In October 1989 the annual motion to expel Israel from the United Nations was brought to the floor of the General Assembly by the delegate from Libya. To him fell the privilege of denouncing Israel as an outlaw country unsuited to be a member in good standing of the family of nations. The incident calls to mind a dramatic moment in Philip Roth’s novel The Counterlife when a metalworker named Buki says, “I am in Norway on business for my product and written on a wall I read: ‘Down with Israel!’ I think, what did Israel ever do to Norway? I know Israel is a terrible country but, after all, there are countries even more terrible.… Why don’t you read on Norwegian walls, ‘Down with Russia,’ ‘Down with Chile,’ ‘Down with Libya’? Because Hitler didn’t murder six million Libyans? I am walking in Norway and I am thinking, ‘If only he had.’ Because then they would write on Norwegian walls, ‘Down with Libya,’ and leave Israel alone.”
But this opening of the UN General Assembly was driven from the front page by something even more calamitous: namely, the Bay Area earthquake. The earthquake interrupted the World Series, and in the aftermath of so much destruction and suffering the question arose, should the games continue? The commissioner of baseball, recognizing the sensitivity of the situation, postponed the third game for eleven days. Several sportswriters noted that this action was in sharp contrast to that of Avery Brundage, chairman of the International Olympic Committee, who, about two hours after eleven Israeli athletes had been murdered by PLO terrorists during the Munich Olympics of 1972, declared that “the games must go on.” Brundage’s reasoning may have been something like that imputed to Roth’s Norwegian graffiti artist, for in 1936 the same Brundage, as chairman of the American Olympic Committee, had insisted that—despite the little unpleasantnesses to which Jews in Germany were then being subjected—he could find no hard evidence that Germany was discriminating against its Jewish athletes, and therefore “the games must go on.”
One notable feature of the postmortems on the Israeli athletes in 1972 was the fear expressed by the man in charge of the ABC television crew broadcasting the games. His greatest concern of the moment, he said, was not for the athletes who had just been murdered—not for him such banal emotions—but for what might result from what he called the wellknown Israeli propensity to exact an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. He thus became one of the first moralists to establish the by now well-fixed principle that the conjectural potentiality of what Israelis might do is a more legitimate occasion for grief than the actuality of what Arabs have already done. Thus the Washington Post, in the spring of 1984, printed a photo of a dead Israeli woman, slumped in the seat of the bus she had been riding when an Arab terrorist’s bomb ended her life, and commented, “A woman was one of three persons killed yesterday when a bomb exploded on an Israeli bus in the latest incident of a growing wave of violence that was expected to raise fears about retaliation against Arabs.” In ordinary cases of murder, sympathy is generally directed to the murdered person; when Israelis are murdered, sympathy is directed, with remarkable frequency, either to the conjectural victim of Jewish retaliation or to the murderer himself, who was driven to commit his deeds because he had not been listened to sufficiently.
In February 1978 an ABC TV program called Hostage examined the terrorist use of hostages to achieve political ends. The stars of the program were Palestinian Arabs and their supporters. From start to finish the narrator took it for granted that in any terrorist outrage it is not the victim—the mutilated child or murdered mother—but the terrorist himself who is the injured party, and whose grievances require immediate healing. In November of the same year, Frank Reynolds of ABC justified an hour-long commercial for violence entitled “Terror in the Promised Land” by claiming that the Palestinian Arabs had been forced to kill people because no one would “listen” to them: “To refuse to listen is to strengthen their argument that violence is their only recourse.”
Needless to say, those viewers whose memories had not atrophied in the preceding eight months understood just the opposite to be the case: the more they are “listened” to, the more clearly do terrorists recognize the profitability of murder. For in between their two prime-time shows on ABC, the Arab terrorists found time to commit some of their most spectacular outrages, including the murder in March of thirty-five men, women, and children, and the wounding of seventy others, on the coastal road near Haifa. Eight years later, in May 1986, by which time the Palestinian Arabs had surely become the most publicized claimants to victim status of any national or ethnic group in the world, Palestinian Arab terrorists butchered Pan Am passengers in Karachi and Jews worshiping in Istanbul. At this moment, Bill Moyers, another advocate of the “listening” theory of terrorism, called for a massive effort to discover, with respect to the killers, “Who are these young men? What’s happening out there to rouse their fury?” Since the primary wish of these young louts is to destroy Israel and the Jews who inhabit it and perhaps also the Jews who do not, how exactly did Moyers propose to abate their “fury”?
It requires no abstruse research to conclude that there is something irregular, startling, flagrant, and scandalous in the way that many prolific, world-class explainers deal with Israel. It is the way of false moral symmetry and the double standard. On the one hand, the actuality of crimes that have been committed by Arabs is yoked together, by a perverse metaphorical violence, with the potentiality of crimes that might be committed by Israelis; and, on the other hand, Israel’s actual conduct is judged by a standard applied to no other nations, least of all the Arab states.
No more industrious laborer in this Goshen of duplicity can be found than the New Yorker’s (Jewish) Middle East expert, Milton Viorst. Viorst hailed the three noes of Khartoum (August 1967: no peace, no recognition, no negotiation) as a major breakthrough for peace because the Arab naysayers did not specifically call for the destruction of Israel. (Actually, they did, for they declared the need to recover “all occupied Arab territory.”) Viorst has called the incessant terrorist war against Israel, sponsored by states whose combined military might approaches that of NATO, the last resort of the weak against the powerful. He has called the Yom Kippur War launched by the Arabs a limited-objective exercise, not threatening to “Israel itself or to its people.” He has alleged, falsely of course, that Rabbi Kook (the first chief rabbi of modern Eretz Yisrael) advocated an Arabenrein Israel and a “Jewish jihad.” Profoundly troubled by the conjectural potentiality of such anti-Arab actions, he has yet to deplore the actuality of Judenrein Saudi Arabia or Jordan, or the grim situation of Jews in Syria, a country he usually depicts as a model of trustworthiness and responsibility. Syria may once or twice have used some aggressive language toward Israel, but, he adds, there are “hawks on both sides.” Since Israel deploys forces just outside its northern border in Lebanon, why, he asks, should anyone complain about Syrian occupation of two-thirds of that country, especially since Syria has a conjectural fear that it may one day find “an Israeli army sitting on its western frontier.”1
Viorst interprets Israeli attachment to Judea and Samaria as a cynical preference for territories over peace; but he defends Egypt’s insistence on every inch of the Sinai as not only understandable but admirable. In a November 1989 op-ed piece in the New York Times, Viorst concluded that Israel is to blame for the carnage and chaos in Lebanon, which to the untutored eye seems to involve Syrians and various factions of Lebanese Arabs.…
We come then to the question of the theoretical justification offered for the double standard by its practitioners. Many of them have grown tired of denying its existence, and have instead taken to arguing that it really is right that things should be wrong, because the more unfairly Israel is treated, the better off it will be. Anthony Lewis is probably the best-known exponent of this view. About ten years ago an irreverent reader of the New York Times nominated Lewis for the Pete Rose Journalism Award, in recognition of his having written forty-four consecutive columns on the Arab-Israeli conflict that laid all blame for its continuance on the intransigence, brutality, and oppressiveness of the Jews. By now, even the Joe DiMaggio Award (for hits in fifty-six consecutive contests against Israel) would be insufficient recognition of Lewis’s unmatched consistency in depicting Israel as a breeding ground of fanatics who have betrayed the high ideals of Jews of the prophetic persuasion, from Isaiah to Brandeis to Anthony Lewis himself.
Lewis typically deplores Israeli actions not merely because they hurt Arabs. No—he deplores them because they “cannot serve the spirit of Israel, or its true security.” Like Brutus brooding over the misdeeds of his beloved Caesar, Lewis has persuaded himself that “in the spirit of men there is no blood.” He is therefore not tremendously perturbed by the prospect that it may be difficult to come by Israel’s spirit without dismembering Israel. “Yes,” Lewis has written, “there is a double standard. From its birth Israel asked to be judged as a light among nations.”2 Of course this preposterous assertion bears no relation to the truth about the Zionist movement, which rejected Jewish chosenness and sought precisely to normalize Jewish existence while gaining acceptance as a member of the family of nations, treated neither worse nor better than others. “Yes,” said Jabotinsky to the Royal Commission in 1937, “we do want a state; every nation on earth, every normal nation, beginning with the smallest and humblest who do not claim any merit, any role in humanity’s development—they all have states of their own. That is the normal condition for a people. Yet, when we ask for the same condition as the Albanians enjoy, then it is called too much. I would remind you of the commotion that was produced in that famous institution when Oliver Twist came and asked for ‘more.’ He said ‘more’ because he did not know how to express it; what Oliver really meant was this: ‘Will you just give me that normal portion which is necessary for a boy of my age to be able to live?’”3 Lewis’s formulation is, finally, sinister in its insinuation that Israel has no right to exist unless and until it is perfect, a “light unto the nations,” and therefore that it should never have been created in the first place.
In Anthony Trollope’s novel of 1855, The Warden, a journalist named Tom Towers is described as “walking on from day to day, studiously trying to look like a man, but knowing within his heart that he was a god.” In the Bible God himself keeps saying to Israel, “You only have I known among all the families of the earth; therefore, I will visit upon you all your iniquities” (Amos 3:2). In Lamentations Jeremiah describes how the enemy has ravaged Jerusalem and butchered its citizens, but conveys God’s message that all is the fault of the Jews themselves. If God speaks as if he were a member of Peace Now, always blaming Israel for the aggression of its enemies, why should not the members and advocates of Peace Now speak as if they were God? In claiming that his invocation of the double standard to lacerate Israel for its sins arises from his unique love for her, Lewis has actually confused himself with the God of the Hebrew Bible, who also sees Israel as the only responsible party in Middle Eastern conflicts. Worship of one’s own mind has rarely led to more flagrant idolatry.
Unless such idolatry be in the mind of Lewis’s younger colleague at the New York Times, Thomas Friedman. In his widely acclaimed book From Beirut to Jerusalem, Friedman recounts a moment of revelation he had in London while reading the International Herald Tribune. He noticed that the paper had spread over four columns on its front page a photo of “an Israeli soldier not beating, not killing, but grabbing a Palestinian.” When he sought out the story behind the photograph, he discovered only a two-paragraph item on page two. But the rude blare on the front page blotted out, among other small troubles in the Islamic world, that day’s slaughter of several thousand people in the Iran-Iraq war. What, Friedman asked himself, was the explanation of this “lack of proportion”?
His answer was: “this unique double dimension” is attributable to “the historical and religious movements to which Israel is connected in Western eyes.” The double standard of journalists covering the Middle East derives, according to Friedman, from their profound immersion in the Bible. Here, at last, is the explanation of the inveterate, obsessive lashing of Israel we have come to expect from G. A. Geyer, Robert Novak, and Nick Thimmesch on the right, or Tom Wicker, Christopher Hitchens, and Alexander Cockburn on the left: “Their identification with the dreams of Biblical Israel and mythic Jerusalem runs so deep, that when Israel succeeds and lives up to its prophetic expectations, it is their success too.” It is because these journalists—most of whom must have been surprised to learn from Friedman of their profound identification with biblical Israel—view the world from a biblical perspective that they see the Jews as the central, decisive actors in the cosmic drama. Consequently, “what the West expects from the Jews of the past, it expects from Israel today.”4
Is it possible that Thomas Friedman really believes that what the West expected of the Jews of the past was the perfection of so-called prophetic morality? Can this really be the same “West” whose Christian leaders, from the time that Christianity became the state religion of Rome in the fourth century, hounded and persecuted Jews because they had murdered or continued stubbornly to “deny” the Son of God, and whose secular leaders expelled them on racial grounds or stood by passively while the Nazis murdered them en masse? Most people, including, I suspect, the very journalistic colleagues whom Friedman depicts as daily engrossed in devotional exercises, will remember that “the West,” far from thinking of the Jews benignly and ideally, has viewed them as deicides dancing obscenely at the foot of the cross, crafty and diabolic vampires draining the blood of Christian children for their Passover matzot, and, in the words of Martin Luther, “torturers and persecutors of Christians all over the world.”
In only one respect is Friedman right about the unchanging great expectations of the West from the Jews. Despite the fierce persecutions to which they were subject, the Jews for two thousand years did not resort to preventive attack, armed resistance, or retaliation. One of the reasons for Zionism was the desire to flout these great expectations of endless passivity. If Friedman wants an explanation for the double standard of journalists, he should seek it in their disappointment in that department. But he prefers to believe, with Anthony Lewis, that the more unfairly Israel is attacked, the better this will be for the Jewish soul. The ostensibly flattering practice of applying the highest standards of responsibility and guilt to Israel alone has practical consequences that readily indicate its special attractiveness to apologists for Palestinian Arab irredentism.
Of course, the theorists of the double standard are lying through their teeth both in what they assert about Jewish expectations of the West and Western expectations of the Jews. Having begun with the words of a Philip Roth character, let me end the same way, especially since Roth’s characters are usually wiser than their author on the subject of Israel: “The fellows who say to you, ‘I expect more of the Jews,’ don’t believe them. They expect less. What they are really saying is, ‘Okay, we know you’re a bunch of ravenous bastards, and given half the chance you’d eat up half the world.… We know all these things about you, and so we’re going to get you now. And how? Every time you make a move, we’re going to say, “But we expect more of Jews, Jews are supposed to behave better.”’ Jews are supposed to behave better? After all that has happened? Being only a thick-headed grease monkey, I would have thought that it was the non-Jews whose behavior could stand a little improvement. Why are we the only people who belong to this wonderful exclusive moral club?”
1.David Bar-Illan, “Milton Viorst: Master of the Double Standard,” in With Friends Like These: The Jewish Critics of Israel, ed. Edward Alexander (New York: SPI Books, 1993), 77–83.
2.See Ruth R. Wisse, “The Delegitimation of Israel,” Commentary, 74 (July 1982), 29–36.
3.Evidence Submitted to the Palestine Royal Commission (1937), quoted in The Zionist Idea, ed. Arthur Hertzberg (New York: Atheneum, 1975), 559–70.
4.Thomas Friedman, From Beirut to Jerusalem (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1989), See review by Martin Peretz in New Republic, 4 September 1989.