Israel Through (Genuinely) Liberal Eyes. Part 2
As in science, the same set of facts viewed through the prisms of different paradigms will give rise to radically opposed conclusions. When it comes to Israel, most Jews (and doubtless many non-Jews) begin from what might be called the empowerment paradigm.
As Hazony explains it, Auschwitz was brought about because of "Jewish dependence on the military protection of others;" a statehood based on the national particularism of the Jews therefore provides the escape route from future brutalities.
Israel's foes, however, use a competing paradigm to understand the same set of facts.
In their eyes, the solution to Auschwitz is not the national particularism that, as Nazi Germany supposedly proved, leads ineluctably to the camp's gates. The solution is a post-national paradigm.
If in the first paradigm, as Hazony provocatively summarizes it, Israel is the opposite of Auschwitz, in the second, it is Auschwitz.
One might expect that Hazony would locate this second paradigm within the intellectual trends that blazed through European and American universities following the Second World War, particularly the New Left with its disdain for western colonialism.
Actually, he fingers a different, and rather surprising, culprit: Immanuel Kant's treatise Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch, a text much loved by liberal theorists of international relations.
In Perpetual Peace, Kant's idea of the Rechtstaat, or lawful, constitutional state, is universalized so that it sweeps up all the self-interested sovereign states into a benevolent global confederation.
According to Hazony, Israel's Kantian adversaries regard this kind of arrangement - and not the brutish, Hobbesian universe of independent nation states which Israel represents par excellence - as the best guarantee against a future Auschwitz.
Hazony had the recently deceased historian Tony Judt uppermost in mind in making this point. And Judt, it should be emphasized, was distinguished from the vast majority of academic vilifiers of Israel by his anti-communist credentials and liberal anchoring.
That is why the striking feature of Judt's infamous New York Review of Booksessay, Israel: The Alternative, was not his echoing of standard tropes about occupation and apartheid, but his rather Kantian-sounding conclusion: "[Israel] has imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law... Israel, in short, is an anachronism."
Kuhn would argue that for a paradigm to give way, it has to be viewed as an anachronism. Hazony believes that the Kantian paradigm - as employed by Judt - is in the ascendant, so that Israel and its supporters appear to be stubbornly resisting their inevitable obsolescence.
What we therefore need to do, Hazony counsels, is begin the difficult work of constructing a new paradigm. This requires not public relations droids, but serious scholars able to recognize that the results of their endeavors may not manifest for a generation or more.
Hazony's diagnosis is both novel and brilliant. But I am not convinced.
This is Part 2 in a 4-part series of essays by Ben Cohen examining the philosophy and motivations behind international delegitimization campaigns against the state of Israel. His starting point is a critique of Israeli scholar Yoram Hazony’s essay, Israel Through European Eyes.
- Read the next part, Israel Through (Genuinely) Liberal Eyes. Part 3
- Read the first essay, Israel Through (Genuinely) Liberal Eyes. Part 1
