The Arc of a Covenant, page 51
These immigrants are rejected not just because they are foreign. They are rejected because their presence is both a consequence and a reminder of the humiliation of imperial rule. The demand to expel the “illegitimate” foreigners often plays a major role in the struggle against imperial rule. Tensions between native and immigrant groups frequently persist for generations and in many countries post-independence regimes have either discriminated against the descendants of migrants or expelled them. The expulsions of long-settled Greeks from Nasserite Egypt, of Indians from newly independent East African nations, the genocidal violence and ethnic cleansing directed against the Rohingya of Burma (many of whose ancestors migrated from British India in the days of the Raj): these all came about in reaction to episodes of imperially licensed or encouraged migration. For Palestinians who do not accept the legitimacy of Britain’s seizure of Palestine in World War I, the Balfour Declaration and the subsequent immigration of hundreds of thousands of Jews represents a historical crime.
This sentiment has legs. Some of the strongest support for the Palestinian cause is found in countries like South Africa, Malaysia, and Algeria where struggles against the consequences of imperial migration have been central to political life.
This brings us to a third level of the Israeli-Palestinian dispute: the degree to which it reflects the politics of decolonization and national liberation. The Palestinians were fighting, as they saw it, for exactly the same thing Indian, Egyptian, Algerian, Nigerian, and Indonesian liberation movements were fighting for. They wanted to rule themselves in their own land in their own way. They still do.
The perception of the Palestinian struggle as a conventional national liberation movement grounded in anti-imperialism and a rejection of western hegemony is widespread today, not only among Palestinians. That is how the Palestinian cause is still seen in much of the world: as one of a handful of national liberation movements not yet crowned with success. That ensures the Palestinians of deep sympathy and solidarity far beyond the confines of the Arab world.
Additionally, the Israeli-Palestinian dispute is widely seen as part of an ongoing struggle between Christianity and Islam. While the image of the Crusades is often invoked in this context, wars of religion have played a greater role in the more recent history of the lands that once belonged to the Ottoman, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian empires. Imperial Russia was as hostile an environment for Muslims as it was for Jews; roughly two million Muslims fled tsarist repression in Russia and the Caucasus for the Ottoman Empire in the decades before World War I—about the same as the number of Jews who fled Russia in those years. From the Greek Revolt of 1821 to the allied occupation of Constantinople in 1918, Ottoman defeats were interpreted by both Ottoman and western sources as defeats for “Islam” at the hands of an ascendant “Christendom.” Catholic missionaries followed French arms into Algeria and Lebanon; Muslims and Jews fled or were expelled from their homes as the Orthodox Christian peoples of the Balkans threw off the Ottoman yoke.
From the Caucasus through the Balkans and across the Middle East, conflict between Christianity and Islam is not some relic of the Middle Ages. The last two centuries, from an Islamic point of view, saw a series of Christian conquests and serial invasions of the Ottoman and Persian empires. That the British sponsored the Zionists in their early days and that the Americans embraced them as they became powerful underlines the association of the Zionists with the Christian West. The injustice that Palestinians experience, deprived of their land and of the dignity of national independence, exemplifies and symbolizes the injustices that many Muslims in the Arab Middle East and beyond see encoded into the existing world order.
Caught up in this charismatic conflict, the Palestinians have become a kind of representative nationality, one whose experience resonates around the world. At one level, their situation evokes the plight of indigenous peoples worldwide who have lost their homes to a tide of foreign, usually western, colonization and conquest. At another, the Palestinians represent all those treated unfairly or left behind in the contemporary world. Their plight is emblematic of those who feel born into the “loser” nations—kept out of the wealthy precincts of the “advanced countries” by walls, fences, and identity papers.
The talismanic role of the Israeli-Palestinian struggle in the global political imagination made the conflict difficult and perhaps impossible to resolve by conventional means, but it also made solving that conflict look irresistibly attractive to a generation of American leaders eager both to establish and to legitimize the post-historical liberal order they hoped would secure the peace after the Cold War. Just as Solomon established his wisdom by adroitly adjudicating tangled disputes, America would establish its world order by resolving this most difficult and intractable of disputes. We would pull the sword out of the stone; we would capture the Holy Grail.
The American-led peace process after the Cold War was the centerpiece of the American effort to replace the historical rivalries and preoccupations of the Middle East with the kind of liberal order Americans had promoted in Western Europe after World War II and hoped to extend globally following the Cold War. Americans wanted a Middle East composed of liberal democracies enjoying a thick peace, and the establishment of a lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians would, many Americans felt, both symbolize and ensure the establishment of liberal order in a critical part of the world.
This ambitious design did not fail because a particular Israeli leader or Palestinian leader failed to endorse a particular proposal or take a particular step at a particular time. Fundamentally, the plan failed because the United States did not have the power, the wisdom, or the will to impose it. At the end of the day, neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians shared the American faith in liberal order, and the accumulating failures of American policy in the region eroded any faith the two peoples might have had in American wisdom and reliability. In Arthurian legend, the Holy Grail could only be achieved by a knight who combined a pure heart with perfect faith and superhuman strength. Uncle Sam, sadly, was not quite the man for the job.
The Glittering Grail
In late 2000, President Bill Clinton led the peace process to what remains its high-water point when he put forward what became known as the Clinton Parameters for a final settlement to the conflict. Under those parameters, the Palestinians would receive all of Gaza, 97 percent of the West Bank, with territorial compensation elsewhere for the 3 percent (mostly densely populated Jewish settlements near Jerusalem) of West Bank territory that Israel would keep. East Jerusalem would be the capital of the Palestinian state, the Palestinian diaspora would have a “right of return” to the Palestinian state (though not to Israel), there would be an elevated train or highway connecting Gaza and the West Bank over Israeli territory, and the new state would receive $30 billion in aid. Arafat refused to sign on.[5]
“I am a failure,” Clinton told Arafat. “And you have made me one.”[6]
The peace process has not entirely failed. It provided a framework for limited Palestinian self-governance; it managed and limited the conflict for many years; and it helped to secure American power in a crucial region of the world in the aftermath of the Cold War. It helped the Palestinians move into the diplomatic mainstream, immensely assisted their fundraising, and kept their cause in the public eye. For Israelis, the peace process bought them some time to consolidate the settlement blocs near the Green Line (the line of demarcation between Arab and Israeli control at the end of the 1948–49 war) that they most wanted to integrate into Israel proper, reduced violence on both sides of the Green Line, and defused some international criticism against their treatment of the Palestinians.
But if the American effort to mediate an Israeli-Palestinian peace did not utterly fail, it fell far short of success. The Palestinians did not get the land, and the Israelis did not get their peace, and in many ways the two parties seemed further apart in 2022 than in 1990.
Too often in the course of this long series of negotiations, the Americans seemed more interested in selling peace than either the Israelis or the Palestinians were in buying it. Rather than helping the two sides reach an accommodation that both wanted but that neither could reach without help, American diplomacy often involved attempting to bribe, intimidate, or cajole both sides into accepting positions that neither side on the ground really liked, but that the Americans believed could pave the road to peace.
As American diplomats sought to keep the peace process moving forward, they made some unpleasant discoveries. The first was that steering the peace process was like riding a bicycle; if you weren’t making progress the bicycle would wobble and ultimately crash. But that wasn’t all. The closer negotiators came to the final-stage negotiations, the more difficult progress became—the road turned narrower, rockier, steeper, and more pitted with potholes the nearer one came to the goal.
The second was that neither the Israelis nor the Palestinians really believed in the liberal order the Americans were trying to promote. At best, they thought it was a naive American dream with little relevance in the real world; at worst, they saw it as a dangerous delusion. Israelis and Palestinians have complicated political cultures, and there are many different points of view among both groups of people, but for sometimes similar and sometimes different reasons, both cultures have a lot of skepticism about the idea of liberal order. Added to that skepticism were serious and well-grounded concerns about whether the Americans are wise enough and committed enough to the long, arduous, and quite possibly bloody task of creating and defending that order in the years and decades to come. The more both Israelis and Palestinians saw of American policies in the Middle East, the graver those doubts grew.
Israel and Liberal Order
The single most important thing about Israel that most Americans do not understand is that the Jewish state was founded on a reasonable and historically justified skepticism about the ability of liberal order to protect Jews. American liberals in particular long believed that Israel was the firstborn offspring of the United Nations, and that a nation that owed its existence to the international community and liberal values should live by the values which gave it life. That is a beautiful story, but if Stalin had not made a mockery of the arms embargos first imposed by the U.S. and then by the U.N., there would likely be no State of Israel today.
The profoundly ambivalent relationship between liberalism and Zionism goes back to Herzl’s time. In nineteenth-century Europe, liberal, assimilationist Jews argued that the triumph of enlightened values would allow Jews to live in dignity and security. The Zionist movement insisted this faith in the power of liberal order was a fatal mistake. Liberalism cannot save the Jews, Herzl taught, international institutions cannot save the Jews, democracy cannot save the Jews, good intentions cannot save the Jews. Only the sovereign power of a Jewish state offers the Jews hope for survival. For many Israeli Jews today, Herzl’s view makes more sense than ever.
Liberalism remains, many Israelis believe, too weak and too wedded to magical thinking for a nation like Israel to trust. And weak as liberalism is inside countries, the utter uselessness of liberal principles in international life is much worse. How has the “rules-based international order” worked out for victims of the Syrian civil war? How safe are the Rohingya? The Uighurs? The Tibetans?
Many Israelis believe that if the Jewish state had relied on the “international community” for its survival, it would have perished long ago. The United Nations voted for the partition of Palestine and the creation of a Jewish state but didn’t lift a finger to enforce it. Only Stalin’s willingness to defy the arms embargo brought victory to the Jews. The United Nations charter declares that member states must respect the territorial integrity of other states. This has never been enforced on Israel’s behalf—not when Britain and the United States schemed to force Israel to give up the Negev in the early 1950s,[7] not when Arab neighbors gave aid to terrorists seeking to attack Jewish targets in Israel and beyond, not when Arab countries and, later, Iran regularly announced their intention to destroy Israel and drive its citizens into the sea.[8] The United States promised Israel in 1957 that it would protect Israel’s ability to use the Straits of Tiran if Israel returned the Sinai to Egypt.[9] To enforce that commitment, U.N. troops were dispatched to the Straits. In 1967, Nasser ordered those troops to leave. They obeyed. When Israelis asked Washington to honor its promises and prevent Nasser from blocking Israeli sea traffic, the United States was too preoccupied with the Vietnam War to respond. The U.N. was equally passive.[10]
For a nation of refugees, many still in shock from the Holocaust and many others from the shock of expulsion or exile from the Arab-majority nations of the Middle East, the lesson could not be clearer. Israel could only count on itself.
The international community’s failures in the 1967 crisis were not Israel’s only experience with the weakness of liberal order. UNIFIL (United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon) troops have been solemnly tasked by the Security Council to establish a zone on the Lebanese side of the border where the only armed forces would be UNIFIL itself and the regular Lebanese army.[11] UNIFIL continues to patrol, yet somehow this area has become one of the most heavily armed terrorist zones on the planet, bristling with tens of thousands of missiles that somehow slipped past the no doubt eagle-eyed and incorruptible UNIFIL guardians of the peace.[12] The “international community” remains placid and calm unless a prospect of Israeli military action against the peaceful Hezbollah missile sites that dot the graceful hills disturbs the tranquil and liberal order that UNIFIL so respectably provides.
Think, Israelis say, of the Muslims of Bosnia, who trusted in the protection of U.N. peacekeepers in Srebenica. They were massacred by the Serbs and while many world leaders wept beautiful tears on television, the Bosnian victims stayed dead.[13] All this, many Israelis feel, proves that Herzl was right: if the Jewish people entrust their survival to liberal institutions and liberal ideas, they will die.
American Jews and Israeli Jews are often deeply divided over the value of liberal order. American Jews are, by and large, people for whom Herzl was wrong. The liberal principles of American society opened the path for Jewish integration of a depth and scale that Europe had never seen. Since the nineteenth century, many American Jews have felt that the United States, founded on Enlightenment principles and religious freedom, had much more to offer its Jewish citizens than any Jewish state in Palestine ever could. This history has helped make American Jews one of the most deeply and seriously liberal communities in the United States.
While Israelis are not monolithic on this or any other subject, large numbers reject the optimism of their American cousins. Many Israelis who grew up in the former Soviet Union, particularly those who left after 1990, brought the deep-seated Russian cynicism about the West’s liberal values with them. They no more believe in the inevitable triumph of liberal principles than does Vladimir Putin. Russian history teaches lessons similar to Herzl’s: we live in a hard world, and power is the language in which countries speak to each other.
The difference in political orientation between American and Israeli Jews is not just confined to the peace process or to Palestinian issues. During the refusenik era, when Israeli and American Jews were united in their support for Soviet Jews seeking to emigrate to Israel, a yawning gap opened between the two communities. Not all the Jews who wanted to get out of the Soviet Union, it soon became evident, wanted to go to Israel. Many wanted to come to the United States. Many other Soviet Jews didn’t want to go anywhere at all; they just wanted to practice their religion freely in the USSR.
The American Jewish community by and large instinctively supported all of the choices of all of these Jews. American Jews wanted aid to go to refuseniks awaiting exit permits whatever country they wanted to reach. And they responded to pleas by Soviet Jews for religious freedom by working with Americans of all faiths and no faith to pressure the Soviet Union to provide freedom of religion for all of its citizens, not just the Jews.
The Israeli government had a narrower focus. It was only interested in the Jews who wanted to come to Israel. Jews wanting to emigrate to America or other countries were on their own. As for pressuring the Soviet Union to allow religious freedom for people of all faiths, or even only for Jews, this was not a diplomatic burden the Israeli government, which had enough problems with a Soviet government actively supporting Palestinian terrorism, wanted to bear.[14] American Jews in a position of relative security fixed on universal principles; Israeli Jews relentlessly focusing on what Israel in their view needed to survive: the tension between these two approaches to Jewish ethics and priorities continues to this day.
In any case, the plurality of Israeli Jews today who trace their ancestry to the Middle East and the old Ottoman Empire rather than to Western Europe[15] are also deeply skeptical about the prospects for liberal order in the Middle East. Rooted in the Arab world and speaking and reading Arabic, these Israelis often believe that they understand the Arabs better than American intellectuals. A more democratic Middle East, many of them believe, will be more radical and more antisemitic than a Middle East of cautious kings and embattled dictators. Why, they sometimes ask, do so many westerners believe that a surge of populism in the West might lead to fascist identity politics and white nationalism, while Middle East populism would inevitably lead to social democracy and brotherly love?
These different political outlooks lead to very different assessments about what the peace process can accomplish. Americans, including many American Jews, tend to think that an end to the conflict is possible, and argue that Israelis should be more willing to “take risks for peace.” Many Israelis approach the question of Palestinian statehood with a long laundry list of things that could go wrong. Americans counter by pointing out the risks and costs of a continuing conflict.
