How Israel gets away with murder
14/01/2009
Indifference to criticism of the bombing
and invasion of Gaza is the result of
indulgence by the West
By Geoffrey Wheatcroft
When Lord Derby asked Sir Lewis Namier,
the great historian of Georgian England,
why he, as a Jew, didn't write Jewish
history, Namier replied: "There is no
modern Jewish history, only a Jewish
martyrology, and that is not amusing
enough for me." It might be said that
the underlying purpose of the Zionist
project – which Namier passionately
supported – was to reject Jewish
martyrology, and to turn the Jews from
passive victims to active makers of
their destiny.
That
has been accomplished to a fault, many would say as they
watch the news from Gaza, where one image after another
has caused deep revulsion. But then that rejection of
martyrdom and victimhood may also explain what has
puzzled as well as dismayed onlookers – the fact that
Israel seems to be quite oblivious to international
opinion.
In
Muslim countries there is, of course, intense hostility
to Israel, which, in return, has long since followed the
Latin principle oderint dum metuant towards her
neighbours: Let them hate us, so long as they fear us.
Since there's no point in even trying to win their
hearts and minds, they should be taught to respect brute
force, a precept which, it should be admitted, has
enjoyed considerable practical success.
The
West is different, and European sentiment can be changed
by events, as indeed it has been. Israel and Zionism
were once very popular causes in Europe, not least on
the liberal left, until the 1967 Six Day War and after.
Since then, European sympathy has steadily ebbed away as
Israel attacked Lebanon in 1982, and again in 2006, with
the suppression of the intifadas between. And yet Israel
shrugs off all strictures and rebukes. No criticism from
relief agencies or the Red Cross makes any difference.
Even
more strikingly, Israel has ignored the Security Council
resolution calling for a ceasefire. One reason for this
is that the only Western country that really counts is
the United States, and Israel has for many years been
able to rely on unconditional American support. Having
threated to veto previous draft resolutions, the US took
part in drafting the security council resolution calling
for a ceasefire, and was evidently going to vote for it.
Then late on Thursday the American representative
shocked other council members by abstaining. This volte
face came on direct orders from the White House, after
president Bush had spoken to Ehud Olmert, the Israeli
prime minister, and the Israelis have taken abstention
as permission to continue their action. "Israel is not
going to show restraint," Tzipi Livni, the Israeli
Foreign Minister, told The Washington Post yesterday,
understandably enough in the circumstances.
Although Israel is sometimes described as an American
client state, which receives huge financial subsidy from
Washington, she is unique as a client state: she can do
exactly as she likes in the knowledge that she will
never be seriously restrained by her sponsor. Even when
the White House is privately irritated by Israeli
actions, Congress is absolutely reliable, never
knowingly outbid in its unswerving loyalty. During the
bombardment of Lebanon in the summer of 2006, the House
of Representatives passed a resolution of total
solidarity with Israel by 410 votes to eight, and the
Senate has just passed another on a hand vote, not even
bothering to take a formal tally.
Anyone
who thought that there would be a change of heart and
direction after the last American election hasn't been
concentrating. The Senate in question is the newly
elected, strongly Democratic one, which has just met for
the first time. During the presidential campaign Barack
Obama went out of his way to endorse Israel. He has
appointed in the form of Hillary Clinton perhaps the
strongest supporter of Israel ever to serve as Secretary
of State, not excluding Henry Kissinger, a Jewish
refugee from Hitler, though even she is surpassed in her
commitment by Rahm Emanuel, Obama's chief of staff.
But
there is more to it, and Israeli intransigence or
indifference to outside opinion goes back before the
birth of the state. As it happens, Emanuel has something
in common with Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni: their
fathers all served in the Irgun. This was the
intransigent Zionist militia – described as terrorists
by Isaiah Berlin among others, and as fascists by Albert
Einstein among others – which waged a campaign of
violence against the British, and the Palestinian Arabs,
in the last years of the British Mandate in 1946-48. Its
exploits included the bombing of the King David Hotel in
Jerusalem, with great loss of life, the hanging of two
captured British sergeants in reprisal, and the massacre
of villagers at Deir Yassin.
Behind
that brutality lay something else. Men take revenge for
small wrongs, Machiavelli said, unable to avenge the
larger, and the Irgun was avenging an incomparably and
unimaginably greater crime just suffered by the European
Jews. The Jews had tried to be nice to the goyim,
Zionism said in effect, and see where it had got them. A
Jewish state would now be created and guarded with all
necessary force, indifferent to what the outside world
thought. If need be, Israel will borrow the old chant of
the Millwall fans, "No one likes us, we don't care"– and
no more Jewish martyrology.
Not
that Namier was the only Zionist to use "Jewish" in a
derisive sense. When someone mentioned Trotsky's phrase
"No war, no peace", David Ben-Gurion said that it was
"some stupid Jewish idea", and there is a well-known
Israeli story about Moshe Dayan, the military hero of
the Six Day War. When he taught at the Israeli staff
college, Dayan used to expound a problem, ending with
the words, "And I want no Jewish solutions here."
He
meant that, on the sand table or the field, he expected
his battles to be won by dash and ferocity, rather than
than by the traditional Jewish virtues of subtlety and
patience. Zionist toughness has worked for a long time,
but it could be that Israel will one day discover that
there's something to be said for Jewish solutions.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft's books include 'The Controversy of
Zion: Jewish Nationalism, the Jewish State, and the
Unresolved Jewish Dilemma'
©independent.co.uk
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