Doves & hawks together
Goldberg, J. J.
are fighting. It helps, to be sure, with respect to potential stereotypes of Arabs, that many are fighting on"our" side; thus, again, social reality gives morality a boost. There certainly are...
...I argued in these pages against resort to force because of the likelihood of a disproportionate war and the consequent need to 22 February 1991:125...
...Synagogues around the country report record attendance...
...Yet some things may be assumed...
...But on the other hand, President Bush has been careful to say explicitly that the Iraqi people are not our enemy...
...It would offend America's Arab allies...
...All over the country, Jewish doves say they have seen an unprecedented outpouring of antiIsrael and outright anti-Semitic sentiment in recent weeks...
...Justifiable exceptions must, by the force of moral reasoning, override the presumption...
...This combination of Iraqi Scuds and antiwar anti-Semitism appears to have had an incalculable impact on Jews of every persuasion...
...Take the case of Rehavim Ze'evi...
...Israelis take it as an article of faith that they fight their own battles, not sit back and wait...
...So far there have not been any Japs or Gooks or Huns, any equivalent of the widespread mistreatment of people with German names, the eliminating of German from schools, or the refusal to eat sauerkraut (or to eat it as "victory cabbage") of World War I. President Bush has certainly poured obloquy upon invective upon abuse on Saddam Hussein individually far too much, as many have said...
...War damages the fabric of civilization not by the destruction it causes...
...Shamir can't stand being an honored part of the international community," he wrote...
...Within hours after the August 2 invasion, however, Washington made it clear that Israel would not be allowed the pleasure of an "I-told-you-so...
...In a spectacular exhibit of paranoid nonreasoning at the outset of a war, General DeWitt ("A Jap is a Jap") argued that the fact that there had been no instances whatever of sabotage by Japanese-Americans was a "disturbing and confirming indication that such will occur...
...But by hating him, by inventing lies about him and bringing up your children to believe them, by clamoring for unjust peace terms that make further wars inevitable, you are striking not at one perishable generation but at humanity itself...
...But the anti-Semitic innuendo, not from the lunatic fringe but from a former White House aide, sent shock waves through American Jewry...
...His platform repels even hawks in Yitzhak Shamir's right-wing Likud party...
...That must have a reverse-of-the-coin effect in the segments of the Arab world in which America inherits the hostility to the colonizing and arrogant West, and in which Saddam wants to be seen as Nasser, at least, if not Saladin...
...Frequent studies have shown this to be a central feature in the American Jewish self-image...
...When that happens, Shamir will need to offer something resembling a concession...
...To prepare, he has to shore up his right flank...
...Certainly, the sudden emergence of a U.S.-led coalition against Israel's fiercest enemy meant 124: Commonweal a rare confluence of American and Israeli interests...
...When late in World War II a correspondent wrote to George Orwell that although "the Hun has got to be beaten," he objected to the barbarous methods being used--saturation bombing ---Orwell gave the striking response, that calling people, "Huns," was worse than bombing them...
...Insiders said it was an arcane power grab launched by 22February1991:123 one Likud faction to freeze out another...
...In Israel, the Left's depression started last March after the collapse of the six-year-old Labor-Likud unity government...
...policy...
...Liberals, on the other hand, are depressed...
...What it could do was keep its official head down...
...When the Kuwait blitz began, most of Israel breathed a sigh of relief...
...In the moral argument about war, the why question is restrained by when questions...
...Frozen out since then, doves have watched the nation slip ever further away from them...
...The logic of the just-war case is strikingly simple...
...We shall all be dead in less than a hundred years...
...Still, Jewish opinion has been extracted in past surveys...
...This moral teaching is regularly declared to be moribund, but it keeps cropping up in our public life...
...After the November deployment of troops to the Gulf, the debate shifted from the why to the when question...
...There certainly are heavy Arab stereotypes in popular culture...
...Resisting the Iraqi invasion across an internationally recognized border does qualify, as does the initial U.S...
...In an August 26 appearance on CNN, the right-wing, syndicated columnist Pat Buchanan claimed that the "only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the Middle East" were Israel "and its amen comer in the United States...
...Far from seeking its advice, the administration ordered Israel to keep a low profile...
...he wrote...
...More likely, Shamir was just doing his homework, preparing for the next phase of the never-ending Middle East crisis...
...Right now Washington and its allies are busy fighting Iraq...
...Israel had been facing an Iraq crisis ever since Saddam threatened last March to "bum half of Israel" with chemical weapons if Israel moved against his nuclear facilities...
...He had to do something to alienate world opinion...
...Now many see themselves as under attack for their opinions...
...when can it be used, under which conditions...
...not even by the slaughter of human beings, but by stimulating hatred and dishonesty...
...By asking three questions: why can force be used, for what purpose...
...By shooting at your enemy," he wrote, "you are not in the deepest sense wronging him...
...We have now as a nation admitted our guilt on that point, and made such compensation as is possible at this late date, and perhaps we will not do anything quite as bad as that again...
...As to how the majority of America's 5.5 million Jews felt about the war, no one can say...
...Just cause by itself is not a sufficient reason to resort to force...
...The deal outraged Israelis of every political hue, but it makes some sense...
...It may be that, pace Pat Buchanan, Jews are indeed nearly unanimous now...
...On January 12 the House of Representatives voted 250-183 to authorize the use of military force in the Gulf...
...The why or just-cause category surfaced first in August-September...
...The breakup was supposed to have ended with a Labor-led peace cabinet, but it boomeranged and resulted in a narrow Likud coalition...
...The community could not control them...
...Nonetheless, given little choice, Israel conceded...
...J.J...
...Pollsters have probed the views of women, blacks, Southerners, but no one has polled Jews as such...
...Ironically, it took only three weeks for the community to find itself blamed for doing exactly what it was not doing...
...All need to be addressed, but none justify going to war to accomplish these objectives...
...WORLD WATCH J. Bryan Hehir THE MORAL CALCULUS OF WAR JUST BUT UNWISE he public debate about the Persian Gulf war is filled with moral claims...
...Defense Minister Moshe Arens, considered Shamir's top ally, calls Ze'evi's ideas "beyond the pale...
...In the 1980s the ethical arguments about discrimination and proportionality entered the nuclear debate with new power...
...Certainly, most Jews were united in fearing for Israel's safety...
...Now the Persian Gulf policy has brought to the center of public attention the "standard case" of just-war analysis: can aggression be met today in a way that passes moral evaluation...
...Shamir will have earned some credit in Washington because of his restraint in the face of Iraqi missiles...
...Thus, what appears to be Jewish near-unanimity may simply indicate that Jews are withdrawing among themselves---even if it means sharing a berth with the likes of "Gandhi...
...Of course, it was not true...
...The extensive use of the just-war ethic is striking...
...In the Vietnam war people from all sides used its categories without necessarily knowing where they came from...
...When that is done--in six weeks or six months--attention will return to Israel and the Palestinians...
...After two years of Palestinian uprising and army repression, Israelis were weary of fighting and wanted to be rid of the Palestinians...
...Through the spring his threats grew steadily more lurid...
...The Jewish community, moreover, was more divided than was apparent...
...But on August 2, everything collapsed...
...George Bush has declared the war to be just, but this is the beginning of an argument not its necessary conclusion...
...It is well that at this early point at least we do not seem to have wheeled into place any very deep-going collective stereotypes...
...In defending the Gulf war, the president invoked the right questions, but gave answers that have the ring of a stump speech...
...THE GULF WAR DOVES & HAWKS TOGETHER AMERICAN JEWS, ISRAEL & THE WAR ince the outbreak of the Gulf crisis, many Jews in America and Israel have found themselves isolated, lonely, out of sorts, and in bed with strange partners...
...No one polled the Jews...
...Following hints from Washington, Jerusalem passed the same message along to the leadership of the American-Jewish community: No demonstrations, no letter-writing campaigns, no antiIraq outpouring...
...He threatened to strike at Israel for any attack on Iraq, by anyone...
...The Kuwaitis and Saudis, too, were spending millions on prowar public relations...
...In fact, nobody asked...
...We've been right all along, they believed, and now the rest of the world will finally understand "what kind of neighborhood we live in," as Arens told "Nightline...
...the 33 Jewish members split 18-15 against the measure...
...if he is so bad for the Great Satan, then he must be so good for us...
...In part, that is a function of cost, given the Jews' small numbers, wide dispersal, and ideological diversity...
...One respected columnist suggested Shamir had won too much international acclaim lately, due to Iraqi bombardment and the government's measured response...
...It's better to have Gandhi on the inside spitting out than outside spitting in," said one Likud insider...
...In early February, as Iraqi Scud missiles were raining on Tel Aviv, Shamir wrapped up secret negotiations to bring Ze'evi into his cabinet...
...The low-profile order came as a painful shock to hawk and dove alike...
...and how is force to be used, by what means...
...It was, for many Jews, one of those moments when one's oft-tangled loyalties seem to shake out nicely into a consistent world view...
...For many, too, it was humiliating to be shooed out of the new international alliance against tyranny...
...Some said Shamir needs Ze'evi's military expertise, since most top ex-generals belong to the Labor opposition...
...at the time of the oil crises of the seventies the swarthy sinister figure with flowing robes and a hooked nose was rather prominent, but he does not seem to have appeared so far in this war...
...I argued then and still believe that just cause can be identified in this case, but not all reasons put forth by the administration over the last six months qualify as just cause for this war...
...To be sure, few Israelites were surprised by the Iraqi invasion...
...During World War II, the embarrassing anti-German and antiGerman-American excesses of World War I were pretty much avoided, but in their place came not only the heavily racial stereotyping of the Japanese enemy but America's worst conduct ever on this point, the forcible relocation of our fellow citizens of Japanese ancestry, for no crime whatever...
...Liberal Jewish organizations were backing away from U.S...
...one does not yet hear anything of an opposite tendency...
...But while hawks said Saddam Hussein would threaten Israel as long as he retained power, many doves said the best way to stop him from attacking Israel was not to attack him...
...The function of just-war categories, which the president explicitly used, is not primarily to legitimate the policy of states, but to limit their proclivity to reach for the weapons of war...
...For years most Jews believed themselves to be at home in America and protected from bigotry...
...We hear about numbers of newly born children among Palestinians in Jordan, and in Egypt, who have been given the name Saddam...
...GOLDBERG J.J...
...At that, most Israeli liberals threw up their hands in disgust...
...effort to deter aggression against Saudi Arabia...
...Particularly for those who found some just cause, the question was whether the conditions existed to move from just cause to justified use of force--a second issue...
...policy, whether Zionist groups like Americans for Progressive Israel or the staunchly left-wing New Jewish Agenda...
...Whatever the reasons, the elevation of "Gandhi" has deepened a profound mood of depression sweeping Israel's liberal and dovish community since last fall and now spreading through the liberal wing of the American Jewish community...
...How is a justifiable exception identified...
...How should a more disciplined debate be framed...
...John Holliman of the original CNN Baghdad Three went out of his way in the "Larry King Live" interview immediately upon returning to give examples of extraordinary Iraqi generosity...
...The right wing, both Israeli and American-Jewish, is happy to be part of George Bush's war coalition and hardly perturbed when pushed to its margin, since Jewish rightists rarely trust gentiles to begin with...
...Many openly prayed he would make good on his threat to bomb Israel with poison gas--even though the gas might hit them, too...
...In my view the following qualify as serious issues, but not just causes for war: access to oil, preventing nuclear proliferation, establishing a balance of power in the Middle East, and Iraq's human rights r~cord...
...While the conservative community leadership, and who knows how many followers, turned increasingly toward war, individual Jews were joining the antiwar movement...
...Throughout this war, and at its end, and as is probable as its consequences for years to come, this once rather innocent and isolated offshoot of European Christendom, the United States of America, will be deeply entangled in an ancient nation, and an ancient Arabic and Islamic civilization, with which we have had relatively little experience and of which we have relatively little knowledge...
...It brings Shamir's ruling coalition up from 64 to 66 seats in the 120-seat Knesset...
...Even that colorfully extravagant language of invective from Saddam, about the infidel invaders walking barefoot through sands flowing with rivers of their own blood in the mother of battles, and the like, which clearly comes from a radically different rhetorical culture than our own----certainly a different one from George Bush, with his extremely limited vocabulary and imaginative range--has not yet provoked much, as it were, rhetorical retaliation...
...American public opinion shifted suddenly on January 16, when the war began...
...WILLIAM LEE MILLER William Lee Miller is professor of ethics and institutions, and professor of rhetoric at the University of Virginia...
...Maybe reiterating brutal, brutal, brutal is our way of responding...
...Goldberg is New York correspondent of the Jerusalem Report...
...Rosenthal, might trumpet the war option...
...The truly evil thing is to act in such a way that peaceful life becomes impossible...
...Still, they believed the public would someday come to them...
...From a near-even split, America now backed the president by threetoone...
...Perhaps Orwell was a little too cavalier, for argumentative effect, about mere death and destruction, but his larger point was surely correct, and applies to us now...
...There's no one to talk to anymore," declared one of Israel's most influential doves, parliamentarian Yossi Sarid...
...When Iraqi tanks rolled into Kuwait, West Bank Palestinians took to the streets to cheer "Saddam the liberator...
...Doves hoped this weariness could be translated into territorial partition and Palestinian self-rule--assuming Israelis came to trust the Palestinians' new policy of coexistence with Israel...
...Individual Jews, like New York Times columnists William Satire and A.M...
...Crucial to the discussion (November to January) were the criteria of last resort and proportionality...
...He was first elected to Israel's parliament in 1988 as head of a tiny party that seeks the mass "transfer" of Palestinians to nearby Arab states...
...Even Jewish peace groups that were part of antiwar coalitions backed away, with few exceptions...
...Perhaps the demonizing of Saddam has soaked up the passions that might have been spread...
...And for vast numbers of American Jews, Israel is just not a touchstone in judging U.S...
...It begins with a presumption against the use of force and then admits the possibility of justifiable exceptions to the presumption...
...Not on the Gulf...
...Anecdotally, though, it seems the greatest shift among Jews occurred on January 17, when the first Iraqi Scuds fell on Tel Aviv...
...The main was booster was the Bush administration, viewed by Israel and the Jewish community as the most unfriendly administration since the 1950s...
...In Israel, cynics were suggesting all manner of motives for the "Gandhi" putsch...
...He is no pacifist, though...
...The public debate, going on since August, can be tested in terms of these three questions...
...He vowed to lead a panArab army to "liberate Jerusalem...
...Reports surfaced around the country of Jews who had been wavering or antiwar, but now suddenly found themselves in favor of "eliminating Saddam...
...That insures him against blackmail from any of the half-dozen tiny splinter groups in his shaky alliance...
...Ze'evi is a former Israeli general with the odd nickname of "Gandhi," bestowed on him years ago for his slight, bespectacled look...
...But he knows Egypt and Syria will have credit as well, and they will demand movement on the Palestinian issue...
...He vowed not to rest until "Palestine was free...
...Despite its military prowess, its vast intelligence--and its vaunted "strategic alliance" with Washington--Israel was not wanted in the anti-Iraq coalition...
Vol. 118 • February 1991 • No. 4
