The origins of this book reach back to Israel’s invasion of Lebanon in June 1982. I began then for the first time to read systematically about the Israel-Palestine conflict. The topic that most engaged me was the question of Zionism. Specifically, I was intrigued by the debate joined by Michael Walzer and Noam Chomsky on whether a Jewish state can also be a democratic state.1 The research proved sufficiently fruitful that I was able to turn it into a doctoral dissertation.2 My thesis – that Zionism is a kind of Romantic nationalism fundamentally at odds with liberal values – is synthesized in the first chapter of this volume.
Just as the research for my dissertation was completed, I came across a newly published book, From Time Immemorial, which, according to the pantheon of luminaries quoted on the back cover, radically undercut prevailing assumptions about the Israel-Palestine conflict.3 So disturbing (and bizarre) was the book’s main argument – that Palestinians had, individually and en masse, fabricated their genealogies – that I read it with more than the usual care. It quickly became obvious that the said author, Joan Peters, had concocted – and, more revealingly, that the American intellectual establishment had lent its name to – a threadbare hoax. As it happened, documenting the fraud – Chapter 2 of this volume – proved by far the easier task as compared to publicizing my findings. A small sense of the difficulties met is sketched in the chapter’s postscript.
Chapters 3 and 4 consider two of the more substantial contributions to the literature on the Israel-Palestine conflict, Benny Morris’s The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947–1949, and Anita Shapira’s Land and Power.4 Morris’s contention is that the Palestinian refugee problem was ‘born of war, not by design’. Shapira maintains that a ‘fundamental supposition’ of the Zionist movement was that the realization of its project ‘would not require the use of force’. I conclude that the research findings, however original and useful (much more so in Morris’s volume), do not support these largely apologetic arguments.
In recent years, the received wisdom on the first Arab–Israeli war of 1948 has come under withering examination by the so-called new historians.5 Israel’s rationale for its joint assault with England and France on Egypt in 1956 has carried less and less conviction with time; the few myths that managed to endure have now been punctured by Morris’s latest study.6 Israel was never able to make a credible case for its 1982 invasion of Lebanon. Even Israeli scholars fairly quickly conceded that ‘calling the Lebanon War “the War for the Peace of Galilee” is more than a misnomer. It would have been more honest to call it “the War to Safeguard the Occupation of the West Bank”’.7 Yet, Israel’s version of the June 1967 and October 1973 wars has shown remarkable resilience. In both instances, Israel is widely seen as the unprovoked victim of Arab aggression. Chapters 5 and 6 explore, respectively, the backgrounds to these wars. My conclusion is that the Israeli narrative does not in either case withstand close scrutiny.
My approach throughout is to use, as the foil of my critique, an influential piece, or standard body, of scholarship. The form seemed best suited to my double purpose in writing this book: to point up the systematic bias of, as well as to make a modest contribution to, the extant literature on the Israel–Palestine conflict.
Perhaps the most memorable passages of Leon Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed8 are those devoted to the ‘friends of the Soviet Union’: that claque of left-liberal intellectuals that served up one apologia after another for Stalin’s crimes. Michael Walzer is one of the best-known ‘friends of Israel’. Walzer’s intellectual odyssey offers an instructive insight into the etiology of apologetics for Israel.9
In his early works – notably Just and Unjust Wars10 – Walzers defense of Israel is embedded in a universal ethic. The task was easy enough since a critical literature on Israel barely existed and Walzer, in any event, was able to pass scholarly muster with the barest reference to any literature at all: Israel’s case was seemingly so unimpeachable that facts were almost beside the point.
Beginning in the late 1970s (but especially after the Lebanon War), new scholarship became available which cast Israel and the Zionist legacy generally in a much harsher light than hitherto. Paralleling these literary revelations were the practical, political ones of Israel’s brutal occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Defending Israel with reference to the ordinary standards of right and wrong proved increasingly difficult. Symptomatically, Walzer jettisoned the liberal project – most famously in Spheres of Justice11 – as he argued that there was no universal moral code but, rather, only ethnically specific clusters of ‘shared understandings’: one ‘national “family”’ cannot be judged by applying the ‘shared understandings’ of another, and – more important – there is no common language to morally adjudicate between ‘national “families”’ should a conflict arise. Substantive moral judgments are strictly reflexive. The moral universe inhabited by a ‘national “family”’ is separate and disparate, homogeneous and enclosed. The liberation of one nation, as Walzer suggests in Exodus and Revolution,12 is not at all tainted if achieved at the expense of another nation’s extermination. Each ‘national “family”’ judges for itself according to its own peculiar standards and exigencies what is just and what is not. Incommensurate, juxtaposed ‘national narratives’ thus displaced in Walzer the embracive notion of ‘just and unjust wars’.
Culminating Walzer’s rupture with liberalism is The Company of Critics.13 Walzer – like the fascist ideologues that Julien Benda chastised in The Treason of the Intellectuals — now professes that not only is there no universally applicable standard of justice but that, even if one were contrived, the ‘connected’ social critic would still privilege his ‘own’ people. Asked to explain his silence as France waged a bloody, colonial war in Algeria, the French-Algerian writer, Albert Camus, replied: ‘I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother above justice.’ Walzer takes Camus’s apothegm as his credo. Only a hopelessly estranged intellectual would valuate abstract moral principles above the flesh and blood of one’s kith and kin. Thus, Walzer’s bêtes noires are Sartre and de Beauvoir for attaching equal weight to an Arab life as to a French one during the Algerian war and, especially, Rosa Luxemburg, for displaying the same compassion for a tormented African as for a tormented Jew. For Israel’s ‘friends’, the ring of Walzer’s message is as welcome as it is familiar: to be ‘connected’ is to ask, ‘Is it good for the Jews?’14
More from sorrow than anger, a dear friend reflected one night as we sat in his Hebron home that ‘history will not forgive what was done to the innocent people of Palestine’. I am less certain about what history will do: after all, it depends on who does the writing – the conqueror or the conquered. But I do not for a moment doubt what history should do. I once heard someone I greatly admire and respect lecture on her experiences in the Warsaw Ghetto and the Nazi death camps. Asked afterwards her views on the Middle East conflict, my mother briefly replied, ‘What crime did the Palestinians commit except to be born in Palestine?’ That is the core reality lost in all the fabricated images of the Israel-Palestine conflict. The great offense of the Palestinians was that they refused to commit auto-dispossession; they balked at ‘clearing out’ for the Jews. It is perhaps true that the common ethical code joining humanity is – at present, at any rate – a fairly rudimentary one; but one does not need more than such a rudimentary standard to measure that the people of Palestine have fallen victim to a colossal injustice. And I fail to see any redeeming virtue in ‘connecting’ with the perpetrators of that injustice as against the victims of it. Jules Roy, also a French–Algerian writer, answered Camus: ‘It is not a matter of choosing one’s mother above justice. It is a matter of loving justice as much as one’s mother.’15
As the ample scholarly apparatus to this book attests, the plea of ‘not knowing’ cannot in good faith be entered at history’s bar. Those who want to know can know the truth; at all events, enough of it to draw the just conclusion. The mea culpa of Hitler’s adjutant, Albert Speer, applies with equal force to the case at hand:
Whether I knew or did not know, or how much or how little I knew, is totally unimportant when I consider what horrors I ought to have known about and what conclusions would have been the natural ones to draw from the little I did know. Those who ask me are fundamentally expecting me to offer justifications. But I have none. No apologies are possible.16
Indeed, the Germans could point in extenuation to the severity of penalties for speaking out against the crimes of state. What excuse do we have?17
Norman G. Finkelstein
September 1994, New York City