Israel at Sixty: An Interview with Mitchell Cohen

Daniel Buarque: You point out in your article, “Anti-Semitism and the Left that Doesn’t Learn” (Dissent, Winter 2008), that Israel’s legitimacy is often questioned in the world because of conflicts in the Middle East and because of Israel’s relationship to the Palestinians. Should the rest of the world celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of Israeli independence? Why?

Mitchell Cohen: One of the points I tried to make is that Israel is subjected to double standards, especially on the left. Saying that gives me no joy: I identify with the left so my criticism comes from within the left. I celebrate the birth of the state of Israel because it represented the success of a national liberation movement. Here you have a people, the Jews, who had been persecuted for centuries, who had been the internal “Other” of the West. Their suffering culminated in the Nazi slaughter. From its origins in the late nineteenth century, the Zionist movement was pessimistic about the future of the Jews in the West and in Russia. Many liberals and leftists told them that they were too “particularist” and should put all their faith in universalizing political movements—communism or liberalism, for examples—but nobody can look back at the last century and say that the Zionists were wrong in seeing that emergency was at hand and that what might be called political Esperanto was wrong.

Back in the 1930s, David Ben Gurion, the head of Mapai (the Israel Workers Party), debated Vladimir Jabotinsky, leader of the Zionist right-wing (Benjamin Netanyahu is his heir). Jabotinsky insisted that a national movement had to be “pure” and free from all “foreign” ideas but Ben Gurion, who later became Israel’s first prime minister, insisted that any national movement could be good or bad—it depended on its social content, the type of society it sought to create. I agree with Ben Gurion’s view then that one must be a universalist and a particularist at the same time, even if that doesn’t always work easily and sometimes the effort fails. I am against both integral nationalism and integral cosmopolitanism.

I often disagree strongly with Israeli government policies. But recall that Israel was led by the social democratic left until 1977 when Menachem Begin was elected prime minister. One must distinguish policies of different governments and prime ministers from the Zionist project itself. Palestinian nationalism does not become illegitimate just because Arafat was a very bad leader. The Jewish state represents the successful reconstruction of a persecuted, brutalized, and murdered people, and that is why the world should celebrate its sixtieth anniversary. To do so doesn’t contradict a keen sympathy for the Palestinians Arabs or support for a compromise solution. For me, that would mean a two state solution, Israel and Palestine, and a return by Israel to the 1967 borders (more or less, depending on negotiations). So I would object strongly to “critics” who really seek to de-legitimize the existence of Israel in order to see it vanish. There are legitimate Palestinian grievances and they need to be addressed, but morally speaking they comprise only half the story.

D.B.: Is this kind of criticism a threat to the country’s existence? How about the views of Israel’s enemies in the region, like the president of Iran, who says that Israel should be erased from the map. Is that a real threat?

M.C.: Today’s Israel is militarily strong. Sometimes its strength is used wisely, sometimes less so. Criticisms of various Israeli policies are not necessarily a threat, but a global campaign that demonizes, relentlessly so, a Jewish state in language that sounds quite often like traditional anti-Semitism certainly is a threat. A small country needs sympathy and friends. These sorts of campaign aim to deprive Israel of sympathy and friends and to brand or isolate the Jewish state in all circumstances and forums. Consider the attempts to prevent European book fairs from honoring Israel (See “The Turin Book Fair Controversy” Dissent online). It troubles me that some of Israel’s loudest intellectual and political foes in the West make demands of the Jewish state that they make of nobody else and with a fervor that is not found when it comes to other topics. In the meantime, they don’t insist that the millions of Germans who lost homes after World War II in Poland or Czechoslovakia have a “right to return.” When Saddam Hussein butchered Kurds, they were barely interested.

Of course the regime in Iran poses a threat to Israel. Iran is a major and ambitious force in the region and it is run by religious extremists. I know critics of Israel say that you must “understand the context,” that is, Iranian resentment of Western imperialism. Well, Western imperialism was very bad but everything cannot become a matter of Western imperialism. In the nineteenth century a German Social Democrat, August Bebel, accused anti-Semites on the left of the anti-capitalism of fools and nowadays we have “the anti-Imperialism of fools.”

Consider this context today: A regime of religious extremists that wants regional hegemony says openly that it wants to destroy you. It supports with arms and funds various groups (let’s call one of them Hezbollah) that attack you, and then seeks the most destructive weapons in the world. It misled the UN and everyone else on these weapons for two decades. How do you respond? I hope the situation is resolved diplomatically, but I do know this: You don’t respond by second-guessing a regime that acts and speaks this way, and certainly not if your own country is filled people whose grandparents were the victims of genocide. What exactly would a regime of religious extremists have to do or say–or what weapons would they have to possess—before you found it a threat?

D.B.: Why do you think it is wrong to blame Israel for the violence in the region and the problems with the Palestinians?

M.C.: It is simple. Israel is not to blame for everything that happens in the region or even in the Israeli-Palestinian zone. Indeed, some of Israel’s foes seem to think that there is nothing that can be done by a Palestinian that is not the fault of an Israeli. (The Israeli right-wing reverses this type of thinking). If a peace is ever to be achieved, this sort of thinking must become a thing of the past. Not all conflicts are black and white and in the case of Israel and the Palestinians, there is right and wrong on both sides. But it is ludicrous to think that Israel is to blame for everything—even if advocates of the anti-imperialism of fools say so and can never think beyond clichés.

In the 1980s, there was a war between Iran and Iraq in which there were close to a million casualties. Iraq attacked Iran yet the leaders of both countries—Saddam Hussein and Ayatollah Khomeini—were denouncing each other publicly for being “Zionists.” Was the war the fault of the Israelis? “The Zionists” had nothing to do with it and there have been conflicts for centuries in this part of the world. Conflicts between Sunnis and Shiites long antedated the birth of Israel. The same was true with communal violence in Lebanon. There was massive sectarian violence there in 1860, for example, and there was no such thing as Zionism or Israel then. I often think that those who blame Israel for everything should study the last 500 years of Mideast history.

That is not to say that Israel is blameless. It has made some errors, including some very, very serious ones, such as the settlement policy. The right-wing in Israel has constantly—and too successfully—confused security and religious-nationalist issues. I think security matters are legitimate but not settling beyond the 1967 borders for religious or nationalist reasons. The Palestinian leadership is no less to blame. Arafat had a great opportunity in 2000 to make peace at Camp David—Ehud Barak made it clear that he was willing to go further than any previous Israeli leader—but the Palestinian chairman seems to have thought that he had to get everything he wanted before negotiations. Palestinians speak of al Nakba (the Disaster) of 1948, but their own leaders have been a disaster for them and the greatest disaster today is Hamas.

D.B. Professor Josef Joffe published an article in Foreign Policy trying to figure out what would the situation be like in the region if Israel didn’t exist. What do you think it would be like?

M.C.: I haven’t read Professor Joffe’s article so I cannot speak to his specific points. But, again, if you look at the history of the region for centuries—not just since the birth of Israel or even the intrusion of Western imperialism—and you will find incessant conflicts and instability. In the long view, Israel/Palestine is just one such conflict.

There is no simple or easy answer if you ask why there has been so much instability in the region over centuries. It is a complicated and multi-dimensional part of the world. Part of the problem is certainly due to problems of political culture, but here we should be careful because political cultures are diverse in the region. Still, authoritarian political cultures, which are not genetic and change, can also be intransigent and don’t change easily, let alone quickly.

So the short answer to your question is that I think that if Israel didn’t exist, the region would still be pretty tumultuous. But what does it mean to pose this sort of question? Perhaps Joffe poses it to make just the points I am making – that most or many of the region’s problems are not due to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, that to claim that they are is misleading, and usually due to attempts to scapegoat Israel for every mess there is. What if Foreign Policy asked someone to write an article that posed these questions: What would the Middle East be like if there were no Kurds? What would the region be like if there had been no division between Sunnis and Shiites? Of course, we can construct counter-history: if there were no Kurds, there wouldn’t be Kurdish problems in Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria. I am not sure of the use of such a discussion. The painful problem of Israel and the Palestinians must be addressed on its own grounds and not as the key to all issues in the region.

Perhaps the question should be turned around: what would the Middle East be like if there were a fair resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? I think that such a resolution would be good in itself and salutary for the region, for Israelis and Palestinians, but the Middle East would still have many, enormous difficulties and they would continue.

D.B: Some critics say Israel uses the Holocaust as an excuse to act with violence against its enemies. What do you think about that?

M.C.: I think this claim is usually a canard asserted by critics who think Israel has no right to exist period–and no right to defend itself either. Is “the Holocaust” abused sometimes in political debate? Yes, but probably a lot less than the claim that Israel is an “imperialist racist aggressor, etc.” It would be useful to have a debate on the legitimate and illegitimate uses of historical memories in contemporary politics. Still, it seems to me that there is much more demonization of “the Zionists” these days—they are called “Nazis” often enough—than there is abuse of the Holocaust for Israeli political gain. It would be useful for the left around the world, especially its “post-modernists” and “post-colonialists,” to debate whether or not they (or too many of them) succumb to some very dangerous and clichéd thinking when it comes to Israel.

When Israel acts with force against its enemies, this must be judged according to the normal standards of what is just and unjust in armed conflict. When Palestinian groups attack the Israeli army, that is not an act of terrorism. It is an act of war and Israelis have a right to respond to acts of war, within the limits of what is right and what is wrong in warfare. When Palestinian groups blow up kids in a pizza parlor, that is an act of terrorism and Israel also has a right to respond within the limits of what is right and wrong in warfare. If Hamas or Islamic Jihad attacks Israel, they are legitimate targets. Palestinian civilians are not legitimate targets.

D.B.: Demographic studies say that the population of Arab Israelis may supersede the Jews in Israel by 2020. How do you think Israel is going to deal with it without breaking up with democracy?

M.C.: It is important to distinguish between Arabs who are citizens of Israel and Arabs who live in the West Bank and are not citizens of Israel. Israeli doves have warned since 1967 that annexation of the occupied territories would mean the end of Israel as a democratic Jewish state. I think that they were (and are) right. When Israel occupied the territories in 1967, it did so in the name of self defense. I think this was in fact the case but then the territories should not have been settled at all and should have only been bargaining chips to achieve a peace that provides security to Israel and a fair deal for Palestinians. In a fair peace deal, Israel would no longer be ruling the West Bank Palestinians and Arab citizens of Israel would have the same democratic citizen rights and security that minorities everywhere (like diaspora Jews) should have.

-May 9, 2008

Daniel Buarque is an international reporter for G1, the website for Globo Networks of Sao Paulo, Brazil where this interview first appeared in Portuguese (May 14).

Mitchell Cohen is professor of political science at Bernard Baruch College and the Graduate School of the City University of New York and co-editor of Dissent. His books include Zion and State: Nation, Class and the Shaping of Modern Israel (Columbia University Press).