Leading Journal Publishes a Desperate Portrait of Israel as a 'Failed European Fragment' Hated by Its Neighbors

The forthcoming issue of Middle East Policy contains an astonishing piece by Ian Lustick of the University of Pa. on the desperation inside Israel about its future, titled "The Abandonment of the Iron Wall: Israel and the 'Middle Eastern Muck.'" The long piece explores the mistaken ideology that "Israel and Israelis can remain in the Middle East without becoming part of it" and it will surely be grabbed by Barack Obama (and ignored by Sarah Palin), for it pulls together all the narratives that we keep hearing from I/P--the ruthless violence, the hateful fence, the emigration, the "war on terror" as a model for Americans, and not least, the Arabs' hostile passivity and righteous, hardened resistance.

I will never think about the region in the same way. The analysis is sure to find its way to the highest levels. It is not online yet, but here is my summary of the argument.

For the first 90 years of Zionism the Zionists understood that the Arabs didn't want them there and in spite of Arab resistance they were going to just hang in there and pound the heck out of the Arabs till they reluctantly accepted their presence. "The iron wall" strategy of Ze'ev Jabotinsky, which even Rashid Khalidi said recently in the Nation has worked: Israel's there, the Arab states have given in to its presence. Pile up the bodies a little more, sign a peace deal.

But in the wake of the first intifadah, the Iron Wall idea has been cast aside, giving way in a climate of mutual hatred to a sense of existential struggle: that Arabs and Israelis are fundamentally opposed, and that both cannot live in the region. The Israelis have yielded to irrational uses of violence typical of the French in Algeria and other pariah states. And meantime, the Arabs have gotten over the insuperable Iron Wall idea themselves--and begun to believe that if they just last the Israelis out, they will go away.

Neither side really believes in the other's humanity. This explains the hysteria around Iran from Ahmadinejad and Benny Morris too: They want us gone. It explains the World War IV feelings of Norman Podhoretz and other neocons, basically saying that the U.S. has to destroy the Arab world in order to make it safe for Israel. And it explains the triumphalism of Hezbollah and Hamas, and also the growing support for a one-state solution even in leftwing Arabist circles in the U.S.--because it sure is feeling like the long Zionist nightmare is about to end. Israel is another "failed European fragment," like the Crusaders or South Africa or India, but the last one to go.

Lustick admits that he doesn't know the full range of Arab attitudes, but he ruthlessly explores the spiritual sickness in Israeli society, the resort to horrifying violence (wanting to turn Lebanon's clock back 20 years), the lack of faith in Zionism, and the desertion of Israel by as many as 1 million of its citizens who would prefer to live in Europe or the U.S. Oh exile, where is thy sting!

Lustick concludes by saying that the moment is truly desperate and the key is to reimagine Israeli existence, to reach some actual modus vivendi with the Palestinians through some real acknowledgement of Palestinian humanity and rights. He fully articulates something I've repeated here: that the Israelis want nothing to do with Arabs, though they live in the Arab world, 500 miles east of Istanbul. And that going forward requires asking, What do Palestinians want?

Below I'm going to sample choice bits of the piece, which is getting passed with excitement among followers of Middle East policy. As soon as it's online, I'll let you know. Ian Lustick:

Among Israelis, a natural and very
prominent result of this deep-seated
alienation from the region, its peoples and
its cultures is an urge to escape. It takes
many forms. Consider the construction of
the “security barrier,” a network of fencing,
concrete walls, barbed wire, trenches
and embankments intended to surround the
Jewish state. One can usefully imagine the
barrier as transforming Israel into a kind of
“gated community” sealed off from the
Middle East as hermetically as possible.

However, it must also be noted that
the effect of the barrier, and perhaps more
of its purpose than is commonly acknowledged,
is not to keep Middle Easterners
out of Israel, but to physically and psychologically
remove Israel from the Middle
East....

Israelis with the training, skills and
wealth to do so are also literally “escaping”
from the Middle East and from those parts
of Israel that are more Middle Eastern.

There is significant evidence that,
since the collapse of the Oslo peace
process and the outbreak of the al-Aqsa
Intifada, the emigration of Israeli Jews has
increased, as have activities that would
make future emigration easier. In February
2007, Israel’s minister of immigrant
absorption, Zeev Boim, acknowledged that
there were between 700,000 and 1 million
Israeli expatriates worldwide, with some
600,000 in North America alone...

The core idea [of the Iron Wall] was not to
avoid war, but to insure victories of such
vividness and consequence that Arabs
would come to regard Israel’s existence an
immutable, if unpleasant, fact of Middle
Eastern life. Once that attitude was
instilled, the objective was to combine the
stick of coercion with the carrot of compromise
to achieve negotiated peace
agreements....

What Arabs learned from the
Lebanon War was not the inevitability of
accommodating themselves to Israeli
diktats, but the vulnerability of the Israeli
army and Israeli society to determined
Arab and Muslim political and military
action...

As I have stressed, Zionism’s use of
violence against Arabs was traditionally
conceived as a pedagogical device to
convince Arabs of the Jewish National
Home’s indestructibility, and then to
persuade some among them to negotiate
mutually acceptable deals based on the
alternative of suffering painful defeats. It
is natural, then, that, as images of a future
in which Arabs and Muslims can come to
accept the Jewish state fade from Israeli
consciousness, the rationale for violence
also changes. Instead of being conceived
as a persuasive instrument in service of
political or diplomatic aims, force against
Arabs and Muslims is increasingly treated
as a kind of rattonade. This was the term
used to characterize the French practice in
Algeria of entering casbahs and other
Muslim quarters, killing inhabitants, and
then quickly returning to European areas or
bases. Its literal meaning is “rat hunt.”
More generally, it refers to a violent strike
against the enemy “on the other side of the
wall” for purposes of punishment, destruction
and psychological release....

Israel, of course, is the only survivor in
this list [of outposts of European settlement].Counting from the state’s establishment,
it is almost 60 years old. Counting
from the first arrival of Zionist settlers
in Palestine, it is 125 years old — compared
to almost two hundred years for the
Crusaders; about 80 years for the white
version of the Union, then Republic, of
South Africa; 120 years for French Algeria;
and 34 years for independent (white)
Rhodesia. Israel’s biggest challenge,
indeed the biggest challenge facing Zionism
and its descendants, is to escape the fate
of all other polities falling within this
category. Can Israel do what no other
country in this category has done —
establish itself as a commonsensical,
naturalized, and presumptively permanent
feature of a non-European landscape?

The argument set forth here has
been that Israel and Jewish Israelis are
deep into the process of abandoning any
image of the state or of themselves as part
of the Middle East. Instead of hoping to
transform Arab/Muslim attitudes toward
the Jewish state by a pedagogy of force
followed by diplomacy (the Iron Wall
strategy), or of transforming the cultural
content of the region via modernization
cum Westernization, Israelis are seeking
isolation or escape....

[I]t may be noted that in each of the modern cases of
failed European fragments, international
pariah status preceded the polity’s demise.
There is ample evidence that Israel is
assuming this image..

Certainly it is
true that some Arab regimes continue to
express their willingness to sign peace
treaties with Israel. But in a region whose
deepest and strongest political sentiments
are those of religion, it would seem that, if
democracy does take hold in the Middle
East, it may simply accelerate the rise to
power of forces unwilling to accept Israel
as a long-term partner in the future of the
region...

[If] Israelis are so disconnected from Middle
Eastern realities as to have lost the empathy
with Palestinians necessary to convince
them that negotiations will lead to a satisfying
outcome, and if Arabs and Muslims in
the Middle East are as intransigently hostile
to Israel as most Israelis believe them to
be, then, in effect, a two-state solution has
been rendered impossible. This is not
because of the oft-discussed supposed
impossibility of actually establishing a
Palestinian state next to Israel (Hamas, for
its part, is perfectly ready to accept one as
a prelude to a 20-year lull in the battle.).
The impossibility of a the two-state solution
hangs, instead, on the question of whether
the belief in the rationale behind it —
achieving some semblance of a comprehensively
stable and peaceful end to the
Arab-Israeli dispute — will have vanished
from inside Israeli political life. Why
should Israelis tear themselves to pieces to
produce a state that will satisfy the Pales
tinians if they come to believe that the rest
of the Middle East hates Israel more than
they care for the Palestinians?

...Having abandoned the Iron Wall,

Israelis are increasingly confused and even
distraught about the future. Yet they face
a stark choice: engagement with the real
Middle East and the demands it makes
upon Israel for justice, democracy and
territory, or escape from it.

The danger for the Jewish state is that, given the choice between convincing Middle Easterners that Israel can be a good neighbor and leaving the neighborhood, more and more Israelis are attracted to the latter...

Most unsettling of all is the interaction between two logical but mutually reinforcing trends. Israelis are embracing coercive and unilateralist policies that destroy whatever is left of its
image as a potential good neighbor. Arabs and Muslims can be expected to treat signs
of Jewish abandonment of the region as encouragement to forget any inclination
they may still have to make peace with the Jews rather than wait them out....

Comments

[otto]

This piece by Lustick's is also worth reading, even if a little theoretical:
“History, Historiography, and Political Science: Multiple Historical Records and the Problem of Selection Bias," American Political Science Review, Vol. 90, No. 3 (September 1996) pp. 605-618.

And this may be an earlier draft of the Lustick Iron Wall article:
http://www.aisisraelstudies.org/2007papers/AIS2007_Lustick_NV.pdf

[the Sword of Gideon]

Come on, you have to do better than Ian Lustick. And that policy think tank. It reads like a line up for Arabists are us.

[Joachim Martillo]

Before he died Baruch Kimmerling and I were discussing the reliability of Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics with regard to the size of the Jewish and non-Jewish population.

I was looking for dependent variables that were associated mainly with population and whose correlation with other variables could be factored out.

However I looked at the data, I came to the conclusion that the Arab proportion within the green line is at least 10% higher than the CBS indicates.

The CBS tends to over-count Jewish Israelis by counting as resident people who are not. It under-counts Arab Israelis because it treats as emigrants people who have only left temporarily. Yet such a bias does not explain the discrepancy, which probably comes to a large extent from OT Palestinians, who are living within the green line in defiance of Israeli law.

[Eva Smagacz]

All the previous "European fragments" shared one characteristic:

They did not possess nuclear weapons.

Isn't it time to really pressure Israel to let International Atomic Energy Agency to inspect the precautions they have in place to prevent fundamentalists getting too close to the button?

I wonder if key people ( what we would call intellectuals in Europe) would read this article, and unlike Mr. Weiss, I have my doubts. They may well take SOG route and dismiss the article (without reading) as being published by "predictably anti-semitic leftwinger".

This way of pre-selecting reading materials is very common in my humble opinion.

While I can understand why average american has not taken his/hers pink spectacles off when it comes to Israel, I cannot believe that Israel Lobby can control the access to internet of entire chattering classes of the US.

With attitudes to Israel virtually unchanged since the WWW revolution, I can only conclude that people pre-select what they read on the Internet according to criteria set by their preconceived political ideas.

[the Sword of Gideon]

Your family have a good time at Jedwebne Eva?

[Bar]

Anti Israel feeling in US is on the rise for multiple reasons, the biggest being resentment of power of the Jewish-Israel Lobby stifling diversity of opinion, free speech without career impingement, architecture of wars, foreign interests, jew centric ideaolgies. Should every Israeli Jew leave Israel, I am not sure these people would be welcomed in US or Europe such is the gap between governments and how little they reflect popular discourse. If Jews have the same rights as others in western societies then we must learn to do without congresses and demanding, bullying leagues who have done so much to bait non Jews. It is time for more Jews to speak out and demand their fellows Jews, normalise.
Political systems, if they are to be truly democratic must be regulated to ensure no elites, be them corporate or ethnic own the system.

[Michael Blaine]

SoG: You are really odious and loathsome.

[peters]

"I understand perfectly well that nation-building requires ethnic cleansing, and the Israelis were no worse than other nations, whose brutal elimination of ethnic and linguistic minorities has long been forgotten except to specialized historians."
David F

Did no one notice this amazing statement of one commenter? It is extraordinary to me that Jews accuse Arabs of barbarity then say things like this without realizing how he betrayed himself. This is a truly alien, unWestern kind of thinking. Who are we harboring in our midst? (Yes, I know not all Jews think this way.)

[cogit8]

SOG still believes in trenches, blood and iron to solve problems.

[Michael Weis]

This guy thinks he knows Israeli psychology but he is very wrong.

[frizzled]

Apartheid South Africa did in fact possess nuclear weapons.

[Ploni Almoni]

Sentimental and ill-informed.

Where to begin? The Iron Wall theory was in effect discarded long ago; it's not news. Israelis have long understood that Palestinian Arabs will not accept Israel's existence in the foreseeable future, Iron Wall or no. That was the whole reasoning behind the Rabin philosophy of separation, as opposed to the Peres philosophy of integration.

The "rattonade" image is misleading, as if the missions are only for punishment or revenge. As Napoleon said, "With a partisan, you must fight as a partisan." The IDF, like other conventional armies, is finally learning about asymmetrical warfare, or whatever you want to call it.

The aerial attacks on Lebanon, like them or not, were a rational, realist attempt to establish deterrence. Whether it was smart or stupid, there was nothing particularly Israeli or Middle Eastern about the approach.

Israel may be a "European" fragment, but about half its Jewish population is Middle Eastern. There's a strong association between ethnicity and attitudes towards Arabs: Ashkenazim tend towards the wishful dovish thinking represented by this article and by Mr. Weiss, whereas Mizrahim (many of whom speak Arabic as their mother tongue) tend towards a realist, hawkish, skeptical approach towards Arabs.

I think Israelis intuitively understand that even if a significant majority of Palestinians were to accept Israel's permanent existence within the Green Line (which they don't, according to polls), that would not mean that Israel could live in peace. That's because Palestinians would never forcibly disarm and suppress groups like Hamas etc. which, with Iranian backing, continue the struggle to liberate Palestine in its entirety, not just up to the Green Line. Even though a majority of Israelis would be happy to get rid of the settlements (that was basically the platform on which Olmert was elected), most understand that doing so would not bring peace.

Regarding other failed colonies, one difference is that almost all of the examples of colonies listed by the author had a metropolis, or something like that, to which they could return. If Israelis are all settlers (a designation which I accept), then they are settlers without a metropolis, like the Trojan refugees in the Aeneid. They have nowhere to return to, which is one reason the state of Israel might survive.

Bottom line, current Israeli attitudes are much more rational and reality-based than your article suggests. Treacly ideas that all you have to do is be nice and give back half the land you stole and your neighbors will accept you, don't go very far nowadays among most Israelis. They know better.

[Ed]

If the Israelis really wanted peace, they would have drawn their borders and written a constitution years ago. But because they harbor expansionist Greater Israel fantasies, financed and encouraged by the diaspora through its lobbying of the West, they can’t quite bring themselves to do so.

Jewish ideologues like to complain that “anti-Semites” view them as monolithic, yet they themselves often view and portray the Arabs and Muslims as monolithic, when in fact they are often even more divided than the Jews -- a state of affairs routinely exploited by Israelis. So how do, for example, Sunnis and Shiites manage to tolerate the existence of one another without working towards nuclear destruction of the other, and without perpetual high-level conflict, particularly if they are so irrational? Why will the Sunnis tolerate the Shiites, but not the Jews?

The Jews and Arabs will attain peace once the lines are drawn, as they have been between the Sunnis and Shiites. But the diaspora, due to its own pathologies and greed, does not want this to happen. And all the aid that it attains for the Israelis (a big chunk of which it winds up also lining diaspora pockets) is designed to prevent that from happening. The Israelis should keep that in mind, too. The diaspora network is laughing at you all the way to the bank, just as they are laughing at the dumb goy paying for it all.

[Mafish Falastin]

MEP is a "leading journal"? LOL! It's a leading piece of Arab propaganda.

Face facts:

WHAT USE WERE ALL THE WARS? By Mona Eltahwy

Why has time stood still for the Arab world? The Syrian town of Quneitra is exactly as it was when it was destroyed after the 1967 war with Israel, untouched so that we never forget. Yet how many German cities, almost leveled during World War II, have been rebuilt and are thriving again?

The 1967 war was one of the many conflicts with Israel that bookend our ages. Looking around the Arab world today, we must ask: What were they all for? It's time to move on.

Time to move on, cousins- before it's too late for you to recover.