I trust my wife’s instincts completely, and this morning she said to me, “Eliot Spitzer was really awful to that woman last night.” She means his interview with Hanan Ashrawi last night on CNN, seeking “the Palestinian perspective.” I also found it distasteful. Spitzer seems out of control and angry. He repeatedly lectures a Palestinian on her history. Some of the lecture:
Spitzer: “With all due respect, Hamas is a terrorist organization… to its core, it is a terrorist group…. Even Prime Minister Netanyahu… made it very clear in his speech to Congress that Israel would cede territory that it feels it has a legitimate claim to… It wants nothing more than to get rid of those territories….
“Just so the historical record is clear. The territory Israel has right now it has because it was attacked by every surrounding Arab nation. And every person understands that… [we will] never forget the historical record that the Arab nations at every opportunity have attacked and have tried to destroy the state of Israel. So let’s not forget history.”
“I live there,” Ashrawi says.
“I’ve been there often enough,” Spitzer declares.
When Ashrawi says that the Israeli government includes racists and people who support expulsion, he shakes his head. He berates Ashrawi to accept the facts: that Arab armies tried to destroy Israel when it was established, and that Arafat turned down a good offer for a state in 2000-2001.
Before I went to bed, I got out Ussama Makdisi’s great book, Faith Misplaced: The Broken Promise of U.S.-Arab Relations, 1820-2001, which is about the betrayal of Arabs that U.S. endorsement of Zionism represented. Makdisi is an Arab-American professor. Does every person understand the history that Spitzer does? Here are two key historical passages:
1. Why did Arabs fight the birth of Israel?
That many Palestinians resisted an unjust partition is certain, and that they also killed in defense of their land is also beyond doubt. Arab nationalist and Muslim Brotherhood volunteers came from Syria, Iraq, and Egypt to defend their brethren. But they could not significantly alter the course of events…
Peering at Palestine through the looking glass of the Holocaust, the West celebrated the birth of Israel as a vindication of its own deep morality; the Arabs recoiled in disgust, but they had little in the way of a joint military plan to prevent partition, let alone to decisively defeat the Zionist forces in Palestine. Arab states reluctantly entered the conflict in May 1948 to prevent the establishment of what they regarded as an illegal and colonial state… The Arabs were humiliated.
2. The 2000-2001 deal:
Barak presented Arafat with a take-it-or-leave-it deal that on the face of it offered, at last, the promise of an independent, demilitarized Palestinian state. But the devil lay in the details, and these were ominous. Israel demanded or expected control of Palestinian airspace, the water aquifers under the West Bank, and the borders of the proposed rump state…Israel would also annex large chunks of the Wet Bank … and it would exercise sovereignty over most of Jerusalem and the bypass roads that crisscross the West Bank…
Barak was demanding nothing more than a formal surrender…
Arafat… felt that the Palestinians had conceded enough and would not consent to this final deal that so egregiously “ended” the conflict on terms so manifestly unjust. Camp David represented a humiliation too far. A furious Clinton turned on Arafat…
This is the Palestinian perspective. If Eliot Spitzer is serious about hearing it, he should open this question up to Ussama Makdisi, a professor at Rice, and others. He should recognize Peter Beinart’s wisdom, that the historical period of the U.S. and American Jews shaping the future of Israel and Palestine is coming to an end, and with it his historical understanding is losing power. And the “terrorist group” that is Hamas is the latest incarnation of Islamist groups that opposed the creation of Israel, that have broad democratic support within Arab polities, and that are now being enfranchised in Egypt. Demonizing these attitudes won’t make them disappear.
The challenge is to resolve the intractability of this conflict by dealing fairly with both sides.
And Spitzer should confront his own bias here: Why does he as a privileged and influential American Jew regard Israel as such a beacon, with a biblical right to the West Bank? Is he still peering at Israel through the lens of the Holocaust? Does he feel unsafe in the United States? Wouldn’t the world be a better place if American Jews with as much power as Spitzer examined their commitment to Zionism and, maybe just maybe, walked away from the idea of Jewish nationalism?
