The Warped Mirror: The case against Israel

The two memorial days observed by Israelis in the week before the country's Independence Day - Yom Hashoah, dedicated to the memory of the Holocaust and the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, and Yom Hazikaron, honoring Israel's fallen soldiers - highlight a central facet of Jewish existence: Jews were not wanted in Europe, and they were not wanted in the Middle East. Theodor Herzl hoped that the establishment of a Jewish state would put an end to the hate against Jews, but this hope has yet to be fulfilled. 

With Israel getting ready to mark its 60th anniversary, it would certainly be most unfair not to acknowledge that there are many around the world who wish the country well. But at the same time it is all too obvious that Israel remains the only country in the world whose right to exist is routinely called into question. If it was just fanatic jihadists who oppose a Jewish state for reasons of religious perversion, one could conclude that, as worrisome as the phenomenon might be, it was still limited to those willing to endorse violent extremism. However, questioning Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state has become truly fashionable among self-described Western progressives who would often claim to be the vanguard of humanitarian righteousness.

Accusing those progressive zealots of anti-Semitism will only elicit a dismissive sneer, because the left of the left feels immune to this old disease. Yet, their arguments give them away: while they claim to be "just" anti-Zionists or to do nothing but "just" criticize Israel's policies, what they are saying boils down to singling out Jews - Jews shouldn't have a state of their own, they shouldn’t exercise their right to self-defense, and they really shouldn't be where they are.

It is arguably a bitter irony that Israel's vulnerability to such vicious attacks is partly due to one of the central tenets of Herzl's Zionism. In Herzl's vision, a Jewish state had to be attained primarily by means of diplomacy which would result in international legitimacy. This crucial element of Herzl's idealism is highlighted in Jeffrey Goldberg's controversial piece in the May issue of the Atlantic Monthly magazine. Goldberg recounts that Israel's ambassador in Washington, Sallai Meridor, told him once that at the first Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, Herzl asked Max Nordau, the essayist and critic who served as his deputy, "to come up with one sentence of what Zionism is to achieve. He wrote that Zionism is meant to create for the Jewish people a homeland in the land of Israel, assured by international legitimacy. One sentence, the whole story. It's about Jewish people, about defining the community of Jews as a nation, one in the family of nations. Second, it's not a state for all citizens, but for the Jewish people. Third, it's in the land of Israel, but not necessarily all the land of Israel. And it has to be secured by international legitimacy." 
 
But the commendable quest for international legitimacy proved problematic: was international legitimacy achieved in 1922 when the League of Nations adopted the Balfour Declaration of 1917 in the terms set out for the British Mandate in Palestine? Or was it achieved in 1947 when the UN voted to partition the Mandate territory into one Arab and one Jewish state? Or perhaps Israel has not yet achieved international legitimacy because those who opposed the UN decision and refused to set up the state they were granted should be entitled to have a veto, enabling them to deny the Jewish state international legitimacy as long as they see fit?

It is of course this latter view that underlies the case against Israel advanced by those who either argue that a Jewish state can never have legitimacy or insist that its legitimacy is contingent on the establishment of a Palestinian state - and activists who campaign for a "one-state solution" make clever use of this notion.

In Israel's quest for international legitimacy, the goalposts thus keep moving or are forever out of reach. The unilateral disengagement championed by Ariel Sharon and his Kadima party was one attempt to confront this challenge. Given the grim consequences of Israel's withdrawal from Gaza, it is obvious that it does not make sense to contemplate anything similar for the Westbank. At the same time there is no escaping the fact that Israel's international legitimacy is undermined as long as Israel is occupying the Westbank.

But there is also no reason to be transfixed by this dilemma. First, those who shout loudest when it comes to questioning Israel's international legitimacy would do well to look in the mirror: how legitimate was it of Britain to re-interpret the terms of the Mandate to suit political pressures? How legitimate was it when the British White Paper of 1939 restricted Jewish immigration to Palestine while acknowledging fully that "His Majesty's Government are conscious of the present unhappy plight of large numbers of Jews who seek refuge from certain European countries"? Yes, already back then, terrorism paid. As the White Paper declares: "The methods employed by Arab terrorists against fellow Arabs and Jews alike must receive unqualified condemnation. But it cannot be denied that fear of indefinite Jewish immigration is widespread amongst the Arab population and that this fear has made possible disturbances which have given a serious setback to economic progress, depleted the Palestine exchequer, rendered life and property insecure, and produced a bitterness between the Arab and Jewish populations which is deplorable between citizens of the same country."

And of course one could also question how legitimate it was when the Arab League sent their armies to deny the Jews the state that the UN had granted them; or how legitimate it was when Arab states deprived their own Jewish citizens of their rights and possessions and forced them to abandon their ancient communities. With regard to more recent developments, one could also question how legitimate it was when the Palestinians chose to respond to the negotiations at Camp David and Taba with a wave of murderous violence.

But all these question are of course irrelevant for those who are eager to claim that ultimate justice is on the side of progressive pro-Palestinians who devote themselves to making the case against the Jewish state, against its right to self-defense and its right to exist. Given all this, it should hardly be surprising that the Israeli writer Yossi Klein Halevy recently announced "The end of the 'guilty Israeli'".