Seventeen points on Israel and Palestine

Seventeen points on Israel and Palestine

Something I bet everyone will find unsatisfactory

Matthew Yglesias

27 min ago 

11

4

The bad guys won (Saul Loeb / AFP)

Israel and Palestine are small nations and not strategically significant these days, so it’s notable that conflicts there attract not just more, but orders of magnitude more coverage than conflicts in, say, Chad, that objectively impact more people. And if human rights observers ding the government of Chad for something, you won’t see a swarm of people who feel Chad has been unfairly maligned swooping in to “Stand With Chad.”

The basic story is that people talk a lot about Israel/Palestine because a lot of other people are talking about it. Making a public statement about Israel says something about you. Indeed, it’s so widely discussed that a huge range of different nuances is legible. Bernie Sanders’ comments are very critical of Israel, but he also affirms that “Israel has the absolute right to live in peace and security,” thus separating himself from the most critical voices.

If we’re honest with ourselves, we are probably all underweight on Chad takes. It would not take too much work to become the most knowledgeable person in your social circle on the subject of Chad. In that role, you’d have a great opportunity to change minds about Chad and educate others. Making a meaningful contribution to the Israel/Palestine discourse is a very difficult undertaking. Why not stick to Chad?

Predictably, people have different takes on why Israel/Palestine attracts disproportionate attention, and those takes have become polarized along the lines of their own sympathies. People with pro-Palestinian sympathies tell me it’s obviously because of the U.S. involvement in funding Israel, while people with pro-Israel sympathies tell me it’s because the left is shot-through with antisemitism. I don’t think those theories withstand much scrutiny.

Did you know that right now in the United States, the Secretaries of State, Treasury, and Homeland Security are all Jewish, as are the Attorney General, the White House Chief of Staff, and the Director of National Intelligence? My guess is you probably didn’t! It’s a total non-issue in American politics, because while antisemitic remarks and even murders certainly happen in the United States, antisemitism just is not a big force in American politics. The only real question anyone has raised about the ethnic composition of the Biden administration is whether it has enough Asian Americans.

On the aid, I mean … does anyone really believe this is a furious argument about foreign aid? If you posted on Instagram that you favor redirecting the U.S. foreign aid budget away from the Middle East and toward global public health projects, it probably wouldn’t go viral, and you also wouldn’t make people mad. “Israel isn’t poor” is a pretty blah observation, and “foreign aid money should go to poor countries” is a pretty banal take. Banal but correct, I would say. But a critique of American budget priorities is not where the emotional and political heat on this issue is coming from — the United States spends a lot of money on things that are less worthy than global public health projects.

It’s often hard for Americans to accept that things aren’t about us. But if you compare today to 15 to 20 years ago, it’s clear that there’s much more skepticism of pro-Israel politics in the United States than there used to be. The public debate and public dialogue have gotten much more open — mostly in what I think is a good way. What’s gotten worse is the actual outlook for Palestine, because political sympathy for the Palestinians has completely collapsed in Israel, which is where it matters most. Then, under Trump, the Arab states sold the Palestinians out entirely. The George W. Bush administration was seen as very pro-Israel at the time, but they were in some ways more critical than the Biden administration because they thought that was important to their larger regional diplomacy. Now that the Gulf states have joined Israel in the anti-Iranian alliance, the Palestinians are friendless where it matters.

John Ganz did a good post about Theodore Herzl, the intellectual father of Zionism, and his relationship to the Dreyfuss Affair. Ganz’s point is that in the end, Dreyfuss won and the antisemites lost. The reactionary nationalist coalition in France was strong but not unbeatable. You can tell a story about some times in the past when cosmopolitan liberals and leftists were close enough to victory in Israel to deliver a humane two-state solution, but that’s not the situation now — they’re totally marginal. Why that happened is its own set of bitter arguments, but that’s the proximate issue. Israel would rather have American money than not have it, but they can get by without the money just fine, and it won’t change their behavior.

Herzl was born a subject of the Habsburg Empire, and because I’m a weirdo, I think a lot about the dissolution of Austria-Hungary. He was one of many people born there in the late 19th century who believed that trying to make one big country work in a just and humane way was impossible, naive, or misguided, and that a better idea would be for everyone to have their own ethnostate.

The nationalist critique of the Habsburg polity was a strikingly successful political project. But looking at the assassination of Franz Ferdinand, the rise of Hitler, the post-war expulsions of Germanophones, the Yugoslav wars, etc., I think you’d be hard-pressed to say that it was a good idea, all things considered. Many, many, many people died in service of reorganizing the Habsburg realms along ethnonationalist lines.

When I promoted “One Billion Americans,” people would sometimes ask me questions about how my ideas applied to foreign countries. I always said that I think the immigration economics holds, but fundamentally, I was an American writing a book about America. If Finnish people want to say Finland is a land for the Finns and that should be the lodestar of their immigration policies, it’s not my place to say that I disagree. Israel’s relationship to ethnic identity is not unique. That said, in Finland, the small party representing the Swedish-speaking minority almost invariably serves as a member of governing coalitions. It’s a kinder, gentler ethnonationalism in the Nordic realms facilitated by the fact that Swedes are very reasonable negotiating partners.

Twenty years ago, I thought that if Israel went down the Netanyahu path of abandoning the quest for a kinder, gentler solution, they’d end up internationally isolated. That was very wrong. Netanyahu was ahead of his time, and after a period of decline, hard nationalism is on the rise now. Today’s GOP loves Israel far more than Reagan’s ever did. Hindutva Twitter loves Israel. The political descendants of the anti-Dreyfussards love Israel.

As Joe Biden says, America is an idea. We are not an ethnostate, and most of the worst moments in our history trace specifically to the politics of ethnic exclusion. I think this is the greatest country on earth, and as a Jewish person, I am sure that it’s the best country Jewish people have ever had in history. Last decade when startups were cool, Dan Senor and Saul Singer wrote a book called “Startup Nation” about how there’s a lot of startups in Israel. But Jewish Americans have startups too. Better ones, frankly. The market cap of the whole Tel Aviv Stock Exchange is smaller than Facebook, which is run (and was founded) by Mark Zuckerberg, who is Jewish.

The current iteration of the Zionist project appeals mostly to believers in ethnic nationalism. Ethnic nationalism is, as they say, Bad For The Jews — or those of us in the diaspora, at least. One of Herzl’s ideas about the Jewish State wasn’t just that it would be a refuge for Jews against antisemitism, but that you could diffuse the “Jewish Question” by making Jewish people legible in nationalist terms. Today, Israeli political theorist Yoram Hazoni and his book “The Virtue of Nationalism” are the toast of political and intellectual descendants of the anti-Dreyfussards worldwide. It’s a stunning success for a certain theory of the case.

So that is what I think about the latest round of fighting in Israel and Palestine.

For me, though, I am a Jewish American who likes his cosmopolitan liberalism, thank you very much. I find it incredibly regrettable that hard nationalism is on the rise globally, and think that it is leading to pain and misery that will only get worse if it continues to gain steam. Brexit leading to renewed tensions in Northern Ireland is just a small example of how the acid of nationalism creates new problems rather than solving them. As Jacob Levy says, the Israel-Palestine situation has its own unique features, but it is also part of a fairly general trend toward hardening sovereignty claims and deploying nationalism to mask official corruption. It’s all pretty bad.

Did you know that there’s a crackdown on journalists in Ethiopia related to an ethnic conflict there that’s killed thousands of people, and that U.S. aid to Ethiopia amounts to about 1% of their GDP — the same share as we see with Israel? I have no take at all on who is in the right here or what U.S. policy should be (or even is), and I only happen to be dimly aware of it because a good number of immigrants from Ethiopia and Eritrea live in my neighborhood.