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When, in the midst of the 2014 Hamas-Israel war, the U.S. Federal
Aviation Administration briefly banned American carriers from flying to
Israel, Sen. Ted Cruz
(Republican of Texas) accused Barack Obama of using a federal
regulatory agency "to launch an economic boycott on Israel, in order to
try to force our ally to comply with his foreign-policy demands." In so
doing, Cruz made an accusation no Israeli leader would dare express.
Senator Ted Cruz (Left, Republican of Texas)
met with Israel's Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu right after taking
office in January 2013.
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This is hardly unique. Over the years, other American political figures
both Republican (Dan Burton, Jesse Helms, Condoleezza Rice, Arlen
Specter) and Democrat (Charles Schumer), have adopted tougher, and
sometimes more Zionist stances than the Israeli government. This pattern
in turn points to a larger phenomenon: The Arab-Israeli conflict tends
to generate more intense partisanship among Americans than among Middle
Easterners. The latter may die from the conflict but the former
experience it with greater passion.
I shall document and explain this counterintuitive pattern, then draw a conclusion from it.
More Anti-Israel than the Arabs
Americans who hate Israel can be more volubly anti-Zionist than
Arabs. At a memorable Washington dinner party in November 1984, hosted
by the Iraqi embassy for the visiting foreign minister, Tariq Aziz, two
tipsy American press grandees admonished and even insulted this emissary
of Saddam Hussein for being insufficiently anti-Israel. Helen Thomas
of United Press International complained that Iraq had not retaliated
against Israel after the destruction of the Osirak nuclear reactor in
1981.
When Aziz tried brushing off her criticism, she scornfully accused
the Iraqi regime of cowardice: "Just yellow, I guess." Later the same
evening, Rowland Evans
of the syndicated Evans & Novak column, interrupted Aziz when he
called the Iran-Iraq war the most important issue in the Middle East,
shouting, "You must tell Secretary of State Shultz that the Arab-Israeli
conflict is your main concern!" The late Barry Rubin,
who was present, subsequently commented: "Unaccustomed to being
attacked for excessive softness on Israel, Aziz looked astonished."
Helen Thomas was long a fixture at presidential press conferences.
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Similarly, in 1981, James E. Akins, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia described
as "more pro-Arab than the Arab officials," chided Sheik Zaki Yamani,
the Saudi oil minister, for rejecting the idea of linking Saudi oil
production to U.S. policy toward Israel. In 1993, Edward Said of
Columbia University castigated Palestine Liberation Organization leader
Yasir Arafat for entering into the Oslo negotiating process. Meanwhile, Anthony B. Tirado Chase, an analyst of Said's writings, found that "Said's rejectionism speaks for few in the West Bank or Gaza." In 2003, George Galloway, the British parliamentarian, incited Palestinians against Israel:
The Arabs are a great people. Islam is a great religion. But it has
to, and they have to, stand up. … I asked somebody once, when [Ariel]
Sharon was massacring the Palestinians in Jenin, why the huge
demonstrations in the Arab countries didn't continue? Why did they go
away? They answered because a student was killed in Alexandria. I am
very sorry for the student and his family, but the Palestinians are
losing their children every day, yet it doesn't stop them from coming
out the next day. So it can be done. Hizbullah drove the enemy running
from their country. Fares Uday, a 14-year-old boy, stood in front of an
Israeli tank and attacked it with his hands. And when they killed him,
his brother and his neighbors came in his place.
In 2009, after a lecture tour of American universities, the Palestinian journalist Khaled Abu Toameh observed that
there is more sympathy for Hamas there than there is in Ramallah. …
Listening to some students and professors on these campuses, for a
moment I thought I was sitting opposite a Hamas spokesman or a
would-be-suicide bomber. … What struck me more than anything else was
the fact that many of the people I met on the campuses supported Hamas
and believed that it had the right to "resist the occupation" even if
that meant blowing up children and women on a bus in downtown Jerusalem.
Khaled Abu Toameh, an Arab-Israeli journalist, was taken aback by the anti-Zionist passion on U.S. campuses.
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Even more ironically, Abu Toameh found that many of the Arabs and
Muslims on American campuses "were much more understanding and even
welcomed my 'even-handed analysis' of the Israeli-Arab conflict." Along
the same lines, the historian Bernard Lewis notes that "Israelis traveling in the West often find it easier to establish a rapport with Arabs than with Arabophiles."
Conversely, Lewis notes the viciousness of some Westerners residing in the Middle East:
Time and time again, European and American Jews traveling in Arab
countries have observed that, despite the torrent of broadcast and
published anti-Semitism, the only face-to-face experience of
anti-Semitic hostility that they suffered during their travels was from
compatriots, many of whom feel free, in what they imagine to be the more
congenial atmosphere of the Arab world, to make anti-Semitic … remarks
that they would not make at home.
One symptom of this: The recent Hamas-Israel war prompted anti-Israel
hate demonstrations, some violent, on the streets of many Western
cities, while – with the exception of territories under Israeli control –
the Arab street remained largely calm.
More Zionist than the Israelis
Similarly, American supporters of Israel tend to stake out more ardently Zionist positions than do Israelis. In 1978, Richard Nixon
complained that "the problem with the Israelis in Israel was not nearly
as difficult as the Jewish community here." In 1990, Israeli journalist
Yossi Melman
was surprised to find a Jewish audience in Texas taking a harder line
against the Palestinians than he did himself; he responded with alarm
when one young man asserted, referring to a fracas with the Israeli
police that left nineteen Palestinians dead, "I do not feel sorry for
those Palestinians who were killed. The Israeli police should have shot a
thousand of them," and no one in the audience took issue with him.
In 2000, Said
complained that Zionist groups in the United States have views "in some
way more extreme than even those of the Israeli Likud." Also in 2000,
when Israel's prime minister offered unprecedented concessions on
Jerusalem, Malcolm Hoenlein,
vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish
Organizations, criticized his efforts "to take away or compromise Jewish
sovereignty over the Temple Mount and turn it over to the jurisdiction
of the United Nations or the Palestinian Authority." Later, he warned,
"all of us will have to answer to our children and grandchildren when
they ask us why we did not do more to stop the giving away of Har
haBayit [the Temple Mount]."
Polling by the American Jewish Committee
regularly finds American Jews more skeptical than their Israeli
counterparts on the question of the efficacy of diplomacy with the
Arabs. At the same time, for an American to be pro-Israel means liking
all Israelis; starting with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee
and Christians United for Israel, pro-Israel organizations offer
unconditional support to Israel. Many American Jews go further. With
neither their own lives nor those of their children at risk in the
Israel Defense Forces, they do not publicly disagree with Israeli
government decisions. By contrast, ranking Israelis repeatedly demand that Washington pressure their own government into taking steps against its wishes. Most famously, in 2007 David Landau, editor of Ha'aretz
newspaper, told then U.S. secretary of state Condoleezza Rice that
Israel was a "failed state" and implored her to intervene on the grounds
that Israel needs "to be raped."
Explanations
Three reasons account for American partisans adopting stronger positions than their Middle Eastern counterparts:
Pure passion: Abu Toameh notes: "Many of the Palestinian
Authority and Hamas officials … sound much more pragmatic than most of
the anti-Israel, 'pro-Palestinian' folks on the campuses." That is
because they have real-life decisions to make, with which they must
live. Israelis and Arabs maintain a patchwork of relationships and daily
life that softens the harshness of rhetoric. In contrast, pure passion
tends to reign in the West. Most Israelis have contact with Arabs,
something few American Zionists do. Similarly, a fair number of
Egyptians, Jordanians, Lebanese, and other Arabs come into contact with
Israelis. For Middle Easterners, the enemy is human; for Americans, the
opponent consists of two-dimensional political adversaries.
American anti-Zionists astonished Saddam Hussein's henchman Tariq Aziz.
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This even applies to so monstrous a dictatorship as Saddam Hussein's.
As Barry Rubin commented about the experience of Tariq Aziz at dinner:
"Perhaps it was easier to deal with the inner circles of Saddam's
regime, where fear bred discipline, than with these wild, unpredictable
Americans." Two examples: Pro-Israel and anti-Israel Americans never
need to cooperate on joint water supplies. Ismail Haniya,
the head of the Hamas terrorist organization dedicated to Israel's
elimination, has three sisters who emigrated from Gaza to Israel, live
as citizens there, and have children who served in the Israel Defense
Forces.
Solidarity: Israelis argue mostly with other Israelis and
Arabs with Arabs; but in the United States, pro-Israelis argue with
anti-Israelis. Israelis and Arabs in the Middle East feel free to
disagree with their own side more than do their U.S. partisans. When a
left-wing Israeli criticizes the Netanyahu government's policy, he
disagrees with the Likud Party; when a left-wing American Jewish figure
does the same, he attacks Israel. The former debates are within the
framework of Israeli policymaking, the latter in the arena of American
public opinion. Melman noted that "we Israelis have the luxury of
expressing ourselves more frankly than many American Jews" and explained
this by noting how "American Jews fear that their public criticism [of
Israel] might be exploited by professional critics of Israel. Hence,
most American Jews prefer to conceal their disagreements about Israel." Mattityahu Peled,
a left-wing Israeli gadfly, similarly observed that the pressure on
Jews who hold dissenting views in the United States "is far greater than
the pressure on us in Israel. … probably we in Israel enjoy a larger
degree of tolerance than you here in the Jewish community."
Best-known policy issue: In the Middle East itself, other
issues – civil wars in Syria and Iraq, the Saudi vs. Qatar vs. Iran
rivalries, water problems – compete with the Arab-Israeli conflict for
attention. But in the United States, the Arab-Israeli conflict is far
better known than any other issue and thus dominates the discussion. As a
result, the lines of debate are far more clearly etched: When the
Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) conquered Mosul in June 2014, no
one knew what to do; but when Hamas launched rockets against Israel a
month later, the facts and arguments were reassuringly familiar.
Conclusion
Arab-Israeli partisanship fits a broader pattern, in which distance
turns greys into blacks and whites, increasing political passions. In
the case of the Contra war in Nicaragua, the journalist Stephen Schwartz
writes that, on the one side, "Sandinistas often commented to me that
they were put off to realize that their Democrat supporters in
Washington employed a bloodthirsty rhetoric that would never have been
heard in the towns of Central America." When asked about this, a
Sandinista explained: "We have to face death, and it makes us less
willing to speak idly about it; but they enjoy talking about a death
they will never risk or inflict on others ."
During the Spanish Civil War, Leon Trotsky found the rhetoric in London more extreme than the reality in Barcelona.
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The same reluctance applied on the other side, Schwartz found. A
Contra supporter explained: "Our families are split by this conflict,
and we do not feel the aggravated sense of rage displayed by foreigners
about the war here. In fighting we may have to kill, or be killed by, a
relative with whom we grew up. It is not something that fills us with
enthusiasm."
In other wars where combatants live in close proximity to each other
but their supporters do not, a similar pattern has emerged: Civil wars
in Vietnam, Ireland, and Bosnia come immediately to mind. Commenting on
the Spanish civil war, Trotsky observed that the rhetoric in London was
far more extreme than the reality in Barcelona.
In conclusion, this pattern runs contrary to the general assumption
that the frenzied combatants in a war need cool-headed outsiders to help
guide them to resolution and peace – an assumption that sometimes leads
to the unfortunate decision to put ignoramuses
in charge of diplomacy and policy. In fact, the locals may see the
problem more lucidly and realistically than their foreign friends. It is
time for foreigners to stop assuming they know how to achieve the
region's salvation and instead to listen more to those directly
involved.
Mr. Pipes (DanielPipes.org, @DanielPipes) is president of the Middle East Forum. © 2014 by Daniel Pipes. All rights reserved.
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