The Warped Mirror: What's left: now and then

The current issue of the journal World Affairs features a fascinating article that looks back at a time "When the Left Loved Israel". 

The authors of the piece, Ronald and Allis Radosh, focus on the flagship publication of the American left, The Nation, and highlight how much the magazine's stance towards Israel has changed: nowadays, its editorial board includes people like Richard Falk, who thinks comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany are entirely justified;  but at the time when the Nazis were in power, The Nation was led by the remarkable Freda Kirchwey who made sure that "no journal of opinion or media outlet campaigned more vigorously and vocally for Israel's creation."

The current Nation editor Katrina vanden Heuvel argued in a response to the article by Ronald and Allis Radosh  that much has changed since the days of Freda Kirchwey's energetic campaign on behalf of Israel. While vanden Heuvel acknowledges that the authors "do a pretty good job describing Freda Kirchwey and The Nation's important role in the establishment of the state of Israel in the aftermath of the Holocaust", she claims that they "forget that the policies pursued by Israel today are not what its founders and supporters envisioned." According to vanden Heuvel, the changed "context" explains the very different stance of The Nation:

When Kirchwey was writing, Israel was fighting for its survival; it was not engaging in a self-destructive occupation that even Israeli conservatives believe will eventually undermine its character and security. Like many people who care about the future of Israel, The Nation is concerned that short-sighted policies are destroying the possibility of a two-state solution from being realized. ... the Radoshes piece is emblematic of a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt an unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel, then you're anti-Israel. But for true friends, that should not be the measure of our relationship with Israel."

The argument advanced here is obviously problematic, because there are many Israelis and Diaspora Jews who are left of the Likud, but nonetheless definitely "pro-Israel". So vanden Heuvel is clearly wrong to claim that in order to qualify as a "true friend" of Israel, one would have to adopt "an unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel". However, what would indeed be expected of a "true friend" of Israel is an acknowledgement that when it comes to the question of how a two-state solution can be realized, it is not just Israeli policies that deserve criticism.

It is also worthwhile to ask if the "context" has really changed as much as vanden Heuvel would like her readers to believe. When you read the Radoshes' account of the issues that Kirchwey had to address in her fight for the establishment of a Jewish state and the arguments she advanced for her cause, you could easily think you were following a current debate on an internet forum. Take for example the question whether it really served America's interest to support a Jewish state - back in Kirchwey's days, just as today, there were concerns that this might negatively impact America's standing in the Arab world and its access to Middle Eastern oil. As the Radoshes aptly note, Kirchwey countered these concerns with "arguments to come a half-century later" when she objected to the tendency to pander to the ruling elements among the Arabs, "even at the cost of defending a decadent, feudal, and hierarchical social system;" she also argued "that the Jewish community in Palestine was 'the only democratic community in the feudal Middle East,' and hence could play a 'leavening influence in spreading democracy' throughout the region."

And then there was the question of a "one-state solution", which is currently again a quite popular subject. The arguments against this "solution" marshaled back in the 1940s by Kirchwey are still valid and thus often found in current debates. While she acknowledged that the idea might have "a strong democratic appeal," she argued that in a bi-national state, "conflict would inevitably develop between two peoples whose cultural and industrial development is on such contrasting levels and whose approach to social and political problems is so different." She also noted that there was nothing "to justify confidence in the attitude of the Arab states towards minorities in their population" and she pointed out that the treatment of Jews, Lebanese, Christian Copts, and Armenians offered a "striking refutation" of any Arab assurances to respect the rights of minorities.

This is certainly a "context" that hasn't changed much, but it is something that nowadays many self-described progressive leftists would be loath to mention. The same is true for another issue which Kirchwey highlighted, but which has since become a veritable taboo subject for anybody who cares about progressive credentials: the influence of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem on Palestinian and Arab politics. According to the Radoshes,

The exposure of the role played by Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini in the affairs of Arab Palestine was probably The Nation's most important revelation. Newly published histories, such as Matthias Küntzel's Jihad and Jew-Hatred and Klaus Gensicke's Der Mufti von Jerusalem und die Nationalsozialisten, have detailed the Mufti's wartime relationship with Hitler, and his role in support of the Nazis while living in exile in Germany from 1941 to 1945. Kirchwey presented much the same evidence and material in 1947."

The unacknowledged legacy of the Mufti remains destructive to this day, since it is reflected in the openly anti-Semitic passages of the Hamas charter and in the vicious glorification of violence against Jews by radical Islamists and other militant Palestinian factions.Yet, very different from Kirchwey's times, it is now considered particularly "progressive" to pretend that this legacy doesn't exist.

The critical, if not hyper-critical attitude towards Israel that is nowadays often expressed on the pages of The Nation can therefore not simply be explained with a changed "context". To be sure, Israel has become a vibrant country and a formidable military power, but the fact that the Jewish state still faces many serious threats is not, as the current editor of The Nation would have it, simply due to "a self-destructive occupation" that Israel could easily end if it only chose to do so. Arguably, the root of the problem has changed less than the attitudes in some leftist circles: back in the 1940's, Kirchwey energetically campaigned for a Jewish state, but some sixty years later, many on the left are ready to accept that even a supposedly moderate Palestinian leader like Mahmoud Abbas still balks at the idea that any negotiated two-state solution would require the Palestinians to recognize Israel as a Jewish state.