David Bromwich responds to a post from earlier today suggesting that Congress’s docility before Netanyahu means that the Israel/Palestine conflict has become an irrepressible conflict.
I think your comments about the lobby, in the “irrepressible conflict” piece,
are right but I also think there’s a terrible, and largely separate source of
mischief, from American arrogance and superiority and “exceptionalism,” our own “chosen people” myth; doubly dangerous by its affinity with the Israeli myth. Netanyahu played on this resemblance, to the hilt.We Americans had a narrow window to outgrow the myth–circa 1975-1980–but Carter’s bad luck (and want of a certain resourcefulness) and Reagan’s good luck in getting credit for the collapse of the Soviet system, drove us back into immaturity.
Obama’s wisest path as leader would have been to inoculate American public opinion against an arrogance that he distrusts, simply by never pandering to the myth. Speak of America with pride, yes, but as a society more than a nation; and don’t hide the madness. Instead, he pandered. Most of all in his Nobel Prize speech, of all places; where, in a setting most definitive of internationalism, he preached the doctrine of the legitimacy of American nationalist pride. As a nation of peace and good wars. Now, he is the captive of a bad cookbook of persuasion–too used to that cooking to find a way out on his own.
About those applauding congressmen: I agree, a sign of prejudice and craven submission to propaganda (supported by money and threats). But I wouldn’t underrate sheer ignorance as a factor. When they heard Netanyahu say Jerusalem must remain undivided and the capital of Israel, how many members of Congress even knew that its status as a capital is (to say the least) disputed and that it was undivided in the sense of being accessible to three religions, without being under Israeli rule, for most of the 20th century?
