Below are excerpts from two columns against intervention in Libya from nearly two weeks ago. One is by Michael Walzer, the just war theorist, and the second by Pat Buchanan. Read the pieces, then ask yourself, if you knew nothing else about the authors, which one of them you would conclude was the political thinker? Walzer comes across as a man of feeling with the most ad-lib notions of prudence, practical possibility and the limits that history may set on the actions of a great power. Buchanan (It's Their War, Not Ours) comes across as a no-nonsense judge of the situation.
Why the disparity? (hardly a measure of the talents and qualities of the two writers in other settings). Walzer has Israel on his mind. Buchanan does not.
Michael Walzer at Dissent, March 7:
The point of calling in an army would be to overthrow the dictator and help move Libya toward a democratic transformation. And that is just the kind of intervention that [John Stuart] Mill opposed and that international law rules out....
What if it looks as if Qaddafi is going to win? Would we be willing to go all the way with Mill and say that if the rebels lose, it’s because the country isn’t ready, isn’t “fit,” for democratic government? I don’t think I am tough enough for that. But if there is to be, somewhere down the road, a military intervention, let it not be an American intervention. Ideally, I suppose, it should be an Italian intervention. According to post-colonial theory, the Italians are responsible for everything bad that has happened in Libya since they left. But if they tried to fix things, it wouldn’t be a post-post-colonial effort; it would look very much like the old colonialism. In any case, they could act effectively only as part of a NATO force, and NATO is second-worst to the United States as a potential intervener. United Nations auspices would provide a little cover, but it would almost certainly be vetoed in the Security Council. So why not call in the Egyptian and Tunisian armies? A high-tech force isn’t necessary here; with logistical help, these two armies could do the job. And who knows? Promoting democracy in Libya might push them to do the same thing, a bit more eagerly than they are doing now, in their own countries.
When intervention is necessary, neighbors are the best substitute for insiders. But when does “necessity” kick in—when the rebels have been utterly defeated, or when they are on the brink of defeat, or when too many of them are being killed? I would like to say, we will know necessity when we see it—except that so many people see it too soon, and so many never see it. We should begin that argument right now.
2. Buchanan at antiwar.com, March 8:
Before the United States plunges into a third war in the Middle East, let us think this one through, as we did not the last two.
What would be the purpose of establishing a no-fly zone over Libya? According to advocates, to keep Moammar Gadhafi from using his air force to attack civilians...
What is the theme, where is the consistency in U.S. policy?
We backed the dictators Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, who were as autocratic as Gadhafi, whom we demand be deposed.
We support the dictator in Yemen, the absolute monarch in Saudi Arabia, the king in Bahrain, the sultan in Oman, and the emir in Kuwait, but back pro-democracy demonstrators in Iran, though there have been more elections in Iran than in all those other nations put together.
America has taken a terrible beating for what she has done and tried and failed to do in that region for a decade.
Let the “world community” take the lead on this one.
Tell them, this time, the Yanks are not coming.
An Exception to the Rules
Noam Chomsky
Just and Unjust Wars by Michael Walzer
Basic Books, $15.00
in Inquiry, 17 April 1978
When is the resort to violence justified in international affairs? What acts
are legitimate in the conduct of war? These questions raise difficult problems
of ethical judgment and historical analysis. Michael Walzer insists, quite
correctly, that beyond merely "describ[ing] the judgments and justifications
that people commonly put forward, [we] can analyze these moral claims, seek
out their coherence, lay bare the principles that they exemplify." His aim is
to develop a certain conception of our "moral world," and draw from it both
specific judgments on historical events and operative criteria for resolving
future dilemmas.
There are certain beliefs on these matters that are so widely held as to
deserve to be called "standard." With regard to the question of resorting to
violence, the standard doctrine holds that it is justified in self-defense or
as a response to imminent armed attack, often construed in the words of Daniel
Webster in the Caroline case, which Walzer quotes: "instant, overwhelming,
leaving no choice of means, and no moment of deliberation." This part of the
standard doctrine Walzer calls "the legalist paradigm." With regard to the
exercise of force, another part of the standard doctrine constitutes what
Walzer calls "the war convention," consisting of such principles as, for
instance, that prisoners should not be massacred and civilians should not be
the direct objects of attack.
The standard doctrine, which is codified in various international conventions,
holds that both the resort to war and the means employed in warfare fall
within the realm of moral discourse. There has been extensive discussion of
these issues in the context of the Vietnam War, the conflict that prompted
Walzer’s concern. While the standard doctrine is regularly violated, it
remains a worthwhile endeavor to evaluate and refine it.
Walzer argues that the legalist paradigm is too restrictive in certain
respects. In other respects, however, he interprets it strictly, as he does
the war convention. Walzer takes the anti-Axis effort in Europe in World War
II to be "the paradigm…of a justified struggle"; Nazism, he believes, "lies at
the outer limits of exigency, at a point where we are likely to find ourselves
united in fear and abhorrence." Nevertheless, he condemns as illegitimate
under the legalist paradigm Churchill’s decision to mine the territorial
waters of neutral Norway in order to prevent ore shipments to Nazi Germany,
and he considers the terror bombing of German cities to be a serious violation
of the war convention. As these examples illustrate, he construes the standard
doctrine strictly, even in the extreme case of the struggle against Nazism.
Walzer points out that it is impossible within the confines of his study to
present an elaborate historical argument, but to me, at least, the above
conclusions seem reasonable. Furthermore, Walzer is right to challenge widely
accepted views, for example with regard to terror bombing. It is enough to
recall the fundamental moral flaw of the Nuremberg tribunal, graphically
revealed by Telford Taylor’s observation in Nuremberg and Vietnam, that
"there was no basis for criminal charges against German or Japanese" leaders
for aerial bombardment because "both sides had played the terrible game of
urban destruction — the Allies far more successfully." As it turns out, the
operational definition of a "crime of war" is a criminal act of which the
defeated enemies, but not the victors, are guilty. The consequences of this
moral stance were soon to be seen in Korea and Vietnam. It would be naive to
suppose that a serious moral critique would have prevented further criminal
acts of the sort condoned (or ignored) under the Nuremberg principles.
Nevertheless, the example illustrates the seriousness of the enterprise in
which Walzer is engaged.
Even the most profound justification of the standard doctrine would be of
limited import, since it is in any case widely accepted in principle, if not
in practice. Hence the major interest of Walzer’s study lies in the
modifications and refinements he proposes, as in his restrictive
interpretation of the war convention. Since the burden of justification rests
on those who employ force, the still more significant part of his study lies
in those departures from the standard doctrine which advocate its relaxation.
These relate only to the legalist paradigm of the justified use of force.
Walzer suggests four modifications that extend the legalist paradigm. Three of
these revisions "have this form: States can be invaded and wars justly begun
to assist secessionist movements (once they have demonstrated their
representative character), to balance the prior interventions of other powers,
and to rescue people threatened with massacre." These extensions are discussed
under the heading of "humanitarian intervention." Walzer states that "clear
examples of what is called ‘humanitarian intervention’ are very rare. Indeed,
I have not found any, but only mixed cases where the humanitarian motive is
one among several." He cites the Indian invasion of Bangladesh as a possible
example (the only one cited), since "it was a rescue, strictly and narrowly
defined," and the Indian troops "were in and out of the country…quickly."
There then remains to be considered one serious proposal for relaxing the
restrictions of the standard doctrine; and thus much of the significance of
Walzer’s study lies in this crucial case. It is the case of "preemptive
strikes." Walzer accepts "the moral necessity of rejecting any attack that is
merely preventive in character, that does not wait upon and respond to the
willful acts of an adversary" (hence his condemnation of the mining of
Norwegian waters). But he feels that the Caroline doctrine is too narrow.
Preemptive strikes are justified, he proposes, when there is "a manifest
intent to injure, a degree of active preparation that makes that intent a
positive danger, and a general situation in which waiting, or doing anything
other than fighting, greatly magnifies the risk."
A single example is offered: the Israeli preemptive strike of June 5, 1967.
This, Walzer holds, is "a clear case of legitimate anticipation," the only one
cited — in this review of 2500 years of history — to illustrate the point that
states may use military force even prior to the direct use of military force
against them. Israel was "the victim of aggression" in 1967, Walzer claims,
even though no military action had been taken against it. What is more, we can
have "no doubts" about this case, as Walzer states in the following
extraordinary passage:
The Egyptian "challenge" to Israel is thus a clear case of "aggression," on a
par with the direct use of armed force in each of the other cases cited. The
legalist paradigm fails, according to Walzer, because, given the Caroline
doctrine, it does not condone Israel’s response to this "aggression."
Note the crucial nature of this case for Walzer’s argument. In a review
covering 2500 years, Egypt’s 1967 challenge is the single example cited of
"aggression" involving no direct resort to force; nevertheless, it is not an
ambiguous example, but one that raises "no doubts." Israel’s preemptive strike
is the one historical example adduced to illustrate the need to modify the
legalist paradigm to permit "anticipations." Furthermore, this is the only
modification covering supposedly unambiguous historical examples that involves
a relaxation of the standard doctrine. What Walzer is proposing here, as he
notes, is a "major revision of the legalist paradigm. For it means that
aggression can be made out not only in the absence of a military attack or
invasion but in the (probable) absence of any immediate intention to launch
such an attack or invasion." Given the burden carried by this example, a
serious inquiry into the historical facts would certainly appear to be in
order, but Walzer undertakes no such inquiry. He merely asserts that Israeli
anxiety "seems an almost classical example of ‘just fear’ — first, because
Israel really was in danger and second, because [Nasser's] military moves
served no other, more limited goal."
Israeli generals take a rather different view. The commander of the air force
at the time, General Ezer Weizman, stated that he would
The Israeli correspondent of Le Monde, Amnon Kapeliouk, citing corroboratory
statements by General Matityahu Peled and former chief of staff Haim Bar-Lev,
wrote that "no serious argument has been advanced to refute the thesis of the
three generals." This assessment is confirmed by American intelligence
sources, who found no evidence that Egypt was planning an attack and estimated
that Israel would easily win no matter who struck the first blow. The chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff reported to the President on May 26 that Israel
could remain mobilized for two months without serious trouble. "In a military
sense, then, time did not seem to be running out" (William Quandt, Decade of
Decisions).
General Weizman’s justification for the preemptive strike bears comparison to
the argument advanced by Bethmann-Hollweg, the German Chancellor, after the
attack on Belgium in 1914:
Walzer properly dismisses this justification, pointing out that nonmilitary
options had not all been foreclosed and deriding the reference to Germany’s
"highest possession," which he takes to mean "honor and glory" (compare
Weizman’s "scale, spirit and quality"). "The mere augmentation of power,"
Walzer insists, "cannot be a warrant for war or even the beginning of
warrant." No doubt one can find differences, possibly even decisive ones,
between the Israeli and German attacks, or between the Israeli strike and the
Russian invasion of Finland — another clear case of aggression, even though,
as Walzer concedes, the defense of Leningrad from possible future German
attack was at stake and Russia’s invasion after Finnish refusal of territorial
exchange may have saved Leningrad from encirclement when the Nazis did attack.
But two points deserve mention. First, Walzer does not seriously address the
relevant historical background. This is a remarkable oversight given the
crucial role of the Israeli strike in his argument, and given also his
insistence that the Israeli attack on the one hand, and the German and Russian
attacks on the other, are all "clear cases," falling on opposite sides of the
moral divide. Second, a serious analysis of the 1967 case would quickly
reveal that there are indeed doubts and ambiguities, contrary to Walzer’s
claim.
Walzer presents only the Israeli version of events leading to the 1967 war. He
ignores not only the Arab version, but also the well-known analyses of
commentators committed to neither side. He does not mention the Israeli attack
on the Jordanian village of Es-Samu in November 1966, leaving 18 dead, a
"reprisal" after terrorist attacks allegedly originating in Syria (censured by
the UN, including the United States). Nor does he discuss the exchange of fire
on April 7, 1967, which "gave rise to intervention first by Israeli and then
by Syrian aircraft, [then to] the appearance of Israeli planes over the
outskirts of Damascus and to the shooting down of six Syrian planes" with no
Israeli losses (Charles Yost, Foreign Affairs, January 1968; Yost takes this
to have been "the curtain-raiser to the Six-Day War").
Walzer’s unqualified assertion that Nasser’s moves served no more limited goal
than to endanger Israel is sharply at variance with the judgment of many other
observers. Yost, for instance, notes various inflammatory Israeli statements
that "may well have been the spark that ignited the long accumulating tinder"
and discusses the problem that Nasser faced "for his failure to stir at the
time of the Es-Samu and April 7 affairs." Walzer mentions that Egypt expelled
the UN Emergency Force from the Sinai and Gaza and closed the Strait of Tiran
to Israeli shipping. He fails to mention that Israel had never permitted UN
forces on its side of the border and refused the request of the UN
secretary-general to allow them to be stationed there after Egypt ordered
partial evacuation of the UN forces from its territory. (Egypt did not order
the UN forces out of Sharm el Sheikh.) As for the closing of the Strait of
Tiran. if we apply the reasoning that Walzer feels is appropriate in the case
of the German attack on Belgium, we see that there remained unexploited
possibilities for peaceful settlement. For example, the matter might have been
referred to the International Court of Justice, as Egypt had been requesting
since 1957. This proposal was always rejected by Israel, possibly because it
agreed with John Foster Dulles that "there is a certain amount of plausibility
from the standpoint of international law, perhaps, to [the Arab] claims"
(though the United States disagreed with this conclusion).
It also seems that Nasser may have had some legitimate cause for concern when
he heard Levi Eshkol, the Israeli Prime Minister, declare that "we shall hit
when, where, and how we choose," or when he learned that the Israeli chief of
intelligence, General Yariv, had informed the international press that "I
think that the only sure and safe answer to the problem is a military
operation of great size and strength" against Syria. Nasser alluded to these
statements in his May 23 speech, in which he noted various Israeli threats
against Syria. And his concern may have been augmented — quite
understandably — by the memory of the surprise Israeli attack of 1956, at a
time when Egypt was making serious efforts to quiet the border.
My remarks here only scratch the surface of the issue. The point is that the
historical record is far more complex and ambiguous than Walzer makes it out
to be. His statement that Egypt’s "challenge" is a simple and indubitable case
of "aggression," on a par with the Nazi conquests in Europe, can hardly be
taken seriously. Furthermore, he ignores the aftermath of the Israeli attack.
Quite unlike the case of Bangladesh, the Israeli army did not leave. Rather,
it prepared for a continuing occupation, with a clearly stated policy aimed at
the eventual annexation of some areas, the actual annexation of eastern
Jerusalem, and a program of settlement and integration of the occupied
territories — a program that continues in the face of nearly unanimous
international condemnation.
Some 200,000 West Bank Arabs fled during the Israeli attack in 1967, and about
the same number fled or were forcibly expelled after the cease-fire. For many
months afterward, UN Chief of Staff General Odd Bull reports, "The Israelis
encouraged their departure by various means, just as they had in 1948." As
late as the following November, he adds, "There can certainly be no doubt that
many thousands of Arabs at this time fled across the Jordan to the East Bank,
even though there may be no precise evidence of the methods that were employed
to ensure their departure." Thus the land was "liberated" — freed of a large
part of its population. The Israelis instituted a military regime in the
conquered areas that differs from others of the same type primarily in the
favorable press that it has enjoyed in the United States. All of these
subsequent developments seem relevant to an evaluation of the Israeli attack,
as Walzer would surely see the relevance of similar developments in other
cases he discusses.
I focus on this particular example of its crucial role in the structure of
Walzer’s presentation of his "moral world." With this case removed, Walzer is
left with no historical example of any substance to indicate that his
recommended departures from the legalist paradigm are more than
academic — that is, that they cover actual historical events. This is not to
say that the discussion is worthless; even a purely abstract discussion of
these issues is of some interest. But we no longer have "a moral argument with
historical illustrations," as the book’s subtitle states, at least in the
crucial case of relaxing the restrictions of the standard doctrine. Rather,
what we have is a mere moral assertion lacking any connection to clear
historical cases.
Walzer’s analysis of "peacetime reprisals" might also be taken to imply a
relaxation of the standard doctrine. He argues that "reprisals are clearly
sanctioned by the practice of nations, and the (moral) reason behind the
practice seems as strong as ever." The moral argument he presents seems weak;
it barely goes beyond assertion. His single example of a "legitimate reprisal"
again involves Israel: this time the 1968 Israeli raid on the Beirut airport
in which 13 civilian planes were destroyed in retaliation for an attack on an
Israeli plane by two terrorists in Athens. In fact, the reprisal was hardly
efficacious: It "aroused considerable sympathy for the Palestinians in Lebanon
and brought their activities more into the open" (John Cooley, Green March,
Black September), as could have been anticipated. Walzer might have
strengthened his point by drawing some of the natural conclusions of his
position: For example, that it would be quite proper for Cuban commandos to
destroy commercial aircraft at Washington National Airport in reprisal for the
acts of terrorists organized in the United States.
Walzer also gives an example of an illegitimate Israeli reprisal, namely, the
commando attack in which more than 40 villagers were killed in the Jordanian
village of Qibya in 1953, in response to a terrorist murder in Israel that had
no known connection to this village. Walzer concludes that in this case "the
killings were criminal," but the strongest judgment he allows himself is that
"particular Israel responses have in deed been questionable, for it is a hard
matter to know what to do in such cases." Walzer never explains why his
condemnation of terrorist acts against Israel is not similarly nuanced. For
example, in March 1954, 11 Israelis were murdered in a bus in the Negev; it
was the most serious Arab terrorist act since the establishment of the state.
In response, the Israeli army attacked the Jordanian village of Nahaleen
(which was in no way involved), killing nine villagers. Walzer regards the
Israeli retaliation s merely "questionable." But then why was not the original
Arab attack also just "questionable"? Or why not also describe the Israeli
commandos as "thugs and fanatics," Walzer’s term for Arab terrorists (in the
New Republic article from which this account of terrorism is drawn)? The
actual perpetrators of the ambush-massacre of the people on the bus were, as
was known at the time, from a Bedouin tribe that had been driven into the
desert by Israeli troops. More than 7000 of these Bedouins were expelled from
1949 to 1954, as Israel encroached on the demilitarized zones. Surely Walzer
should grant that it is also a "hard matter to know what to do" when people
are driven from their homes and their traditional grazing and watering
grounds, and left destitute in the desert — as it is a "hard matter to know
what to do" when thousands of peasants are expelled from their bulldozed
villages in the same region in the past few years — actions that continue as I
write, though the American press is silent.
Walzer does discuss terrorism, but his account is deeply flawed. He makes the
important point that the tendency to restrict the term "terrorism" to
"revolutionary violence" is "a small victory for the champions of order, among
whom the uses of terror are by no means unknown." It is indeed remarkable to
see how the term has been restricted in recent years so as to exclude
state-organized terrorism. Walzer asserts that "contemporary terrorist
campaigns are most often focused on people whose national existence has been
radically devalued: the Protestants of Northern Ireland, the Jews of Israel,
and so on." He then develops the following "precise historical point: that
terrorism in the strict sense, the random murder of innocent people emerged as
a strategy only in the period after World War II."
His "precise historical point," however, is precisely false, as a look at his
favored example suffices to show. In just three weeks in July 1938, the Irgun
Zvai Leumi, dedicated to the ideals of Menahem Begin’s mentor Ze’ev Jabotinsky
and later headed by Begin himself, killed 76 Arabs in terrorist attacks on
Arab markets and other public places. There were many similar pre-World War II
examples: bombs placed in Arab movie theaters, sniping at Arab quarters and
trains carrying Arabs, and so on. The propagandists of the Jewish terrorist
groups gloried in these triumphs. One of the heroes of the Herut, the party of
the current prime minister of Israel, is a man hanged by the British for
firing on an Arab bus.
(And while the main paramilitary force of the Jewish community in Palestine
did not systematically resort to random terror, it did not disdain it
entirely. To cite one case, the same page of the official history that
describes the Haganah assassination of the orthodox Jewish poet Dr. Israel
Jacob de Haan in 1924 goes on to describe how the Haganah destroyed the house
of an Arab near the wailing wall in Jerusalem in retaliation for harassment of
Jewish worshippers by Arab youths; the bomb caused no injuries "because by
chance the inhabitants of the house were away" [Toldot Hahaganah, the
official history of the Haganah].)
Contrary to Walzer’s claim, random murder of innocent people, is no postwar
invention of the Provisional IRA and the PLO. His point about "people whose
national existence has been radically devalued" is very well-taken — but it
applies to Palestinian Arabs no less than to "the Jews of Israel."
The special place of Israel in Walzer’s "moral world" is also revealed in his
discussion of the war convention — the set of principles that apply once war
is under way. He contrasts the orders given at My Lai with those issued to
Israeli troops entering Nablus during the June 1967 war, citing a book of
conversations among Israeli soldiers. It is perhaps less obvious than he
assumes that this is the most objective source of evidence concerning the
humane practices of the Israeli army. But putting that question aside, he
might have selected other examples from the same book, examples concerning,
say, the village of Latrun, destroyed by Israeli troops, whose inhabitants
were driven into exile. He might have even taken a further step and quoted the
eyewitness account quoted by the Israeli journalist Amos Kenan, describing the
bulldozing of Latrun and neighboring villages under the command of officers
who told their troops, "Why worry about them, they’re only Arabs." He might
have even quoted Kenan’s prophetic conclusion: "The fields were turned to
desolation before our eyes, and the children who dragged themselves along the
road that day, weeping bitterly, will be the fedayeen of 19 years hence."
In another section of the book, Walzer comments briefly on the pacifist
critique of the standard doctrine in an afterword, making the familiar point
that nonviolent measures appeal to "the essential humanity of the enemy," in
A. J. Muste’s phrase, and are therefore of doubtful relevance when the appeal
will not be heeded. Much pacifist theory relies on a dual psychological
doctrine: Nonviolence will strike a responsive chord, and violent resistance
will so shape the character of those who choose it that the distinction
between aggressor and resister will be erased. As Muste put it, "kindness
provokes kindness" and "the problem after a war [even a just war] is with the
victor. He thinks he has just proved that war and violence pay. Who will now
teach him a lesson?" Walzer does not directly address these basic premises of
the theory of nonviolent resistance. To me it seems that they cannot be easily
dismissed, though ultimately they cannot be sustained. I’ve written about this
elsewhere (American Power and the New Mandarins) and will not pursue the
question any further here.
Many other difficult and important questions are raised in Walzer’s study, and
much of the discussion is literate and richly textured. The examples I have
focused on, however, reveal a crucial moral and intellectual flaw, which
undermines much of the argument. No doubt Walzer expresses a broad consensus
in American society when he assigns a special status to Israel and
reconstructs the "moral world" accordingly, but this simply reflects the
pathology of the times. Comparable judgments on the exceptional status of
Soviet Russia would not have been unusual in an earlier period. Consensus is
no criterion of truth or justice.
With three minor corrections:
An Exception to the Rules
Noam Chomsky
Just and Unjust Wars by Michael Walzer
Basic Books, $15.00
in Inquiry, 17 April 1978
When is the resort to violence justified in international affairs? What acts
are legitimate in the conduct of war? These questions raise difficult problems
of ethical judgment and historical analysis. Michael Walzer insists, quite
correctly, that beyond merely “describ[ing] the judgments and justifications
that people commonly put forward, [we] can analyze these moral claims, seek
out their coherence, lay bare the principles that they exemplify.” His aim is
to develop a certain conception of our “moral world,” and draw from it both
specific judgments on historical events and operative criteria for resolving
future dilemmas.
There are certain beliefs on these matters that are so widely held as to
deserve to be called “standard.” With regard to the question of resorting to
violence, the standard doctrine holds that it is justified in self-defense or
as a response to imminent armed attack, often construed in the words of Daniel
Webster in the Caroline case, which Walzer quotes: “instant, overwhelming,
leaving no choice of means, and no moment of deliberation.” This part of the
standard doctrine Walzer calls “the legalist paradigm.” With regard to the
exercise of force, another part of the standard doctrine constitutes what
Walzer calls “the war convention,” consisting of such principles as, for
instance, that prisoners should not be massacred and civilians should not be
the direct objects of attack.
The standard doctrine, which is codified in various international conventions,
holds that both the resort to war and the means employed in warfare fall
within the realm of moral discourse. There has been extensive discussion of
these issues in the context of the Vietnam War, the conflict that prompted
Walzer’s concern. While the standard doctrine is regularly violated, it
remains a worthwhile endeavor to evaluate and refine it.
Walzer argues that the legalist paradigm is too restrictive in certain
respects. In other respects, however, he interprets it strictly, as he does
the war convention. Walzer takes the anti-Axis effort in Europe in World War
II to be “the paradigm…of a justified struggle”; Nazism, he believes, “lies at
the outer limits of exigency, at a point where we are likely to find ourselves
united in fear and abhorrence.” Nevertheless, he condemns as illegitimate
under the legalist paradigm Churchill’s decision to mine the territorial
waters of neutral Norway in order to prevent ore shipments to Nazi Germany,
and he considers the terror bombing of German cities to be a serious violation
of the war convention. As these examples illustrate, he construes the standard
doctrine strictly, even in the extreme case of the struggle against Nazism.
Walzer points out that it is impossible within the confines of his study to
present an elaborate historical argument, but to me, at least, the above
conclusions seem reasonable. Furthermore, Walzer is right to challenge widely
accepted views, for example with regard to terror bombing. It is enough to
recall the fundamental moral flaw of the Nuremberg tribunal, graphically
revealed by Telford Taylor’s observation in Nuremberg and Vietnam, that
“there was no basis for criminal charges against German or Japanese” leaders
for aerial bombardment because “both sides had played the terrible game of
urban destruction — the Allies far more successfully.” As it turns out, the
operational definition of a “crime of war” is a criminal act of which the
defeated enemies, but not the victors, are guilty. The consequences of this
moral stance were soon to be seen in Korea and Vietnam. It would be naive to
suppose that a serious moral critique would have prevented further criminal
acts of the sort condoned (or ignored) under the Nuremberg principles.
Nevertheless, the example illustrates the seriousness of the enterprise in
which Walzer is engaged.
Even the most profound justification of the standard doctrine would be of
limited import, since it is in any case widely accepted in principle, if not
in practice. Hence the major interest of Walzer’s study lies in the
modifications and refinements he proposes, as in his restrictive
interpretation of the war convention. Since the burden of justification rests
on those who employ force, the still more significant part of his study lies
in those departures from the standard doctrine which advocate its relaxation.
These relate only to the legalist paradigm of the justified use of force.
Walzer suggests four modifications that extend the legalist paradigm. Three of
these revisions “have this form: States can be invaded and wars justly begun
to assist secessionist movements (once they have demonstrated their
representative character), to balance the prior interventions of other powers,
and to rescue people threatened with massacre.” These extensions are discussed
under the heading of “humanitarian intervention.” Walzer states that “clear
examples of what is called ‘humanitarian intervention’ are very rare. Indeed,
I have not found any, but only mixed cases where the humanitarian motive is
one among several.” He cites the Indian invasion of Bangladesh as a possible
example (the only one cited), since “it was a rescue, strictly and narrowly
defined,” and the Indian troops “were in and out of the country…quickly.”
There then remains to be considered one serious proposal for relaxing the
restrictions of the standard doctrine; and thus much of the significance of
Walzer’s study lies in this crucial case. It is the case of “preemptive
strikes.” Walzer accepts “the moral necessity of rejecting any attack that is
merely preventive in character, that does not wait upon and respond to the
willful acts of an adversary” (hence his condemnation of the mining of
Norwegian waters). But he feels that the Caroline doctrine is too narrow.
Preemptive strikes are justified, he proposes, when there is “a manifest
intent to injure, a degree of active preparation that makes that intent a
positive danger, and a general situation in which waiting, or doing anything
other than fighting, greatly magnifies the risk.”
A single example is offered: the Israeli preemptive strike of June 5, 1967.
This, Walzer holds, is “a clear case of legitimate anticipation,” the only one
cited — in this review of 2500 years of history — to illustrate the point that
states may use military force even prior to the direct use of military force
against them. Israel was “the victim of aggression” in 1967, Walzer claims,
even though no military action had been taken against it. What is more, we can
have “no doubts” about this case, as Walzer states in the following
extraordinary passage:
The Egyptian “challenge” to Israel is thus a clear case of “aggression,” on a
par with the direct use of armed force in each of the other cases cited. The
legalist paradigm fails, according to Walzer, because, given the Caroline
doctrine, it does not condone Israel’s response to this “aggression.”
Note the crucial nature of this case for Walzer’s argument. In a review
covering 2500 years, Egypt’s 1967 challenge is the single example cited of
“aggression” involving no direct resort to force; nevertheless, it is not an
ambiguous example, but one that raises “no doubts.” Israel’s preemptive strike
is the one historical example adduced to illustrate the need to modify the
legalist paradigm to permit “anticipations.” Furthermore, this is the only
modification covering supposedly unambiguous historical examples that involves
a relaxation of the standard doctrine. What Walzer is proposing here, as he
notes, is a “major revision of the legalist paradigm. For it means that
aggression can be made out not only in the absence of a military attack or
invasion but in the (probable) absence of any immediate intention to launch
such an attack or invasion.” Given the burden carried by this example, a
serious inquiry into the historical facts would certainly appear to be in
order, but Walzer undertakes no such inquiry. He merely asserts that Israeli
anxiety “seems an almost classical example of ‘just fear’ — first, because
Israel really was in danger and second, because [Nasser's] military moves
served no other, more limited goal.”
Israeli generals take a rather different view. The commander of the air force
at the time, General Ezer Weizman, stated that he would
The Israeli correspondent of Le Monde, Amnon Kapeliouk, citing corroboratory
statements by General Matityahu Peled and former chief of staff Haim Bar-Lev,
wrote that “no serious argument has been advanced to refute the thesis of the
three generals.” This assessment is confirmed by American intelligence
sources, who found no evidence that Egypt was planning an attack and estimated
that Israel would easily win no matter who struck the first blow. The chairman
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff reported to the President on May 26 that Israel
could remain mobilized for two months without serious trouble. “In a military
sense, then, time did not seem to be running out” (William Quandt, Decade of
Decisions).
General Weizman’s justification for the preemptive strike bears comparison to
the argument advanced by Bethmann-Hollweg, the German Chancellor, after the
attack on Belgium in 1914:
Walzer properly dismisses this justification, pointing out that nonmilitary
options had not all been foreclosed and deriding the reference to Germany’s
“highest possession,” which he takes to mean “honor and glory” (compare
Weizman’s “scale, spirit and quality”). “The mere augmentation of power,”
Walzer insists, “cannot be a warrant for war or even the beginning of
warrant.” No doubt one can find differences, possibly even decisive ones,
between the Israeli and German attacks, or between the Israeli strike and the
Russian invasion of Finland — another clear case of aggression, even though,
as Walzer concedes, the defense of Leningrad from possible future German
attack was at stake and Russia’s invasion after Finnish refusal of territorial
exchange may have saved Leningrad from encirclement when the Nazis did attack.
But two points deserve mention. First, Walzer does not seriously address the
relevant historical background. This is a remarkable oversight given the
crucial role of the Israeli strike in his argument, and given also his
insistence that the Israeli attack on the one hand, and the German and Russian
attacks on the other, are all “clear cases,” falling on opposite sides of the
moral divide. Second, a serious analysis of the 1967 case would quickly
reveal that there are indeed doubts and ambiguities, contrary to Walzer’s
claim.
Walzer presents only the Israeli version of events leading to the 1967 war. He
ignores not only the Arab version, but also the well-known analyses of
commentators committed to neither side. He does not mention the Israeli attack
on the Jordanian village of Es-Samu in November 1966, leaving 18 dead, a
“reprisal” after terrorist attacks allegedly originating in Syria (censured by
the UN, including the United States). Nor does he discuss the exchange of fire
on April 7, 1967, which “gave rise to intervention first by Israeli and then
by Syrian aircraft, [then to] the appearance of Israeli planes over the
outskirts of Damascus and to the shooting down of six Syrian planes” with no
Israeli losses (Charles Yost, Foreign Affairs, January 1968; Yost takes this
to have been “the curtain-raiser to the Six-Day War”).
Walzer’s unqualified assertion that Nasser’s moves served no more limited goal
than to endanger Israel is sharply at variance with the judgment of many other
observers. Yost, for instance, notes various inflammatory Israeli statements
that “may well have been the spark that ignited the long accumulating tinder”
and discusses the problem that Nasser faced “for his failure to stir at the
time of the Es-Samu and April 7 affairs.” Walzer mentions that Egypt expelled
the UN Emergency Force from the Sinai and Gaza and closed the Strait of Tiran
to Israeli shipping. He fails to mention that Israel had never permitted UN
forces on its side of the border and refused the request of the UN
secretary-general to allow them to be stationed there after Egypt ordered
partial evacuation of the UN forces from its territory. (Egypt did not order
the UN forces out of Sharm el Sheikh.) As for the closing of the Strait of
Tiran, if we apply the reasoning that Walzer feels is appropriate in the case
of the German attack on Belgium, we see that there remained unexploited
possibilities for peaceful settlement. For example, the matter might have been
referred to the International Court of Justice, as Egypt had been requesting
since 1957. This proposal was always rejected by Israel, possibly because it
agreed with John Foster Dulles that “there is a certain amount of plausibility
from the standpoint of international law, perhaps, to [the Arab] claims”
(though the United States disagreed with this conclusion).
It also seems that Nasser may have had some legitimate cause for concern when
he heard Levi Eshkol, the Israeli Prime Minister, declare that “we shall hit
when, where, and how we choose,” or when he learned that the Israeli chief of
intelligence, General Yariv, had informed the international press that “I
think that the only sure and safe answer to the problem is a military
operation of great size and strength” against Syria. Nasser alluded to these
statements in his May 23 speech, in which he noted various Israeli threats
against Syria. And his concern may have been augmented — quite
understandably — by the memory of the surprise Israeli attack of 1956, at a
time when Egypt was making serious efforts to quiet the border.
My remarks here only scratch the surface of the issue. The point is that the
historical record is far more complex and ambiguous than Walzer makes it out
to be. His statement that Egypt’s “challenge” is a simple and indubitable case
of “aggression,” on a par with the Nazi conquests in Europe, can hardly be
taken seriously. Furthermore, he ignores the aftermath of the Israeli attack.
Quite unlike the case of Bangladesh, the Israeli army did not leave. Rather,
it prepared for a continuing occupation, with a clearly stated policy aimed at
the eventual annexation of some areas, the actual annexation of eastern
Jerusalem, and a program of settlement and integration of the occupied
territories — a program that continues in the face of nearly unanimous
international condemnation.
Some 200,000 West Bank Arabs fled during the Israeli attack in 1967, and about
the same number fled or were forcibly expelled after the cease-fire. For many
months afterward, UN Chief of Staff General Odd Bull reports, “The Israelis
encouraged their departure by various means, just as they had in 1948.” As
late as the following November, he adds, “There can certainly be no doubt that
many thousands of Arabs at this time fled across the Jordan to the East Bank,
even though there may be no precise evidence of the methods that were employed
to ensure their departure.” Thus the land was “liberated” — freed of a large
part of its population. The Israelis instituted a military regime in the
conquered areas that differs from others of the same type primarily in the
favorable press that it has enjoyed in the United States. All of these
subsequent developments seem relevant to an evaluation of the Israeli attack,
as Walzer would surely see the relevance of similar developments in other
cases he discusses.
I focus on this particular example of its crucial role in the structure of
Walzer’s presentation of his “moral world.” With this case removed, Walzer is
left with no historical example of any substance to indicate that his
recommended departures from the legalist paradigm are more than
academic — that is, that they cover actual historical events. This is not to
say that the discussion is worthless; even a purely abstract discussion of
these issues is of some interest. But we no longer have “a moral argument with
historical illustrations,” as the book’s subtitle states, at least in the
crucial case of relaxing the restrictions of the standard doctrine. Rather,
what we have is a mere moral assertion lacking any connection to clear
historical cases.
Walzer’s analysis of “peacetime reprisals” might also be taken to imply a
relaxation of the standard doctrine. He argues that “reprisals are clearly
sanctioned by the practice of nations, and the (moral) reason behind the
practice seems as strong as ever.” The moral argument he presents seems weak;
it barely goes beyond assertion. His single example of a “legitimate reprisal”
again involves Israel: this time the 1968 Israeli raid on the Beirut airport
in which 13 civilian planes were destroyed in retaliation for an attack on an
Israeli plane by two terrorists in Athens. In fact, the reprisal was hardly
efficacious: It “aroused considerable sympathy for the Palestinians in Lebanon
and brought their activities more into the open” (John Cooley, Green March,
Black September), as could have been anticipated. Walzer might have
strengthened his point by drawing some of the natural conclusions of his
position: For example, that it would be quite proper for Cuban commandos to
destroy commercial aircraft at Washington National Airport in reprisal for the
acts of terrorists organized in the United States.
Walzer also gives an example of an illegitimate Israeli reprisal, namely, the
commando attack in which more than 40 villagers were killed in the Jordanian
village of Qibya in 1953, in response to a terrorist murder in Israel that had
no known connection to this village. Walzer concludes that in this case “the
killings were criminal,” but the strongest judgment he allows himself is that
“particular Israel responses have indeed been questionable, for it is a hard
matter to know what to do in such cases.” Walzer never explains why his
condemnation of terrorist acts against Israel is not similarly nuanced. For
example, in March 1954, 11 Israelis were murdered in a bus in the Negev; it
was the most serious Arab terrorist act since the establishment of the state.
In response, the Israeli army attacked the Jordanian village of Nahaleen
(which was in no way involved), killing nine villagers. Walzer regards the
Israeli retaliation as merely “questionable.” But then why was not the original
Arab attack also just “questionable”? Or why not also describe the Israeli
commandos as “thugs and fanatics,” Walzer’s term for Arab terrorists (in the
New Republic article from which this account of terrorism is drawn)? The
actual perpetrators of the ambush-massacre of the people on the bus were, as
was known at the time, from a Bedouin tribe that had been driven into the
desert by Israeli troops. More than 7000 of these Bedouins were expelled from
1949 to 1954, as Israel encroached on the demilitarized zones. Surely Walzer
should grant that it is also a “hard matter to know what to do” when people
are driven from their homes and their traditional grazing and watering
grounds, and left destitute in the desert — as it is a “hard matter to know
what to do” when thousands of peasants are expelled from their bulldozed
villages in the same region in the past few years — actions that continue as I
write, though the American press is silent.
Walzer does discuss terrorism, but his account is deeply flawed. He makes the
important point that the tendency to restrict the term “terrorism” to
“revolutionary violence” is “a small victory for the champions of order, among
whom the uses of terror are by no means unknown.” It is indeed remarkable to
see how the term has been restricted in recent years so as to exclude
state-organized terrorism. Walzer asserts that “contemporary terrorist
campaigns are most often focused on people whose national existence has been
radically devalued: the Protestants of Northern Ireland, the Jews of Israel,
and so on.” He then develops the following “precise historical point: that
terrorism in the strict sense, the random murder of innocent people emerged as
a strategy only in the period after World War II.”
His “precise historical point,” however, is precisely false, as a look at his
favored example suffices to show. In just three weeks in July 1938, the Irgun
Zvai Leumi, dedicated to the ideals of Menahem Begin’s mentor Ze’ev Jabotinsky
and later headed by Begin himself, killed 76 Arabs in terrorist attacks on
Arab markets and other public places. There were many similar pre-World War II
examples: bombs placed in Arab movie theaters, sniping at Arab quarters and
trains carrying Arabs, and so on. The propagandists of the Jewish terrorist
groups gloried in these triumphs. One of the heroes of the Herut, the party of
the current prime minister of Israel, is a man hanged by the British for
firing on an Arab bus.
(And while the main paramilitary force of the Jewish community in Palestine
did not systematically resort to random terror, it did not disdain it
entirely. To cite one case, the same page of the official history that
describes the Haganah assassination of the orthodox Jewish poet Dr. Israel
Jacob de Haan in 1924 goes on to describe how the Haganah destroyed the house
of an Arab near the wailing wall in Jerusalem in retaliation for harassment of
Jewish worshippers by Arab youths; the bomb caused no injuries “because by
chance the inhabitants of the house were away” [Toldot Hahaganah, the
official history of the Haganah].)
Contrary to Walzer’s claim, random murder of innocent people, is no postwar
invention of the Provisional IRA and the PLO. His point about “people whose
national existence has been radically devalued” is very well-taken — but it
applies to Palestinian Arabs no less than to “the Jews of Israel.”
The special place of Israel in Walzer’s “moral world” is also revealed in his
discussion of the war convention — the set of principles that apply once war
is under way. He contrasts the orders given at My Lai with those issued to
Israeli troops entering Nablus during the June 1967 war, citing a book of
conversations among Israeli soldiers. It is perhaps less obvious than he
assumes that this is the most objective source of evidence concerning the
humane practices of the Israeli army. But putting that question aside, he
might have selected other examples from the same book, examples concerning,
say, the village of Latrun, destroyed by Israeli troops, whose inhabitants
were driven into exile. He might have even taken a further step and quoted the
eyewitness account quoted by the Israeli journalist Amos Kenan, describing the
bulldozing of Latrun and neighboring villages under the command of officers
who told their troops, “Why worry about them, they’re only Arabs.” He might
have even quoted Kenan’s prophetic conclusion: “The fields were turned to
desolation before our eyes, and the children who dragged themselves along the
road that day, weeping bitterly, will be the fedayeen of 19 years hence.”
In another section of the book, Walzer comments briefly on the pacifist
critique of the standard doctrine in an afterword, making the familiar point
that nonviolent measures appeal to “the essential humanity of the enemy,” in
A. J. Muste’s phrase, and are therefore of doubtful relevance when the appeal
will not be heeded. Much pacifist theory relies on a dual psychological
doctrine: Nonviolence will strike a responsive chord, and violent resistance
will so shape the character of those who choose it that the distinction
between aggressor and resister will be erased. As Muste put it, “kindness
provokes kindness” and “the problem after a war [even a just war] is with the
victor. He thinks he has just proved that war and violence pay. Who will now
teach him a lesson?” Walzer does not directly address these basic premises of
the theory of nonviolent resistance. To me it seems that they cannot be easily
dismissed, though ultimately they cannot be sustained. I’ve written about this
elsewhere (American Power and the New Mandarins) and will not pursue the
question any further here.
Many other difficult and important questions are raised in Walzer’s study, and
much of the discussion is literate and richly textured. The examples I have
focused on, however, reveal a crucial moral and intellectual flaw, which
undermines much of the argument. No doubt Walzer expresses a broad consensus
in American society when he assigns a special status to Israel and
reconstructs the “moral world” accordingly, but this simply reflects the
pathology of the times. Comparable judgments on the exceptional status of
Soviet Russia would not have been unusual in an earlier period. Consensus is
no criterion of truth or justice.
Lieberman, Rubin, Senor, Kristol are for Libya action. How can this be good?
Connecting the dots from Tunis to Tripoli:
Investment bankers salivate over North Africa
link to alethonews.wordpress.com
zionism = shock doctrine
But I know more about Buchanan than this one article (That I won’t read beyond the excerpt).
link to holocaust-history.org
link to buchanan.org
link to colorlines.com
Anyone who still takes him seriously after reading those has nothing to say to me.
There’s also
“Before the United States plunges into a third war in the Middle East, let us think this one through, as we did not the last two.”
So it’s not a war until our soldiers are dying directly? Bombing targets in Pakistan and Yemen doesn’t count?
Wow, thanks, Miura, I haven’t seen this before.
Leigh, you might find reviews of Walzer books by Ronald Dworkin and Brian Barry of interest also. Specifically, these two reviews (dating from 1983 and 1989, respectively) studied in chronological manner with a review by Edward Said below (1986) and Noam Chomsky’s review above (1978) will shine some much needed light on what Norman Finkelstein calls Walzer’s ‘intellectual odyssey’:
Said’s review was first published in Grand Street, an exquisite literary journal that could not survive the vicissitudes of the publishing industry. Publication of this review was not likely in respected journals of the period until editor Ben Sonnenberg accepted the challenge as Alex Cockburn noted in his recent obituary of Sonnenberg: ‘There was no other cultural periodical at that time that would have given the finger so vigorously to polite New York intellectual opinion’. Worthwhile–and relevant–pieces from Grand Street still keep turning up and one hopes that given the centrality of Walzer’s ‘Just War theory’ (Obama cited it in his Nobel acceptance speech) and his penchant for issuing ex cathedra pronouncements on the correct dosage of cruise missiles–that usually go entirely unchallenged–that Said’s review will also see the light of day for a wider audience. In particular, the literary analytical tools that Said brings to his dissection of Walzer’s prose remain unmatched and apply across the board to just about everything Walzer has written (including the piece on Libya from 2 weeks ago). Following are passages from ‘Michael Walzer’s Exodus and Revolution: A Canaanite Reading’ that first appeared a quarter century ago:
…
A ‘relaxed and easygoing vision’ of reality, said Ronald Dworkin of one of
Walzer’s previous books: the same vision is very much in evidence in Exodus
and Revolution. Homey, egalitarian, melioristic…As you read Walzer and mull over his various agreeable conclusions and
affirmations, you begin to wonder how the world has become so malleable and so
possible a place. Not that Walzer actually says it is a possible place; on
the contrary, he insists on its complexity and difficulty at almost every
opportunity. No: what bothers you is the world of Walzer’s discourse, the
verbal space in which his discussions and analyses take place, as well as the
political locale isolated by him for reflection and hypothesis. Then you begin
to realize how many extremely severe excisions and restrictions have occurred
in order to produce the calmly civilized world of Walzer’s Exodus. In itself,
the strategy of découpage is unavoidable. Every author who pretends to
rationality obviously has to do some cutting and delimiting in order to manage
his or her subject, but although these tend of occur offstage, they are
certainly well within critical reach, and require fairly close inspection if
the main onstage action is to be fully comprehended.
Walzer’s ‘relaxed and easygoing’ work is the result of a very curious and, to
my mind, extremely problematic antithetical mode, insistent and uncompromising
in places, indifferent and curiously forgiving in others. Take as perhaps the
most obvious instance the cluster of descriptive references with which he
endows Exodus: it is Western, Jewish, liberating, complex, this-worldly,
linear, clear. Compared with that of Lewis Feuer’s Ideology and the
Ideologists (referred to once in a passing note by Walzer), the Exodus of
Walzer’s study is tremendously circumscribed; Feuer is anxious to show the
presence of the Exodus ‘myth’, as he calls it, in all revolutionary
ideology, Western and non-Western, progressive and reactionary alike, the more
easily to reveal its multiple shortcomings. But the grounds for Walzer’s
assertions of Exodus’s various discrete and positive qualities are kept
obscure and, I think, unexamined. Why is Exodus ‘Western’, for instance? Why
is it of use to seventeenth-century English revolutionaries? to some Latin
American liberationists and not to others? to some Black leaders but not to
others? Walzer has no answer that is not tautological, and he does not really
propose the questions.
The effect of Walzer’s chatty style is to disarm those who might look for
evidence, argument, proof and the like — particularly in the writing of an
author whose numerous strictures on Michel Foucault (Dissent, Fall 1983)
include the objection that Foucault’s studies are ‘often ineffective in what
we might think of as scholarly law enforcement — the presentation of evidence,
detailed argument, the consideration of alternative views’. Nor can Exodus
and Revolution be taken as a poetic or metaphoric excursus through an Old
Testament text. Walzer’s political and moral study is addressed to us ‘in the
West’ and his prose is dotted with us‘s and ours, the net result of which
is to mobilize a community of interpretation that relies for illumination upon
a canonical text believed to be central, true, important as giving ‘permanent
shape to Jewish conceptions of time’. And, he adds, ‘it serves as a model,
ultimately, for non-Jewish conceptions too’. Ultimately in this sentence
plays a crucial tactical role, as of course does the plural in ‘Jewish
conceptions of time’. Walzer signals that there are in fact more issues than
can be dealt with by ‘us’ here and now; if we had the time, we could
ultimately discover how important Exodus was as a model for various
nonspecified non-Jewish views of temporality. Ultimately.
Let me call this tactic inclusion by deferral, in order next to bring in its
accomplice, avoidance. Remember that at the same time that he uses these
tactics, Walzer is making very strong assertions about revolution, progress,
peoplehood, politics and morality: it is not as if he were just an avoider and
a deferrer. In fact, a fog is exhaled by his prose to obscure those problems
entailed by his arguments but casually deferred and avoided before they can
make trouble. The great avoidance, significantly, is of history itself — the
history of the text he comments on, the history of the Jews, the history of
the various peoples who have used Exodus, as well as those who have not, the
history of models, texts, paradigms, utopias, in their relationship to actual
events, the history of such things as covenants and founding texts.
…
Once you begin a catalog of the exceptions to Walzer’s claims for Exodus, much
less remains of his argument about the book’s paramount importance for future
movements of liberation. Vico, Marx, Michelet, Gramsci, Fanon either mention
the book not at all or only in passing. Many Black and Central American
theorists do mention it; but a great many more do not. Certainly Exodus is a
trope that comes easily to hand in accounts of deliverance, but there isn’t
anything especially ‘Western’ about it, nor — to judge from the various
‘non-Western’ tropes of liberation from oppression — is there anything
especially progressive that can be derived from its supposedly Western
essence. All oppressed peoples dream of liberation after all, and most tend to
find rhetorical modes for mobilizing themselves, imagining a better future and
justifying to themselves the vengeance they intend to take not only on their
former masters but also on their future underlings.
Given recent history, one would have thought that Walzer might have
reconsidered the whole matter of divinely inspired politics and coaxed out of
it some more sobering, perhaps even ironic, reflections than the ones he
presents. With examples readily at hand of a crazy religious leadership at the
head of substantial political movements in Israel, Lebanon and Iran (all of
them pulling references out of their common monotheistic tradition in order to
eliminate opposition) can he be seriously recommending that we use Exodus as
‘realistic’ or ‘progressive’? Yes, he can. Perhaps it is the Exodus narrative
itself he finds appealing as a work of art. If so, he says hardly anything
about it that hasn’t been said more artfully by various literary
theorists — Northrop Frye, Frank Kermode, Paul Ricoeur, Hayden White, scholars
whose uses of the Bible are exhilarating in their technical as well as
aesthetic ingenuity.
No: Walzer’s Exodus offers the opportunity for him to assert and stress the
inaugural priority of a text as a master of consolidation and conviction, not
of persuasion or proof. As for the relationship between Exodus and its
subsequent users, Walzer included, that, like so much else about this curious
contemporary performance, is hinted at it in telegraphic allusions….Above all, I think, Walzer’s work
relegates the notion of a genuinely secular political option to nullity; he
seems to be saying that only the salutary inflections in Exodus could bring
forth a wholesomely progressive politics, thereby sweeping the board
improbably clean of zealotry, vicious sectarianism, tyrannical theoretical
systems and the sheer disorderly tumble of historical events. Reading Walzer
you could not know that a whole ideological literature, Western and
non-Western, had offered millions of adherents ideas for which his reading of
Exodus makes no allowances. Why is Walzer so undialectical, so simplifying, so
ahistorical and reductive?
…
…the Jewish material in Walzer’s work is made to pull in the
chariot, so to speak, of a resolutely political (and not philosophical)
agenda, its path marked by repeated words and phrases: progressive, moral,
radical politics, national liberation, oppression.
Considered as a group, the provenance of these is not Exodus. The terms enter
American and European political vocabulary after the Second World War, usually
in the context of colonial wars fought against movements of national
liberation. The power of ‘liberation’ and ‘oppression’ in the works of those
Third World militants like Cabral and Fanon, who were organically linked to
anticolonial insurrectionary movements, is that the concepts were later able
to acquire a certain embattled legitimacy in the discourse of First World
writers sympathetic to anticolonialism. The point about writers like Sartre,
Debray and Chomsky, however, is that they were not mere echoes of the African,
Asian and Latin American anti-imperialists, but intellectuals writing from
within — and against — the colonialist camp.
…
The revival of anti-imperialist and liberationist language in discussions of
Nicaragua and South Africa is one major exception to this pattern. The other
major exception has been the rhetoric of liberal supporters of Israel. I speak
here of a rather small but quite influential and prestigious group which,
since 1967, has conducted itself with — from the perspective of students of
rhetoric — considerable tactical flexibility. All along, in the face of
considerable evidence to the contrary, members of this group have tried to
maintain Israel’s image as a progressive and wholly admirable state.
Consider that all of the Third World national liberation groups identified
themselves with the displaced and dispossessed Palestinians, and Israel with
colonialism. Historically, Zionist writers did not generally describe their
own enterprise as a national liberation movement; they used a vocabulary
specific to the moment of their vision of history — in the early twentieth
century — which, while it contained important secular elements, was primarily
religious and imperialist. The concepts of the chosen People, Covenant,
Redemption, Promised Land and God were central to it; they gave identity to a
people scattered in exile, they were useful in getting crucial European
support and in the setting up of institutions like the Jewish National Fund,
and, as is the case in all such situations, they were a focus for heated
discussion, intense partisanship, contested political theories. After the
Second World War the appeal of Zionism to the British Labour Party, the
Socialist International, or to any number of Western liberal supporters — in
whose ranks, surprisingly, one could find anti-imperialists like Sartre and
Martin Luther King — was determined by European sympathy with the dominant
Weizmann-Ben-Gurion (and not Jabotinsky-Begin revisionist) trend within
Zionism. This trend was perceived as socially progressive and morally
justifiable in a form that Europeans and Americans could immediately
understand. When R. H. S. Crossman, Paul Johnson or Reinhold Niebuhr spoke of
Zionism (and later of Israel), it was because the Jewish presence in Palestine
was viewed as an extension of like-minded undertakings in European and, much
more significantly, as restitution for the horrors of European anti-Semitism.
Arabs were routinely seen as corrupt, backward, irrelevant.
After 1967, it became difficult to portray the Israeli occupation armies in
Gaza, the West Bank, Sinai and the Golan Heights as furthering a great social
experiment. And it has not often been noted how strange the anachronism, how
ironic the disjuncture, that enabled the emergence of a new and eccentric
colonial situation at exactly the same time that classical colonialism was
being defeated nearly everywhere else. Eccentric because while they were
settler-colonists like the French or British in Africa, Israeli Jews were
different in essential ways: they had a traditional tie to the land, they had
an unimaginable history of suffering, they were by no means an overseas
offshoot of a metropolitan Western power. In 1967 however, the American
intervention in Vietnam was at its height, and so for progressive supporters
of Israel it became directly imperative to separate Israel in the Occupied
Territories from America in Indochina, and to find coherent reasons for
excusing the first while condemning the second.
Walzer played a pioneering role in this effort. With Martin Peretz (to whom
Exodus and Revolution is dedicated) he wrote a landmark article in
Ramparts (July 1967). Its title, ‘Israel is Not Vietnam’, comprehended half
a dozen points, all of them showing the way in which Israel was not like
France, the United States or Britain in their nasty colonial adventures. The
article did not change the opinions of too many on the Left — to whom the
article was explicitly addressed — and Peretz later withdrew his financial
support from Ramparts. In any event, the article is important not only
because Walzer used his Left credentials to speak with and to the Left, but
also because the piece codified the mode of analysis he would later use.
The steps Walzer takes are worth listing. One: he finds a contemporary
situation that could, if it isn’t immediately addressed, affect Israel’s
standing adversely. In Exodus and Revolution it is the discredited
appearance both of Jewish fundamentalism and continued colonial rule over many
Arabs and Arab land. Two: he does that initially by appearing to condemn
something close at hand, which progressives can also condemn without much
effort and for which an already substantial consensus exists. In Ramparts it
was Western colonialism; in Exodus and Revolution it is Zionist extremists
like Gush Emunim and Rabbi Kahane. Three: he shows how certain rather
provocative aspects of Jewish and/or Israeli history and/or related episodes
in, say, American or French history, do not all fit the condemned instances,
although some obviously do. Thus since Kahane, like Begin and Sharon, does not
resemble Moses, Moses’s stature as a fine leader is enhanced and hence he
qualifies along with contemporary Israelis like Gershom Scholem and members of
the Labor Party. Four (the really important intellectual move): Walzer
formulates a theory, and/or finds a person or text — provided that none is
totally general, too uncompromising, too theoretically absolute — that
provides the basis for a new category of politico-moral behavior. The book of
Exodus as interpreted by Walzer does fit the need quite perfectly, especially
by allowing him to appropriate the language of national liberation and apply
it anachronistically to the ancient Jews. Similarly, as we shall see
presently, Albert Camus’s position on French colonialism is made by Walzer to
stand for the role of the ‘connected’ intellectual. Five: he concludes by
bringing together as many incompatible things as possible in as moral-sounding
as well as politically palatable a rhetoric as possible. The desired effect is
that both the generosity and the ‘relevance’ and not the inconsistency of the
procedure will be noted.
Operations of this sort cannot survive critical analysis. Exodus and
Revolution proves their fallibility in all sorts of ways. The nagging
question is how Walzer can continue to claim that his positions are
progressive and even radical. He seems unconscious of the degree to which
Israel’s military victories have affected his work by imparting an
unattractive moral triumphalism — harsh, shortsighted, callous — to nearly
everything he writes, despite the veneer of radical phrases and protestations.
The results have often been extraordinarily disturbing, but not, apparently,
to him; here and there a disquiet will briefly disturb his style, but all in
all Walzer is at ease with himself and always has been been. In 1972, for
example, he argued that in every state there will be groups ‘marginal to the
nation’ which should be ‘helped to leave’. Saying that he had Israel and the
Palestinians in mind, he nevertheless conducted this discussion (that coolly
anticipates by a decade Kahane’s bloody cries of ‘they must go’) in the
broadly sunny and progressive perspectives of liberalism, independence,
freedom from oppression. In his book Just and Unjust Wars, he insists on the
difference between the two kinds of war, yet finds excuses for Israeli
recourse to such actions he otherwise condemns as preemptive strikes and
terrorism. His political articles in Peretz’s New Republic, especially
during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, are full of such tactical
paradoxes. In 1984 he rewrites the history of the Algerian war by praising
Camus, the archetypal trimmer, for his loyalty to the pied-noir community
(one of ‘the two Algerian nations’, as Walzer calls them), for his rejection
of ‘absolutist’ politics, and for his unwillingness completely to condemn
French colonialism. Walzer’s unstated thesis is that the one hundred and thirty
years of Algerian enslavement and consequent demands for Algerian liberation
were somehow less of a moral cause than that of Camus’s community of French
settler-colonialists.
But Walzer’s recuperation of Camus’s lamentable waffling is even more
interesting as an example of the relentless application of step four (the
creation of a new category of politico-moral behavior). An essay by Walzer
which appeared in the Fall 1984 issue of Dissent, the socialist magazine he
edits with Irving Howe, reveals a good deal more about Walzer in the process
than it does about Camus. Walzer says that Camus was impressive because ‘he
was committed to a people, the FLN intellectuals to a cause’. I shall leave
aside for now the astonishing highhandedness of this judgment of the Algerian
resistance and return to it later. According to Walzer, the people Camus wrote
for were his own, and insofar as it has been viewed as the critic’s role to
write of his/her own people as ‘the others’, Camus, to his immense credit,
does not fit the prescription. So much, by way of backhanded dismissal, for
Benda’s trahison des clercs. Camus wrote of what was intimate for him as ‘a
connected social critic’, connected, that is, to his people, the colonizing
pieds-noirs of Algeria. Thus he was effective in touching their consciences
in ways that intellectuals who have taken critical distance from the people
could not be. Moreover, Walzer adds, Camus, the writer of ‘intimate
criticism’, was always aware of how what he wrote might expose his family ‘to
increased terrorism’. Therefore he was sometimes reduced to silence, even
though ‘the social critic can never be alone with his people; his intimacy
can’t take the form of private speech; it can only shape and control his
public speech’. In short, much more than those French intellectuals like
Sartre and Aron, who condemned French colonialism outright, Camus the
temporizer and political ‘realist’ was heroic. He remained, in Walzer’s
approving formulation, ‘what he was’.
The backing and filling as well as the complaisant sophistry mobilized for
this redefinition of the responsible intellectual’s role are quite remarkable.
Not only does Walzer advocate just going along with one’s own people for the
sake of loyalty and ‘connectedness’: he also begs two fundamental questions.
One: whether the position of critical distance he rejects could not also, at
the same time, entail intimacy and something very much like the insider’s
connectedness with his or her community? In other words, are critical distance
and intimacy with one’s people mutually exclusive? Two: whether in the end the
critic’s togetherness with his/her community might be less valuable an
achievement than condemning the evil they do together, therefore risking
isolation? These questions raise others. Who is more effective as a critic of
South African racial policy, a white South African militant against the
regime, or an Afrikaner liberal urging ‘constructive engagement’ with it? Whom
does one respect more, in the accredited Western and Judaic traditions, the
courageously outspoken intellectual or loyal member of the complicit majority?
Much of Walzer’s recent political and philosophical writing validates the
notion of a double standard, one applied to outsiders, another to the members
of the intellectual’s own community or, to use an important word for him,
sphere. Ronald Dworkin was right to say, in the New York Review of Books (13
April 1983), that Walzer’s moral theory depends on ‘a mystical premise’ that
‘there are only a limited number of spheres of justice whose essential
principles have been established in advance and must therefore remain the same
for all societies’. In a sense, Exodus and Revolution is a book about the
establishment of such a sphere for the Chosen People who are inscribed in a
Covenant and owner of a Promised Land presided over by God. Hence one’s
realization that Walzer’s idea about ‘Exodus politics’ turns out to be very
snobbish and exclusive indeed.
Walzer has regressed to an odd position on the concept of equality. He has
modified it by saying that social goods ought to be considered as having
different valences within their separate spheres (education, medicine,
leisure, office), not in absolute terms. The key terms once again are
‘members’ in and ‘strangers’ to a community, and although Walzer does not
refer to Jews and non-Jews, it is difficult not to arrive at the conclusion
that his reflections as a Jew on Israel have ‘shaped and controlled’ his other
thought. Thus, for him, the views that members have rights that strangers
don’t, or can’t have, come from the very same political ground on which
Israel, as the ‘state of the Jewish people’ — and not of its citizens, 20 per
cent of whom are not members of ‘the Jewish people’ — is constructed. An
additional complication, unattended to by Walzer’s philosophy, is that whereas
any Jew anywhere is entitled to Israeli citizenship under the Law of Return,
no Palestinian anywhere, whether born in Palestine before 1948 or not, has any
such right. I refer here to over two million Palestinian refugees, those
people (with their recent descendants) who like the Canaanites were originally
driven out of their native land by Israel on the premise that they were
‘explicitly excluded from the world of moral concern’.
Yet the secular facts are not so neat, so clear and simple, for ‘spheres’ do
not just exist, nor do they simply acquire the authority of natural facts, nor
are they accepted uncomplainingly by ‘strangers’ who feel their rights have
been denied. Spheres are made and maintained by men and women in society. My
feeling about Walzer is that his views on the existence of separate spheres
have been shaped not so much by Israel as by those of Israel’s triumphs which
he seems to have felt have been in need of defense, explanation,
justification. If Jews were still stateless, and being held in ghettos, I do
not believe that Walzer would take the positions he has been taking. I cannot
believe that he would say, for example, that communities have the right to
restrict land ownership or immigration so that Jews (or Blacks, or Indians)
couldn’t participate equally in an absolute sense. Not at all. But now that
Israel holds territories and rules inferior people, he does not question such
practices against non-Jews. Rather he speaks about the intimate connectedness
of Camus and the role of ‘members’ in a state, as well as that of people
marginal to it. As for the root problem — why the discrimination instituted by
Jews in power should be any more just than the discrimination against Jews by
non-Jews in power — that elicits no comment.
It would be wrong and unfair to single out Walzer in all this, since the
adjustments and the compromises he has made are part of a general retreat
among Left and liberal intellectuals during the last few years. We are at the
point now where it is nearly impossible to discern individual themes within
the chorus of revised views that blare out from the pages of formerly Left or
liberal publications like the New Republic. Nowadays religion and God have
returned, along with realism; utopia and radicalism are dirty words; terrorism
and Soviet communism have acquired a kind of metaphysical purity of horror
that eliminates history entirely; competition and the laws of a free market
have replaced justice and social concern.
Certainly the peculiarity of Walzer’s position (about which, with a few
exceptions, he has not been stridently polemical) is that is still advanced,
and honored, as the Left position. It is at bottom a position retaining the
vocabulary of the Left, yet scuttling both the theory and critical astringency
that historically gave the Left its moral and intellectual power. For theory
and critical astringency, Walzer has substituted an often implicit but always
unexamined appeal to the concreteness and intimacy of shared ethnic and
familial bonds, the realism, the ‘moral’ responsibility of insiders who have
‘made it’. Still, as I have said, if like the Canaanites you don’t happen to
qualify for membership you are excluded from moral concern. Or, in Walzer’s
other surprisingly disparaging, dismissive judgment, you are relegated to a
mere cause, like the FLN intellectuals.
If this is the difference between Exodus politics and the politics of causes,
then I’m for the latter. For not only does Exodus seem to blind its
intellectuals to the rights of others, it permits them to believe that
history — the world of societies and nations, made by men and
women — vouchsafes certain peoples the extremely problematic gift of
‘Redemption’. Another of the many endowments Walzer bestows on Exodus
insiders, Redemption, alas, elevates human beings in their own judgment to the
status of divinely inspired moral agents. And this status in turn minimizes,
if it does not completely obliterate, a sense of responsibility for what a
people undergoing Redemption does to other less fortunate people, unredeemed,
strange, displaced and outside moral concern. For this small deficiency Walzer
has a reassuring answer too: ‘to be a moral agent’, he says, ‘is not to act
rightly but to be capable of acting rightly’. While it is not blindingly clear
to me how national righteousness — a highly dubious idea to begin
with — derives from such precepts, I can certainly see its value as a
mechanism for self-excuse and self-affirmation.
Little of such writing derives from ‘radicalism’ or from ‘righteousness’.
Walzer’s Exodus book is written from the perspective of victory, which it
consolidates and authorizes after the fact. As a result, the book is shot
through with a confidence that comes from an easy commerce between successful
enterprise in the secular world and similar (if only anticipated) triumphs in
the extra-historical world. As to how radicalism and realism square with
Walzer’s astonishing reliance on God, I cannot at all understand. I have no
way — and Walzer proposes none — for distinguishing between the claims put
forth by competing monotheistic clerics in today’s Middle East, all of
whom — Ayatollah Khomeini, Ayatollah Begin, Ayatollah Gemayel (and there are
others) — say that God is indisputably on their side. That the Falwells, the
Swaggerts, the Farrakhans in America say the same thing piles Pelion on Ossa,
and leaves Walzer unperturbed, urging a remarkable amalgam of God and realism
upon us, as we try to muddle through.
But the one thing I want Walzer to remember is that the more he shores up the
sphere of Exodus politics the more likely it is that Canaanites on the outside
will resist and try to penetrate the walls banning them from the goods of what
is, after all, partly their world too. The strength of the Canaanite, that is
the exile position, is that being defeated and ‘outside’, you can perhaps more
easily feel compassion, more easily call injustice injustice, more easily
speak directly and plainly of all oppression, and with less difficulty try to
understand (rather than mystify or occlude) history and equality. I have read
Walzer for many years and I have always admired his intellect, although I have
fundamentally disagreed with his politics. I have always wanted to say to him
that the defense of spheres and peoplehood based on exclusion and displacement
of others who are deemed to be lesser is not what intellectuals ought to be
about. I have also wanted to say that ideologies of difference are a great
deal less satisfactory than impure genres, people, activities; that separation
and discrimination are often not as estimable as connecting and crossing over;
that moral and military victories are not always such wonderful things. But
having read him again recently, I now realize that Exodus may be a tragic
book in that it teaches that you cannot both ‘belong’ and concern yourself
with Canaanites who do not belong. If that is so, then I thank Walzer for
showing me that, and allowing me — and I hope others — to remain unconvinced
by what he says, and to resist.
“Let the “world community” take the lead on this one.”
It did. France pushed it through, and the Arab League went along. The US was reluctant to join in. (Not that the US won’t try to run the show, and boast endlessly about anything useful it does.)
So, a state’s (or organized group’s?) “challenge” to another state justifies preemptive/preventive war by the challenged state? Any composite of threat more or less comparatively equal to what Nasser did justifying Israel’s ’67 war? And Israel’s second step, which has been going on since ’67 in the form
of its ever expanding settlements and seige of Gaza? If this is the litmus test for universally recognized civilized conduct, what could it mean for the future? And even now? How does Bush Jr’s attack on Iraq square with this test? And how does that test square with the prayed-for attack on Iran and current full-spectrum boycott of that state? And with our boycott of Libyan oil & trade and present attack on the failing regime there?