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Books: Why We Fight
Stuart Schoffman
"It is frankly astonishing," writes Yaacov Lozowick (right), "that at this juncture in history a case must be made for the justice of the Israeli War of Independence, yet that is the point we have reached after decades of anti-Zionist propaganda." All too true, and terribly sad, and ironic to boot. Yet any supporter of Israel who has spent time lately on university campuses or the Internet has moved well beyond astonishment. After Durban, and 9/11, and three years of intifada, the State of Israel, in many circles, has achieved the unpleasant status, as Alan Dershowitz puts it, of "�the Jew� among nations" -- accused of being a stiff-necked well-poisoner of the global village, a racist, colonialist anachronism that the world could happily do without. The impassioned defenses of Israel that these two talented men have published are thus timely and welcome, and both are well worth reading and pondering.
Dershowitz, author of "Chutzpah" and many other books, is a renowned defense attorney and professor of law at Harvard. His scalpel-sharp legal mind and patented pugnacity serve him well in making "The Case for Israel." Each of its 32 chapters is titled by a question -- "Was the Zionist Movement a Plot to Colonize All of Palestine?," "Has Israel Denied the Palestinians Statehood?," "Is Israel the Prime Human Rights Violator in the World?" -- and is structured like a formal argument. First Dershowitz cites "The Accusation" ("The European Jews who came to Palestine displaced Palestinians who had lived there for centuries"), then identifies "The Accusers" (various Arab journalists, Noam Chomsky, the late Edward Said), next describes "The Reality" ("Israel is the only nation in the Mideast that operates under the rule of law"), and finally presents "The Proof," often in great detail adorned by a wealth of footnotes.
Israel did not create the Arab refugee problem, argues Dershowitz; it was "created by a war started by the Arabs." As opposed to the Arabs, who in the 1948 war targeted Jewish civilians and "did in fact massacre many who tried to escape," the Jews permitted Palestinian civilians to flee to areas controlled by Arabs. "It is precisely because the Israeli army, unlike Arab armies, did not deliberately kill civilians that the refugee problem arose." For Lozowick, an American-bred Israeli who is director of the archives at Yad Vashem and author of "Hitler�s Bureaucrats," a book about the Nazi security police, this crucial moral distinction is the core of the case. The Hebrew text of the Ten Commandments, he writes, "does not say �Lo taharog� (�Thou shall not kill�), but rather �Lo tirzach� (�Thou shalt not murder�) -- and therein lies a world of difference." War, in the Jewish view, "is not the worst thing that can happen, but... it must be waged justly." The massacre of innocent Arab civilians at Deir Yassin in April 1948 was "horrendous," Lozowick writes: "Murder is murder is murder." But it was also aberrant, and was strongly condemned by the Zionist leadership, who a few months thereafter ordered the newly formed IDF to open fire on the Altalena, the ship bringing arms to the Jewish extremist factions who perpetrated the slaughter. The Arabs, Dershowitz points out, "retaliated for the Deir Yassin massacre not by attacking... Etzel or Lechi military targets," but rather by "deliberately committing a far more premeditated massacre of their own," namely the murder of 70 medical personnel and patients en route to the Hadassah hospital on Mount Scopus.
So too today: Palestinian terrorism is aimed at killing as many civilians as possible, whereas "no country in the modern history of warfare," in Dershowitz�s words, "has been more protective of the rights of innocent noncombatants than Israel." Lozowick insists that "weakening one�s defenses when surrounded by enemies who would destroy you is suicidal and therefore immoral." Nonetheless, he takes exception to the assassination of "master terrorist" Salah Shehadeh in Gaza in July 2002, when the IDF dropped a one-ton bomb on his house, killing 15 civilians. In his assessment, this particular action was "not defensible," indeed "the closest the IDF came to a war crime in the entire intifada." At the same time, argues Lozowick, the intense public debate on the subject demonstrates that "a society under attack can still hold discussions on morality.... This is not a statement the Palestinians can make."
Devotees of the Palestinian narrative of the conflict are unlikely, I think, to be persuaded by such claims of superior Israeli morality. Yet open-minded readers (not to mention Jewish partisans) cannot fail to be impressed, and often swayed, by the skillful arguments of the two authors. Dershowitz pounds away unrelentingly at the double standard by which Israel is judged guilty of human-rights abuses whereas the Arabs and other offenders come out clean. His choice of words is anything but accidental: The 1929 massacre of 60 Jews in Hebron was a "crime against humanity" as well as an act of "�ethnic cleansing,� as all the Jews of Hebron were either murdered or transferred out of the city in which Jews had lived for millennia." Regarding the situation from 1949 to 1967, he writes: "The occupation of Palestine by Jordan and Egypt was never the subject of U.N. condemnation or even expression of concern from human rights groups." And Palestinians and their supporters who outrageously liken the Israelis to the Nazis should be reminded that the mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, was "a full-fledged Nazi war criminal" and "Hitler�s partner in genocide." (Dershowitz�s verdict on Husseini is based in part on the research of the myth-busting Israeli historian Benny Morris, whose book "Righteous Victims" he cites regularly.)
Playing to an American audience, Dershowitz compares the Hamas to the Ku Klux Klan, and characterizes the partition of Palestine (first proposed by the British in 1937, and rejected by the Arabs) as an example of the "new self-determination that President Woodrow Wilson and many other progressives had championed." And lest he be accused of a right-wing tilt, he sets forth his ideological bona fides: "The truth is that I support Israel precisely because I am a civil libertarian and a liberal. I also criticize Israel whenever its policies violate the rule of law." Not every civil libertarian, however, would endorse Dershowitz�s defense of house demolition as "a soft form of collective punishment directed against the property of those who are deemed somewhat complicit" with terrorism. "That it occasionally has an impact on innocent people detracts from its moral purity," he allows, adding unpersuasively that economic sanctions against entire nations, such as Cuba, Iraq and Libya -- and of course the Arab boycott of Israel -- are worse.
The author�s feisty persona leaps loudly from the page in such phrases as "I challenge anyone" and "I hereby challenge," as Dershowitz repeatedly dares readers to prove him wrong. Lozowick, for his part, writes with raw eloquence and winsome candor, not as a seasoned advocate but as a proud Israeli Jew, a citizen-soldier, a father, a religious Zionist, a former supporter of the Oslo peace process. Unlike Dershowitz, he provides no bibliography and only a sparse sprinkling of footnotes; "Right to Exist" is a cri de coeur, not a manual for pro-Israel activists. The introductory chapter, "Why I Voted for Sharon," describes the author�s deep disillusion following the rejection by Arafat of Barak�s peace offerings at Camp David: "Sticking to my liberal guns might be what my heart wanted, but it was not what my mind dictated."
Like many of us Israelis, he unabashedly grapples with conflicting impulses. A high point of his book is the chapter called "A Society Worth Fighting For," in which he effectively rebuts the charge that Israel is per se a racist country by drawing a rich portrait of the country�s "raucous cacophony" of subcultures and immigrant groups. "The situation of Israeli Arabs," he writes, "is much better than that of blacks under either Jim Crow or South African apartheid, although there is much that Israeli Jews could be doing better." While there are "no anti-Arab laws on the books... there are laws that are slanted against them," and yes, he concedes, "many Israeli Jews don�t like Arabs." Yet "to this glum picture must be added the fact that Arabs have never, anywhere, regarded Jews as their equals, unless it be beyond the perimeters of the Arab world."
Lozowick is fond of grand generalizations and brazen value judgments, a good number of which undermine the power of his argument. "The real project" of post-Zionists, he declares, "is not to analyze but to moralize." Palestinian suicide bombings reflect "a whole society insanely in love with death." Journalists, in his estimation, "are not thinkers... Most reporters cannot conceive of a frame of mind radically different from their own." The Reform movement in Germany "turned Judaism... into a pseudo-Protestant sect." Lozowick suggests, too, that secular Israeli thinking is to blame for the failure of the Oslo approach, based as it was on "the seemingly rational assumption that the conflict was about practical injustices, not wishes or fantasies or irrational concepts such as religious destiny or historical purpose. Who in their right mind would kill or die for those?" Nor is the following preachment, reassuring as it may be to many readers, likely to win over the unconverted: "Jews do not murder, they are not brutal, nor do they seek revenge... It is exceedingly unpolitically correct [sic] to say, but it is an empiric fact: Jews, both persecuted and sovereign, generally behave in a more moral way than their enemies and their detractors ever did."
Both authors support a two-state solution. Lozowick opposes the expansion of settlements while defending the settlers as "moral" and "basically positive" people; Dershowitz is "personally opposed to the settlements." Neither believes that the settlements are, in Dershowitz�s words, "the real barrier to peace." The deep-seated cause is rather, as Lozowick puts it, "the Palestinian refusal to make peace with a sovereign Jewish state." Dershowitz ends his book on a note of "cautious optimism," occasioned by the sight of Sharon, Abu Mazen, King Abdullah and George Bush shaking hands at Aqaba last June. Lozowick, on the other hand, figures it will take "at least 150 years" for the Arabs to come around; until then, the Jews must continue the struggle, "because that�s what Jews do."
"Zionism," declares Lozowick, "is the decision of the Jews to make choices that influence their national existence and living with the consequences." In his grim, stoic view, "the goal of Zionism was not to have peace. It was to ensure the existence of the Jews as a nation. Nothing could have been more moral." The "Zionist peace camp," he contends, is made up mostly of "people who refuse to accept the pessimism that comes with the expectation of future generations of Arab rejection... [T]hey still cling to an optimistic fantasy that Israel by her actions can somehow make things better." As a thinking journalist, a post-denominational religious Zionist, and a fearful father, to that last charge I proudly plead guilty.
Right to Exist: A Moral Defense of Israel's WarsYaacov Lozowick, Doubleday 324 pp; $26 The Case for Israel Alan Dershowitz, John Wiley & Sons 264 pp; $19.95
November 17, 2003
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