Disenchantment

The reality of Israel’s conduct is finally catching up to it. It was easier, not long ago, to ignore, or even support, the destruction of Palestinian society in the West Bank and Gaza, the bombing of multiple countries, the assassination of foreign leaders, and the theft of Lebanese and Syrian territories. The killing, often deliberate, of more than twenty thousand children in Gaza injured consciences, not purses, and consciences could be managed with some ritual censuring of Benjamin Netanyahu or his proudly bigoted colleagues. It was the assault on Iran that exposed to broader public scrutiny a strange aberration in the international community: a rapidly surging number of citizens in Europe and North America now marvel at the imprimatur their elites bestowed on Israel.

This imprimatur depended as much on a systematic suppression of facts as on a general ignorance about the Middle East. Israel was presented in the non-Arab mainstream as the only democracy in the region, adorned with the world’s “most moral army.” Dissent invited ostracism: no “cancellations” were as punitive and swift in the West as those triggered by bad-faith accusations of anti-Semitism, itself redefined as critique of Israel’s bellicose ethnonationalism. But the calamitously reckless war on Iran has now broken the spell.

The new rupture has manifested in various ways. More Americans now sympathize with Palestinians than with Israel, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll. This dramatic shift in public opinion has disturbingly emboldened members of the far right in many parts of the United States to uncloset a very real and virulent antiSemitism. At the same time, a growing mass awareness about the profound corruption of American politics is making for some salubrious trends. Politicians across the ideological spectrum are being electorally rewarded for opposing subventions to a forever warring state, something not lost on the perennially opportunistic J. D. Vance, who, eyeing the 2028 election, publicly counseled Israel, “You can’t just kill your way out of solving every nationalsecurity problem that you have.” In an astonishing break from his predecessors, the mayor of New York has repeatedly accused Israel of committing genocide and yet has earned greater approbation from Jewish Americans than Netanyahu does. In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed, campaigning on a promise to end unconditional military aid to Israel, defeated Representative Haley Stevens, a proponent of unconditional aid.

Reassessments of Israel are accelerating more broadly among its once-stalwart allies outside the United States. Italy joined Indonesia and Pakistan in condemning Israel’s national-security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, when he posted a video depicting himself jeering at zip-tied and kneeling pro-Palestinian activists. Andy Burnham, before becoming the new prime minister of the United Kingdom, chose to publicly apologize in a social-media video for Keir Starmer’s stance on Gaza, which included endorsing the Israeli technique of strangulating Gaza by cutting off water and power. Bandwagoners such as the United Arab Emirates, a signatory of the Abraham Accords that grant Israel diplomatic recognition, have reportedly turned to bribing Iran after failing to cripple it. But the deeper shifts caused by the global disgracing of Israel are still only faintly registered.

No less than revolutionary Russia and China, or other states with utopian projects, Israel has long proclaimed its own morality—the superior morality of those engaged in a noble endeavor—while killing and dispossessing vulnerable peoples. And Zionist politics commanded, more than other long-distance nationalisms (Irish, Hindu, Armenian, Tibetan) influential advocates across Europe and the United States from the Seventies onward; this is what allows Netanyahu to confidently present Israel at the vanguard of Western civilization’s stand against the barbarians. Originally the refuge of a persecuted minority within the West, the country gradually became, through a series of maneuvers, crucial to the self-worth of Western elites. Conventional explanations of Israel’s outsized influence have tended to focus on the racketeering of lobbying groups in business, politics, and media. A more historical and revealing account, however, cites the hasty makeover of the Western self-image from the ground zero of 1945.

Hitlerism consisted, as Simone Weil pointed out in 1943, “in the application by Germany to the European continent, and the white race generally, of colonial methods of conquest and domination.” George Orwell had seen enough of those methods in Asia to wonder, as late as 1940, whether he ought to support the British Empire against its Nazi rival. Winston Churchill’s tendencies toward genocidal Hitlerism were noted in 1944 by one of his own ministers after he helped inflict a famine on British-ruled India. Certainly Albert Camus was not exaggerating when he pointed in 1946 to Hitlerism as a modern Western poison that had survived the war. Loathing of the Jewish minority did not disappear in the countries where people actively collaborated with the Nazis (there were pogroms in Poland as late as 1946). Even the liberators of Europe, Britain and the United States, maintained high barriers to entry for Jewish survivors of the Holocaust. The nuclear incineration of Japan, preceded by the depiction, in The New Yorker and the New York Times no less, of the Japanese as monkeys, and followed by brutal counterinsurgencies in British and French colonies, confirmed the persistence of white-supremacist mentalities among the Allied powers.

Nevertheless, the eruption of a new war—dubbed “cold” but undeniably hot, from Korea to Afghanistan—against the Soviet Union demanded a more flattering self-conception. The notion that the “free world” is locked in a necessary battle against totalitarianism (first Nazi, then Soviet, Baathist, and more recently Islamist) became the basic analytical framework of successive generations of educated white North Americans and Europeans. The Second World War itself came to be seen as democracy’s existential battle against tyranny, despite the fact that Hitler had drawn inspiration from American eugenicists and enviously competed with British imperialists, or that the most crucial victories against Nazi totalitarians were achieved by the Soviets.

A nation founded largely by avowed socialists—initially armed by Stalin— Israel did not quite fit the postwar imaginary of the free world. The new Jewish state itself confused matters by participating in an oldfangled imperialist heist in 1956—the British-French attempt to steal the Suez Canal from Egypt. Nor did its large population of dark-skinned Jews from Arab countries help advance its membership in the West: covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, Hannah Arendt described the Jewish crowds waiting outside the court in Jerusalem as an “oriental mob.” Israel’s quick victory in the Six-Day War of 1967 enthused many Jewish Americans who had previously looked askance at the supposed homeland of global Jewry. It prompted the French president Charles de Gaulle, however, to describe Jews as “an elite people sure of themselves and domineering.”

De Gaulle’s views were a sign, rarely identified until the Seventies, that mainstream prejudice had made France rather than Germany the more likely setting for the mass extermination of Jews. Another indication was that the Shoah had received no sustained attention in France for decades after the liberation—mostly accomplished by the Red Army—of the death camps in 1945. A reckoning with it and a renovation of national and civilizational identities became unavoidable only after the exposure, by the American historian Robert O. Paxton in the early Seventies, of the extent of French collaboration with Nazism, followed by a series of trials of Vichy criminals. The urgent rebranding was helped inadvertently by the Soviet Union, whose persecution of Jews suddenly became a cause célèbre across the free world. Supporters now proclaimed their superior values on behalf of dissident Soviet Jews, turning human rights, as Samuel Moyn argued in The Last Utopia, from a demand born among the powerless to a weapon wielded by the powerful.

In another nifty ideological restyling, commemorating the Shoah with ostentatious remorse steadily became, from the Eighties onward, central to the collective identity of those who had zealously contributed to it: a syndrome most strikingly manifest in Germany, where a former Nazi, Kurt Georg Kiesinger, became chancellor in the mid-Sixties, and which, after reunification, began to conflate, with blithe anti-Semitism, the world’s Jewish population with Israel, turning the latter’s protection into its Staatsräson. Eastern European countries, the main settings of the Shoah, emerged from Communist rule in the Nineties to find that suitably rueful acknowledgment of their massacres of Jews was the “entry ticket” to the wealthy community of their Western European neighbors, as Tony Judt pointed out in Postwar. The new Europe, wrote Judt, had “invested itself with the responsibility to make sure that attention is paid” to the atrocities inflicted on Jews and to “define ‘Europeans’ as people who do pay attention to them.”

There were always risks in the “compensatory ubiquity,” as Judt put it, “with which Europeans now acknowledged, taught, and memorialized the loss of their Jews” and made commemoration of their crimes the “very definition and guarantee of the continent’s restored humanity.” Not even a show of moral attentiveness, for instance, was required for the numerous crimes Europeans committed against other peoples: the millions of Congolese murdered and mutilated by Belgian imperialists; the tens of millions consumed by the late-Victorian holocausts; or, for that matter, the estimated twenty-seven million killed as a result of the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. These receded from view in the Western public imagination, dominated by the entwined horrors of the Shoah and the gulag. The manifold victims of the West’s genocidal imperialism in Asia and Africa were told to stop blaming past events for their plight and to assume responsibility for their failures in the present. Meanwhile, Israel, claiming to be the essential safeguard against future crimes of annihilation, commanded, with perfect timing, the Cold War zeitgeist—and became the prime beneficiary of refurbished Western self-images.

Nearly simultaneously, intensified identity politics in the United States, which turned historical victimhood into an emblem of moral virtue, helped to both Americanize the Holocaust and place Israel itself beyond reproach. For many Jewish Americans increasingly obsessed with the Shoah, there was a “special frisson,” as Robert Alter identified it, “of vicariously experiencing the unspeakable, in all the material comfort and security of our American lives.”

As it happened, Israel assumed its honorary membership in the free world just as it swaggered down the path to BenGvirism. Saul Bellow was one of the overcompensating American latecomers to the Shoah and Zionism; nevertheless, he warned in a private letter in 1978 that Israel was working itself up to a “dangerous pitch of fanaticism.” Alfred Kazin, continuously deploring in his journals “the increasing brutality of the Israelis” and growing Jewish-American infatuation with Israel, concluded in 1988 that “there will never be peace with Israel”: “I have always suspected that there would be endless conflicts between Israel and the Moslem world, and my deepest suspicion is that the third world war might very well start there.”

In the four decades since, a racist and imperialist state with nuclear weapons and a deepening affinity with neofascist white nationalists in the West has enjoyed broader and deeper esteem than any of the regimes of Communism ever knew among Western politicians and intellectuals. Isaiah Berlin was no outlier in his admission to Susan Sontag that he caught himself thinking of Israel as obsessively and tenderly as Communists once thought of the Soviet Union. Nor was this sage of Anglo-America untypical in exempting Zionism from his lifelong analysis of the pathologies of nationalism and authoritarianism. The works of prominent Western public intellectuals—from Jürgen Habermas to Michael Walzer, from Timothy Snyder to Francis Fukuyama—are marked by the same omission. It was an extensive trahison des clercs, joined by the flag-wavers of Western liberalism as well as the hacks of Rupert Murdoch, that forged the alternate reality of an apartheid state. The success of this Potemkin democracy can be measured by the outrage with which many people awaken today to the Western elite’s unconditional support for a society overrun by genocidal passions.

Of course, Israel’s foundational idea—that Jewish Israelis ought to possess greater rights than Palestinians—was always, as Natalia Ginzburg put it, “monstrous.” No amount of past suffering could justify its policy of organized violence and injustice in the occupied territories. And the implicit claim of Israel’s champions that victimhood confers permanent virtue never made much sense. The survivors of pogroms during the Russian Civil War (1917–21) speedily turned into enforcers of the Bolshevik regime, supervising extensive slaughter, mass famine, and forced labor. “Hate oppression; fear the oppressed,” V. S. Naipaul once wrote, in an unsentimental coda for the age of extremes, which repeatedly clarified that no group of people, from Ukraine to Indonesia, is immune to the corruptions of power and ideology. Zionism has proved to be no exception to the dismal rule that political idealism born of extreme suffering contains the seed of its own perversion and decay, and that, driven by fear and vengeful hatred, victims of historical calamities can very quickly turn into executioners.

In the Democratic Party and other pro-Israel political formations of the West, we can also see what Ginzburg meant when she said that a monstrous idea that “grows and proliferates along with our best impulses and our thirst for justice and equality” eventually turns them into “a pile of sodden straw.” The growing realization that absolute fidelity to Israel has coarsened minds and souls will no doubt be resisted. Too much is now endangered for the country’s partisans: a whole unexamined way of self-cherishing, of thinking and feeling about oneself and others, and of acting pitilessly and unassailably. Finally failing, their moral blackmail is already hysterical, the trap questions about Israel’s “right to exist” are more frantic, and the accusations of anti-Semitism increasingly unhinged. The corporate-funded brutalizing of university campuses and clumsy Pravda-ization of CBS and CNN indicate that the cover-up of salient facts about Israel can no longer be enforced through subtler means. But the upshot of such hyperorganized support for a society committed to endless war and destruction is now too plainly manifest in many aspects of Western life, from a compromised leadership at the political center and the far right’s insidious mobilization of Judeophobia to the scores of universities enfeebled by accusations of anti-Semitism and journalistic institutions debased by their fabrications and euphemisms about genocide. Spiritually devastated by prolonged exposure to such atrocities, and haunted by their likely complicity in them, more and more people have reached the same conclusion: that the very definition and guarantee of their restored humanity lie in decisively repudiating the monstrous actions of Israel.

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