Predictably, the Anti-Defamation League’s National Director Abraham Foxman answered the letter with outrage, also in the New York Review of Books, complaining that its coauthors Mark Lilla and Richard Sennett had not bothered to get the organization’s side of the story before going public: “What is so shocking about this letter is that a group claiming to be defending fundamental values of free expression in a democratic society—values that ADL has worked to ensure for decades—employs techniques which completely debase those values.” Although Foxman was aware that some of the letter’s signatories, including Lilla himself, could hardly be considered progressives, his reply nevertheless managed to artfully conjure the specter—rooted in the student radicalism of the 1960s—of a Left more intolerant than its antagonists. “Their behavior is a much subtler and more dangerous form of intimidation than the baseless accusations conjured up against ADL.”
The most striking part of both this exchange and l’affaire Judt generally was its lack of civility. The speed with which each side resorted to implicating the other in totalitarian tactics clarifies how threadbare the sense of common identity and purpose had become within the Diaspora by the mid-2000s. Whereas previously one could have imagined heated debates about Israel cooling off into the impression of solidarity, in this case any resolution seemed impossible. In a sense—to play off of Judt’s formulation—everyone had lost control of the debate. The American Jewish Committee raised the stakes even further when they published an essay by Holocaust scholar Alvin Rosenfeld asserting that the position on Israel held by Judt and other progressive Jews like American playwright Tony Kushner and British literary theorist Jacqueline Rose is functionally anti-Semitic. Suddenly everyone in the Diaspora seemed to be talking about issues that in the old days no one wanted to discuss.
In his Observer interview, Judt explained to Wood that this reticence had been secured by fear: “All Jews are silenced by the requirement to be supportive of Israel, and all non-Jews are silenced by the fear of being thought anti-Semitic, and there is no conversation on the subject.” Though it seems deeply ironic that the fear of more vigorous silencing would inspire people to speak freely, this shift is one that Judt—a former translator for the Israel Defense Forces—clearly welcomed, concluding the interview on a hopeful note: “I think one could say that after the Iraq War, for want of a better defining moment, the American silence on the complexities and disasters of the Middle East was broken. The shell broke and conversation—however uncomfortable, however much slandered—became possible. I’m not sure that will change things in the Middle East, but it’s changed the shape of things here.”
For better or worse (or, more precisely, for better and worse), discussion of Israel has shifted markedly in the wake of the attacks on the United States of September 11, 2001. Trends that began to emerge at the conclusion of the Cold War are now fully manifest. As l’affaire Judt amply illustrates, rancor has supplanted reasoned exchange as the dominant mode of discourse. Even when people are on the same general side, they find ways to treat each other as opponents. The polarization of the debate has made people who want to find solutions despair of making progress. But it has also provided an opportunity to rethink the way Israel is regarded both within its borders and beyond. What we need in the midst of all the heated polemics on Israel is a way to perceive the gray in both black and white.
That’s my primary goal here. I want to bring depth to conversations that have been flattened into reflex. In this chapter and the ones to follow, I focus on specific examples from recent debates in the media. Frequently, I connect them to the history that preceded them. But this is not a history book. What concerns me, as I suggested in my introduction, are not the facts of modern Israel’s existence, but the way people have marshaled those facts in the service of polemics, whether in the United States, Europe, or the Middle East. Although denouncing arguments for their rhetorical sleights of hand may feel good, it does little to advance the cause of peace. Just as it becomes harder to generalize about members of a particular ethnicity or religion when you get to know some of them personally, it’s more difficult to judge positions in a debate after you study them in depth, with as much attention to their nuances as their broad strokes. But that’s a challenge I take up eagerly, as the only way for us to make progress in an ideological debate is to challenge our certainties.
PREOCCUPIED TERRITORIES
Visiting New York in February 2007, I got into a conversation with a Jewish gentleman in his sixties who wanted to discuss what Israel had achieved in the Six-Day War of 1967. Because I was born in that year and grew up in a context where Israel’s stunning victory remains so crucial to understanding contemporary Jewish attitudes toward the country, I’m always eager to talk about it, and have become accustomed to Americans rationalizing the necessity of the occupation, in one form or another, as a means of ensuring Israel’s security, as though they were justifying the defense of their own country. But what this man said unsettled me more than usual. He only seemed able to countenance the war’s impact on American life.
Israel’s transformation into a state with military muscle and the imperial conquests to prove it was significant, he explained, because it completed the process of Jewish integration in the U.S., helping us secure the level of equality we experience in America today. From his perspective, what the Six-Day War meant to Americans outweighed the changes it caused in the Middle East. The war cleansed the Jewish American population of the stigmas it had borne, and was evidently worth the stigmatization that the occupation of formerly Arab lands had ultimately inflicted on both Israelis and Palestinians. It’s hard to imagine a purer example of the figure of Israel taking precedence over “actually existing” Israel.
One of the biggest issues confronting Jews today is the way Israel gets “constructed” by both its proponents and opponents in America. When Tony Judt explained that he wasn’t sure whether the controversy that Jewish critics of Israeli policy in the United States have provoked “will change things in the Middle East,” but that “it’s changed the shape of things here,” he made a revealing comment about Israel’s role in American political life. It seems that Israel has become a staging ground for conflicts that, while bearing on its special relationship with the United States, are first and foremost internal struggles. The same goes for debates about Israel elsewhere within the developed world, particularly Western Europe. But given both the size of the Jewish community in the U.S. and the extensive media network devoted specifically to its concerns, the intensity and scope of those struggles is frequently magnified within an American context.
This helps explain the vehemence with which some fellow Jews have attacked people like Judt. Even if he is right that debates within the American Diaspora may not directly impact Israel, the belief that they could matter elevates the significance for their participants. And when liberal journalists like Philip Weiss write about the formation of a new Jewish Left, as he did in a blog entry for the New York Observer on February 7, 2007, they only add fuel to the fire. Acknowledging that U.S. organizations like Jewish Voice for Peace still have a relatively small amount of influence, he found sufficient evidence to assert, “The formerly marginalized progressives are movin’ in.” This kind of analysis is typically sustained by a healthy dose of wishful thinking that reflects both progressives’ thirst for an expanded profile and journalists’ professional desire to perceive a balance of powers within the ideological conflict over Israel. But when repeated often enough, Weiss’s analysis has the capacity to transform its exaggerations into reality. Once the Diaspora Jewish Right feels sufficiently threatened, it’ll respond in a way that produces precisely what it fears. That’s the ironic state of affairs that Judt had in mind when he declared, “They’ve lost control of the debate.”
It’s also what prompted Dan Sieradski, in an entry he posted to his former abode, the progressive blog Jew-school, to make the bold leap of calling this ideological struggle in the Diaspora a “Jewish civil war.” Although Sieradski was skeptical of Weiss’s claim that a unified Jewish Left was making its presence felt—implying that this “movement” only appears like a coordinated force to its opponents—he argued that progressives