Due in large part to the examples set forth by editors Philip Weiss and Adam Horowitz, readers of Mondoweiss have been encouraged to think about the issue of American “double standards”, especially in terms of the Israeli/ Palestinian conflict. As we know, the commonly heard trope that Israel is always held to some “double standard” in international affairs is, in fact, totally accurate—though not in the way Israel’s apologists suppose. As Weiss has frequently pointed out, in their “support” for Israeli policy, many Americans have demanded that the Palestinians acquiesce to conditions that they themselves would immediately recognize as untenable if applied to their own lives.
Obviously, there are many such ways that “double standards” affect our outlook on the world. As we know from our personal lives, it is easy to gravitate towards a vision of ourselves that confirms us in our righteousness. States are no different. Indeed, this may seem so obvious as to be merely truistic. Nonetheless, I do think there is one crucial tactic the modern democratic state has used to deflect criticism of its actions that has been largely ignored, but merits some attention. And that tactic is the embrace of what one might call “other people’s dissidents”.
I don’t know what the roots of this phenomenon are, but certainly during the latter part of the Cold War, American presidents, with the help of the media, were eager to glorify the likes of Soviet dissidents like Andrei Sakharov and Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Polish opposition leader Adam Michnik, and future president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel. Needless to say, all these men were undoubtedly brave in their own right. And it apparently didn’t matter to Americans that conditions under U.S. backed right-wing juntas in Central America made Havel’s house arrest look like a stay at a Club Med, for Havel eagerly embraced the Cold War as a Manichean struggle between right and wrong, and was therefore a useful ally in our endless demonization of the Soviet Union. Others, like Solzhenitsyn, were a little more erratic, criticizing the U.S. for leaving Vietnam and then turning on Western “materialism” and “soullessness” altogether. While not a dissident per se, Elie Wiesel served much the same function as Havel after collapse of the Soviet Union, when our actions could no longer be justified on traditional Cold War grounds, and thus fell under a brand new rubric, that of “humanitarian intervention”. Wiesel encouraged Clinton to take military action in the Balkans, though he was noticeably silent as hundreds of thousands of Iraqis died from U.S. imposed sanctions.
During the administration of George W. Bush, the mantle was passed first to Iraqi exile Kanan Makiya, who made the case for toppling Saddam in op-eds throughout the American press. As the rationale for the war on Iraq shifted from nonexistent WMD to the export of democracy, Havel and Michnik, now as seasoned leaders of the “anti-totalitarian left” and moral exemplars what Donald Rumsfeld called “New Europe”, also declared their support for Washington. In Afghanistan, it has proven somewhat harder to find reliable dissidents to play our game. The remarkably brave Malalai Joya, for example, has stood up to the Taliban, but also vigorously opposes the American occupation of her country. Many Iranian activists, such as Akbar Ganji, have similarly distanced themselves from Washington’s belligerence, warning the United States of the disastrous effect a war on Iran might have on the prospects for democracy in Iran and beyond.
As Joya and Ganji must realize, the one rule “other people’s dissidents” must follow if they are to be celebrated by elites in the U.S. is that their attitude towards the U.S. must be precisely the opposite of their attitude towards their own state—namely, they must be willing, in this instance, to endorse the machinations of the powerful against their victims. More than that, they should also offer a larger framework for understanding international affairs that obliterates nuance and neatly polarizes the world between two readily understood categories. Ideological discrepancies between states should be emphasized at the expense of sociopolitical realities.
It is thus no surprise that the one dissident, perhaps more than any other, who has been perennially useful to Washington is Anatoly (“Natan”) Sharansky. Readers will recall that Sharansky’s 2004 book The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny & Terror was a personal favorite of President Bush’s, who presumably discovered in Sharansky’s book an articulation of what he already knew. The main premise of Sharansky’s book is that there are “free societies” and “fear societies”, and “fear societies” necessarily threaten the existence of “free societies” because “fear societies” must constantly search for external enemies to deflect attention away from the illegitimacy of their rule at home. Sharansky proposes a simple method for determining which societies qualify as “free” or “fear” based, what he calls the “town square test”: If one can march into their town square and denounce their leadership without fear of reprisal, they are living in a “free society”. If not, they are living in a “fear society”.
Of course, there are less abstract indicators of a “fear society” that one might imagine would equally resonate with Sharansky. The U.S., for example, now has the highest per-capita incarceration rate of any nation in the world, and has long demonstrated that imprisoning millions of its citizens for the pettiest (usually drug-related) crimes, thereby expelling them the electorate, is not incompatible with democracy. But this is obviously not the kind of analysis that is going to ingratiate oneself to American presidents. Before Bush, Sharansky had similarly captured the imagination of Ronald Reagan when he was released from the Soviet Union after years spent in the Gulag. By the time he wrote The Case for Democracy in 2004, Sharansky was well ensconced in his own political life, spending equal time in Israeli government—nine years—as he did in a cell in the Soviet Union. The following year, in 2005, Sharansky would be amongst the handful of ministers in the Israeli government to resign in protest of Sharon’s decision to “withdraw” from the Gaza Strip.
Sharansky’s personal journey, culminating in his arrival to Israel, is retold in Gal Beckerman’s new book When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone: the Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry. As the title suggests, Beckerman’s story is primarily a historical drama chronicling what Cynthia Ozick has suggested is “one of the great liberation strivings of the twentieth century”. In this drama, Sharansky looms large as the icon of the Soviet dissident movement; one who, after he was released from the Soviet Union, “confidently established himself as the ultimate voice of authority on Soviet Jewry, a man with a large store of moral capital”. But Beckerman also gives a glimpse at the somewhat different role Sharansky ended up playing once he gained his freedom; a role, that to my mind, is far more instructive than the one he has been celebrated for.
Beckerman does not have a penchant for revisionism, and he is working within a popular historical genre—that portraying a collective struggle for freedom—that leaves little room for personal or psychological complexity. He is thus careful not to retouch Sharansky’s image as hero to the point where he becomes unrecognizable. But a reader not enamored with Sharansky can nonetheless see how remarkably short his journey was from dissident in the Soviet Union to state apparatchik in Israel. Indeed, more than anything else, Sharansky’s life testifies to two principles, which we can discern even in Beckerman’s suggestive account: one, how an unmitigated, unchecked sense of nationalism will always trump moral commitment; and two, how easy it is to utilize notions of human rights and universal justice when you are on the right side of history; and how quickly one must say “goodbye to all that” when those whom you represent are not.
In The Case for Democracy, Sharansky claims to have felt like a “human wishbone” upon arriving in Israel, with all different groups vying to appropriate him for their causes. In reality, he willingly cast his lot with the nationalist-settler movement upon arriving, and throughout his years in Israeli government, he never betrayed them. Sharansky always credited his awakening to traditional Judaism with sustaining him throughout his imprisonment; as he says in The Case for Democracy, “it was the connection I felt with all the people of Israel, with our mutual history and destiny, that was the source of my strength”. And well before he arrived in Israel, according to Beckerman, Sharansky linked his ideological commitments with his passion for human rights, claiming that “As a Zionist and a Jew, I support universal justice, the call from Sinai”. Reading Sharansky’s later writing, however, we learn that he would become quickly disenchanted with the mechanisms of “universal justice” shortly after his arrival to Israel. A revealing (if predictable) anecdote, as Sharansky describes it in The Case for Democracy, has him meeting with “old comrades” from Amnesty International and being handed a copy of their annual human rights report. Soon after he begins flipping through the pages, Sharansky notices, like a man given a pornographic magazine unsuited to his sexual orientation, “that there was something terribly wrong. There were pages and pages of material about human rights abuses in my new country, Israel, and very little on the nondemocratic states that surrounded us”.
This sort of thing is by now tiresomely familiar to those who follow Israeli politics. As the above story suggests, Sharansky, like his neoconservative allies in the U.S., has no genuine interest in substantive democracy. No one with more than a nominal appreciation of “democracy” could claim, as Sharansky has, that “America’s democracy was shocked into action” by Abu Ghraib. In reality, Sharansky sees “democracy” as an idol to be worshipped, some makeshift totem pole; whatever form it takes is largely irrelevant. For the key thing is not to draw attention to all those that are prevented from worshipping the same idol; it is really to permit no serious criticism of those that do. Thus “democracy” becomes an effective way to evade accountability, a tool to gloss over and rationalize crimes by a favorite state, no matter how well documented. Indeed, Sharansky always invokes the potential for self-correction and openness of “free-societies” as his response to charges leveled against those societies. But this reasoning is always elliptical, for simply telling ourselves ad nauseam that we have the recourse to openly debate our actions ends up precluding self-scrutiny, replacing it with mere self-congratulation. Hence the vital role played by human rights groups, necessarily critical by nature, but invariably dismissed as too critical of democracies.
In fact, the deliberate marginalization of human rights groups and related NGO’s has led to something far more ominous. In recent years, many of these groups, specifically those operating within Israel, have come to be seen not as simply flawed, or biased, but vilified as essentially treasonous. The umbrella term “lawfare” is now used to denote the existential threat human rights groups and organs of international law pose to the sovereignty of Israel, as well as the U.S.—perhaps making Israel and the U.S. the only democratic states where it is acceptable for educated elites to try not only to evade the law, but to vitiate “law” itself, as a concept. Yet Beckerman shows that this was not always the case—in fact, the Soviet refuseniks, with considerable support from Israel and the U.S., were eager to seize upon international law to bolster their cause. The salient principle of international law for the refuseniks, according to Beckerman, was Article 13 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, where it is stated that “everyone has a right to leave any country, including his own, and return to his country.” As Beckerman tells us, the refusenik-run samizdat journal based in Moscow, Ishkod, printed Article 13 on the opening page of every issue , alongside the Jewish exhortation “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, may my right hand wither”. Sharansky, as well as much of organized Jewry, seems to believe that the former principle is something less than sacrosanct today. One might imagine that a similar “right of return” claimed by the Palestinians has something to do with the disappearance of Article 13 from the agenda.
Apart from pointing to the attenuation of Sharansky’s “moral capital”, this should make us aware of how deeply cynical all of the current reaction against international law, whether under the banner of “lawfare” or not, truly is. And it also hints at what, throughout Beckerman’s long narrative, can only be called the elephant in the room: that most politically conscious readers, engaged by the “epic struggle to save Soviet Jewry”, are going to link that struggle with the fate of the Palestinians today. That being said, we should also not be surprised if many obstinately resist the same comparison—especially if such a comparison raises uncomfortable questions about their own political affinities. Still, if viewed as narrowly possible, even by those who ordinarily show contempt for international law and human rights, a story like Beckerman’s can nonetheless inspire. After all, no one embodies the parochialism of erstwhile champions of “universal justice” more than Natan Sharansky, whose first book is called Fear No Evil, and who’s latest is Defending Identity.
Cynthia Ozick, whom I previously mentioned, provides the epigraph for Beckerman’s book. It is a quote from a lecture Ozick gave in Jerusalem in 1970, later printed in her book Art and Ardor, called “Toward a New Yiddish”. Calling for the revival of Yiddish in America, Ozick took the image of the shofar, the ceremonial ram’s horn blown during Rosh Hashanah, as a metaphor for the attitude she wanted her fellow Jewish writers in the U.S. to adopt. As Ozick said, “If we blow into the narrow end of the shofar, we will be heard far. But if we choose to be Mankind rather than Jewish and blow into the wider part, we will not be heard at all; for us America will have been in vain”. Beckerman evidently considers this to be an apt description of the way many American Jews utilized ethnic solidarity, as opposed to general notions of humanitarianism, to help arrest the plight of their Soviet brethren. In any event, though the Yiddish revival never materialized, this did not prevent Ozick from engaging in further predictions about the future. In a 2003 op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, Ozick took a grim look at the imminent creation of a Palestinian state. Asking rhetorically, in the words of Yeats, “what rough beast, its hour come at last/ Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?”, Ozick tells us that Palestinians have “reared children unlike any other children, removed from ordinary norms and behaviors”. She then proceeds to compare Palestinians (unfavorably) to termites. According to Ozick , “the drive to live is inherent. The very mite crawling on this sheet as I write hastens to flee the point of my pen. The child who has been taught to die and kill from kindergarten on, via song and slogan in praise of bloodletting, represents an inconceivable social ideal.”
It may seem ironic, perhaps even contradictory, that such a blatantly racist person could also appreciate a “grand assertion of human rights”, as Ozick calls the saga recounted by Beckerman. Orwell, however, clued us in to this ideological paradox when he posited the idea of “doublethink” in his novel 1984. Orwell defined “doublethink” as “the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, while accepting both of them”, as well as the ability to “forget any fact which has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again… to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed”. Might this also give us some insight into the evaporation of Article 13, as well as other once-inviolable principles of “universal rights”, from enlightened discourse? To be fair, Orwell in 1984 was describing the mentality of commissars, not “dissidents” or some of our more admired intellectuals in the West. Were Orwell alive today, though, he would know their type.
