A Moral Witness

By Avishai Margalit
New York Review of Books, 54(19), December 6, 2007

Dark Hope: Working for Peace in Israel and Palestine
by David Shulman
University of Chicago Press, 226 pages

Edited by Andy Ross

David Shulman's powerful and memorable book is a record of his intense involvement with a volunteer organization composed of Israeli Palestinians and Israeli Jews founded in October 2000.

Shulman explains: "Israel, like any society, has violent, sociopathic elements. What is unusual about the last four decades in Israel is that many destructive individuals have found a haven, complete with ideological legitimation, within the settlement enterprise."

Forty years since the Israeli victory of 1967 brought the West Bank under occupation, Shulman immigrated to Israel from the US. In the Israeli army he was trained as a medic. At the Hebrew University of Jerusalem he acquired a good mastery of Arabic. In 1987 he received a MacArthur Fellowship. By temperament and calling, Shulman is a scholar, not a politician.

Shulman's work on India and its culture suggests that his politics would draw on Gandhi's example. At the beginning of the first intifada, in 1988, Israel expelled Mubarak Awad, a Palestinian-American child psychologist who advocated Gandhian tactics for resisting the occupation. The Israeli government had no reason to be worried, since Awad made no headway among the Palestinians: nonviolent struggle is perceived by Palestinians as "unmanly."

The effect of Palestinian violence on Israel's war policy is clear. During the second intifada, Palestinian violence elicited an intense military response from the Israeli side, resulting in devastation of the Palestinian community in the West Bank.

Shulman cites Mordechai Kremnitzer, a law professor at the Hebrew University: "Even if you accept the Palestinian reading of what happened at Camp David and assume that the Israeli proposals were inadequate, still it is impossible to accept the violence they have adopted as their weapon while still faced with an Israeli partner who wanted to reach a solution."

Shulman advocates a Gandhian approach on moral grounds and perhaps also on practical grounds. Shulman has a moral purpose: to expose the evil done by a regime that tries to cover up its immoral deeds.

Assaf Sharon took part in many of the activities that Shulman describes. He is mentioned in the book by his first name only. In the southern West Bank, Assaf tells us, southeast of Yata, the main township in the area, more than a thousand Palestinians dwell in caves. Water is scarce and the cave dwellers are dependent to a large degree on local cisterns.

In the 1970s, Israel declared part of the Yata region a "closed military area." In 1980, next to the closed area, Israel established four settlements, which now have about two thousand settlers. Between 1996 and 2001, these settlers erected four additional armed encampments. The army expelled the Palestinian cave dwellers by force from the closed area, destroying their wells, blocking their caves, and confiscating their meager property of blankets and food.

What Shulman saw in the South Hebron Hills causes him to use the word "evil" unsparingly: "What we are fighting in the South Hebron Hills is pure, rarefied, unadulterated, unreasoning, uncontainable human evil. Nothing but malice drives this campaign to uproot the few thousand cave dwellers with their babies and lambs. They have hurt nobody. They were never a security threat."

Shulman shows that the settlers are supported by what he calls the "intricate machine," a term he uses to describe various Israeli government agencies, including the army, the police, and the civil authorities that administer the West Bank.

Shulman makes it clear that the settlers in the South Hebron Hills are almost all religious people. The established leaders in most of the older settlements often belong to the Gush Emunim or reflect its mentality: religious, intensely nationalistic, idealistic. By contrast, I have found among the second generation a lethal combination of attitudes: a conviction that they have the right to dominate Palestinians and a sense that they are themselves victims.

Shulman shows that a wild generation was born in the territories, a generation whose members are far bolder than their parents, far more ready to defy the law, and far more capable of utter lawlessness with regard to Palestinians. It is a generation saturated with intense hostility toward the Arabs, and ferociously tribalistic.

Israeli Prime Minster Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Abu Mazen may agree on principles for a settlement of the conflict. But Abu Mazen wants an agreement to be specific and Olmert wants it to be vague, and the question is whether they can arrive at a compromise.

Shulman's diary gives an acute sense of the gap between peace schemes in their "peace process" phase and the relentless and dreadful reality on the ground. The reality is shaped not by agreements but mainly by the violent workings of Israel's intricate machine and by the violence of Palestinian forces.

To narrow the gap between the grand schemes and the reality on the ground, the intricate machine must be halted. Daily life has to be seriously improved if any grand scheme is to be trusted. To believe that this is going to happen calls for a leap of faith.

Avishai Margalit is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is currently the George Kennan Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
 

Israel and Zionism

By Tim Rutten
Los Angeles Times, April 23, 2008

Edited by Andy Ross

Reappraisals: Reflections on the Forgotten Twentieth Century
By Tony Judt
Penguin Press, 448 pages

As a university professor at New York University and head of that school's Remarque Institute, Tony Judt is one of our foremost historians of Europe, an elegant writer and subtle thinker whose last book was a Pulitzer finalist. His latest work collects 24 of his essays, most of which have been published in the New York Review of Books and the New Republic.

The best of them deal with some of 20th century Europe's major intellectual figures or with consequential historical phenomena such as the fall of France in 1940 and Romania's emblematic nationalism. A handful engage his more recent preoccupation with contemporary U.S. domestic and foreign policies, and there his arguments are more problematic.

In recent years, Judt has emerged as a passionate and formidable critic of America's relationship with Israel, of Israel's conduct generally, and of Zionism itself.

Judt, 60, was born in England, the son of Jewish refugees: a Russian mother and Belgian father. He was educated at Cambridge, where he later taught, and at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. It's a background that superbly prepared him to raise the two concerns that run through these essays. One "is the role of ideas and responsibility of intellectuals." The other is that he thinks we shall "look back upon the half generation separating the fall of Communism in 1989-91 from the catastrophic American occupation of Iraq as the years the locust ate: a decade and a half of wasted opportunity and political incompetence on both sides of the Atlantic."

Against that amnesia, the best of these essays set the examples of Koestler, who Judt thinks has been too quickly forgotten; Camus (his essay borrows Arendt's description, "the best man in France" for its title); Levi, whom the author convincingly argues has suffered badly from misreading on both sides of the Atlantic; and Kolakowski, the Polish Catholic historian of Marxism whose definition of evil, "postwar intellectual life's fundamental question," Judt finds compelling.

As a student in England, Judt was an ardent supporter of Labor Zionism, spent time on a kibbutz and volunteered as a translator and driver for the Israel Defense Forces during the 1967 war. One of the two essays on Israel that Judt includes in this collection is a review of Michael Oren's history of that conflict, which the author argues was a disaster for Israel, fundamentally altering the Jewish state's culture, politics and even its demography for the worse.

The other piece was commissioned by the editors of the Israeli daily Haaretz. In it, Judt argues that "Israel's future is bleak," the country "an object of universal mistrust and resentment" through its own doing and because of its infantilizing relationship with the United States.

Missing from this collection is the most controversial of his anti-Israeli polemics, a 2003 piece for the New York Review of Books in which he advocated abolition of the Jewish state in favor of a new, binational country of unspecific constitution. The heart of Judt's argument can be found in this paragraph: "Today, non-Israeli Jews feel themselves once again exposed to criticism and vulnerable to attack for things they didn't do. But this time it is a Jewish state, not a Christian one, which is holding them hostage for its own actions. ... The depressing truth is that Israel today is bad for the Jews."

The best rejoinder to Judt's superficially "realist" argument came quickly from the New Republic's Leon Wieseltier: "Why must Israel pay for his uneasiness with its life? The reason, I fear, is that Judt has misinterpreted the nature of the hostility that vexes him. ... For the notion that all Jews are responsible for whatever any Jews do, that every deed that a Jew does is a Jewish deed, is not a Zionist notion. It is an anti-Semitic notion."

There's an oddly jejune thread that runs through these essays: the true-believing young Labor Zionist, disenchanted with the normalization of Jewish life in a Jewish state, becomes an anti-Zionist.
 

AR  Why should Jews answer for Israel? Why do we want Israel to be an essentially Jewish nation? And why do we forget that Arabs are Semites too?