A Durable Peace (59 page)

But the Soviet collapse has already brought to the surface other, previously suppressed areas of mutual interest. A host of
countries that had broken off relations with Israel after the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War have reestablished relations
with Israel: China, Russia, India, Nigeria, and nearly thirty others in the years between 1988 and 1992. There were several
reasons for this change (among them the democratization of Eastern Europe), but a principal force behind the seemingly endless
procession of diplomats and heads of state to Jerusalem in recent years has been that many of these governments believe Israel
possesses special capacities to influence American policy in what, for a while at least, promises to be a unipolar world.
It matters little whether this assessment is correct; it matters a great deal that it is held. For those who argued that Israel
was doomed to international isolation unless it gave up the territories, this was particularly sad news. Some exponents of
this view wrote lugubrious articles in Israel’s leading papers lamenting the narrow views of these foreign governments driven
by considerations of power and self-interest alone.

In fact, this is not exactly the case. Unlike public opinion, many governments do tend to be concerned first with power, and
only then with virtue or the appearance of virtue. This is exactly why a campaign to influence public opinion, which in turn
influences government policy, is often so essential. Nowhere is this more important than in the United States. American support
for Israel is not rooted exclusively, or even mainly, in the question of interest. The United States, more than any other
country, shapes its policies in accordance with the climate of its public opinion, and the climate that has ruled for a very
long time finds in Israel a society that treasures values shared with the United States. Nurturing
these feelings, and the values Americans share with the Jewish state, should be a top priority of every Israeli government.

Nevertheless, I firmly believe that at the point of testing, a weak Israel would elicit a great deal of American sympathy
but not much else. This is not mere theory. It was tested before the Six Day War in the life-threatening siege imposed by
Nasser’s coalition, when a highly sympathetic U.S. administration stood on the sidelines. This same lesson was taught once
more by the terrible events that unfolded in the ruins of Yugoslavia in 1992. Although the Bosnians may have been able to
muster all the sympathy in the world, a ground war intervention against the Serbs was nonetheless an option too costly, too
dangerous, and too short on clear political benefits for any nation in the world to do more than sympathize, even as the slaughter
raged on for years. If you lack the power to protect yourself, it is unlikely that in the absence of a compelling interest
anyone else will be willing to do it for you. Air support, yes. Ground war action with its attendant casualties is much slower
to come, if at all.

What emerges is this: Power is the cornerstone of the effort to attract and maintain alliances. Yet without a campaign to
secure international sympathy, even the most formidable accumulation of military or economic power is simply insufficient
to assure enduring support. Equally, the accumulation of international sympathy is no substitute for self-defense. The Jewish
people must forcefully resist the jejune notion of the Israeli left that an Israel stripped of its physical defenses will
be so morally strong as to inspire ever-ready and everlasting protection from the mighty. Weakness buys you nothing. It is
not a prescription for securing the support of governments, or for their acting on your behalf. On the contrary, it is the
one sure way of securing their indifference.

But Israel must resist the equally immature conception of the Israeli right that nothing we will do or say will make a difference
to an implacably hostile world. Actions invariably speak louder than words, assert the self-declared Spartan “realists” of
the right, so let us do without the words. They are wrong. Support among the nations, especially in the great democracies
of the West, can be bolstered,
cultivated, and protected by an incessant campaign to win over the public. If the Jewish people had understood this principle
during the couse of this century, it could have activated others to assist it in times of peril rather than having the very
opposite happen. And had Israel understood this principle, it certainly would not have allowed Arab propaganda, including
all the gross distortions detailed in this book, to capture the high ground of international opinion.

It may puzzle some that after all the depredations Jews suffered in the last one hundred years, all this is not self-evident.
Yet there are many people who might glimpse pieces of a puzzle and reach totally different conclusions about the whole. For
example, there are some in Israel who, sensing that military power is not enough, proceed to say that it is therefore unnecessary.
Others question the wisdom of Herzl’s vision by arguing that attacks against Jews still persist in the form of attacks against
the Jewish state, just as they did when the Jews lived as a collection of dispersed communities. They miss the point. A Jewish
state was not expected to eliminate all attacks on the Jewish people, merely to enable an effective
defense
against such attacks. Herzl viewed the establishment of a Jewish state as the prerequisite instrument by which the Jews could
resurrect their capacity to resist the ill fortunes heaped on them by a history of dispersion and the baser instincts of mankind.

And indeed, what a difference the Jewish state has made for Jewish fortunes. It has rescued beleaguered Jewish communities,
bringing them, as from Yemen and Ethiopia, on the wings of eagles to the soil of their ancient homeland. It beckons as a haven
and resting place for millions of Jews in Russia, the Ukraine, and elsewhere, who look over their shoulders at the spectre
of anti-Semitism. What these Jews have is what the Jews of Europe half a century ago did not: the knowledge that they are
not alone, that they have a place to go, that there is a country that not only wants them but will intercede for their safety
and their well-being.

In another powerful scene in
Shoah,
a minor official of the Polish government-in-exile, a non-Jew, describes how during the Nazi annihilation of Polish Jewry,
he was approached by a delegation of
Jews from Warsaw begging for Allied assistance—for military action, for arms for the Jewish fighters in the ghetto, at least
for public pronouncements of support. No one was listening, and so they had to come to him, they said. “We understand we have
no country of our own, we have no government, we have no voice in the Allied councils. So we have to [seek help from]… little
people like you… Will you approach… the Allied leaders?” But there was of course little he could actually do.
⁸

No more succinct a statement could be made about the significance of the rise of Israel. For if there had been an Israel earlier
in this century, there surely would have been no Holocaust. There would have been a country willing to take the Jewish refugees
when America, Britain, and the other nations refused. There would have been a country to press for their departure. And there
would have been an army ready to fight for them. If the past was lacking in this regard, the future is not: The Jews are no
longer helpless, no longer lacking the capacities to assert their case and to fight for it. It is an uncontestable fact that
the establishment of the Jewish state has retrieved for the Jews the ability to again seize their destiny, to again control
their fate. And if that ability is still in the making, if the Jewish people needs time to shed its apolitical habits of thought
and behavior acquired in years of exile, this process will have to be substantially accelerated. The Jewish state is at the
center of an international maelstrom, and it needs much political ingenuity to maneuver on the international scene. Somehow
Israel will have to compress the long decades required to produce the political statesmanship it so badly needs. It cannot
wait to become politically mature. It must skip its adolescence and become politically adult. The Jewish people underwent
this kind of rapid transformation in the case of building military strength, and it will now have to do the same in re-creating
its political abilities.

But this is not a change that Jews alone find difficult to assimilate. Israel encounters difficulties in explaining its position
that no other nation encounters. No other country faces both constant threats to its existence
and
constant criticism for acting against
such threats. I do not believe that the international obtuseness in grasping Israel’s predicament is grounded solely in the
successes of Arab propaganda and Israel’s ineffectual response to it. This explanation may remove the topsoil of attitudes
toward the Jewish state, but it does not get to the psychological bedrock underneath. That rock, I believe, consists of a
basic difficulty in accepting the revolutionary change in the status of the Jews.

The entire world is witnessing the historical transformation of the Jewish people from a condition of powerlessness to power,
from a condition of being unable to meet the contingencies of a violent world to one in which the Jewish people is strong
enough to pilot its own destiny. For a world accustomed to seeing the Jew as the perennial victim, suffering endless atrocities
at the hands of a succession of persecutors, this is a jarring shift in reality that has barely begun to make sense. This
is certainly true for the opponents of the Jews, who believe that Jewish power is nothing more than a passing aberration,
and that the Jewish state will fall sooner or later to a combination of political and military forces.

But the inability to adjust to the reality of Jewish power is equally true of those who are sympathetic to Jewish suffering
and wish to see it end. Many philo-Semites have come to appreciate the Jews as a persecuted people and therefore as a people
that cannot be morally in the wrong. For one who has no power over anyone else, or even over himself, cannot be blamed for
the harm that befalls others. For such sympathizers, it is no easy thing to watch the Jews become a people wielding power.
Power inevitably means moral responsibility, and sometimes it means making mistakes as well. Once the Jews have an army and
a state, it is all too easy to blame them for their actions—and to look back wistfully upon the perfect morality of the defenseless
Jew.

This is an important part of the secret of the success of Arab propaganda: It appeals to a world that has not yet accustomed
itself to the sight of Jewish strength, military and political. It implicitly urges philo-Semites to yearn for a “purer” age
when Jews were beyond reproach because they were beyond succor. This is the
root of the infamous, twisted standard by which the Arabs remain completely blameless for expelling hundreds of thousands
of people—as Saudi Arabia did to its Yemenis in 1990 and Kuwait did to its Palestinians in 1991—while Israel is excoriated
for deporting a cadre of terrorists; or by which Israel is condemned for maintaining the presence of a few hundred soldiers
in a six-mile sliver of Lebanon while Syria annexes almost the entire rest of the same country; or by which Saudi and Jordanian
apartheid laws forbidding Jewish residence went unnoticed for many years, while Israel, whose Arab citizens are freer than
those of Arab states, is still accused of racism for quelling riots. All of this and much worse emanates not from Israel’s
opponents but from many of its sin-cerest sympathizers—who genuinely believe in the idea of the Jewish state but cannot bring
themselves to accept the reality accompanying that idea: that such a state, in order to actually survive in practice, may
have to resort to buffer strips, deportation of subversives, or riot control. It appears that attitudes evolved over centuries
are difficult to change for non-Jews, too.

Yet there is, with all this, a profound desire in modern society, influenced as it is by biblical values, to see the Jewish
people’s odyssey through. I encountered that attitude on a drizzly morning in 1986, when I visited the Arch of Titus in Rome,
which the Romans erected to mark their victory over the Jews in 70
C.E.
I stood underneath the arch peering at the decaying Forum below. A group of Japanese tourists was vacating the space to a
group of Scandinavians. The tour guides pointed dripping umbrellas at the engraving of the sacred Jewish candelabrum being
taken into captivity on the shoulders of the triumphant Romans, looking as freshly cut in the stone as it had 1,900 years
earlier, when the Romans had celebrated the razing of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem.

A Jew’s thoughts, or those of some Jews anyway, tend to turn introspective at moments like this. The destruction of the Temple
was one of the two greatest catastrophes of a Jewish history teeming with catastrophes. But what struck me most that morning
was the easy comprehension that I recognized on those Japanese and
Scandinavian faces. They nodded their heads, they pointed, and said the word
Israel
several times. Perhaps they sensed what many who have visited this arch sensed: that the candelabrum etched on its wall was
a potent symbol of overturning the laws of history.

Writing in the early eighteenth century, the Italian philosopher Giovanni Battista Vico put forth what appeared to be an iron-clad
historical sequence: Nations go through a predictable cycle of birth, adolescence, maturity, and death. Students of history
from Hegel to Arnold Toynbee adopted this idea, pointing to the Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans,
and even their later counterparts such as the Incas and the Aztecs—civilizations that flowered, shriveled, then died. If you
wait long enough, the historians assure us, the blows of time will eventually do their work on everyone. But the Jews were
a problem: They received more blows than any other nation, yet they refused to die. Or more accurately, as one of Hegel’s
Jewish disciples, Rabbi Nachman Krochmal, explained, they suffered a decline as did all other nations, but each time they
avoided death with a new birth, beginning the cycle anew. They refused to give up the dream of their salvation and the attainment
of justice. Perhaps this is why when Frederick the Great asked his physician to adduce proof of God’s existence, he was satisfied
with the reply: “The proof that God exists is that the Jews exist.”