TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/022690/0226640.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 13.4 KB | 270 lines

                                                                                ESSAY, Page 77

Judging Israel


By Charles Krauthammer


    Jews are news. It is an axiom of journalism. An
indispensable axiom, too, because it is otherwise impossible to
explain why the deeds and misdeeds of dot-on-the-map Israel get
an absurdly disproportionate amount of news coverage around the
world. If you are trying to guess how much coverage any Middle
East event received, and you are permitted but one question, the
best question you can ask about the event is: Were there any
Jews in the vicinity? The paradigmatic case is the page in the
International Herald Tribune that devoted seven of its eight
columns to the Palestinian uprising. Among the headlines:
"Israeli Soldier Shot to Death; Palestinian Toll Rises to 96."
The eighth column carried a report that 5,000 Kurds died in an
Iraqi gas attack.

    Whatever the reason, it is a fact that the world is far more
interested in what happens to Jews than to Kurds. It is
perfectly legitimate, therefore, for journalists to give the
former more play. But that makes it all the more incumbent to
be fair in deciding how to play it.

    How should Israel be judged? Specifically: Should Israel be
judged by the moral standards of its neighborhood or by the
standards of the West?

    The answer, unequivocally, is: the standards of the West.
But the issue is far more complicated than it appears.

    The first complication is that although the neighborhood
standard ought not to be Israel's, it cannot be ignored when
judging Israel. Why? It is plain that compared with the way its
neighbors treat protest, prisoners and opposition in general,
Israel is a beacon of human rights. The salient words are Hama,
the town where Syria dealt with an Islamic uprising by killing
perhaps 20,000 people in two weeks and then paving the dead
over; and Black September (1970), during which enlightened
Jordan dealt with its Palestinian intifadeh by killing at least
2,500 Palestinians in ten days, a toll that the Israeli
intifadeh would need ten years to match.

    Any moral judgment must take into account the alternative.
Israel cannot stand alone, and if it is abandoned by its friends
for not meeting Western standards of morality, it will die. What
will replace it? The neighbors: Syria, Jordan, the P.L.O.,
Hamas, Islamic Jihad, Ahmed Jabril, Abu Nidal (if he is still
around) or some combination of these -- an outcome that will
induce acute nostalgia for Israel's human-rights record.

    Any moral judgment that refuses to consider the alternative
is merely irresponsible. That is why Israel's moral neighborhood
is important. It is not just the neighborhood, it is the
alternative and, if Israel perishes, the future. It is morally
absurd, therefore, to reject Israel for failing to meet Western
standards of human rights when the consequence of that rejection
is to consign the region to neighbors with considerably less
regard for human rights.

    Nevertheless, Israel cannot be judged by the moral standards
of the neighborhood. It is part of the West. It bases much of
its appeal to Western support on shared values, among which is
a respect for human rights. The standard for Israel must be
Western standards.

    But what exactly does "Western standards" mean? Here we come
to complication No. 2. There is not a single Western standard,
there are two: what we demand of Western countries at peace and
what we demand of Western countries at war. It strains not just
fairness but also logic to ask Israel, which has known only war
for its 40 years' existence, to act like a Western country at
peace.

    The only fair standard is this one: How have the Western
democracies reacted in similar conditions of war, crisis and
insurrection? The morally relevant comparison is not with an
American police force reacting to violent riots, say, in
downtown Detroit. (Though even by this standard -- the standard
of America's response to the urban riots of the '60s -- Israel's
handling of the intifadeh has been measured.) The relevant
comparison is with Western democracies at war: to, say, the U.S.
during the Civil War, the British in Mandatory Palestine, the
French in Algeria.

    Last fall Anthony Lewis excoriated Israel for putting down
a tax revolt in the town of Beit Sahour. He wrote: "Suppose the
people of some small American town decided to protest Federal
Government policy by withholding their taxes. The Government
responded by sending in the Army . . . Unthinkable? Of course
it is in this country. But it is happening in another . . .
Israel."

    Middle East scholar Clinton Bailey tried to point out just
how false this analogy is. Protesting Federal Government policy?
The West Bank is not Selma. Palestinians are not demanding
service at the lunch counter. They demand a flag and an army.
This is insurrection for independence. They are part of a
movement whose covenant explicitly declares its mission to be
the abolition of the state of Israel.

    Bailey tried manfully for the better analogy. It required
him to posit 1) a pre-glasnost Soviet Union, 2) a communist
Mexico demanding the return of "occupied Mexican" territory lost
in the Mexican War (Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada and
California) and 3) insurrection by former Mexicans living in
these territories demanding secession from the Union. Then
imagine, Bailey continued, that the insurrectionists, supported
and financed by Mexico and other communist states in Latin
America, obstruct communications; attack civilians and police
with stones and fire bombs; kill former Mexicans holding U.S.
Government jobs ("collaborators"); and then begin a tax revolt.
Now you have the correct analogy. Would the U.S., like Israel,
then send in the Army? Of course.

    But even this analogy falls flat because it is simply
impossible to imagine an America in a position of conflict and
vulnerability analogous to Israel's. Milan Kundera once defined
a small nation as "one whose very existence may be put in
question at any moment; a small nation can disappear and knows
it." Czechoslovakia is a small nation. Judea was. Israel is. The
U.S. is not.

    It is quite impossible to draw an analogy between a small
nation and a secure superpower. America's condition is so
radically different, so far from the brink. Yet when Western
countries have been in conditions approximating Israel's, when
they have faced comparable rebellions, they have acted not very
differently.

    We do not even have to go back to Lincoln's Civil War
suspension of habeas corpus, let alone Sherman's march through
Georgia. Consider that during the last Palestinian intifadeh,
the Arab Revolt of 1936-39, the British were in charge of
Palestine. They put down the revolt "without mercy, without
qualms," writes Middle East scholar Fouad Ajami. Entire villages
were razed. More than 3,000 Palestinians were killed. In 1939
alone, the British hanged 109. (Israel has no death penalty.)

    French conduct during the Algerian war was noted for its
indiscriminate violence and systematic use of torture. In
comparison, Israeli behavior has been positively restrained. And
yet Israel faces a far greater threat. All the Algerians wanted,
after all, was independence. They were not threatening the
extinction of France. If Israel had the same assurance as France
that its existence was in no way threatened by its enemies, the
whole Arab-Israeli conflict could have been resolved decades
ago.

    Or consider more contemporary democracies. A year ago, when
rioting broke out in Venezuela over government-imposed price
increases, more than 300 were killed in less than one week. In
1984 the army of democratic India attacked rebellious Sikhs in
the Golden Temple, killing 300 in one day. And yet these
democracies were not remotely as threatened as Israel. Venezuela
was threatened with disorder; India, at worst, with secession.
The Sikhs have never pledged themselves to throw India into the
sea.

    "Israel," opined the Economist, "cannot in fairness test
itself against a standard set by China and Algeria while still
claiming to be part of the West." This argument, heard all the
time, is a phony. Israel asks to be judged by the standard not
of China and Algeria but of Britain and France, of Venezuela and
India. By that standard, the standard of democracies facing
similar disorders, Israel's behavior has been measured and
restrained.

    Yet Israel has been treated as if this were not true. The
thrust of the reporting and, in particular, the commentary is
that Israel has failed dismally to meet Western standards, that
it has been particularly barbaric in its treatment of the
Palestinian uprising. No other country is repeatedly subjected
to Nazi analogies. In no other country is the death or
deportation of a single rioter the subject (as it was for the
first year of the intifadeh, before it became a media bore) of
front-page news, of emergency Security Council meetings, of
full-page ads in the New York Times, of pained editorials about
Israel's lost soul, etc., etc.

    Why is that so? Why is it that of Israel a standard of
behavior is demanded that is not just higher than its
neighbors', not just equal to that of the West, but in fact far
higher than that of any Western country in similar
circumstances? Why the double standard?

    For most, the double standard is unconscious. Critics simply
assume it appropriate to compare Israel with a secure and
peaceful America. They ignore the fact that there are two kinds
of Western standards, and that fairness dictates subjecting
Israel to the standard of a Western country at war.

    But other critics openly demand higher behavior from the
Jewish state than from other states. Why? Jews, it is said, have
a long history of oppression. They thus have a special vocation
to avoid oppressing others. This dictates a higher standard in
dealing with others.

    Note that this reasoning is applied only to Jews. When other
people suffer -- Vietnamese, Algerians, Palestinians, the French
Maquis -- they are usually allowed a grace period during which
they are judged by a somewhat lower standard. The victims are,
rightly or wrongly (in my view, wrongly), morally indulged. A
kind of moral affirmative action applies. We are asked to
understand the former victims' barbarities because of how they
themselves suffered. There has, for example, been little
attention to and less commentary on the 150 Palestinians lynched
by other Palestinians during the intifadeh. How many know that
this year as many Palestinians have died at the hands of
Palestinians as at the hands of Israelis?

    With Jews, that kind of reasoning is reversed: Jewish
suffering does not entitle them to more leeway in trying to
prevent a repetition of their tragedy, but to less. Their
suffering requires them, uniquely among the world's sufferers,
to bend over backward in dealing with their enemies.

    Sometimes it seems as if Jews are entitled to protection and
equal moral consideration only insofar as they remain victims.
Oriana Fallaci once said plaintively to Ariel Sharon, "You are
no more the nation of the great dream, the country for which we
cried." Indeed not. In establishing a Jewish state, the Jewish
people made a collective decision no longer to be cried for.
They chose to become actors in history and not its objects.
Historical actors commit misdeeds, and should be judged like all
nation-states when they commit them. It is perverse to argue
that because this particular nation-state is made up of people
who have suffered the greatest crime in modern history, they,
more than any other people on earth, have a special obligation
to be delicate with those who would bring down on them yet
another national catastrophe.

    That is a double standard. What does double standard mean?
To call it a higher standard is simply a euphemism. That makes
it sound like a compliment. In fact, it is a weapon. If I hold
you to a higher standard of morality than others, I am saying
that I am prepared to denounce you for things I would never
denounce anyone else for.

    If I were to make this kind of judgment about people of
color -- say, if I demanded that blacks meet a higher standard
in their dealings with others -- that would be called racism.

    Let's invent an example. Imagine a journalistic series on
cleanliness in neighborhoods. A city newspaper studies a white
neighborhood and a black neighborhood and finds that while both
are messy, the black neighborhood is cleaner. But week in, week
out, the paper runs front-page stories comparing the garbage and
graffiti in the black neighborhood to the pristine loveliness
of Switzerland. Anthony Lewis chips in an op-ed piece deploring,
more in sadness than in anger, the irony that blacks, who for
so long had degradation imposed on them, should now impose
degradation on themselves.

    Something is wrong here. To denounce blacks for misdemeanors
that we overlook in whites -- that is a double standard. It is
not a compliment. It is racism.

    The conscious deployment of a double standard directed at
the Jewish state and at no other state in the world, the
willingness systematically to condemn the Jewish state for
things others are not condemned for -- this is not a higher
standard. It is a discriminatory standard. And discrimination
against Jews has a name too. The word for it is anti-Semitism.