Strange Bedfellows: The Radical Assault on Israeli Legitimacy

Irving Louis Horowitz and
Roger F. S. Kaplan

Irving Louis Horowitz is Hannah Arendt University Professor Emeritus at Rutgers University, and Roger F. S. Kaplan is consulting editor of Human Rights Review and past editor of Freedom Review.

How can one speak of symmetry between a normal cell and a cancerous one? With its messianic pretensions, its totalitarian suppression of dissent, and its authoritarian power structure, our regime resembles a cancer cell-Andrei Sakharov, "1953" in Memoirs.

The human rights "movement" has created some strange coalitions. Academics from diverse intellectual persuasions and professional worlds find common cause not in what they support so much as in what they oppose. Nowhere is this axiom more clearly apparent than in the opposition to Israel with respect to the Palestinian-Arab areas. Fueled by massive European support for Muslim causes-largely the product of immigration from the Middle East throughout Western and Central Europe-it has become fashionable to create a linkage between human rights violations, anti-Israeli demonstrations and, with increasing frequency, manifest varieties of anti-Semitism. It is no longer feasible for the human rights movement to pretend that such a syndrome is a passing fancy, and it is hence impossible to escape the issue of human rights support and the terrorist disguises in which such rights issues are enveloped. The cases of Noam Chomsky and Tony Judt, scholars of clear and considerable accomplishment, are arguably two of the more prominent examples of how scholarship in one area does not prevent ideological extremism in the human rights field.

The human rights faction that calls for the disengagement and ultimately dismemberment of Israel, is of course, trafficking precisely in the human rights impulse of the Israelis. It is evident that they are reticent to pursue a policy of murder and mayhem of innocent individuals unconnected to actual military engagements. In seeking to develop a policy of combating terrorism, Israel finds itself in difficult straits, often awkward in its responses that seek to protect its own people without inflicting harm on other innocents and non-combatants. It is far simpler for Palestinian extremists to advocate and conduct theatrical exercises in suicide bombings than for Israelis to develop acceptable, that is to say, humane, policy alternatives. The essential scandal of the situation is the use of human rights as a canard in defense of Arabist revanchism as a means to frustrate Israeli modes of measured response or retaliation.

Asked in a recent interview (April 2, 2002, Z-Net) to comment on the situation in the Middle East, Noam Chomsky, inside of 45 seconds, applies to Israel's government and to two of its leaders (Shimon Peres and Ariel Sharon) harsh terms of indictment, calling them "neocolonialists" and "war criminals." He states they have created a "Bantustan" situation, as the Nationalists did in South Africa. Indeed,

This new policy [of Sharon' s] is a regression below the Bantustan model of South Africa of forty years ago to which Clinton-Rabin-Peres-Barak and their associates aspired in the Oslo peace process.

This is bizarre, to say the least. The record of the negotiations that took place prior to the outbreak of the current conflict in the Middle East, and that continued during its first months, is that the U.S. and Israeli leaders offered concession upon concession to Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority. They had the clear aim of implementing the long-delayed "two-state solution" called for in UN Security Council resolutions 242 and 338. Israel had resisted the two-state solution between 1967 and 1992 for a variety of reasons, but it changed its policy when Yitzhak Rabin was prime minister. The length to which Rabin, and his successor Ehud Barak, went, with President Clinton's encouragement, to make this long-standing Arab demand a practical possibility was remarkable and rare, if not unprecedented in the history of statecraft.

The Israelis offered to give up territory, including a portion of Jerusalem, their capital. They provided their adversaries with weapons-in effect gave them the arms that would be turned against them-on the understanding these would be for the legitimate policing purposes of a new Palestinian state. They accepted as leaders of this state not a government sanctioned by democratic legitimacy-the Palestinian Arabs were never consulted-but a political movement that for some thirty-five years had called for the destruction of the state of Israel. Ehud Barak explains the collapse of the Oslo peace process into war by concluding that Yasser Arafat was never intent on recognizing Israel, no matter what he said during the heyday of Oslo. The strategy is to wear Israel down with new demands every time a step is taken. "[T]hey will push for a bi-national state," Barak explains, "and then, demography and attrition will lead to a state with a Muslim majority and a Jewish minority" (NYRB, June 13, 2002). Despite his strong Labor credentials, Barak understood that in the final analysis, it was the very idea of a Jewish state that the Palestinian Authority could not abide.

The war that broke out in September 2000 certainly supports Barak's pessimism. The initial reaction of observers, including many, both in the Middle East and in the West, who had applauded the Oslo process, seems to have been the right one: confronted suddenly with success, Arafat launched a war of terrorism, which put everything into question. Arafat did not want the responsibility of nation-building, which would have involved mundane matters like education, sewage systems, negotiations with Israel regarding water usage, and the like. This was a role for which he had no political training and no military inclination.

Pessimists, or realists, in Israel as well as in other countries, maintained all along that Oslo was a chimera because Arafat could not accept the idea of a Jewish state. Indeed, they argued that this idea was not likely to find significant resonance in the Arab world in the foreseeable future. Their conclusion was that it was necessary to dig in and wait, because "negotiations" only led to illusions. Against this background, Noam Chomsky has no qualms about offering comparisons of Israel with apartheid South Africa and war crimes. It does not concern him that his moral posturing is exactly what Arafat's strategy calls for. It is in countries like the U.S. and Israel that the complaints and criticisms of a thinker like Chomsky are taken seriously, and have, perchance, some influence on public affairs. In a state run by Arafat, Chomsky would be silenced.

Chomsky's accusatory tone is typical of the invective perfected by the "revolutionary" left since Marx's time. The idea is to set up the premises so brutally and swiftly that your opponent, while clumsily trying to disprove a negative, (e.g., " I am not a war criminal.") is forced to argue for his very right to present his case. After all, should criminals be allowed to defend their crimes? The core of the anti-Israel argument, since the late 1940s, has been that Israel has no right to exist, and that letting this country defend itself is the equivalent of letting a murderer justify himself. This has been true in virtually every forum, with regard to every aspect of the "Israeli-Arab" conflict. When there is violence and war, Israel is immediately accused of war crimes and crimes against humanitarian law (regulating the behavior of authorities in occupied territories). Each time the conflict becomes violent, the chorus against Israel becomes louder. During the 1982 Lebanon war, the American media, heretofore neutral in the matter or rather inclined toward the Israeli side, joined the prevailing view that the chronic conflict is primarily Israel's responsibility.

For obvious reasons, the press in despotic societies reacts promptly to the political-diplomatic line of the regime in power. Reporting and commentary are indices of the rulers' views. For example, from the 1967 war onward, the entire Soviet bloc press, including its affiliates in Western Europe (Humanite, Unita, etc.) reported and interpreted Middle East events on the premise that Israel was the instrument of "U.S. imperialism" in the region. This is still the case with the regime of Castro's Cuba, whose official press, Granma, reports on Middle East affairs in terms even more lurid than one finds in places like Cairo and Karachi. The press in free societies, notwithstanding the views on this matter of critics like Noam Chomsky, has many problems, but the obligation to follow a party line is not one of them. There are "herd mentalities" that operate within the culture of a free press, to be sure; there are party-line publishers with their own agendas; there are all the defects that flow out of the commercial requirements of the information industry, of which news organizations are only one part. Broadly, these problems are the price free societies pay for the free flow of information.

Because of the confusion that is inherent in the information marketplace, the views of intellectuals take on an importance they do not have in repressive societies. If there is no market, the intellectual's function is merely to formulate the party line; he is really a copywriter for the despot. This was the function of editorialists at Pravda, or in a country like Egypt, where Mohamed Heikal for many years served as the regime's spokesman. In such societies, if intellectuals refuse this role they can become moral beacons, like Andrei Sakharov. In the U.S. or any other society where access to raw information is virtually unlimited, the intellectual seeks to create frames of reference that help the reporter understand what he is saying. To call an intellectual commentator on the Middle East responsible for the way the Western news organizations report events is inaccurate. The intellectual is responsible for his ideas, for they have consequences, but the reporter also must bear responsibility for letting himself be influenced: in free societies, responsibility is always a two-way street.

Chomsky's indictment of Israel is sweeping. It is not only Sharon who is responsible. (Not that the reasons for singling him out for special opprobrium are ever explained by Chomsky.)

Many of Sharon's worst atrocities were carried out under Labor governments. Peres comes close to Sharon as a war criminal.

In other words, it is not merely a particular Israeli policy or leader that is guilty, but rather Israel's establishment in its entirety. Labor and Likud have led coalitions since the state of Israel's inception. But Chomsky is not satisfied with such a sweeping accusation. "The prime responsibility," he says, "lies in Washington, and has for 30 years." Why 30 years? Perhaps because that marks the beginning of Chomsky's career as a critic of American foreign policy-during the Vietnam War he developed an analysis of U.S. imperialism from which he has not deviated. Global politics, in this view, are determined by American economic interests, and with instruments both subtle and brutal-the Israeli army, the servile U.S. media-successive U.S. administrations have done whatever is necessary to promote these interests.

The American interest in the Middle East, according to Chomsky, is economic: "control of the world's major energy resources; the U.S.-Israel alliance took shape in that context. The alliance became firm in 1967, when Israel performed an important service for U.S. power by destroying the main forces of secular Arab nationalism. This was considered a serious threat to U.S. domination of the Gulf region." Today, Chomsky concludes, "Israel is virtually a U.S. military base."

The historical record indicates that the United States has long been "evenhanded." It was not opposed to Arab nationalism. On the contrary, many post-war administrations, whether Democratic or Republican, have rescued Arab regimes from their worst nightmares. Eisenhower opposed the British-French-Israeli attack on Egypt in 1956, which if allowed to run its course would have undermined, if not destroyed, the regime of Gamal Abdel Nasser, then the principal representative of Arab nationalism. The Nixon administration rescued Egypt again in 1973 when it pressured Israel's government to accept a draw rather than press for complete victory in a war that Egypt's government had launched. The U.S. rescued the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1982-by finding sanctuary for its cadres in Tunisia-after Israel pursued it to the gates of Beirut and came near to destroying it. These are only some of the more egregious cases.

The case actually could be made that the United States has been the main supporter of Arab nationalism, even if its main beneficiary was the Soviet Union-at least until the movement violently turned against the Soviets in Afghanistan. From Stalin to Gorbachev, the Soviet position for nearly 40 years was able to encourage various forms of Arab nationalism to disturb the peace of the Middle East, thereby sowing dissension among the Western democracies (which always responded to Middle East problems by quarreling among themselves). The U.S. supported the national movements in the Maghreb against French rule. Algerians still speak with pride and gratitude of the statements made on their behalf by John F. Kennedy when he was a senator, though in fact they were very limited. Still later, of course, the United States gave decisive support to Moslem nationalist movements fighting against Soviet occupiers in Afghanistan. It was a feat loudly celebrated in much of the Arab's world media, from newspaper editorials to feature films.

As to Arabs, with some notable exceptions, including the Saud royal family, it is difficult to pinpoint the advantages they have derived from the relationship. The Arab-in-the-street has been, since the gradual retreat of Ottoman, British, and French imperialism in the Middle East, the instrument of demagogues and fanatics. This is of no concern to people like Chomsky, interested only in demonstrating that the U.S. is a force for evil in the world. If Israel is a virtual United States military base, it, too, can serve only evil purposes. The inference of nearly everything Noam Chomsky has been saying on the subject of international politics for the past 40 years is that the world would be a better place if the U.S. disbanded its military might, and countries like Israel, which he considers American instruments, disappeared. The world would then be run by the likes of Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden, and Slobodan Milosevic.

Before considering this prospect, perhaps it should be granted to Chomsky that American foreign policy has not been entirely disinterested. Support of Afghan independence surely served United States interests, such as blocking the Red Army's overland routes to the Gulf region and its oil. Similarly, the Bush administration in 1990 did not admit that in rescuing Kuwait from Iraqi conquest, it had oil in mind. The Soviet Union in Afghanistan, moreover, was drawn into a quagmire that weakened its capacity for mischief elsewhere. In fact, it was weakened decisively-a point that Zbigniew Brzezinski made unabashedly. Supporting Egypt-the U.S. is, and has been for 30 years, Egypt's major source of aid-wins a few friends (though most of them do not advertise the fact) in a region where there are, as Chomsky always reminds us, important energy resources, as there are in the Maghreb.

Great powers have interests as well as friends. When interests take precedence, they are merely applying to statecraft the hoary but not irrational idea that charity begins at home. The Jewish states of antiquity made alliances of convenience with the great Middle East powers of their day. The modern state of Israel has found allies, in different periods, in the Soviet bloc, the immediate neighborhood (Christian-Arab Lebanon and, less ostentatiously, Jordan), France, and Germany. The U.S. has been, since the late 1960s, both friend and ally. Chomsky is aware of this, but he can see only a grand and sinister design-Israel acts within the limits set by its "master" in Washington. But in its refusal to set a time-table for "withdrawal'' from Palestinian strongholds, its determination to pursue the war against terrorism wherever that led in geographical terms, and most recently, in its reticence to negotiate with Palestinian leaders whom it deems to be terrorists, Israel has shown itself capable of a wider swath of autonomous action than previously thought possible.

In this formulation, Chomsky reveals the limits of his method. Any power, great or small, acts within limits. Unleashing its power without restraint, France could have maintained itself in Algeria; the U.S. could have prevailed in Vietnam; Israel could have destroyed the Egyptian army in 1973 and sent its tank columns into the very streets of Damascus; more recently, it could have annihilated the Palestinian Authority.

Can we always explain by reference to impersonal factors why powers behave as they do? To Chomsky the question is scarcely worth posing. But the consequence of his Marxist reductionism is repeatedly to dehumanize the actual people about whom he is talking. Ariel Sharon, a man who has devoted his life to the real, not abstract, existence of the people, is reduced to the figure of a ruthless instrument of sinister forces in Washington, D.C., which Chomsky, conveniently, cannot identify. It is only normal to seek the sources of American, or any other, foreign policy and to criticize them. Chomsky's method, categorical and without appeal, ignores half a century of constant, passionate debate in Israel over the ends and means and purposes of its foreign and security policy. It is a debate the scope and breadth of which can be found in no other society-except the U.S. Somehow, the most free and democratic nation in the Middle East, and the most free and democratic nation in the world, are the ones Chomsky singles out for his most relentlessly uncharitable criticism.

So intense is Chomsky's need to ascribe malevolence to the United States that-to take only a recent example-he ascribed "tens of thousands" of deaths to the U.S. attack on a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant, referencing a Human Rights Watch report. HRW, however, pointed out that it had made no study of the effects of the cruise missile attack, ordered by President Bill Clinton. There can be no doubt that the policy was controversial-coming in the wake of the bombing of U.S. embassies in Africa, many critics blamed the Clinton administration for a desultory anti-terrorism policy. According to critics, the policy incoherence was symbolized by a weak retaliatory strike at Sudan that was poorly executed and not followed up. Chomsky, however, is not interested in policy analysis or political debate-such as discussing the shortcomings of Clinton's policy or the reasons for these shortcomings. He is interested only in taking whatever examples are at hand to repeat a global anti-American theme. In this he is perhaps the representative American Marxist of his generation-fixated on an intellectual construct and unable to take an interest in real people. In October 2001, Chomsky declared on Australian radio:

The U.S. is the prime support for Israel's military occupation. . . . If Israel settles in the territory, the U.S. is indirectly paying for it. When attack helicopters target civilian complexes, or carry out assassinations [sic], here they may call them Israeli helicopters, but they know perfectly well they are U.S. helicopters.

This is a variation of what might be called the perennial Chomsky tune. "The main reasons for my concern with U.S. foreign policy are that I find it, in general, horrifying," he declared in 1983 (published in Language and Politics, 1988). He covers himself by adding that other states too have horrifying foreign policies, but who is going to worry about the foreign policy of Austria or Gabon? He continues:

In some circles it is considered naive or foolish to be guided by moral principles. About this form of moral idiocy, I have nothing to say.

That, unfortunately, is precisely the point. High minded, abstractly moral and moralistic, Chomsky refuses to engage in real debate. What circles is he talking about, and how does he know these are circles that scoff at moral principles? Chomsky does not want to find out, because to do so would undercut his ideas about large impersonal forces over which men have no control. Though he is incapable of seeing this, men whose choices were derived from moral principles waged the Vietnam War, the issue that made Chomsky's reputation as a critic of American foreign policy. The Vietnamese Communists, for example, believed it was the higher form of morality to send half a million men to their deaths in the pursuit of a better future for their country. In response, American and South Vietnamese leaders had to ask themselves how many of their young men they could sacrifice, and how many of the enemy they should kill, to show the Communists their strategy was ill-conceived.

Where moral idiocy is concerned, it is difficult to find a more egregious example than the words offered by the American critic Susan Sontag, immediately following the September 11 attacks. "Where," she asked,

. . . is the acknowledgement that this was not a cowardly attack on "civilization" or "liberty" or "humanity" or "the free world," but an attack on the world's self-proclaimed superpower, undertaken as a consequence of specific American alliances and sanctions?

In fact, there was worse. Norman Mailer pronounced the ruins in lower Manhattan "more beautiful than the buildings were," and used the occasion to denounce the U.S. as "cultural oppressors and aesthetic oppressors of the Third World." In these breathtakingly mean-spirited, nihilistic, and arrogant statements, Mailer and Sontag are saying what Chomsky has said for years with his Marxist generalities-the U.S. is the cause of its own troubles, just as Israel brings on the Palestinians' suicidal rage.

Chomsky's moralistic Marxist reductionism demolishes any possibility of free human action. The U.S. and Israel are instruments of oppression in the world and must expect to become the targets of long-suffering Palestinians or humanity in general. Chomsky knows perfectly well that the U.S. is freer than, say, Saudi Arabia or Iraq. He maintains, however, that countries like Saudi Arabia and Iraq have the regimes they have only because of the global system maintained by the U.S. (and in the Middle East, its Israeli ally). The simplest way to express Chomsky's fallacy is to say that he blames the victim.

Seeking a high moral ground, Chomsky ignores the world of policy making and human action. By contrast, Tony Judt, purporting to a hard-headed kind of realism, loses sight of the moral issues involved in Israel's strategic position and proceeds to drift into an abstract appeal to historical experience that would leave Israel utterly vulnerable to its enemies. Admittedly, Chomsky and Judt occupy different spheres of the political Left. They also have a different intellectual formation. But it appears that when it comes to Israel, all of these conventional distinctions dissolve, and what remains is the hard core distaste for the Zionist enterprise, or more broadly, the Jewish national life.

In what must rank as one of the more astonishing examples of political myopia about the crisis in the Middle East, Tony Judt offers soft utopianism (in contrast to Chomsky's America- and Israel-hating Marxist utopianism), in the name of hard realism. His statement indeed constitutes "The Road to Nowhere" (NYRB, May 9, 2002). No doubt these positions-taken by a well-known, respected, influential American historian-will elicit joyous chortling from Palestine Liberation Organization defenders, and bristling from Israeli policy makers. But beyond political postures is the question of facts. The solution put forth by Mr. Judt is precisely what Yasser Arafat turned aside at the Camp David meetings in 2000 with then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak. This gives the lie to his prediction of a bright future of peaceful cooperation between Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews-if only that "dark id," Ariel Sharon, would be kind enough to vanish. Three grand fallacies undergird his analysis. (These are well worthy of examination, because unlike Chomsky's ahistorical Marxist utopianism, they are the kinds of errors that seep into the mentalities of journalists and others in need of a framework of reference to understand current events.)

The Judt statement starts and finishes with the claim that the French experience in Algeria can serve as a model both for what now exists and what might eventually take place in Palestinian-Israeli relationships. Judt seems to believe that Israel's goals are to eliminate a Palestinian entity. Judt completely blots out of his mind the fact that Israel turned over, to the Palestine Authority, control of large parts of the territories claimed as Palestine. What prompted the current round of hostilities was that Authority's overt support, if not instigation, of escalating attacks on Israeli citizens and cities, with the obvious intention of destabilizing Israel. Since September 2000, the beginning of the suicide assaults by groups protected by the Palestinian Authority, Israel has experienced 12,500 attacks, 464 deaths, and 3,700 injuries. To speak of Hamas as a "community-based organization" as Tony Judt does will assuredly raise derisive laughter on both sides of the Green Line. The Algerian struggles against French colonial rule took place in Algiers (and its environs), not in the streets of Paris and Marseilles. Israel has never had as an article of its policy "imposing its rule or its will on Arab neighbors and states." Quite the reverse: it is the stated intention of Islamists to liquidate the State of Israel (and there is ample evidence that it is Arafat's intention as well). Judt's false analogy with Algeria is not just a scandalous rewriting of history, but a cynical use of the work of Raymond Aron, a Jewish scholar as well as a French patriot, in the cause of Middle East terrorism. Aron, readers will recall, stated that should Israel be destroyed, he would lose his will to live.

Judt essentially argues that Israel exists, and that the Palestinians both need and already essentially have a state of their own. The two states will live side by side in early mistrust but in eventual harmony. The 1967 borders, as modified by the Taba agreements (1991 or 2001), will eventually serve as a benchmark for distinguishing the two states. They will both have a capital in Jerusalem, along lines already demarcated. Judt lacks even a shred of evidence that the Palestinians have any interest in coexistence-on these or any other terms. His Algerian analogy breaks down completely at this point, since there is no indication that Paris has become co-capital of Algeria, or even that a state of real harmony now exists between the French and the Algerians. Ehud Barak recently articulated, better than Ariel Sharon, the source of the friction: it is not a state of Israel that gives offense to Muslims (extremists), but the idea of a Jewish state.

The ideological and theological sources of this fundamental divide are simply ignored by Judt. He prefers to place full responsibility and blame for the current situation upon Ariel Sharon, with an absurd analogy to Victor Hugo's Inspector Javert "insanely given to the destruction of Jean Valjean." In fact, it is evident that were Sharon's intention the liquidation of Yasser Arafat, this could have been accomplished readily enough and long ago. It may well be that a two-state solution is in the offing. But such a condition, in all likelihood, will be neither pleasant nor cooperative.

Time, aided by the evolution of the European Union, has indeed mitigated the centuries of struggles in Ireland or those between Germany and France that Judt touts. But Protestants and Catholics in Ireland, and most member-states in the European Union have in common a Christian faith, a shared market economy, and long traditions of political institutions, however sundered and fractured. One looks in vain for even a shred of evidence within Islamic states for similar institutional safeguards to religious belief or personal security. Only in Turkey, where the armed forces were able to get behind the popular Kemalist uprising, were the forces of Muslim extremism reined in-and this is the only nation in the Muslim world where it might be truly said that any semblance of normal relations with Israel exists. Judt's notion that the political character of Islam is irrelevant to the type of settlement that is possible or even the type of war being waged reflects not hard realism but indifferent utopianism.

It is by now familiar territory for American academics to see the solution, if not the problem, in the Middle East as residing elsewhere, in Washington, D.C. Judt blames the Bush administration for moving away from involvement, and claims that since September 11, the administration has "silenced rational foreign policy debate." He asserts the by now conventional theme that terror is in the eyes of the beholder. As Judt would have it, since Stalin and Hitler defined their opposition as terrorists, the very concept of terrorism itself is somehow discredited. Apparently, the slaughter of the innocents in Israel, and for that matter, the World Trade Center, are to be equated to efforts by a courageous few in Germany and Russia to dispose of the twin tyrannies of the 20th century. Judt is nonetheless certain that the U.S. war on terrorism will fail. He coyly footnotes this item by asserting as fact what "American commentators and officials are quick to deny," specifically, "any link between anti-Americanism and the Israel-Palestine conflict." However, he is careful not to make too explicit his endorsement of the fictitious idea that if the United States moves away from support of Israeli survival, the Arab extremists, along with their European advocates, would be quick to embrace us as an ally.

What is especially insidious about Judt's acceptance of the Arab Muslim position on the benefits of resolution of the conflict in the Middle East is that anti-Americanism has been a constant long before the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and doubtless will remain so for years afterwards. As the single most powerful nation on earth, it can hardly be otherwise. Love and power are not ham and eggs. Negotiations and, perchance, peace, will take place, and it may even be that prospects for overall peace in the Middle East will improve. But the idea that the U.S. will reap political benefits from a settlement, whatever its nature, is hard to believe. In the meantime, the issue is not such blatant nonsense as concerns about "Israeli treatment of their Arab subjects," but how to avoid conversion of Israel into a land of Jewish subjects under Arab sovereignty. Judt asserts a utopian fantasy in which Israel's "dark id" (Sharon) and, presumably, the Palestinian light ego (Arafat) fade away to be replaced by a new United States policy which removes the "guarantees" for Israeli survival in the name of a higher purpose-international peace. That indeed would be the road to disaster for Western Civilization. It is a place to which not even Mr. Judt would want to travel, or at least not without an armed guard.

Judt and Chomsky are, to be sure, very different thinkers, operating with quite different premises. Judt arrives at his anti-Israeli position from the fashionable heights of European Left traditions, while Chomsky's views are remarkably close to the native American variety of anti-Zionism. Where they converge is in their intense dislike of Ariel Sharon-the embodiment of Jewish military resistance. This particular animus provides a clue to their commonality of purpose: undercutting Israel's legitimacy. Military background or otherwise, Sharon is the democratically-elected chief executive of a free society, a society in which there has never been any restriction on the right of free expression, up to and including acts of civil disobedience, and even military insubordination. Sharon leads a coalition government that, for all its awkwardness, corresponds to a national consensus on at least one issue, namely that the Barak-Clinton proposals at Camp David in 2000 represent the outer limits of negotiable concessions to Palestinian Arabs. When there is demonstrable evidence of their desire to live in peace with Israel-evidence that still has not been produced, either by the Palestinians with whom the Israelis are now at war, or the Egyptians with whom they have been, formally, at peace since 1979-then a much abused "peace process" can commence. Sharon is not immune from criticism-he is criticized daily in Israel. But the attack on him as a "dark id" and a "war criminal" is simply a way of saying that Israel has chosen an evil man for its leader, and is therefore itself an evil entity. Needless to add, the same standards of behavior are nowhere to be found in the examination of Arafat.

In this regard, Judt and Chomsky are playing what might be called "the French game"-outwardly standing for peace and good will, while in practice undercutting the one side in a conflict that has made concrete gestures toward peace and good will. The game is played in France by officials and by private parties. French diplomacy unrelentingly places the onus of the conflict on Israel. Among private parties, Israel is routinely described as a neo-fascist state that oppresses Arabs. The reality of Israel's occupation methods is a subject for another essay, but the very notion of comparing it to the German occupation of much of Europe in the 1940s, or of the French occupation of Algeria, or of the Soviet occupation of the satellite nations, is an insult to common standards of intellectual decency. It is hard to imagine that if Jewish civil or military personnel were holed up in the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, they would be treated with such remarkable restraint and concern for human life.

Yet it was a French official who told the journalist Eric Rouleau (of Le Monde) that what Israel did during its invasion of the Palestinian Authority-controlled territories in April and May of this year was "much worse" than anything the French Army did in Algeria (reported by Friedman in NYT). The reference, evidently, was in particular to the fighting at Jenin. Approximately 60 Palestinian fighters were killed at Jenin, compared to less than 20 Israelis. A number of houses suspected of holding munitions used for terror were attacked, some were destroyed. The IDF withdrew when it felt it had accomplished its mission-or as much as it could in the political context-to disrupt the networks in Jenin that were sending suicide bombers into Israel to kill civilians. (Asked about the morality of killing children, a Palestinian Authority official replied that since every Israeli child potentially is an Israeli soldier, he or she represents a legitimate military target.)

Compared to this operation, the French in Algeria routinely destroyed entire villages, relocating their inhabitants behind barbed wire. Suspects as well as known terrorists were, as a matter of officially sanctioned policy, tortured to death, with methods that included strangulation, beating, burning, drowning, and feeding to ravished dogs. The one thing that needs to be said to the official who spoke to Rouleau, and who is not untypical of the climate of opinion in France, is that de Gaulle knew perfectly well what was being done in Algeria. However, he had the moral sense to simply not talk about it.

This is the kind of intellectual argument Judt and Chomsky and many of their followers lend themselves to when they single out a democratically elected leader, make him the symbol of a free country, and turn him into a monster. Whether dressed up in false historical analogies (Judt) or sweeping Marxist abstractions (Chomsky) the tactic is the same: to criminalize the opponent, destroy his legitimacy, and then grandly offer a generous solution to the problem that amounts to turning Israel over to people sworn to its complete destruction.

The current phase in what Lucy Davidowicz long ago identified as "the war against the Jews" is most revealing of a different kind of war in the United States and Europe-a war of the intellectual class against the common cultural standards and political traditions of these advanced areas. It is a conflict cloaked in the benevolent language of human rights, without a corresponding sense of political obligations. The critique of Israel is part and parcel of a larger struggle to globalize the political process, to internationalize decision-making, and hence make it less responsive to the national interest of both the United States and Europe. The issues surrounding Israel raised by Judt and Chomsky must thus be seen as part of a larger effort at delegitimizing not only Israel, but the United States as well. When this is fully understood, then the "human rights" efforts of the old New Left will be placed in proper ideological and historical context, and seen for what it is-the anti-Americanism of an elite corps of American academics.