The liberal intellectual narrative and the suppression of the Nakba that accompanies it is beginning, however, to face challenges. Ari Shavit’s 2013 My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of Israel, for example, does break a certain amount of new ground. A major best seller in North America, the book was celebrated as a conversation changer: The New Yorker excerpted it; and The New York Times ran three glowing reviews. Shavit’s main thesis is that the occupation—deplorable and pernicious as it may be—isn’t Israel’s main problem. The country has deeper historical and existential reckonings to make. First, the historical fact of the expulsion of the Palestinians must be openly admitted. Second, it is necessary to recognize that the demographic problem that led to this expulsion continues to be the main threat to Israel’s existence. “Today 46 percent of all of the inhabitants of greater Israel are Palestinians,” Shavit writes. “Their share of the overall population is expected to rise to 50 percent by 2020 and 55 percent by 2040. If present trends persist, the future of Zion will be non-Zionist.” Lastly, Shavit warns of the danger of being “blinded by political correctness.” The Tel Aviv elite, he argues, “instilled ad absurdum a rigid political correctness by turning the constructive means of self-criticism into an obsessive deconstructive end of its own”—that is, through excessive self-criticism, Israel has lost its national unity and sense of justification. Americans and Europeans can perhaps afford the luxury of being “politically correct” about things, Shavit contends, but Israelis cannot: only by the sword can Jews survive in the Middle East. They have no choice but to get their hands dirty.
Shavit, in short, is a liberal Zionist who recognizes the Nakba’s role in Israel’s national narrative, and this is no mean achievement. We see this most clearly in the book’s Lydda chapter—the one that gave it its fame—in which Shavit retells the city’s story of expulsion and massacres....In describing Lydda as Zionism’s “black box” and “dark secret,” in recognizing that “substantial contradiction,” Shavit accomplished something that Israeli liberal intellectuals like Oz et al. had refused to even attempt.
The acknowledgment, however, only goes so far: throughout his book, for example, Shavit carefully avoids even using the word “Nakba.” In such a book, this cannot be an accident but rather a conscious decision: the refusal to name the occurrence is a refusal to recognize it as history....not mentioning the Nakba is in line with Shavit’s later argument, which is to concede the expulsions and massacres happened and to embrace that hard truth for the sake of Israel. Thus, he writes, “if need be, I’ll stand by the damned”—referring to those Israeli war criminals who are responsible to Lydda. “If it wasn’t for them,” he explains, “the State of Israel would not have been born. . . . They did the dirty, filthy work that enables my people, myself, my daughter, and my sons to live.”
Despite appearances, this isn’t a courageous confession of Israel’s existential tragedy. On the contrary: such statements are designed to disarm the tragedy’s impact on Israeli consciousness—dismissing its relevance to current Israeli concerns or the future of liberal Zionism. To think otherwise, we are told, is to yield to political correctness. Far from incorporating the Nakba into liberal Zionist consciousness, Shavit transforms that into the consciousness of the right, which has never had any need to repress the facts.
The left’s relation to memory and tragedy is relatively easy to distinguish from that of the right. Being on the left consists in the understanding that a people must change, sometimes radically, in order to come to terms with the tragic past. By contrast, being on the right consists in endorsing your people’s history and tragedy as givens—embracing them as the inescapable preconditions of who you are. Under a pretense of liberalism, Shavit does just that. “The choice is stark,” Shavit concludes: “either reject Zionism because of Lydda, or accept Zionism along with Lydda.” Somehow, the one reasonable possibility remains unmentioned: that Zionism need not be rejected because of Lydda, nor ever, absolutely never, accepted along with it; that confronting Lydda, and Haifa, and Deir Yassin, and Safsaf—and so many other names of places in our country and our past—means that Zionism must be transformed.
Susie Linfield, in an interview she conducted with Shavit, gets to the root of his confusion. Shavit is “essentially arguing,” Linfield points out, “that war crimes can be committed even in the course of a just war.” The war’s justness “is not erased by such crimes; conversely, the criminality—the barbarism—of the acts in question cannot be mitigated by the justness of the cause.” That’s how Shavit would like his argument to be seen, but we must ask what he considers to be a just war. For Shavit the Nakba is about Israel’s survival, but this is misleading—misleading in the same way that not mentioning the Palestinians in the 1944 Atlantic City Resolution was. As Arendt knew then, what’s at stake isn’t bare survival, but ensuring the ethnic Jewish majority that’s necessary for a Jewish democracy. In other words, and Shavit is clear that this is Zionism’s “dark secret,” the violent mass expulsions of Palestinians did not just happen in the course of the war. They were intrinsic to the war’s aims, yet still he deems them just. Hopefully the future’s liberal Zionists will look at this reasoning and refuse to budge: if you’re willing to accept ethnic cleansing as a just cause, no doubt you will end up thinking that your war’s “justness” isn’t diminished by war crimes committed in its midst. Logically, this is consistent, but this is the logic of the right—the violent far right even—rather than of what anyone would recognize as the left.
But Shavit will have none of it: that is all “political correctness,” or what Zangwill, a hundred years earlier, dismissed as “grandmotherly
sentimentalism.” With the demise of the two-state solution, the “dirty, filthy” work Shavit justifies as a necessary part of Israel’s past may now be invoked as necessary to secure its future. The chauvinist willingness to dismiss human conscience as grandmotherly sentimentalism threatens to degrade Zionist politics into a form of barbarism.--Omri Boehm (2021) The Haifa Republic: A Democratic Future for Israel, pp. 118-123,
Last week (recall), I explored Menachem Begin's (1977) ill-fated plan for a kind of confederation involving Jordan, Israel, and a Palestinian Council at the instigation of Boehm's extended pamphlet, The Haifa Republic. And while Begin's plan has some genuine limitations, it has been, to the best of my knowledge, the only truly liberal peace plan rooted in individual rights and individual choice (and if you are unfamiliar with it go read that Digression first). But inspired by it, Boehm (a leading scholar of the history of philosophy) proposes an outline (not a blueprint) of a "one-state" bi-national "single federation." (150) And it is worth exploring the details of Boehm's plan before long.
But before I get to that, in this post, I address some features of Boehm's argument. One important strain of the argument is about the nature of historical memory (and forgetting) in nationalism, Zionism in particular. Here he draws on Renan and Yehuda Elkana. Some of his views on this are hinted at in the excerpt (paragraph 5) quoted above from chapter 3 (aptly titled "Remembering and Forgetting: The Nakba"). But the second strain of this argument is that these views are inscribed in a polemic -- as the quoted passage reveals, from "the left" -- against what Boehm calls 'liberal Zionism.' That Boehm is interested in this polemic is familiar to readers of this blog (recall) because I wrote on it back in 2016.
Now, to put some of my cards on the table, 'liberal Zionism' is primary an American (and formerly British) construction. (As regular readers know, I claim that Zionism is the effect of the failure of liberalism (and this is why it's interesting to political theory) and that there never was a truly liberal Zionism in Israel ((recall here and here), especially here and here; and here),) By this (that is, "construction) I mean its audience is Anglophone public opinion (not just exile Judaism, but also gentile editorialist and politicians). To be clear, it does not just have merely propaganda value, but it also plays a role in the never ending public relations debates (and fundraising) that surround nearly all discussion of Israel and Zionism in leading American outlets. Within the history of Zionism and Israeli political life, liberal ideas played a marginal role (recall this post on Franz Oppenheimer), primarily associated with Chaim Weizmann (the first President of Israel). Yes, there have been liberal Zionist intellectuals and some small parties that are liberal in some broad sense. I actually suspect Boehm agrees with this observation (see his comment about The New Yorker and The New York Times in the quoted passage above). And this is one reason why I stressed the uniquely liberal characteristics of Begin's "Home Rule" plan.
Now, it's worth noting that my claims are illustrated by Shavit's position, which even leaving aside his views on the Nakba, are markedly illiberal. Self-criticism is the life-blood of liberalism; and the focus on relative demographic strength between groups completely ignores the moral priority of individual rights and choices. As critics of liberalism never tire of complaining, liberalism's focus on minority rights, proceduralism, and legal review are mechanisms by which the majority is tamed. The whole point of having a liberal institutional structure is that one does not have to fear the majority--in fact, one can be absent from political life (so maddening to many of its critics). The obsession with demography is, in fact, nearly always a sign one is dealing with illiberal arguments. Finally, it is constitutive of liberalism to reject zero-sum frameworks and the glorification of open-ended war ("only by the sword can Jews survive in the Middle East").* What does happen, alas, is that Israelis (like Shavit) that reject settlement programs and that are, in some sense, pro-peace tend sometimes to be lionized as 'liberals' abroad.
The claim "only by the sword can Jews survive in the Middle East" is a self-fulling prophecy (and self-justifying of many crimes) that dooms Zionism to failure. What's needed, both for the health Zionism and to give liberalism a chance in Israel, is a program that gets Israel's borders recognized and peaceful. (I think Boehm and I agree about this.) The constructive ambiguity over Israel's final borders that has been so characteristic of Israeli political life for so long creates and sustains the conditions for open-ended warfare.
I do not mean to suggest that Boehm is wrong to take Shavit (and Benny Morris) to task for the consequentialist justification for ethnic cleansing (Boehm also uses 'expulsion' and 'transfer politics') during the Israeli War of Independence. One of the great merits of Boehn's Haifa Republic, is its relentless unwillingness to let many of Israel's most cherished public intellectuals, who have enabled a culture of silence surrounding the Nakba, off the hook for their participation and construction of a culture of silence. Again, as Boehm notes the culture of silence is only partial, and given the dominance of Israel's Right, not very successful. But Shavit is no liberal, so (ipse facto) no liberal Zionist.
A much more liberal approach -- which the German Federal Republic recognized in a treaty with Israel -- is to recognize Palestinian claims on property and lives lost, and pay out generous compensation to individuals and their offspring. In practice, Israel has sometimes recognized this fundamental fact, but often in the context of pushing (the legitimate) claims of Jews who had to flee Arab (and Persian) lands, and often in the context of demanding a final settlement. In my view such compensation should be offered ahead of a final settlement, and regardless of Arab reciprocity, especially because living claimants will not live forever. (It would also unfreeze a lot of discussions among Palestinians, and show good faith.) Notice that such compensation does not imperil Israel or changes facts on the ground.
As an aside, I admit I am taking no stance on the question of bare survival. Unlike Boehm, I don't think it was completely foregone conclusion that Israel would survive war with the Arab Legion and Egypt simultaneously. Boehm does not mention, I think, that Jews were expelled from the West Bank -- some of which very long standing Jewish settlements -- and the Old City conquered by the Arab Legion during the war of Independence.
A consequentialist may wonder why I sided with Boehm against Shavit. Why not see -- with a nod to Kant -- such ethnic cleansing as the necessary unsocial sociability that drives history? As it happens here I do not object to what we may call secular theodicy as such. But there are two important features of Shavit's argument that make me side with Boehm. First, as Boehm notes Shavit's stance is basically a carte blanche for war crimes (including these in the future). The problem isn't just the brute fact of war crimes, as Boehm notes, but also (and here I echo Plato (recall) and Kant (recall)) that the way one fights a war also signals something about one's attitude toward peace (or lack thereof). An unwillingness to acknowledge the Nakba and to pay compensation for its misdeeds, signals a fundamental unwillingness to consider true peace to one's enemies. This point does not require any wishy washy views about human nature but is ground in self-interest and realpolitik.
Second, it's an important constraint on secular theodicy that those that are harmed by progress or one's political goals are victims on your own side. (I am not sure what to call this principle.) There is nothing wrong with glorifying those that freely sacrificed or martyred themselves (in some sense) on your behalf. Of course, in practice there can be a lot wrong this, but that's generally because of the manner of glorifying or remembering the sacrifice. But sacrificing or harming others on your behalf turns a problem of evil into (ahh) a legitimacy of evil. The fact that people like Morris and Shavit miss this really simple distinction is evidence of the corrosive effect of their nationalism on their judgment.
Again, what I am saying is orthogonal to the question of dirty hands (or even Left/Right distinctions--reading Lenin is not for the faint hearted). I am not suggesting that dirty hands can be avoided in political life. Rather, I am suggesting that if one takes the problem of dirty hands seriously (qua liberal, but not just a liberal), one must also accept the need for atonement and reparations and a way to find a place for one's injustices in one's historical memory. As noted, Boehm has intriguing proposals on how to do this, and to these I will turn next (and then conclude my series by looking at his political proposal). To be continued.
*Some of you might feel that my account of liberalism cannot do full justice to liberalism's complicity with imperialism and colonialism in the late nineteenth century. Fair enough.
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