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New Israels, Continued

I think Daniel makes an important point that any group conceiving of themselves as a “New Israel” would be more likely to have ambivalent feelings at best, hostile ones at worst, toward any group calling themselves “Old Israel.” Christianity itself provides an excellent example. So saying that Americans have an affinity for Israel because we […]

I think Daniel makes an important point that any group conceiving of themselves as a “New Israel” would be more likely to have ambivalent feelings at best, hostile ones at worst, toward any group calling themselves “Old Israel.” Christianity itself provides an excellent example. So saying that Americans have an affinity for Israel because we think of ourselves as a New Israel does leave something out.

What it leaves out, I think, is that the State of Israel is also a “New Israel_ – it’s both a settler society and a reborn nation. I doubt very much that Americans would have a similar affinity for Israel if neither of these things were true, if Israel were, say, a Jewish version of Armenia. This is a point I made in my dialogue with Ross Douthat this past summer.

I’m also slightly surprised to hear Daniel disparaging the argument that there is a cultural affinity between the United States and Israel, or that this impacts our foreign policy, because an argument very like that was the basis of his criticism of a personal favorite piece of mine from early 2009. ~Noah Millman

I appreciated Noah’s comments, but he may be misremembering what it was I said in response to his imaginative counterfactual. What I was trying to argue then was not that “there is a cultural affinity between the United States and Israel,” but that there would have been no cultural affinity with Noah’s imagined Angevin settler state. Noah was suggesting that America would support this Angevin state largely because of cultural affinity and because they would be seen as part of “who we are.” My point is that Americans would regard an Angevin state, well, rather like most Americans regard Armenia. That is, they would be indifferent or possibly even hostile because Americans would not recognize them as “who we are.”

What I was trying to argue in the two previous posts on this subject was not that there is no cultural affinity between the U.S. and Israel. I am saying that this affinity does not necessarily make Americans more receptive to arguments in favor of American Israel policy. I would also stress that the affinity that does exist today has been amplified and expanded especially over the last forty years by steady repetition that Israel is a reliable ally, that Israel is “the only democracy in the Middle East” (which always conveniently forgets Turkey), and more recently that Israel is a “front-line state in the war on terror.” Obviously, there was some foundation on which to build up an affinity, but there has certainly been a lot of construction work done in just the last few decades to make affinity between America and a state created by a secular Jewish nationalist movement seem like a natural or even inevitable product of American culture. That such an affinity can exist and not really shape U.S. foreign policy is fairly easy to show, since U.S. policy in the region in the 1950s and early 1960s was significantly different from what came later.

One reason I am spending this much time on this is that I find the “explanations” for current U.S. Israel policy offered by Mead entirely unconvincing and designed to shut down discussion before it begins. A less obvious, but no less important reason I am discussing this at length is that I have no patience with historical arguments that stress broad, sweeping cultural and/or religious factors at the expense of discernible, specific causes. That partly informs my impatience with claims that jihadists attack Western governments because of “who we are” rather than what those governments do. When we want to avoid understanding the realities of terrorism, we simply say, “Their god compels them,” and leave it at that. What is most bothersome about this is that it doesn’t actually take cultural and religious factors seriously at all. On the contrary, it ignores the actual significance of cultural and religious factors by distorting them beyond recognition and using them as the framing for essentialist arguments that are designed to perpetuate conflict and facilitate vilification of other peoples. Such arguments pretend to pay attention to deeper causes, but in the end provide the most superficial analysis dressed up in condescending rhetoric. Instead of explaining a phenomenon, they are intended to explain it away.

We saw a lot of this during the Balkan Wars, when fairly lazy journalists declared that the conflicts between Serbs and Croats or Serbs and Bosnian Muslims in the 1990s went back centuries and were the product of ancient hatreds that modern Westerners could barely fathom. In reality, the roots of the conflicts in the 1990s could be traced almost entirely to WWII and not much earlier. Invoking medieval origins for modern Balkan conflicts was one way of saying, “These conflicts are inexplicable and opaque to Americans,” and it was also a good way to impute irrationality to the peoples of the Balkans as a prelude to claiming the role of enlightened interventionists for ourselves. It was also a way of avoiding real understanding of the political movements the U.S. eventually supported. Worse than that, it was a concession to the mythology of one or both parties to the conflict.

It seems to me that enough Americans already embrace the mythology of one side in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict without adding on another layer of mythology about Americans’ inherent cultural sympathy for the State of Israel.

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