Israel Through (Genuinely) Liberal Eyes. Part 4
It is precisely this phenomenon of "Jews Behaving Normally," as my friend and co-writer Eamonn McDonagh describes it, that so excises Israel's enemies.
Why they think this way is a complex matter. But I would reiterate that the liberal, post-national, European Union-friendly paradigm which Judt used to horsewhip Israel is not the principal explanation.
I would venture elsewhere, firstly into the legacy of New Left thinking about colonialism.
These disparate factions were beautifully parodied in a Dissent essay by Irving Howe as "sometimes looking like kamikaze radicalism, sometimes like white Malcolmism, sometimes like black Maoism." The net result was a separation of the world into allies and enemies, with the identity and social position of a group determining which camp it belonged to.
Increasingly after 1967, Israel - seen as a creature of western colonialism, demonized in countless Soviet pamphlets as the twin of South Africa's apartheid regime - was placed in the enemy camp. But that didn't stop the New Left from celebrating the idea of national resistance. Indeed, rather than opposing state-building projects, the New Left actively supported them, so long as they were firmly tied to decolonization.
Needless to say, these were not juridical states in the Kantian sense, but corrupt, oppressive autocracies. And if you want a symbol of the degree to which elements of the left degenerated as a result of this romance, look no further than the spectacle of German and Palestinian terrorists landing a hijacked plane in Idi Amin's Uganda in 1976.
Antisemitism, which already enjoyed a pedigree on the left at least from the nineteenth century, is a second, no less important, factor.
Again, the spread throughout the 1960s, 70s and 80s of such choice Soviet tropes as the collaboration of Zionism with Nazism, prepared the ground for today's onslaught, which has imported many of these themes into the mainstream.
What we are confronting here is an ideology, one that is malleable and therefore more receptive of traditional antisemitic themes - witness film director Oliver Stone's recent outburst - yet never deviates from fundamental principles.
In that regard, I am reminded of the distinction between science and ideology elucidated by Karl Popper in his critique of Thomas Kuhn: the test of whether a theory is scientific lies in its falsifiability- its receptiveness to facts which undermine its claims - rather than its confirmability. Because endless confirmation, irrespective of facts, is what ideologies do, and partly explains why they are so hard to defeat.
Yoram Hazony is supremely correct when he says that work on constructing a new paradigm for Israel must begin now. I would urge him, as he does so, not to cast aside Kant, with his emphasis on reason and his insistence on liberal government.
Like Afghanistan, like Iraq, Israel is one of the great tests of the post 9-11 era: whether we are willing to spread the core principles of liberty and whether we are prepared to embrace a natural ally in that same spirit.
This is Part 4 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 criticism of Israeli scholar Yoram Hazony’s essay, Israel Through European Eyes.
* Read the previous essay, Israel Through (Genuinely) Liberal Eyes. Part 3
