In a society that has replaced the glorification of
equal rights with the worship of ‘diversity’- of origins, cultures, races-
known as ‘multiculturalism,’ is it really surprising to witness the failure of
integration? The retraction of the value of equality in American society is by
no means limited to the area of race relations. As we have already, the
economic evolution from 1980 to 1995 can be described as an accelerated march
towards inequality that has led to worsening situations or outright implosion
for certain low-income sectors of the population – mostly black as it turns
out.
Once again, however, we ought to avoid falling into easy caricatures and try to
understand in its totality the mechanisms of the Anglo-Saxon mind that needs to
segregate some- blacks certainly and maybe Mexicans – in order to assimilate
others- the Japanese or Jews, for example. It might be more accurate to speak
of a differentialist rather than a universalist assimilation in this case.
In a climate of declining enthusiasm for domestic universalism, the integration
of the Jews within the mainstream of American society is of particular
importance for anyone interested in the strategic choices of the United States.
This integration of Jews at home needs to be examined alongside American’s
movement away from universalism in its foreign policy, in particular in its
handling of the Middle East conflict. The inclusion of Israel within the
differentialist system of the American mind is taking place both at home and
abroad. In the foreign context Arabs are playing the role of excluded ‘others’
that blacks and Mexicans play back in the States.
In the United States the ideological fixation with a Hebrew state is not
limited to the Jewish community. The hypothesis of a general movement away from
universalism offers a way to understand this fixation. But we ought to examine
the history that is currently unfolding with modesty. The solidity of the
current links between America and Israel is new and unprecedented. Our purpose
here is not to try and explain it so much as it is to use it as another symptom
of the basic forces that are currently driving the United States. The
partnership with Israel is one of the visible manifestations of America’s move
away from universalism and a strengthening of the differentialist attitudes
that express themselves both abroad with the rejection of Arabs and at home
with the integration problems of Mexicans and the persistent segregation of
blacks.
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American loyalty toward Israel is truly a mystery for specialists of strategic
analysis. A perusal of the recent classic studies offers no explanation.
Kissinger treats the Israeli-Palestinian question in detail but with the
exasperation of a longtime realist who has to deal with irrational populations
fighting for possession of a promised land. Huntington places Israel outside the
sphere of Western civilization that he wants to consider as a strategic bloc.
Brzezinski does not discuss Israel, nor does Fukuyama. This is rather odd if
one considers the importance of the link with Israel within the establishment
of a generalized American antagonism towards the Arab world or, more generally,
the Muslim world.
The rationality and purpose of this link are difficult to demonstrate. The
hypothesis of necessary cooperation between democracies is unconvincing. The
injustice committed day after day towards Palestinians by the Jewish
colonization of what remains of their land is itself a negation of the
principle of equality that is the foundation of democracy. Other democratic
nations, notably those in Europe, do not have the same unconditional sympathy
towards Israel that America feels.
The military usefulness of Tsahal, the Israeli army, almost makes more sense as
an explanation. The weakness of America’s ground forces – so slow and so
reluctant to sustain casualties – implies the increasingly systematic use of
allied contingents or even mercenaries for carrying out operations on land.
Obsessed by the need to control the world’ oil supplies, American leaders are
perhaps unwilling to forego the support of the leading army in the Middle East.
With its size and shape and its abundant arms, Israel sits battle ready like an
enormous aircraft carrier at anchor amid Arab seas. From the point of view of
an American strategic realist, whether civilian or military, to be able to
count on a military force capable of eliminating any Arab army within a few
days or weeks is more important than the affection or the respect of the Muslim
world. But if this is the realist strategy, why do the realist not talk about
it? And can one seriously see the Israeli army taking over control of the oil
fields of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, or the United Arab Emirates when one knows that
it was formerly unable to control without great loss of life a relatively small
piece of southern Lebanon and today cannot maintain control of the West Bank?
Interpretations that insist on the role of the American Jewish community and
its capacity to influence electoral politics have a grain of truth. It is the
theory of the ‘Jewish lobby’ to which one might add a theory about the nonexistence
of an Arab lobby. In the absence of an Arab Community sufficiently large to
function as a counterweight, the political cost of supporting Israel is near
zero for any candidate seeking reelection. Why lose the Jewish vote if there is
not a corresponding larger Arab vote to be won? But we ought not to exaggerate
the size of the Jewish community, which at 6.5 million constitutes only 2.2
percent of the American population.
Moreover, America is not without its traditions of anti-Semitism, and
one can imagine that among the 97.8 percent of non-Jewish Americans, there are
those who vote against the supporters of Israel. But anti-Semites are no longer
anti-Israel. We are now approaching the heart of the mystery.
Groups considered anti-Semitic by American Jews, such as Christian
fundamentalists, are politically aligned in the Republican right. But the support for Israel is strongest among
right-wing Republicans, and the American religious right that supports Bush has
developed passion for the state of Israel – the positive counterpart to its
sworn hated for Islam and the Arab world. If one recalls that on the other side
three-quarters of American Jews consider themselves center-left, vote Democrat,
and fear the Christian fundamentalists, we arrive at a crucial paradox-
American Jews are implicitly antagonistic towards part of the American
electorate that shows the most support for Israel.
One cannot understand the ever more determined support for Ariel Sharon’s
Israel without taking into account these two rather different sources of
support and realizing that their combination and contradictory motivations
explain both the continuity ad inconsistencies of American foreign policy
towards Israel.
On the one hand there is the traditional support of American Jews. When
Democrats are in power, this support takes the form of attempts to protect
Israel while making some effort to respect the rights of Palestinians. The
peace process conducted by President Clinton at Camp David is a good example of
this kind of support.
Another new and original type of support for Israel originates on the
Republican right., which projects onto the context of the Middle East the
preference for inequality that characterizes America today. It is not
impossible to prefer inequality and injustice after all.
Universalist ideologies proclaim the equivalence of all people. This ‘just’
attitude makes those who hold it also believe it to be necessary for the
creation of alliances between peoples. One can, however, form an attachment
with someone without any appeal to a notion of equality. During the
Peloponnesian War, Athens, the champion of democracies, of course supported the
democrats throughout Greece whenever it could. But Sparta, the champion of
oligarchs, set up an oligarchical regime whenever it took control of a city. At
the end of the eighteenth century, the different European monarchies were able
to come together without much difficulty to oppose the principle of equality that
emerged from the French Revolution. The most spectacular example of a distant
but firm identification between two regimes that not only opposed equality but embraced the idea of hierarchy among
peoples has to be the alliance between Germany and Japan during World War II.
After Pearl Harbor, Hitler declared war on the United States out of solidarity
with Japan. Thus there can be a shared preference between countries, just as there
can be between individuals, for evil or simple injustice- if, that is, one is
evil and unjust oneself. The fundamental principle of identification with
someone else is not the recognition of good but the recognition of oneself –
good or bad – in the other.
In is in terms of this kind of problematic identification, I believe, that the
newly reinforced affection of the United States for Israel needs to be
understood. Because Israel is becoming less virtuous at the same time as
America, the latter approves of Israel’s ferocious behavior towards the
Palestinians. America is sliding towards a firmer belief in the inequality of
men and believes less and less in the unity of the human species. The same
conditions apply, point by point, to the state of Israel whose policies with
regard to the Arabs are consistent with its internal social fragmentation as
witnessed by its economic inequality and widely divergent religious beliefs.
The growing inability of the Israelis to consider the Arabs at bottom human
beings like them is evident to anybody who reads a newspaper or watches
television. But it is not s easy to observe he process of internal
fragmentation of Israeli society that, as in American society, has succumbed to
a fever of inegalitarianism. The income gaps between rich and poor are now
among the largest of all developed and ‘;democratic’ countries. The different
Israeli subpopulations – secular, Ashkenazi, Sephardic and ultra-Orthodox –
remain separate as can be seen from the range of birth rates among the
different groups that go from two children per women among secular Israelis to
seven for the ultra-Orthodox.
The early relations between Israel and the United States were based on their
shared conviction of belonging to a common sphere of liberal democracies. There
was also the concrete link of the physical presence on American soil of the
largest contingent of Jews from the Diaspora, as well as the biblical link
between Calvinism and Judaism. When a Protestant read the Bible in a somewhat literal way, he identified with
the people of Israel. In the specific case of American Puritans of the
seventeenth century, you have a people who arrive in a promised land exhibiting
a horror of idolaters – Indians and blacks – and thereby extending the differentialism
of the Bible.
The recent general fixation of the United States on Israel does not seem to
have much to do with this original religious affinity, a love for the Bible, or
with a positive and optimistic identification with the chosen people of Israel.
I am convinced that if republican or Catholic France were still at war with
Algeria – repressing, interning, and killing Arabs as the stare of Israel is
doing in Palestine – today’s United States, differentialist, inegalitarian, and
wracked by its own bad conscience, would side with this colonial France that
had abandoned its own universalism. There is nothing more reassuring for those
who have given up on justice than to see others behaving unjustly. The
injustice that has lately taken hold in Israel apparently does not shock
today’s dominant Western power.
The most important task of global strategic analysis is to grasp te deep logic
of American behavior. The incapacity of the United States to see Arabs as other
human beings is consistent with the ebbing of universalism within American
society.
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This model allows one to understand the nervousness
of American Jews, a community we might expect to be simply happy to have
successfully accomplished their social integration and enthusiastically
grateful for America’s steadfast loyalty towards Israel. But in fact this
privileged community has fallen into the disturbing, not to say neurotic, cult
of the Holocaust. The American Jewish community is endlessly commemorating and
‘testifying’ about the massacre that its members managed to escape. It
endlessly denounces rising anti-Semitism throughout the world and harbors fears
on behalf of all groups of the Diaspora, notably the French- fears that these
individuals themselves do not have in anywhere near the same degree even though
there were, for example, attacks against synagogues in some quarters of France
in the spring of 2002. French Ashkenazi Jews, for whom the Holocaust was a more
concrete family reality than for many
American Jews, seem to be truly less uptight and more confident about the
future even if they are perennially derided in America as deserters with no
community spirit and as future victims whenever the undying French Judeophobia
next rears its ugly head. This persistent Jewish fear in the country with the
supposedly all-powerful “Jewish lobby’ has something paradoxical about it. The
hypothesis of a general ebbing of universalism in America would explain the persistence of Jewish anxiety – What if my integration is revoked?
Let us summarize again the key points of our argument. The Anglo-Saxon mind
has two characteristics when it comes to its relations with ‘others’. First, it needs to exclude in order to
include. Second, the borderline between the included and the excluded is not
stable. It waxes and wanes like the moon but without the moon’s regularity.
The inclusive integration of American Jews coincides with the exclusion of
blacks and maybe Mexicans.. Therefore, it has taken place at a time that has
seen the general waning of universalism and the slick progress of differentialism
via an updated array of American affirmations of ‘diversity’, ‘difference’, and
other tribal sentiments. The motor that moves America today is not equality but
inequality. So how can one live safe and secure with a clean conscience, given
such a twisted process of so-called integration? How can one not experience
this ‘integration’; as precarious and subject to who knows what hidden dangers?
American Jews project onto the outside world a far that is much closer to home.
They have a vague sense that they may be mere toys or tokens within a
regressive differentialist dynamic rather than true beneficiaries of a
conquering generosity of a universalist type.
The views I have expressed are not simply the fruits of theoretical reflection.
I was enlightened on this subject for the first time in the early 1980s during
a conversation with one of my grandfathers, an American of Jewish-Austrian
origin. On a visit to Disneyland, as Mickey and his friends danced around us,
he told me of his nagging anxiety – the racial passion in American society
reminded him unpleasantly of the Vienna of his adolescence. I have never
observed this kind of nervousness on the Jewish-French side of my family.
An Empire Cannot be Differentialist
The American rhetoric about an ‘evil empire,’ an ‘axis of evil,’ or any
other earthly manifestation of the devil’s handiwork is so grossly inept that
one has to smile and shake one’s head or else scream in outrage depending on
the moment and one’s personal temperament. However, it ought to be taken
seriously in its decoded form. This rhetoric truthfully expresses and American
obsession with evil that is identified accusingly as emanating from outside the
country when in fact it originates from inside the United States. The menace of
evil in the United States is truly everywhere if one thinks of the renunciation
of the principle of equality, the rise of an irresponsible plutocracy, the
overdrawn credit card existence of millions of consumers and the country as a
whole, the increasing use of the death penalty, and the return with a vengeance
of obsessions about race. Not to mention the disturbing anthrax episodes post-9/11
that may have been carried out by demented and unsupervised members of the secret
service. God has certainly not been blessing America lately. The country is
steaming mad about the evil it sees everywhere, no doubt in party because the
kettle cannot see how black it has become. This regression can make us more aware
of what we are all losing, namely the America of 1950-1965, a broadly democratic
country where freedom of speech, an expansion of social programs, and the fight
for civil rights made it an empire of good in spite of the mistakes derived
from the Anything But Communism policies exemplified by McCarthyism.
So-called American unilateralism – the term itself is a striking eruption of differentialist
thinking in international politics- will not be considered in this study from
an essentially moral angle. One must look at its causes and consequences. The
fundamental case, as we have seen, is a move away from caring about equality
and universalism in the United States itself. The fundamental consequence is
America’s loss of an indispensable resource of all empires. Without a
homogeneous vision of a united humanity composed of its many peoples, America
will not be able to reign over such a vast and diverse world. An ideal justice
was an arm in the arsenal of its ‘soft power’ that America no longer possesses.
he post-World War II period from 1950 to 1965, while far from perfect, was the
high-water mark for American universalism. As with the universalism of imperial
Rome, America triumphed briefly through modesty and generosity.
The Romans knew to appreciate the superiority of Greek philosophy, mathematics,
literature and fine arts. The Roman aristocracy Hellenized itself. The winner
on the battlefield adopted many of the characteristics of the superior culture
of the defeated country. Rome allowed itself to be influenced by several Middle
Eastern religions before deciding to focus on only one. During its authentically
imperial moment, the United States was curious and respectful towards the
outside world. Americans observed and analyzed sympathetically the diversity of
the world’s societies via political science, anthropology, literature, and
cinema. Preserving the best of what it finds in the word is the mark of the
true universalist empire. The conqueror’s force permits cultures to fuse. This
time in American history that combined military and economic strength with
intellectual and cultural tolerance now seems far away. The weakened and
nonproductive post-Y2K America is no longer tolerant or confident. It pretends
to incarnate an exclusive ideal, to know all the secrets of economic success,
and to produce the only movies worth watching. The recent boasting about its
presumed social and cultural hegemony, the progress of its ever expanding
narcissism, is only one of the many signs of the dramatic decline of America’s
real economic and military power and of its universalism most of all. Unable to
rule the world, America denies the world its autonomous existence and the
diversity of its many societies.
