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Muslim world is mystified as to why Americans support the existence
of Israel. Some critics in the Middle East excuse "the American
people," while castigating our government. In their eyes, our
official policy could not really reflect grassroots opinion. Others
misinformed spin elaborate conspiracy theories involving the power
of joint Mossad-CIA plots, Old Testament fundamentalists, international
bankers, and Jewish control of Hollywood, the media, and the U.S.
Congress. But why does an overwhelming majority of Americans (according
to most polls, between 60 and 70% of the electorate) support Israel
— and more rather than less so after September 11?
The answer
is found in values — not in brainwashing or because of innate
affinity for a particular race or creed. Israel is a democracy.
Its opponents are not. Much misinformation abounds on this issue.
Libya, Syria, and Iraq are dictatorships, far more brutal than even
those in Egypt or Pakistan. But even "parliaments" in
Iran, Morocco, Jordan, and on the West Bank are not truly and freely
democratic. In all of them, candidates are either screened, preselected,
or under coercion. Daily television and newspapers are subject to
restrictions and censorship; "elected" leaders are not
open to public audit and censure. There is a reason, after all,
why in the last decade Americans have dealt with Mr. Netanyahu,
Barak, and Sharon — and no one other than Mr. Arafat, the Husseins
in Jordan, the Assads in Syria, Mr. Mubarak, and who knows what
in Lebanon, Algeria, and Afghanistan. Death, not voters, brings
changes of rule in the Arab world.
The Arab street
pronounces that it is the responsibility of the United States —
who gives money to Egypt, Palestine, Jordan, Afghanistan and others,
has troops stationed in the Gulf, and buys oil from the Muslim world
— to use its influence to instill democracies. They forget
that sadly these days we rarely have such power to engineer sweeping
constitutional reform; that true freedom requires the blood and
courage of native patriots — a Washington, Jefferson, or Thomas
Paine — not outside nations; and that democracy demands some
prior traditions of cultural tolerance, widespread literacy, and
free markets. Moreover, we give Israel billions as well — but
have little control whether they wish to elect a Rabin or a Sharon.
Israel is also
secular. The ultra-Orthodox do not run the government unless they
can garner a majority of voters. Americans have always harbored
suspicion of anyone who nods violently when reading Holy Scripture
— whether in madrassas, near the Wailing Wall, or in
the local Church of the Redeemer down the street. In Israel, however,
Americans detect that free speech and liberality of custom and religion
are more ubiquitous than, say, in Saudi Arabia, Iran, or Palestine
— and so surmise that the Jewish state is more the creation
of European émigrés than of indigenous Middle-Eastern
fundamentalists.
Pluralism exists
in Israel, rarely so in the Arabic world. We see an Israeli peace
party, spirited debate between Left and Right, and both homegrown
damnation and advocacy for the settlers outside the 1967 borders.
Judaism is fissured by a variety of splinter orthodoxies without
gunfights. There are openly agnostic and atheistic Israeli Jews
who enjoy influence in Israeli culture and politics. In theory,
such parallels exist in the Arab world, but in actuality rarely
so. We know that heretical mullahs are heretical more often in London,
Paris, or New York — not in Teheran or among the Taliban. No
Palestinian politician would go on CNN and call for Mr. Arafat's
resignation; his opposition rests among bombers, not in raucous
televised debates.
Israeli newspapers
and television reflect a diversity of views, from rabid Zionism
to almost suicidal pacifism. There are Arab-Israeli legislators
— and plenty of Jewish intellectuals who openly write and broadcast
in opposition to the particular government of the day. Is that liberality
ever really true in Palestine? Could a Palestinian, Egyptian, or
Syrian novelist write something favorable about Golda Meir, hostile
to Mr. Assad or Mubarak, or craft a systematic satire about Islam?
Past experience suggests such iconoclasts and would-be critics might
suffer stones and fatwas rather than mere ripostes in the
letters to the editor of the local newspapers. Palestinian spokesmen
are quite vocal and unbridled on American television, but most of
us — who ourselves instinctively welcome self-criticism and
reflection — sense that such garrulousness and freewheeling
invective are is reserved only for us, rarely for Mr. Arafat's authority.
Americans also
see ingenuity from Israel, both technological and cultural —
achievement that is not reflective of genes, but rather of the culture
of freedom. There are thousands of brilliant and highly educated
Palestinians. But in the conditions of the Middle East, they have
little opportunity for free expression or to open a business without
government bribe or tribal payoff. The result is that even American
farmers in strange places like central California are always amazed
by drip-irrigation products, sophisticated water pumps, and ingenious
agricultural appurtenances that are created and produced in Israel.
So far we have seen few trademarked in Algeria, Afghanistan, or
Qatar.
There is also
an affinity between the Israeli and Western militaries that transcends
mere official exchanges and arms sales. We do not see goose-stepping
soldiers in Haifa as we do in Baghdad. Nor are there in Tel-Aviv
hooded troops with plastic bombs strapped to their sides on parade.
Nor do Israeli presidents wear plastic sunglasses, carry pistols
to the U.N., or have chests full of cheap and tawdry metals. Young
rank-and-file Israeli men and women enjoy a familiarity among one
another, and their officers are more akin to our own army than to
the Republican Guard, Hamas, or Islamic Jihad.
The Israelis
also far better reflect the abject lethality of the Western way
of war. Here perhaps lies the greatest misunderstanding of military
history on the part of the Arab world. The so-called Islamic street
believes that sheer numbers and territory — a billion Muslims,
a century of oil reserves, and millions of square miles — should
mysteriously result in lethal armies. History teaches us that war
is rarely that simple. Instead, the degree militaries are westernized
— technology that is a fruit of secular research, group discipline
arising from consensual societies, logistical efficiency that derives
from capitalism, and flexibility that is the dividend from constant
public audit and private individualism — determines victory,
despite disadvantages in numbers, natural resources, individual
genius, or logistics.
We hear a quite
boring refrain from enraged Palestinians of "Apache helicopters"
and "F-16s". But in the Lebanese war of the early 1980s
we saw what happens in dogfights between advanced Israel and Syrian
jets in the same manner Saddam's sophisticated weapons were rendered
junk in days by our counterparts. So Israel's power is more the
result of a system, not merely of imported hardware. The Arab world
does not have a creative arms industry; Israel does — whether
that be ingenious footpads to wear while detecting mines or drone
aircraft that fly at night over Mr. Arafat's house. If the Palestinians
truly wished military parity, then the Arab world should create
their own research programs immune to religious or political censure,
and ensure that students are mastering calculus rather than the
Koran.
Nor are Americans
ignorant of the recent past. The United States was not a colonial
power in the Middle East, but developed ties there as a reaction
to, not as a catalyst of, its complex history. Israel was instead
both created and abandoned by Europeans. The 20th century taught
Americans that some Europeans would annihilate millions of Jews
— and others prove unwilling or unable to stop such a holocaust.
We sensed that the first three wars in the Middle East were not
fought to return the West Bank, but to finish off what Hitler could
not. And we suspect now that, while hundreds of millions of Arabs
would accept a permanent Israel inside its 1967 borders, a few million
would not — and those few would not necessarily be restrained
by those who did accept the Jewish state.
Somehow we
in the American heartland sense that Israel — whether its GNP,
free society, or liberal press — is a wound to the psyche,
not a threat to the material condition, of the Arab world. Israel
did not murder the Kurds or Shiites. It does not butcher Islam's
children in Algeria. Nor did it kill over a million on the Iranian-Iraqi
border — much less blow apart Afghanistan, erase from the face
of the earth entire villages and their living inhabitants in Syria,
or turn parts of Cairo into literal sewers. Yet both the victims
and the perpetrators of those crimes against Muslims answer "Israel"
to every problem. But Americans, more than any people in history,
live in the present and future, not the past, loath scapegoating
and the cult of victimization, and are tired of those, here and
abroad, who increasingly blame others for their own self-induced
pathologies.
The Europeans
are quite cynical about all this. Tel Aviv, much better than Cairo
or Damascus, reflects the liberal values of Paris or London. Yet
the Europeans rarely these days do anything that is not calibrated
in terms of gaining money or avoiding trouble — and in that
sense for them Israel is simply a very bad deal. All the sophisticated
op-eds about the shuffling of Mr. Jack Straw about Islamic liberalism
cannot hide the fact that Europe's policy in the Middle East is
based on little more than naked self-interest. If Israel were wiped
out tomorrow, Europeans would ask for a brief minute of silence,
then sigh relief, and without a blink roll up their sleeves to get
down to trade and business.
Our seemingly
idiosyncratic support for Israel, then, also says something about
ourselves rather than just our ally. In brutal Realpolitik, the
Europeans are right that there is nothing much to gain from aiding
Israel. Helping a few million costs us the friendship of nearly
a billion. An offended Israel will snub us; but some in an irate
Muslim world engineered slaughter in Manhattan. Despite our periodic
tiffs, we don't fear that any frenzied Israelis will hijack an American
plane or murder Marines in their sleep. No Jews are screaming at
us on the evening news that we give billions collectively to Mubarak,
the Jordanians, and Mr. Arafat. And Israelis lack the cash reserves
of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, and they do not go on buying sprees
in the U.S. or import whole industries from America. So the reason
we each support whom we do says something about both Europe and
the United States.
Instead of
railing at America, Palestinians should instead see in our policy
toward Israel their future hope, rather than present despair —
since it is based on disinterested values that can evolve, rather
than on race, religion, or language that often cannot. If the Palestinians
really wished to even the score with the Israelis in American eyes,
then regular elections, a free press, an open and honest economy,
and religious tolerance alone would do what suicide bombers and
a duplicitous terrorist leader could not.
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