Joshua Muravchik is a fellow at the Foreign Policy Institute of the Johns Hopkins University School for Advanced International Studies and a contributor to this magazine. He is also author of 11 books, including the recently published "Making David into Goliath: How the World Turned Against Israel":http://www.amazon.com/Making-David-into-Goliath-Against/dp/1594037353/. I spoke with Muravchik about how Israel went from underdog to pariah, and the chances of that changing back anytime soon.
**Lee Smith: You say the world has turned against Israel, but aren’t Israel and the Gulf states, like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, closer than ever because of Iran?**
Josh Muravchik: It is not only the Gulf states and it is not only because of Iran. Much of the Sunni world feels doubly threatened: on one side by Iran and the Shiite and Alawite Arab populations aligned with it, and, on the other, by Sunni radical Islam. The latter movement at its extreme slaughters or enslaves whoever in its reach will not bow to it. But even in its relatively moderate iterations, it is seen as a totalitarian conspiracy that aims to monopolize political power and religious interpretation. Thus most Gulf states, including significantly Saudi Arabia, and also Jordan and Egypt and perhaps some of the other North Africans are at least implicitly on better terms with Israel than ever before.
But so what? Israel still faces enemies aplenty: heavily armed terror armies on its northern and southern borders stoking a restive population on the West Bank. These in turn are backed by Iran and Turkey—powers that were once allied with Israel but have embraced radical Islam and that are more formidable than the Arabs—as well as by Qatar, a simulacrum of a country with inexhaustible oil wealth.
Looming over all of this is the specter of an Iranian nuclear bomb, which President Obama will not prevent, and which, even if not used in a first-strike against Israel, will make all of Israel’s enemies bolder and more virulent.
Meanwhile, global discourse—encompassing Europe, the UN, international news media, NGOs, and even the Obama administration—exudes hostility toward Israel that constrains its ability to act in self-defense. The Arabs who today sympathize with Israel might alter this were they outspoken. But quite to the contrary, they keep their sympathy very quiet lest they arouse the anger of their own populations.
LS: Doesn’t the plight of the Palestinians anger the international community?
JM: Yes, the plight of the Palestinians evokes anger and sympathy, and this plight is indeed an unhappy one. Still, an egregious discrepancy is evident between the rage at Israel over the situation of the Palestinians and the indifference shown to other peoples suffering occupation and/or the denial of their national aspirations.
For instance, rarely does one encounter anger over the occupation of Tibet, although it has been occupied longer and more cruelly than the Palestinian territories, and unlike the case with Israel’s conquests in 1967, China’s occupation of Tibet was scarcely an act of self-defense. Were Beijing to offer Tibet the terms that Israeli prime ministers like Ehud Barak or Ehud Olmert offered the Palestinians, the Dalai Lama would dance for joy.
As for thwarted national fulfillment, who is angry on behalf of the Kurds? Kurds are five times more numerous than Palestinians. Their national identity goes back a millennium while Palestinian nationalism is less than a century old. The Kurds have their own language(s), history and traditions. The Kurds yearn for a state of their own. And yet no one non-Kurdish seems to give a fig.
**LS: How much of the world’s turn against Israel has to do with Israel’s policies especially regarding the Palestinians?**
JM: Israel’s policies of course contribute, and not only vis a vis the Palestinians. Israel’s transition from the world’s most perfect democratic socialism to a largely capitalist economy has cost it friends and admirers.
Regarding the Palestinians, Israeli positions in the peace process and on settlement building provide grist for Israel’s detractors. But when Israel takes a softer line, it doesn’t seem to make much difference. Barak accepted the “Clinton parameters” only to have them spurned by Yasser Arafat, and Olmert offered similar terms to Mahmoud Abbas who simply declined to respond to them. Despite this, the tide of blame against Israel, rather than the other side, just kept mounting.
And what about Palestinian policies toward the Israelis? The entire peace process was blown to smithereens, and the prospects for a two-state solution gravely damaged, by the second intifada. It was either planned or fanned by Arafat and was carried out largely by his and Abbas’s “moderate” party, Fatah. It was an unspeakably vicious terror war aimed at markets, coffee shops and bus stations, claiming a thousand Israeli lives. And it appears to have done little if anything to turn the world against the Palestinians.
**LS: What’s happened in Europe since 1967 that has turned popular as well as elite opinion against Israel?**
JM: Two kinds of forces have been at work. One consists of material pressures in the form of terrorist intimidation that evoked a reaction of appeasement; the leverage inherent in Europe’s dependence on Arab oil; and sheer weight of numbers, with one-hundred Muslims in the world for every Jew, 22 member states of the Arab League and 57 members of the Organizations of Islamic Cooperation arrayed against one Israel, all of it adding up to considerable diplomatic and economic sway.
No less important has been an intellectual transformation not specific to the Middle East but with profound effects on the perception of Israel in its conflict with the Arabs or Palestinians. This is a transformation of the central paradigm of Leftism. At the time of Israel’s birth, its detractors came mostly from the Right; but today the engine of hostility to Israel is on the Left. This is immensely important because while the Left constitutes a majority in few, if any, countries, it constitutes a decisive one in the precincts of academia, journalism, entertainment—in short, in the world of discourse.
From the mid-19th until the mid-20 century, the central paradigm of Leftism consisted of a passion play pitting poor against rich or workers against capitalists. This drama lost force in the latter half of the twentieth century and gave way to a new, more contemporary version. The exploitation of English mill hands or German steel workers no longer fired imaginations as much as the degradation of proud African warriors and pacific Hindu mystics and the mistreatment of blacks in America. Instead of class conflict, the redemptive struggle of the new era became “the rest against the West” or the “people of color against “the white man.” The iconic arbiter of latter day Leftism, Jean-Paul Sartre, expressed the paradigm shift in his preface to Frantz Fanon’s canonical The Wretched of the Earth: “Natives of all underdeveloped countries, unite!”
When this lens is focused on the Middle East, the Israelis appear as the Western, white men, and the Palestinians as the anti-colonial people of color. The former are inherently wrong and the latter inherently right. It does not matter how either side behaves. History has decreed who are the good guys and who the bad.
LS: Can this happen in the United States, too?
JM: The United States has proven resistant to this strain of thought as it has to Marxism. However, inroads have been made which Israel can ill afford given how dependent it is on American support in a mostly hostile world. The essence of these inroads consists in the displacement of distinct American exceptionalist liberalism of John Dewey, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, A. Philip Randolph and George Meany that always set itself against the hard Left. In its place has arisen a liberalism of Henry Wallace, Tom Hayden, George McGovern, Al Sharpton and Ken Roth which opposes the hard Left on tactics but shares most of its antipathies and affinities. As a result, American liberalism, once the strongest redoubt of support for Israel is turning rapidly against the Jewish state. This is counterbalanced by a dramatic rise in support for Israel among conservatives. But Israel would be safer if it could count on support across the political spectrum.
**LS: Is there any way for Israel to turn it around and win the world's affection again? Or, would it be different if Israel was led by a left-wing rather than a right-wing government?**
JM: An Israeli government of the Left would be cut more slack than the current one, but the difference would not be large. The second intifada erupted in 2000 during the premiership of the Labor Party’s Ehud Barak. Yet this was the moment at which the decisive turn against Israel became manifest, with harsher criticism being directed at Israel for self-defense than at the Palestinians for their terrorist war of aggression. The 2008-09 Gaza war that occasioned the infamous Goldstone Report was conducted by the Olmert administration, not of the Left but not of the Right either. And in this summer’s Gaza war, Netanyahu took no steps that were not supported by the main Israeli parties of the Left. In other words, with a government of the Left, Israel might be more restrained in regard to settlements and thus evoke less condemnation on that score, but at any moment that Israel felt impelled to act in self-defense—and those moments recur with heartrending frequency—it could count on the world’s opprobrium whoever was in office in Jerusalem.