Choosing Israel by Emmanuel Todd

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.