Tragedy And Ashes

When it comes to the matter of an Iranian bomb, Israeli citizens feel both utterly threatened and mostly silenced. What can ordinary voters and critics usefully say about this? Think of America in the 1950s, in the depth of the Cold War. There was no other form of military power that depended so much on expert engineers, policy strategists, and high military officers—and on revolving political leaders who were hostages to secret recommendations. When Israeli professionals say, “We need to preempt their first-strike capability” (as in Iraq or, more recently, in Syria), who dares to contradict them?

Reticence will not end here. Let's imagine the unimaginable: Iran gets the bomb. If the ultimate goal is deterrence—as it must be—ordinary Israelis will all have a stake in a perfected, secret infrastructure they have no part in designing; an infrastructure that can both survive a first-strike and retaliate against the attacking state; a piece of the state apparatus just unsecret enough to make any potential attacker believe it exists. (Presumably, this is what Israelis already have.)

Whatever else they feel, therefore, how can Israelis not feel a kind of silent gratitude for the highly skilled people who do this work? And let's return to the current situation. How—when Israeli intelligence professionals now tell us that an Iranian bomb must be preempted, by military attack if necessary—can ordinary Israelis object? Do not even disarmament advocates like Jonathan Schell insist that Iran’s trajectory to getting a bomb is clear and imminent, whatever the US “intelligence estimate”? How could Israelis not wish for some partnership of Israeli and US forces to just get on with a strike if current diplomacy fails?

THE PROBLEM COMES when other considerations assert themselves. We presume, and intelligence reports confirm, that a) no military attack can be really effective against Iran’s widely dispersed, underground facilities, b) the Iranian government has the petro-dollars to replace what might be destroyed, with even greater secrecy and determination, and c) the immediate consequence of a presumably insufficient attack would be to unite virtually all Iranians behind an otherwise unpopular regime, and unleash revenge attacks by Iranian proxies in Iraq, Lebanon, the Gulf and around the world.

So it is impossible not to feel deeply anxious and seriously thwarted. Words like holocaust roll of the tongues of military strategists, but intuitively we know that they are playing a three-dimensional chess game and an attack feels like checkers. What, if not attack, should our leaders be doing? What are ordinary citizens supposed to think?

THERE IS ONE thing you can count on certifiably tough leaders to deliver in a situation like this, and that is a tough speech. From Bush, Rudy and Bibi (increasingly also from McCain), we will hear much about Munich, the dangers of appeasement, and the need get them before they get us. Harvard's Law Review, we will be assured, is no place to learn life's hard truths.

Mind you, these leaders are not actually advocating an attack. They are insisting that anybody who really cares about Israel will entertain an attack—that anybody who, on the contrary, speaks about engaging with Iran is selling Israel out. It is not their strategy that we are supposed to flock to. That brought us Iraq. It’s their (what do American pundits call it?) values: the idea that they care enough to imply a bond of blood; the insinuation that they hate their enemies subtly.

Read my lips, “Never again.”

OK, THERE IS a vague strategic argument behind the aggressive posturing. The attacks from Iranian proxies in Lebanon and Gaza and Syria are bound to come in any case, they tell us, and they will come more certainly and more recklessly behind an Iranian nuclear umbrella. Recently, Haaretz’s Shmuel Rosner dutifully reproduced this argument (without much examining it) in his blog,

One knowledgeable observer was using this baseball metaphor yesterday. The Iranians have players waiting on all three bases. Hamas on first, Syria on second and Hezbollah on third. All they need now is the grand slam homerun - a nuclear bomb in the hands of Iran that will send them running around the bases for home.

But none of these base-runners have hesitated to act against Israel or Israeli interests in the past, and with no nuclear umbrella. And it is hard to see how one could threaten to incinerate Tel-Aviv and not threaten to irradiate Gaza. When you look at the history of the Cold War, it seems that the opposite argument can be inferred: that once you have nuclear powers facing off against one another, as in Berlin or in Cuba, they tend to restrain their proxies for fear of being dragged into a nuclear exchange.

Of course there is another, even weirder claim lurking behind this one, which is that Iranian leaders would actually welcome a nuclear exchange. They are fanatics, bent on world conquest. They have sacrificed so many young people in the war against Iraq, that they would willingly accept losing, say, Teheran and Qom just to get rid of Israel. To believe that you have to believe something like what what Richard Pipes argued about the Soviets in the 1970s, when he was plumping for the MX missile: that Russians lost so many people in World War II that cities (human life, etc.) meant less to them than it typically means to us. (Come to think of it, to believe about Muslims what we used to believe about Commies you ought listen to Richard Pipes’s son.)

But what, as MIT's Barry Posen asks, could Iran really expect from a nuclear exchange? What other than "tragedy and ashes?"

ANYWAY, EXPOSING THE fatuity of hawkish rhetoric does not solve the underlying problem. The prospect of a nuclear Iran in a Middle East that seems headed to Bosnian-style violence is not a happy one. How long before Egypt and Saudi Arabia insist on becoming nuclear powers, too? How long before one suicide bomber, or one missile around Ben-Gurion Airport, ignites the kind of tit-for-tat that will bring apocalyptic results?

Which brings me to two points, humble citizens' points, not fully developed here, but worth considering in light of the lessons of the Cold War. The first is that the only way we can hope to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear bomb is to get them to agree to international inspections and rigorous nonproliferation agreements. And the only way we can hope to move them to cooperation of this kind is to put Israel’s own nuclear program on the agenda.

I do not doubt that Israel pursued nuclear military technology in the 1950s and 60s in order to preclude a real threat to its very existence from the Arab world. The question is, are there now no ways to guarantee Israel’s existence in an overall peace process (say, by inclusion in NATO) other than an independent nuclear capacity? Why not rededicate ourselves to comprehensive, regional non-proliferation?

Second, even if Iran moves toward a bomb, even if the peace process continues to stall, we should hold our fire and revisit the logic of containment and détente: wed patient diplomacy to compelling economic forces. President Shimon Peres held a conference on “facing tomorrow” in Jerusalem this past week, in which he declared that Iran is the past, while Israel is the future. Let us think more along these lines.

Peres meant by this, and he was right, that the capacity to survive the forces of globalization, oil or no oil, means learning to interact with the science and management that one finds in the West and in the global economy more generally. Libya is now learning this lesson. So is North Korea. As long as we keep the peace in the region, we are in a game Islamists cannot win. When we are dragged into asymmetrical wars, with terrorists and terror regimes, we are in a game we cannot win.

Iran, too, has a middle class that wants to rise. Why should not President Obama shake the Iranian president's hand, if only with the same tactical vision with which Nixon shook Mao's? Why not rob Iranian leaders of their chance to claim Muslim humiliation and victimhood? Why not, in any case, raise our sights?

Brand Managers

I was a guest on NPR's call-in show On Point last week, along with Israel's hilarious young writer Etgar Keret. We spoke our minds. Eventually, a caller asked the inevitable question, something like this: “Why are your guests going on about the deficiencies of Israeli democracy when it is so clearly the only real democracy in the Middle East? Israel suffers existential threats. Shouldn’t we be celebrating Israeli democracy rather than criticizing it?”

This may seem a reasonable, even innocent, complaint. It actually sharpens the differences between how Israelis view their fate and how American Jews view theirs by means of Israelis.

TO A GREAT many American Jews (the reasons are too complex to pursue here), Israel has become the necessary hero, the vicarious nationality, the white rook supporting America’s white queen. Israel is, more and more, their brand to be managed. Democracy, in this context, has become a common synonym for good. When the caller insisted that Israel was admirably democratic, she was really insisting that Israel is worthy of American support.

The explicit premise here is that axes of evil are poised to strike—and strike Israel first. The implicit one is that gentiles will never much like Jews and don’t need new excuses to throw us to the wolves.

THERE ARE ISRAELIS who speak this way, of course; the next time Bibi Netanyahu is interviewed by Wolf Blitzer, you’ll see a master in action. But for most Israelis, Netanyahu included, the performance of Israeli democracy is even more urgently a pragmatic problem. It is not just a public relations challenge. Their lives depend on it.

For Israel is a country that is fragmented in serious ways, a plural society that is not quite pluralist. Etgar Keret tenderly observed that Israeli buses do not run on the Sabbath, and the orthodox influence is growing, yet an Israeli drag queen represented the country at the Eurovision song contest. Is this stand-off really sustainable without deep constitutional protections? (It is not.)

More important, to say that the discriminatory features of existing constitutional law alienate the country’s Arab minority is not to favor Palestinians in some popularity contest. It is a call for reforms that will preserve Israel from disaster. An intifada driven by the frustrations of Israeli Arabs will bury the two-state solution and open the door to wholesale ethnic cleansing, as in the Balkans. To question the health of Israeli democracy is to invite a diagnosis, not a slur.

The point is, democracy is not some victory lap Western peoples, fattened on capitalism, eventually allow themselves. It is a way of keeping the peace. The question of whether Israeli democracy works well enough will fascinate educated Americans and may embarrass some American Jews but, most important, it points to whether or not Israelis can solve their internal frictions nonviolently. And internal threats are more “existential” than anything Iran can inflict—about which more in my next post.

New York Post Post

To understand Israel at 60 years old, think about the conundrum of educated Israelis in their forties and fifties: the professional, scientific, and entrepreneurial elites who increasingly run the place...

Read the whole article from the New York Post.

New Israel Fund: Webcast On Religion And State

Consider this NIF webcast. Any of the speakers, Naomi Chazan, Gershom Gorenberg, Jafar Farrah, and Francis Raday would be worth your time; together, they will produce the kind of conversation you deserve but will never get in the best of our media.

Enemies

Irving Howe once quipped that it’s nothing to make an enemy: the trick is to keep one. Marty Peretz has mastered this trick so famously, and with so many, that complaining about his new attack on me will seem like special pleading. But one insinuation needs a response because it might be mistaken for fair criticism. Marty writes of me:

Poor preening boy. He needs to have the approval of Tony Judt and the rest who believe that justice is only done when the Jewish state is maximally endangered.

In fact, I have never met Tony Judt, though I have great respect for him, as does any reader of modern European history. Nor do I think he is cavalier about Israel's very existence. At the same time, I do not at all subscribe to Judt’s call for a unitary, binational state, which he advanced, however tentatively, in his widely discussed article in the New York Review. I've already explained my hopes for a two-state solution in this blog. I also presented the following rejoinder to Judt's argument in The Hebrew Republic:

[Judt’s] article caused an immediate sensation among educated Israelis… In part, this was a defensive response to Judt’s stinging, and not exactly misplaced, criticism of Israel’s legal structure. But the real problem was Judt’s extrapolation from that structure to a misty future in which Jewish national life would be inconceivable—a move that has echoes in Zionist history…

Before the founding of the state, when socialist internationalism was still in vogue, certain left-Zionist parties—most notably, the Hashomer Hatzair—argued for a binational state with the Palestinian “proletariat.” They assumed most Jews would be socialists living in pioneering kibbutzim, and that their novel national culture would be protected by a kind of cloistering. You find that forlorn hope in the early writings of Noam Chomsky. Various intellectuals in pre-state Palestine, such as Martin Buber and Judah Magnes—the founders of the Brit Shalom movement—argued for a quite different form of binationalism, in effect, a liberal state with two distinct populations, which would continue to co-exist under the aegis of the British mandate. Yet you still find serious Western intellectuals (not only Judt, but the late Edward Said, Judith Butler, Jacqueline Rose, and others) who have thought it useful to revive the vision, or some version of it. Binationalists who argue in this vein seem to regard the problem as one of creating a melting pot here, Jews and Arabs living in a common society, each community presumably speaking a nicely accented English.

It is not surprising, therefore, that Israel’s centrist élite assumes people who speak of binationalism are simply trying to reset the clock to 1948 and reintroduce ideas which call into question the very logic of launching Israel in the first place… [This keeps Israelis] from seeing beyond vague claims for binationalism, which they loathe, to federalism, which they need…

Judt is a great historian. But there was, ironically, little sense of history in his attack on Zionism, such as the urgent need for the Zionists to have settled a million holocaust refugees in 1948, something the Arab part of a binational state would never have agreed to. Nor does Judt have any obvious affinity for Hebrew culture. He is an eloquent defender of the European Union, but he does not seem to take for granted defenses of national life in Israel which are common among all European member nations.

Why, after all, could not Israel end exclusive privileges for Jews as individuals, and for the Jewish religion as an established state religion, and yet privilege Jewish national culture—by maintaining an official language, or focusing on Jewish history in the national school system, or investing in public institutions like the Israel Museum or the Hebrew University? The Montréal I came from was the product of the Quiet Revolution. Was it not obvious that Québecers—a French majority, but living on an English continent—were justified in taking urgent action—consistent with accepted standards of human rights, but irritating to English Montrealers—to preserve their national culture—things like compulsory French education, compulsory French signs, a holiday on St. Jean Batiste Day when the rest of Canada celebrated the tie to the English crown? Would not Israelis be obviously justified today in taking action to preserve their national culture?

Affirmative Action

Israel advances the status of a young man by taking his disadvantages into consideration.

After The Fall

Israeli journalists are pre-celebrating Israel’s sixtieth with a big, compelling story, yet another police investigation of Ehud Olmert. But their tone, this time, is subtly different from the past. The reports of interrogation (of Olmert himself, former staffers, etc.,) are less sassy. Ministers are keeping their counsel instead of rushing to Olmert’s defense. There are confident leaks that the “situation is grave.” The police seem to have got their man—anyway, if their case is not bullet-proof, it is they who should be investigated for doing this to the public, of all times, now.

So reasonable people are preparing themselves for the possibility that Olmert will soon have to resign. This would be bad news—and good.

FIRST, THE BAD. I have not hidden my personal fondness for Ehud Olmert, which makes me completely unremarkable. Olmert is a likable, glad-handing centrist, a poster-child for Israel’s rising professional and entrepreneurial élites, who has cultivated Western journalists and back-and-forth Israelis like myself for years. But this is not personal. It is business. Waiting in the wings, liking the polls, is the worst government imaginable, a Bibi Netanyahu coalition of Likud’s hardest-liners, back-to-the-Land-of-Israel cultists, ultraOrthodox claustrophiles, Russian reactionaries and oligarchs, and General-opportunists. Resignation could bring the demise of the Kadima Party, as former Likud people scurry back to the fold.

True, Olmert’s prosecution would be a tribute to Israeli democracy, in a way—to the rule of law and the procedures for electing what’s next. But new elections would almost certainly bring to power the most antidemocratic coalition in Israel’s history, just at a time when negotiations with the Palestinian Authority hang by a thread, a new administration is coming to Washington, and Israel’s own Arab minority is inching toward wholesale alienation. I am not sure Israel could take five more years of this. I am sure the West, Arab moderates, etc., cannot take five more years of this Israel.

THE GOOD NEWS, however, is that there is an obvious replacement for Olmert, who has always stood a much better chance of holding Kadima together by the force of her popularity. I mean, of course, the foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, a straight-talking, very bright, and evolving politician (profiled here by the New York Times’ Roger Cohen).

Livni, unlike Olmert, was not tarnished by the 2006 Lebanon fiasco. As Akiva Eldar implies, she might well revive Kadima and draw new, younger forces to it. She is also more likely to advance the peace negotiations (which she nominally runs), or at least bring them to the national agenda. She provides Labor’s doves a leader to rally to while their own leader, Ehud Barak, continues to posture as the new Ariel Sharon, the IDF’s real commander, the scourge of terrorists. She could add the leftist Meretz Party, which said it would never join a government led by Olmert after Lebanon.

Indeed, the best scenario is not unlikely—not if the Bush administration supports it actively, and helps keep restless ministers (like former Likud defense minister Shaul Mofaz) bailing water instead of abandoning ship. It is that Livni and Barak will govern together for a year or so, and reconstitute the Israeli center, while putting the taint of corruption behind them. Only this will deny Netanyahu his second act. Something must.