Pragmatism and Palestine


by Steven C. Day

9.24.02 |  It isn’t hard to admire the kind of pragmatism that puts people ahead of ideological purity. It gets tougher, however, when the subject turns to the comparatively tawdry pragmatism of winning elections. But the one is, of course, inexorably tied to the other: You can’t do much good in political office if you lose the election.

That pragmatism is tested, though, when it comes to Palestine. Liberals, of course, are far from uniform in their views on the Middle East, or, for that matter, on much of anything else. But clearly the tendency within the progressive community is to view Palestinian grievances involving the occupied territories (or the ’so-called occupied territories’ as our increasingly addled secretary of defense recently put it) more sympathetically than most. There is also little doubt that from the standpoint of practical politics this is a recipe for disaster.

Aside from the growing Muslim population in America, the liberal community is as close as the Palestinians come to having a friend in this country. If you happen upon an article in a U.S. publication that is at all sympathetic to the Palestinian point of view, and the odds against that happening are overwhelming, it will almost certainly be in one of the small handful of liberal publications, such as The Nation.

Public opinion polls, however, tend to refute the perception that the American public is passionately pro-Israeli. Americans lately seem to have developed a not unreasonable “pox on both your houses’ attitude toward the Israelis and the Palestinians. But political power in the United States is based less on majority preferences than on the strength of interest groups. And there are few interest groups more powerful than the Israeli lobby, as evidenced by the recent primary election losses of Black Caucus members Earl Hilliard of Alabama and Cynthia McKinney of Georgia, both targeted by Israeli partisans.

An even bigger political danger may be the potential to splinter what remains of the progressive coalition. Jewish Americans, as a group, have traditionally supported liberal positions on a wide variety of social issues, including civil rights. They have also historically voted Democratic and contributed generously to Democratic candidates. Al Gore, for example, took almost 80 percent of the Jewish vote in the last election.

But this could change. Conservative Republicans are pursuing an aggressive courtship of Jewish voters, building their case almost exclusively on strong support for Israel’s “get-tough” policy toward the Palestinians. One particularly brazen example was a New York Times OpEd-column written in April by William Safire, called “Democrats vs. Israel,” which argued that the Democratic party had been soft in its support for Ariel Sharon’s brutal response to the second Palestinian Intifada.

Safire was being disingenuous, and the National Jewish Democratic Council called him on it. Congressional Democrats, as a group, are every bit as rabid in their support for Likud Israel as any member of the GOP. Still, there’s no doubt that the refusal by the party’s liberal wing to uniformly accept the Israel-can-do-no-wrong conventional wisdom is playing into the Republicans’ hands.

While a significant number of Jewish Americans favor an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories and oppose the harshness of Likud policies toward the Palestinians, the wave of suicide bombings has caused many former doves to circle the wagons with Sharon. Also, as the cycle of violence in the Middle East has intensified, support for Israel has increasingly become the defining political issue for many Jewish voters. This has opened the door to an unlikely alliance between Jewish political organizations and those of the Christian right, despite their divergent views on issues like abortion and the separation of church and state.

Given all this, there’s no question that the politically smart move for liberals would be to dump the Palestinian issue. And it’s tempting. There is, after all, little good to be said for Yasser Arafat and the rest of the corrupt leadership of the Palestinian Authority. The suicide bombings and other attacks against Israeli civilians are reprehensible.

It could also reasonably be argued that the liberal community has bigger fish to fry. The upcoming congressional elections couldn’t be more important: If the GOP retakes the Senate while retaining the House, ideological conservatives will be in control of all three branches of the federal government. No sooner will the midterm elections be over then the battle to prevent Bush’s ‘re”-election will be at hand.

But I guess this is where my pragmatism ends — where, for me, the importance of being politically smart gives way to the importance of being morally right. It seems indisputable that the United States bears a unique moral responsibility for Israeli actions. It may or may not be fair to describe Israel as an American “client state,” as most of the rest of the world does. But certainly Israel could not exist in its current form, as a Middle Eastern superpower, absent American sponsorship.

Close to 40 percent of U.S. foreign aid goes to tiny Israel — that’s $2.1 billion in military financing plus $600 million in economic aid. We make the occupation possible. We make the construction of new settlements in the occupied territories possible. And, to a significant degree, we make possible targeted assassinations, home demolitions, land confiscations and all of the other Israeli human rights abuses that inevitably flow from its status as a long-term occupying power.

And one other thing: Through our money, we make it possible for Sharon & Co. to continue pursuing policies regarding the Palestinians that lack even an ounce of creativity and that stand no chance of actually bringing peace to the Middle East.

As I write, there has been another suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, killing six people. And once again, Sharon, lacking any real idea of how to stop the violence, is busy knocking down buildings in Arafat’s compound and killing people in the West Bank and Gaza Strip who had nothing to do with the attacks. 

Meanwhile, Israel is under severe international criticism for its heavy-handed treatment of the Palestinians — the U.N. Security Council has approved a resolution calling for Israel to withdraw from Palestinian cities. (The United States, calling the resolution flawed, abstained but did not veto it. The vote came a day after the United States issued its own surprisingly direct condemnation of Israel’s response to the suicide bombings.) 

And for good reason: More civilians are dying. 

As reported by the Israeli newspaper Ha”aretz, 30 of the 49 Palestinians killed by Israeli Defense Forces in the occupied territories during the month of August were unarmed civilians. And all this before the dust had even settled from the last major incident on July 22, when Israel forces dropped a one-ton bomb in a heavily populated residential neighborhood in an assassination attempt against Salah Shehadeh, a leader of the military arm of Hamas. They got him. They also got 15 civilians, including nine children.

Just another day in the war on terrorism, or in the unjust oppression of a conquered people by an imperial power, depending, I suppose, on your perspective. And perspective, where the Middle East is concerned, can be a muddled thing. Thus, shortly after the Shehadeh assassination debacle, Bush, generally a dependable Israeli apologist (Ariel Sharon is “a man of peace”), condemned the strike, whereas Eric Alterman, a persistent critic of the Sharon government, writing in his MSNBC weblog, deemed the attack morally defensible. Go figure. 

Trying to judge any single event in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in isolation is almost always a mistake. These folks have a blood feud going. The “bad guy” on any particular day is whoever threw the last punch. Tune in a few days (or at most a few weeks) later and the roles will be reversed.

Assessing blame doesn’t end feuds. Demanding retribution for the last crime doesn’t end feuds. Feuds end when both sides stop killing — period. And the killing isn’t going to stop in the Middle East until both the Israelis and the Palestinians each accept the other’s right to exist.

But peace will not come unless the United States makes it happen. If recent events make anything clear, it’s that Sharon and Arafat, or for that matter Sharon and any possible successor to Arafat, will never get it done on their own. It will take pressure from the outside. And the United States is the only country that has the necessary leverage to do job.

For there to be any chance of the United States using this leverage effectively in the quest for peace, however, we will have to be willing to go to the mat. And that means doing something that is now politically unthinkable: communicating a credible threat to Israel that all U.S. aid will end unless it begins moving in good faith toward compliance with the applicable United Nations resolutions. Other ultimatums will, of course, need to go to the PLO, but Israel, as the dominant power, is the bigger problem.

Working to create a political environment in which such a demand upon Israel will be possible is probably not smart politics for liberals in the short term. But it’s the best chance for peace in the Middle East.

P O P   F O R U M
Discuss support of Israel

Related Sites
Visit the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Electronic Intifada offers a pro-Palestinian viewpoint. 
Read the NPR transcript or listen to Mara Liasson’s report about conservative Christians and American Jews.
From the Village Voice, Alisa Solomon writes about activists questioning aid to Israel.
The Jewish Virtual Library, part of the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, provides information on the history of U.S.-Israel relations and a state-by-state breakdown of financial and other ties.