In an interview on "Z-word," a Zionist site run by the American Jewish Committee, the writer Paul Berman rejects the idea that the Gaza assault was disproportionate, and suggests that Israel thereby averted "genocide."
[W]hich of these is the correct analysis – that Hamas poses a genocidal threat in the making? Or that Hamas expresses mostly the ugliness of the powerless, and poses a relatively small danger? Everything hangs on the answer to that question. People tend to assume that the proportionality of a military action should be measured against what has already taken place – that somebody who has been attacked has the right to counter-attack on roughly the same level. "The law of even-Steven," in Walzer's dismissive phrase. But it is the future that has to be taken into account.
Unfortunately, we cannot predict the future. We stand in the dark, and we make guesses. Those of us who look on the Gaza war from thousands of miles of away enjoy the luxury of speculating this way or that way. But if you were in the Israeli government, it wouldn't be so easy to gamble on the answer. So Israel is in a bind. No matter what the Israelis choose to do, they have to recognize that they might be tragically wrong – either in their failure to defend themselves, or in the suffering they inflict on other people.
This highflown manner is typical of Berman: he rises on circling verbal thermals and leaves reality. Because: hold on: Is anyone really standing in the dark about Hamas's threat? No: It is rockets that kill people in neighboring cities. They don't have nukes, or helicopters. Where is the "genocidal," i.e., existential, threat?
Berman is forced to anticipate this argument. Now watch as he goes back to the old standby: that Hamas are Nazis, and they are aided by– uh oh, Walt and Mearsheimer.
Back in the 1930s, people used to assume that, once the Nazis had found their way into a position of responsibility for the well-being of Germany, they would stop saying wild things and would certainly think twice about putting their program into action. Power was supposed to sober the Nazis up. But maybe there is something about ideologies of group hatred that makes it hard to sober up.
Then again, I think that a certain number of people see nothing especially crazy or hateful in Hamas' arguments and goals. They see points that are fairly reasonable, even if Hamas' way of expressing those points seems a little crude. The Jews should not be killed, all reasonable people agree; but (so goes a very popular argument) neither do the Jews have a right to defend themselves. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is not a sophisticated document; but Walt and Mearsheimer's book "The Israel Lobby" is (in some people's view) a sophisticated document. And the sophisticated document makes the unsophisticated one seem like it is on to something. By reasoning in this fashion, people end up concluding that Hamas' doctrines have a purchase on truth – something that quite a few people believe. But they choose not to say it because they don't want to look unsophisticated or coarse.
Anyway, history does not lack for genocides, and we have to assume that a lot of people have figured that, for one reason or another, genocide is a good idea. The people who think in this fashion are not just the fanatics who engage in the massacres, but also a larger public that gazes from the sidelines without objecting, and sometimes even applauds.
It seems as if Berman is saying that Walt and Mearsheimer have intellectually licensed genocide against the Jews? Wow. And notice that he uses the word "massacres" for some anticipated assault on Jews, when Israel has just killed 400 children.
Berman is a sincere writer; another way of saying that is that every time I read him, I have the same feeling. But we're not living on the same planet. For him, it is always 1938. He speaks authoritatively here about antisemitism in the Middle Ages, and 90-something Bernard Lewis, and the world's unending discomfort with Jews as the pebble in the shoe. There is no reckoning with the incredible fact of Jewish power in American society–with all the Jews in the Obama administration and the Bush administration before that, with the fact that Steve Walt holds a chair at Harvard endowed by a Jew, and is married to a woman of Jewish heritage, and that John Mearsheimer has long taught a Holocaust course and denounced antisemitism. The whole interview is utterly disconnected from the fact that Israel rained white phosphorus on civilians and that many more people dislike Israel now than did a few months before.
The Turks for instance. When a Turkish delegation goes to Gaza and says that the destruction is "beyond description," do we write that off–and every other international condemnatoin–as a bunch of foreigners who hate Jews? Or do we see the common humanity of Turks, Palestinians, and Jews? For Berman, Jews are the eternal pursued minority. I don't believe this. We are deeply integrated into U.S. society; and the central issue is about Jewish exceptionalism, Jewish self-absorption. Can Jews see Israel as others see Israel? Many Jews can. Because this isn't about Jews, it's about a state that is out of control when it comes to threats, and that many of its neighbors now fear (per Roger Cohen).
61 years ago Chaim Weizmann wrote (per Richard Cohen) that he had no doubt that the world would judge Israel by how it treated the Arab population. This turns out to be accurate. And why isn't that a just standard?
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