Why is all the good mainstream journalism about Israel appearing in England and Israel? Here is Max Hastings, former editor of the Telegraph, giving an inspired lecture on how Israel, which he frequently visited and long admired, has so celebrated the use of force that it has damaged its soul. The lecture is excerpted in the Guardian today. It is only astonishing to me that this sensible analysis of self-destruction, which Americans Ian Lustick, Steve Walt, Henry Siegman, Jerome Slater, and John Mearsheimer all echo, is not published prominently in my country. Hastings:
[In the 1970s] I glimpsed a darker side of Israel. I learned a lot about the ruthlessness of Israeli anti-terrorist operations. I spent many hours talking to thoughtful Israelis, who voiced their fears about the perils, the threatened corruption of their own society, which they perceived in the 1967 conquests. I also became dismayed by the naked imperialism displayed by Israel's rightwing zealots. One night at a dinner party in Jerusalem in 1977, I heard a young Israeli talking about the Arabs in terms which chilled my blood. "In the next war," he said, "we've got to get the Palestinians out of the West Bank for good."
To me, in my naivete, Israel's struggle had hitherto seemed that of a brilliant little people, who had suffered the most ghastly experience of the 20th century, struggling for survival amid a hostile Middle East still bent upon their destruction. Now, suddenly, I found myself meeting Israelis committed to the creation of a greater Israel embracing the West Bank, who were utterly heedless of the fate of its inhabitants. The Palestinians were perceived as losers, a mere incidental impediment to the fulfilment of Israel's historic territorial destiny. By a curious quirk, that young Israeli whom I heard enthuse about emptying the West Bank of Arabs was Binyamin Netanyahu, today his country's prime minister.
…In the days when I visited Israel regularly, dinner-table arguments about the nation's strategy became familiar. There would often come a moment when somebody would blurt out – justifying this or that aspect of Israeli policy: "But you've got to understand why we must do this – because of the Holocaust." For more than 60 years, the Holocaust card has been played again and again. Today in Europe, there is not the slightest danger that the unspeakable fate of the Jews in the 1940s will be forgotten. But many people, especially the young, no longer perceive the crimes of Hitler, however monstrous, as providing remotely adequate justification for – for instance – Israeli military excesses in Gaza and the appropriation of scarce water resources at Palestinian expense.
The Holocaust argument is sometimes displaced by a more facile jibe: that those who criticise Israel are guilty of anti-semitism. I have been accused of this myself…Many Jews no longer believe that the Zionist concept of entitlement, based first upon Biblical history, and latterly upon the Holocaust, suffices to justify perpetuating historic injustice upon the Arabs of Palestine…
An Israeli listening to all this might interrupt angrily: "But why do you say so little about Hamas and Hizbollah, rocketing and suicide-bombing innocent Israeli civilians?" Yes, indeed – such acts must always be condemned. But what of proportionality? In recent years, for every Israeli killed by terrorism, the Israeli security forces have killed 30, 40, 50 Palestinians – most of them civilians. Israel exacts a blood price from the innocent of a severity which only tyrannies have historically thought appropriate.
The entire thrust of Israeli policy towards the Palestinians in recent times has been to convey a crude message of overwhelming power, of Israel's ability to command, kill or destroy at will, without fear of sanctions. The Israeli army, which once exemplified much that was best about Israel, has today been corrupted by the long experience of suppressing insurgency. Morally, if not militarily, it is a shadow of the force which fought in 1948, 1956, 1967, 1973.
