoke Munich. This glaring oversight pissed me off, reminding me that, despite my commitment to secularism and diversity, I still had the political reflexes of a postwar Jew.
The tendency to see Europe in the Middle East, and, as I noted earlier, to see the Levant in Europe, conveys one of the core themes of this book: that the Middle East has become a metaphor for the world. Whether you chalk it up to undue Zionist influence on post–World War II American foreign policy, the disproportionate impact that the Arab-Israeli conflict has wielded over Western political life, the growth of Islam in Europe and Arab immigration everywhere else, or the global impact of Persian Gulf petrodollars, the point is ultimately the same: for a variety of reasons, the Middle East has become more tightly enmeshed in the West than ever before. The jihadi terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the military occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan during the War on Terror have had the ironic consequence of colonizing American culture and politics.
Israel vs. Utopia analyzes this change from the perspective of an Israeli American who, having been raised in Israel, the United States, and Europe, finds that they all have much in common despite the repellant “othering” of Israel that takes place in the latter—even by Israelis themselves. If the West has infiltrated the Middle East, and vice versa, then how could Israel, one of the chief conduits for this transformation, remain something so thoroughly unknowable? Particularly given how many of its citizens, especially those with centuries-old backgrounds in Europe, continue to live abroad. The best answer I can provide is one that, instead of issuing a prescription, seeks to outline a struggle to know Israel better. Specifically, I want to consider and complicate the relationship between the misconceptions of Israel that flit about in fantasies of the place, whether positive or negative, and what I call, with a nod to the Cold War Left, “actually existing” Israel.
My desire to reform American understandings of Israel is significant in this regard, because so much of today’s anti-Islamic invective in the U.S. is purported to be “pro-Israeli.” When I hear such talk I consistently perceive a racist conflation of my national and religious identity, as though what defines my Jewishness is its inherent opposition to someone else’s religion. To be pro-Israeli, to be pro-Jewish (whatever either of these things really mean), is not the same thing as being prejudiced. Unfortunately, making that equation is the easiest way to assign a specific politics to being Jewish, a fact which conservatives both in Israel and the United States have regularly exploited. Under such circumstances, Israelis like me have difficulty finding any ideological freedom of movement. And pressure from Diaspora Jewry only makes matters worse.
The negative reaction that many Israelis tend to have when Americans act as though Israel is solely reducible to its religious character illustrates a larger tension between the two peoples. Americans are able to “construct” Israelis in this manner because of the unequal relationship between the two countries. In return, Israelis typically respond as though they are colonial subjects straight out of central casting, consistently rejecting being defined by their unofficial “parents” in such a biased fashion. But they are also aware that this feeling of colonization brings them uncomfortably close to acknowledging Israel’s treatment of the non-Jewish population within its own military aegis. If pressed, most Israelis will admit that the settlement enterprise in the Occupied Territories is a textbook colonial endeavor. The implications of that realization, though, pose psychological problems for a people raised on the conviction that they are always on the brink of being at the mercy of hostile forces.
Hence my title, Israel vs. Utopia. First dreamed up six years ago, at the depressing height of the al-Aksa In-tifada, when I was living in my old apartment in San Francisco’s Richmond District, it forced me to imagine scenarios where the cold, hard facts permitted only the continuation of the status quo—a problem many progressives confronted during the Bush administration—and to do so without having to determine what that utopia should be. Given how certain many people in my circles had become about Israel, their impressions hardening into reflexes, I thought there might be some benefit to suspending the impulse to draw conclusions. If Israel had become the most popular global synonym for dystopia, I reasoned, why not tease out the negative space of that assumption?
By setting Israel in opposition to what it’s supposed to be, by creating a framework in which it is possible to substitute “America” or “Europe” for “utopia”—or even “settlements” for “Israel”—I wanted to restore movement to the discussion of its past, present, and future. Certainty has its appeal, but it also has a way of cluttering the mind with obstacles to reflection. Where the concept of Israel is concerned, what we need right now is room to maneuver. My hope for this book is that it will contribute to that worthy cause, helping to break up the blockages that have impeded the peace process, whether specific to the post–9/11 era or dating further back in the history of the Middle East.
Joel SchalitJuly 2009Milan, Italy
It felt like a dream. I was watching President Bush introduce the November 2007 Annapolis Conference on C-SPAN. But I could have sworn I was a boy sitting in my parents’ former home in London. I had been transported back in time, and instead of President Bush, I was fixated on the spectacle of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat addressing Israel’s parliament thirty years earlier.
I heard my father behind me shouting, “But he’s a brownshirt!” * in reference to former Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, who was playing host to the event. The idea that a right-winger like Begin would permit Israel’s nemesis to speak in the Knesset had left him dumbfounded. My stepmother 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