Reappraisals (48 page)

In many parts of the world this is in danger of becoming a self-fulfilling assertion: Israel’s reckless behavior and its insistent identification of all criticism with anti-Semitism is now the leading source of anti-Jewish sentiment in Western Europe and much of Asia. But the traditional corollary—if anti-Jewish feeling is linked to dislike of Israel, then right-thinking people should rush to Israel’s defense—no longer applies. Instead, the ironies of the Zionist dream have come full circle: For tens of millions of people in the world today, Israel is indeed the state of all the Jews. And thus, reasonably enough, many observers believe that one way to take the sting out of rising anti-Semitism in the suburbs of Paris or the streets of Jakarta would be for Israel to give the Palestinians back their land.

If Israel’s leaders have been able to ignore such developments, it is in large measure because they have hitherto counted upon the unquestioning support of the United States—the one country in the world where the claim that anti-Zionism = anti-Semitism is still echoed not only in the opinions of many Jews but also in the public pronouncements of mainstream politicians and the mass media. But this lazy, ingrained confidence in unconditional American approval—and the moral, military, and financial support that accompanies it—may prove to be Israel’s undoing.

For something is changing in the United States. To be sure, it was only a few short years ago that Prime Minister Sharon’s advisers could gleefully celebrate their success in dictating to President George W. Bush the terms of a public statement approving Israel’s illegal settlements. No U.S. congressman has yet proposed reducing or rescinding the $3 billion paid annually to Israel (20 percent of the total U.S. foreign aid budget) which has helped sustain the Israeli defense budget and cover the cost of settlement construction in the West Bank. And Israel and the United States appear increasingly bound together in a symbiotic embrace whereby the actions of each party exacerbate their common unpopularity abroad—and thus their ever-closer association in the eyes of critics.

But whereas Israel has no choice but to look to America—it has no other friends, at best only the conditional affection of the enemies of its enemies (such as India)—the United States is a Great Power; and Great Powers have interests that sooner or later transcend the local obsessions of even the closest of their client states and satellites. It seems to me of no small significance that the recent essay on “The Israel Lobby” by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt has aroused so much public interest and debate. Mearsheimer and Walt are prominent senior academics of impeccable conservative credentials. It is true that—by their own account—they could still not have published their damning indictment of the influence of the Israel lobby on U.S. foreign policy in a major U.S.-based journal (it appeared in the
London Review of Books
); but the point is that ten years ago they would not—and probably could not—have published it at all. And while the debate that has ensued may generate more heat than light, it is of great significance: As Dr. Johnson said of female preachers, it is not well done, but one is amazed to see it done, at all.

The fact is that the disastrous Iraq invasion and its aftermath are beginning to engineer a sea change in foreign policy debate here in the U.S. It is becoming clear to prominent thinkers across the political spectrum—from erstwhile neoconservative interventionists like Francis Fukuyama to hard-nosed realists like Mearsheimer—that in recent years the United States has suffered a catastrophic loss of international political influence and an unprecedented degradation of its moral image. The country’s foreign undertakings have been self-defeating and even irrational. There is going to be a long work of repair ahead, above all in Washington’s dealings with economically and strategically vital communities and regions from the Middle East to Southeast Asia. And this reconstruction of the country’s foreign image and influence cannot hope to succeed while its foreign policy is tied by an umbilical cord to the needs and interests (if that is what they are) of one small Middle Eastern country of very little relevance to America’s long-term concerns—a country that is, in the words of the Mearsheimer/Walt essay, a strategic burden: “a liability in the war on terror and the broader effort to deal with rogue states.”

That essay is thus a straw in the wind—an indication of the likely direction of future domestic debate here in the U.S. about the country’s peculiar ties to Israel. Of course it has been met by a firestorm of criticism from the usual suspects—and, just as the authors anticipated, they have been charged with anti-Semitism (or with advancing the interests of anti-Semitism: “objective anti-Semitism,” as it might be). But it is striking to me how few people with whom I have spoken now take that accusation seriously, so predictable has it become. This is bad for Jews—since it means that genuine anti-Semitism may also in time cease to be taken seriously, thanks to the Israel lobby’s abuse of the term. But it is worse for Israel.

This new willingness to take one’s distance from Israel is not confined to foreign policy specialists. As a teacher I have also been struck in recent years by a sea change in the attitude of students. One example among many: At New York University in 2005 I was teaching a class on twentieth-century Europe and trying to explain to young Americans the importance of the Spanish Civil War in the political memory of Europeans and why Franco’s Spain had such a special place in our moral imagination: as a reminder of lost struggles, a symbol of oppression in an age of liberalism and freedom, and a land of shame that people boycotted for its crimes and repression. I cannot think, I told the students, of any country that occupies such a pejorative space in democratic public consciousness today. You are wrong, one young woman replied: What about Israel? To my great surprise most of the class (including many of the sizable Jewish contingent) nodded their approval. The times they are indeed a-changing.

That Israel can now stand comparison with the Spain of General Franco in the eyes of young Americans ought to come as a shock and an eleventh-hour wake-up call to Israelis. Nothing lasts forever, and it seems likely to me that in later years we shall look back upon the years since 1973 as an era of tragic illusion for Israel: years that the locust ate, consumed by the bizarre notion that, whatever it chose to do or demand, Israel could count indefinitely upon the unquestioning support of the United States and would never risk encountering any backlash. This blinkered arrogance is tragically summed up in an assertion by Shimon Peres in 2003, on the very eve of the calamitous war that will in retrospect be seen, I believe, to have precipitated the onset of America’s alienation from its Israeli ally: “The campaign against Saddam Hussein is a must.”

From one perspective Israel’s future is bleak. Not for the first time, a Jewish state finds itself on the vulnerable periphery of someone else’s empire: overconfident in its own righteousness; willfully blind to the danger that its indulgent excesses might ultimately provoke its imperial mentor to the point of irritation and beyond; and heedless of its own failure to make any other friends. To be sure, the modern Israeli state has big weapons—very big weapons. But what it can do with them except make more enemies? However, modern Israel also has options. Precisely because the country is an object of such universal mistrust and resentment—because people expect so little from Israel today—a truly statesmanlike shift in its policies (dismantling of major settlements, opening unconditional negotiations with Palestinians, calling Hamas’s bluff by offering its leaders something serious in return for recognition of Israel and a cease-fire) could have disproportionately beneficial effects.

But such a radical realignment of Israeli strategy would entail a difficult reappraisal of every cliché and illusion under which the country and its political elite have nestled for most of their life. It would entail acknowledging that Israel no longer has any special claim upon international sympathy or indulgence; that the United States won’t always be there; that weapons and walls can no more preserve Israel forever than they preserved the German Democratic Republic or white South Africa; that colonies are always doomed unless you are willing to expel or exterminate the indigenous population. Other countries and their leaders have understood this and managed comparable realignments: Charles de Gaulle realized that France’s settlement in Algeria (far older and better established than Israel’s West Bank colonies) was a military and moral disaster for his country, and in an exercise of outstanding political courage he acted upon that insight and withdrew. But when de Gaulle came to that realization he was a mature statesman, nearly seventy years old. Israel cannot afford to wait that long. At the age of fifty-eight the time has come for it to grow up.

Part Four

THE AMERICAN (HALF-) CENTURY

CHAPTER XVIII

An American Tragedy? The Case of Whittaker Chambers

In the fall of 1993, Maria Schmidt, a young Hungarian historian in Budapest, phoned me in New York. She had a question. “Tell me about ‘Alger Hiss’?” I explained as briefly as I could. “You mean that there are people in the United States who still believe that he was telling the truth?” Certainly, I replied, and not least among my fellow professors. “In that case,” she said, “I am going to send you something that I have found.” Schmidt is a historian of contemporary Hungary. She had gained access to the wartime and postwar archives of the Hungarian Communist Party, and there, while combing through communications and reports that passed between Hungarian secret policemen and Communist Party leaders, she had come across the name “Alger Hiss” a number of times. Assuming it to be an alias—the Hiss case does not figure prominently in European history lessons—she was surprised to discover that a man had actually existed by that name (and was at that time still alive). Schmidt’s evidence has since been corroborated by material retrieved from Soviet and American government sources. For those who do not believe in fairies, the Hiss affair is now closed.

What remains is the altogether more interesting case of Whittaker Chambers. The events that brought Whittaker Chambers to public notice are well known, and in a fascinating biography Sam Tanenhaus recapitulatesthem in gripping detail.
¹⁵
A courier for the Communist underground from 1932 until 1938, Chambers “defected” from the party and told his story in 1939 to Adolf A. Berle Jr., an assistant secretary of state in the Roosevelt administration and the president’s liaison for intelligence matters. Berle passed along Chambers’s information, which included the names of the party’s sources in the American government, among them Alger Hiss, a rising star in the State Department who had served in the early Roosevelt years in the Agricultural Adjustment Administration.

For some years nothing more was done, though Chambers was investigated and interrogated by the FBI in 1941 and again after the war. Then, in July 1948, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) called Elizabeth Bentley to testify. Bentley, who had succeeded Chambers as the underground Communist courier in Washington, D.C., offered testimony that for the first time corroborated Chambers’s earlier information. Chambers was called before the committee. His own testimony implicated Alger Hiss and seven others as members of a Communist network operating in the inner circles of the New Deal administrations. At that time, Chambers did not claim to have knowledge of any espionage undertaken by the group, nor could he furnish documentary evidence in support of his testimony. Belonging to the Communist Party in the 1930s was not in itself a criminal activity.

Hiss, too, was called to testify before the committee. He made a good showing and denied ever having known Chambers. In later sessions Hiss conceded that he had indeed known him “under a different name”; and Hiss’s own version of their meetings in the 1930s contained a number of contradictory details. All the same, a series of encounters between the two men, in closed and open sessions of the committee, did little to advance the case against Hiss. But when Chambers repeated his charges—that Hiss was a Communist and might still be a Communist— on a radio program, without benefit of the legal protection afforded by the House hearings, Hiss (confident that Chambers had no proof with which to back his assertions in court) sued him for slander on September 27, 1948.

Obliged now to come up with something more than his recollections, even if they were confirmed by at least one other ex-Communist witness, Chambers finally recanted his earlier denial and affirmed that Alger Hiss and others had been engaged in espionage. He backed up his claim by retrieving from their hiding place documents and microfilms that he had stashed away at the time of his apostasy in 1938 as insurance against Soviet retribution. This material was temporarily reburied in a hollowed-out pumpkin on Chambers’s farm (hence the notorious “pumpkin papers”) before being dramatically offered up to HUAC in evidence. HUAC then passed the material, reluctantly, to a grand jury, and on December 15, 1948, Alger Hiss was indicted on two counts of perjury: for denying under oath that he had seen Chambers after January 1, 1937, and for claiming, also under oath, that he had never transmitted government documents to him. On both these points, the evidence of the new material was decisive. Hiss could not be charged with espionage, since the statute of limitations had passed, but the charge of perjury stood in for such an accusation.