Routine Deceits - @MidEastTruth

Routine Deceits

American Theocracy’s disingenuous characterizations of Israel.

By Gil Troy
National Review Online
June 5, 2006

As experts continue debunking the polemical paper demonizing the “Israel Lobby” written by a Harvard dean and a University of Chicago political scientist, Kevin Phillips’s latest book, American Theocracy, has been wowing critics and climbing best-seller lists. A lead New York Times Book Review hailed Phillips’s work as the “most alarming analysis of where we are and where we may be going to have appeared in many years” as well as “extensively researched and for the most part frighteningly persuasive.” Yet, for all this “extensive” research, Phillips makes a series of wild accusations against Israel which are undocumented by him, unnoticed by reviewers, and, sadly, not unusual these days for Democrats and critics of America’s war on terror.

Here is the more insidious and ubiquitous threat, far more dangerous than scholarly hatchet jobs against Israel, which have become, alas, routine in academia, especially in Middle East Studies. Although many Democrats remain staunchly pro-Israel, many American liberals and intellectuals regularly indulge in a steady, instinctive, increasingly ritualistic form of Israel-bashing. This progressive tic frequently scapegoats Israel and Jews, unfairly blaming Israel for Islamicist hostility to America, exaggerating Jews’ role in advocating the Iraqi war (while overlooking the American Jewish majority which opposes the war), and caricaturing democratic Israel as a fanatic theocracy. This last misrepresentation helps bash American evangelicals while normalizing Muslim extremism. Alarmingly, these propositions are becoming so familiar they escape notice, an accepted part of the background noise accompanying many denunciations of American foreign policy.

Phillips’s book exemplifies this disturbing trend. American Theocracy warns of a declining American empire, with an oil-addicted foreign policy and a speculative economy gorging on debt, headed by a Republican religious zealot. To demonize the religious Right, Phillips misuses the term “theocracy”; despite his hysteria, America’s society, politics and ethos remain deeply secular. Soft-pedaling the Islamicist terrorist threat to further indict George W. Bush’s policies, Phillips repeatedly makes a false, amoral comparison between the United States and its Islamicist enemies. Treating religious zealotry as a worldwide epidemic, Phillips periodically clumps America with another evangelical favorite and, thus to Phillips, another foe, Israel. “The excesses of fundamentalism, in turn, are American and Israeli, as well as the all-too-obvious depredations of radical Islam,” Phillips claims in his preface.

Phillips alleges that just as evangelicals dominate American politics, Israeli policy is equally held hostage by settler fanatics, causing Israel’s misguided, God-invoking aggressiveness, which helps make it a world menace. Of course, reality is more subtle—and more complex. Both America and Israel are secular democracies with strong pockets of religiously motivated voters who have an impact on their political systems, but have not hijacked either. Religious right-wingers in both countries regularly lose political battles—abortion remains legal in America while the supposedly omnipotent settlers failed to stop Israel’s Gaza disengagement.

Nowhere, amid hundreds of footnotes, does Phillips document his allegations against Israel or attempt to prove them, beyond telegraphing and assuming a general prejudice against the Jewish state. This impression is reinforced by the absurd claim in a riff against Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish sexism that “Orthodox Jewish females cannot even study the Torah.” This claim is so wrong and malicious as to impeach the author’s integrity along with his credibility, especially because the anti-Israel rants prop up his broader worldview.

Although the exaggerated claim about the “Israel Lobby’s” power is the Big Lie festering about the Middle East today, particularly on the Left, the many less-noticeable little lies metastasizing need refuting too. No matter how many times critics lazily and blindly try to fit Israel into their clichéd, PC, postcolonial conceptual straitjacket, reality is messier.

Honest critics of Israel and Zionism have to acknowledge that reaching into the grab bag of twentieth century Western sins and charging Israel with colonialism, racism, apartheid, and oppression, simply does not work. Jews’ four-thousand-year-old tie to their homeland, and the continuous presence of Jews in Palestine during the long exile, means that Zionism is not your average Gilbert and Sullivan, “very model of a modern major general” type of imperial colonialism with a “mother country” manipulating and exploiting an overrun nation from afar. The voting rights Israeli Arabs enjoy, let alone the multicultural rainbow of Israel’s Jewish population, ranging from black Ethiopians to blonde Russians, further muddies the “White Man’s Burden” caricature.

Apartheid is a powerful slur, but an absurd comparison: Israel’s security fence responded to thousands of Palestinian attacks and comes with none of the Afrikaners’ official exclusionary and Social Darwinist rhetoric. In fact, objective observers in the Holy Land would have to admit that most of the racist rhetoric spewed in the region comes not from official Israeli sources, but from Palestinian mosques, Palestinian television, and Palestinian Islamicists—against Jews, of course.

Finally, the zigzag Israeli-Palestinian narrative, which includes Israeli concessions in starting the Oslo Peace process and at Camp David, let alone Palestinian leaders’ strategic decision to turn toward suicide bombing, complicates progressive intellectuals’ black and white, oppressor-oppressee dichotomy. None of this is to claim that Israel is perfect; but if Israel is guilty of crimes, these most assuredly are not the ones.

Critics of Israel and Zionism often whine that they are being muzzled—despite the steady flow of these increasingly common outrageous libels, and despite the popularity of casual hatchet jobs like the Phillips book. Often, this allegation feeds the stereotype of Jews as thin-skinned, hysterical, clannish, defensive. Supporters of Israel need not fear honest debate—but it is only fair to demand that Israel’s detractors renounce the knee-jerk demonizing and the casual caricaturing, the hysterical undocumented claims and the imported, inappropriate slurs, to focus on the real issues. The issues themselves are knotty enough without using Israel as a catch basin for all sorts of perceived sins or as a whipping boy for alleged Western—or American—wrongs.

—Gil Troy is Professor of History at McGill University. An updated version of his book Why I Am A Zionist: Israel, Jewish Identity and the Challenges of Today has just been released.

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