Unqualified Offerings

For much of Tony Judt’s much-discussed New York Review of Books essay on the Middle East this week, Unqualified Offerings wondered if it even needed to exist. UO first encountered Judt in the early 90s when he wrote, for NYRB, important, clarifying essays about ethical and philosophical sickness among European intellectuals during the Soviet era. (Particularly French intellectuals.) In the latest NYRB work, he brings the same acuity to the problem of the Holy Land.

In 1958, at the height of the Algerian crisis, with Arabs bombing French cafés in Algiers, Paris tacitly condoning the use of torture by the occupying French army, and paratroop colonels demanding a free hand to end terror, the French philosopher Raymond Aron published a small book, L’Algérie et la République.[1] Cutting through the emotive and historical claims of both sides, Aron explained in his characteristically cool prose why the French had to quit Algeria. France lacked both the will and the means either to impose French rule on the Arabs or to give Arabs an equal place in France. If the French stayed the situation would only deteriorate and they would inevitably leave at some later date—but under worse conditions and with a more embittered legacy. The damage that France was doing to Algerians was surpassed by the harm the Republic was bringing upon itself. However impossible the choice appeared, it was nonetheless very simple: France must go.

Many years later Aron was asked why he never engaged the heated questions of the time: torture, terrorism, the French policy of state-sponsored political assassination, Arab national claims, and the colonial heritage of the French. Everyone, he replied, was talking about these things; why add my voice? The point was no longer to analyze the origins of the tragedy, nor assign blame for it. The point was to do what had to be done.

In the cacophony of commentary and accusation swirling around the calamity in the Middle East, Aron’s icy clarity is sorely missed. For the solution to the Israel–Palestine conflict is also in plain sight. Israel exists. The Palestinians and other Arabs will eventually accept this; many already do. Palestinians can be neither expunged from “Greater Israel” nor integrated into it: if they were expelled into Jordan, the latter would explode, with disastrous consequences for Israel. Palestinians need a real state of their own and they will have one. The two states will be delineated in accordance with the map drawn up at the Taba negotiations in January 2001, according to which the 1967 borders will be modified, but nearly all of the occupied territories will come under Palestinian rule. The Israeli settlements in the occupied territories are thus foredoomed, and most of them will be dismantled, as many Israelis privately acknowledge.

There will be no Arab right of return; and it is time to abandon the anachronistic Jewish one. Jerusalem is already largely divided along ethnic lines and will, eventually, be the capital of both states. Since these states will have a common interest in stability and shared security concerns, they will learn in time to cooperate. Community- based organizations like Hamas, offered the chance to transform themselves from terrorist networks into political parties, will take this path. There are numerous precedents.

If this is the future of the region, then why is it proving so tragically hard to get there? Four years after Aron’s essay, De Gaulle extricated his countrymen from Algeria with relative ease. Following fifty years of vicious repression and exploitation, white South Africans handed over power to a black majority who replaced them without violence or revenge. Is the Middle East so different?

Okay, I’m liking this part because it echoes my own arguments. But it’s a great comfort having someone as smart as Judt on your own side - even greater than having a creep like Michael Ledeen on the other side. More Judt.

Most Israelis are still trapped in the story of their own uniqueness. For some, this lies in the primordial presence of an ancient Jewish state on the territory of modern Israel. For others it rests in a God-given title to the lands of Judea and Samaria. Many still invoke the Holocaust and the claim that it authorizes Jews to make upon the international community. Even those who reject all such special pleading point to geography in defense of their distinction. We are so vulnerable, they say, so surrounded by enemies, that we cannot take any risks or afford a single mistake. The French could withdraw across the Mediterranean; South Africa is a very large country. We have nowhere to go. Finally, behind every Israeli refusal to face the inevitability of hard choices stands the implicit guarantee of the United States.

The problem for the rest of the world is that since 1967 Israel has changed in ways that render its traditional self-description absurd. It is now a regional colonial power, by some accounts the world’s fourth-largest military establishment. Israel is a state, with all the trappings and capacities of a state. By comparison the Palestinians are weak indeed. While the failings of the Palestinian leadership have been abysmal and the crimes of Palestinian terrorists extremely bloody, the fact is that Israel has the military and political initiative. Responsibility for moving beyond the present impasse thus falls primarily (though as we shall see not exclusively) on Israel.

But Israelis themselves are blind to this. In their own eyes they are still a small victim-community, defending themselves with restraint and reluctance against overwhelming odds. Their astonishingly incompetent political leadership has squandered thirty years since the hubris-inducing victory of June 1967. In that time Israelis have built illegal compounds in the occupied territories and grown a carapace of cynicism: toward the Palestinians, whom they regard with contempt, and toward a United States whose erstwhile benevolent disengagement they have manipulated shamelessly.

Just as this site is wondering if it has a single opinion Judt is not capable of expressing better, he kindly says something with which one can disagree:

There is no magic moment when the walls come down, but the sequence of events is clear: first comes the political solution, typically imposed from outside and above, often when mutual resentment is at its peak.

Judt feels the key to peace is outside intervention. I think the record, particularly in the Middle East, shows that the opposite is more nearly the case. The actual breakthroughs, the ones that either worked (Sinai) or might have worked (Oslo) have been initiatives of the local actors themselves. It wasn’t Kissinger’s shuttling but Sadat’s initiative that brought peace to the Suez. The negotiators of Oslo not only thought up the idea themselves, they attempted to keep negotiations secret from even the United States. We not only weren’t the patrons of Oslo; we were shut out. Because the US is more or less continuously trying to jumpstart some peace process or other in the Middle East - and other parts of the world too - you get a lot of post hoc ergo propter hoc effects when peace does break out somewhere.

[Update: Reader “P Nielsen Hayden,” who does not go by “Patrick Hayden” or “Leslie Nielsen” or “John Hadl,” writes to point out that the first posted version of this piece linked to Airstrip One rather than Judt’s NYRB article. “My ears are bleeding. Libertarian isolationists everywhere will pay,” writes P Nielsen Hayden. Unqualified Offerings regrets the ears.]