The Onion, America’s finest news source, reported recently that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would exercise Israel’s “longstanding, constitutionally granted veto power over American policy if U.S. lawmakers confirmed retired Senator Chuck Hagel as the United States’ next Secretary of Defense.” Tongue only partly in cheek, the satirical magazine noted that Hagel lacked the “nine-tenths” majority needed to override a nominee so “far out of line” with Israel’s national priorities. The Onion concluded by informing Americans that the prime minister would forward to President Obama the name of three individuals he felt would be “appropriate” choices to lead the U.S. armed forces.
Life, as they say, imitates art, and while the Israeli veto hasn’t quite been written into the U.S. Constitution as of yet, the Onion’s mocking isn’t quite so far off the mark as might be supposed. As the right-wing speaker of the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, noted publically, “Because of his statements in the past and his stance toward Israel, we are worried.”
Indeed, over the years the good senator from Nebraska has raised eyebrows with the AIPAC crowd because his well-known independence streak has demonstrated his refusal to march in lockstep with what the Israeli far-right demands.
Take, for instance, this damning statement by Hagel: “The Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people up here. I’m not an Israeli senator. I’m a United States senator. I support Israel, but my first interest is I take an oath of office to the Constitution of the United States, not to a president, not to a party, not to Israel.” Clearly, Americans of all stripes should be leery of putting their trust into a man who would say such a blatantly true thing out loud where people could hear it.
Or, how about this odious piece of pro-terrorist anti-Semitism: “What I fear more today is that desperate men do desperate things when you take hope away, and that’s where the Palestinians are today.”
The former Vietnam combat veteran, who served a tour of duty in that conflict as an enlisted soldier, further compounded this treasonous villainy by noting that, “Peace comes through dealing with people. Peace doesn’t come at the end of a bayonet or the end of a gun.” Such malarkey is so much panty-waisted hokum, as Eliot Cohen, one of the brave architects of the Iraq fiasco and a leading Iran hawk, has pointed out of late.
Indeed, if you are to believe the American right, the Nebraska Republican is a fire-breathing member of the pinko left who hates Israel, is weak on Iran and spouts crypto-Marxist, Chomskyite conspiracy theories that connect our various Middle East interventions with our nation’s need for oil.
Of course, none of this is particularly true of Sen. Hagel, and the former senator has demonstrated he is a friend of Israel on multiple occasions, as his supporters have pointed out.
No, Chuck Hagel’s true sin is not that he is an enemy of Israel, but that he is a friend of the Jewish state who nonetheless opposes an ultra-nationalist expression of Israeli identity that is increasingly at odds with America’s broader national interests and is dividing the pro-Israel American establishment against itself.
The Iron Wall
This identity referred to above was first articulated by Ze’ev Jabotinsky, a leading Zionist of the early 20th century who might be considered the intellectual founding father of Israel’s militant far-right. Though Jabotinsky was a complex figure, he was nonetheless a hard-nosed realist in his attitudes toward Israel’s Arab neighbors.
His “Iron Wall” philosophy posited that since the Palestinian majority currently inhabiting the land of Israel would never acquiesce to the usurpation of their country by an armed minority, “Zionist colonization must either stop, or else proceed regardless of the native population. Which means that it can proceed and develop only under the protection of a power that is independent of the native population – behind an iron wall, which the native population cannot breach.” Thus protected, Arabs would eventually give in and accept the existence of Israel while Palestinians would accept their incorporation into it.
As far as it goes, Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall is not especially controversial in its realism. All states are ultimately expressions of a sovereign power’s ability to wield violence, and so one should not be surprised that the founders of the Israeli state saw force and coercion as integral to their national survival. All states do this.
The problem, however, comes when this philosophy is applied lopsidedly in a confrontation with a disenfranchised, subject minority – as has increasingly been the case since 1979, the date officially marking the end of relatively equally-sided state-to-state conventional warfare between Israel and its neighbors.
It is doubly troubling when such a policy is used by an ostensibly democratic state that enshrines the best of Western liberalism in its own founding laws. Thus, from the beginning, the intellectual cornerstones upon which the Israeli state has been built contains a fatal flaw that now threatens the stability of the entire edifice. As in our own founding, which incorporated our original sin of slavery in the federal Constitution, the internal contradictions of Israel’s founding principles are now threatening the very future of Israeli liberalism.
When the Israeli state was new, weak and surrounded by powerful, hostile states openly dedicated to the destruction of the nascent Jewish polity, such internal contradictions could be waved away by the danger posed by credible external enemies.
Indeed, the Israeli Labor Party, led by lions of the Israeli center-left like David Ben-Gurion, was able to bridge this gap in principles for decades and, in theory at least, maintain an option for a peace between a strong, liberal Israel and both the Arab states and the Palestinian people. The possibility for such a lasting peace, however, ended with the assassination of Labor Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin by an Israeli religious ultra-nationalist – a fate not unlike that suffered by the Egyptian peacemaker, Anwar Sadat, who was similarly assassinated by religious radicals opposed to peace with a hated enemy.
A shift in attitude
As the Labor Party convulsed from the assassination of it inspiring leader and the Oslo peace process descended into the violence of the Second Intifada, Israel’s liberal establishment collapsed. From the ashes emerged a new, ultra-nationalist expression of Israeli identity which has adopted a hardline stance on Israeli security and its subject population.
As Israeli historian Avi Shlaim has shown, the combination of external danger and domestic political infighting has always meant the Iron Wall philosophy first articulated by Jabotinsky has remained a consistent feature of Israeli society.
Indeed, Israel has for a long time taken on many aspects of a Praetorian state where military and security apparatus dominate politics and political life. Before the assassination of Rabin, however, this militarist element had always been held in check by a liberal political establishment that served as the Israeli conscience.
That conscience has, since Rabin’s assassination, been cut out of Israeli politics by a hardened population made frustrated, angry and deeply afraid of its inability to make peace with its neighbors.
Democracy, retain Palestine or keep Jewish character?
This has occurred, ironically, not when you might expect it – when Israel consistently faced well-armed neighbors backed by a nuclear-armed superpower in conventional conflicts on multiple fronts. No, the center-left consensus that existed since the founding of the Israeli state survived these wars only to emerge relatively unscathed.
What changed the nature of the Israeli state was acquisition of the entirety of Mandate Palestine and, for the first time, a huge Palestinian population it could not peacefully incorporate into the Israeli body politic, ethnically cleanse from its territory, make independent or return to its original owners as part of a comprehensive peace settlement.
In short, in finally achieving the old Zionist dream of claiming the entirety of Mandate Palestine, Israel was finally forced to face the inherent contradictions of its national existence. It could not, in other words, remain a liberal democracy with equal rights for all, retain the entirety of Mandate Palestine and its subject population as well as retain its majority-Jewish character indefinitely. Israel can choose two, but it cannot have all three.
This is precisely the conundrum faced by contemporary Israelis, and their inability to resolve this issue among themselves has spilled over into American politics. In Israel, it pits those who are willing to sacrifice Israeli liberalism for what it believes is iron-clad military security coupled with retention of the entire West Bank and the armed maintenance of the Jewish character of the Israeli state.
Opposing them are those in Israel who see a two-state or a liberal, bi-national state as the only way out of the soul-destroying morass that is the long-term subjugation of the Palestinian people under a system that increasingly looks like Apartheid South Africa.
Here in the United States, it pits an aging community of Zionist, Jewish-Americans and right-wing fundamentalist Christians against younger, more liberal-minded and secular Jewish-Americans who cannot reconcile the occupation they see with the arguments of moral equivalency or military necessity made by their elders and the currently triumphant Israeli right.
Hagel and the future
Like all family disputes, this fight to determine once and for all the true character of the Israeli state is a bitter one, and Sen. Hagel’s nomination has become contentious because he is supported by one side in this family quarrel and opposed by the other.
The success or failure of his candidacy to run the Department of Defense is thus in some sense a test of which side is currently prevailing here in America, which in turn heavily influences the balance of political and moral power back in Israel.
At the moment, it looks as if the Hagel’s right-wing opponents have backed off somewhat by letting the American left attack Hagel for his socially conservative views on abortion and gays, hoping this will doom a candidate the Israeli far right doesn’t want to be seen as openly opposing.
It would be a shame if left-wing intransigence on abortion and gays here in America successfully derails Hagel’s chances to run the Pentagon, for Hagel’s defeat would be seen as a victory for the Israeli far right and their supporters here in the United States. That, in turn, would only strengthen Israeli hardliners and make America’s Middle East diplomacy that much more difficult to conduct.