LETTERS
Editors: Regrettably, by the time that President George Bush pardoned Caspar Weinberger and five others last Christmas Eve, it was too late to make any alterations in my review for the Winter...
...I don't pretend that the nation-state is the best imaginable political formation, only that it is better in practice than the actually available alternatives...
...I think that Rule wants them incorporated in a secular, democratic state—a neutral state that has no dominant nation, very much like the United States...
...It is bizarre to suggest that conduct of the kind described above is somehow characteristic of states like Norway and France (of Croatia and Armenia I know very little...
...He makes much of the fact that Golda Meir dismissed the claims of the Palestinians dispossessed by the founding of Israel with the words "They did not exist," rather than "They do not exist...
...By and large, those efforts have been successful...
...She would happily have handed them over, against their will, to the Jordanian king...
...Now firmly on top, the dominant group reserves its most severe repression for instances where those on the bottom appear tempted to embrace tactics like those that brought the victors to power in the first place...
...We should, of course, oppose discrimination against Palestinians in Israel and Algerians in France and Azeris in Armenia, and so on and on...
...And note how Meir justifies this position: by citing the fact that the people in question supposedly never had a state of their own...
...Under the circumstances, had I known about the pardons in time, I would have incorporated a condemnation in my article, and take this opportunity to do so now...
...Michael Walzer Replies: I understand that Jim Rule has a problem not only with the policies but also with the existence of Israel...
...But the local alternatives to the nation-state—Lebanon, Cyprus—are so radically unpromising that we have little choice but to live with those problems...
...It may well be that separate states for Palestinians and Jews is the best compromise anyone can hope for in the tangled situation in the Holy Land...
...And, elsewhere in the same interview, she offers the same kind of moral dismissal in the following terms: "When was there an independent Palestinian people with a Palestinian State...
...Michael Walzer Replies: Jim Rule provides a remarkable account of recent Jewish history, which leaves out the holocaust, the years of illegal immigration, the UN vote on partition, the 1948 war, and anything else that might complicate its agitational style: all in all, not the sort of account that I think I need to deal with at length...
...Cut off the money and watch . . . what...
...In the course of his three responses to my (highly qualified) defense of national self-determination, he has managed to raise the ante each time, exposing more and more clearly his hostility to the Zionist endeavor—which by now seems to reach far beyond his hostility toward nationalism in general...
...What should we say about them...
...But Rule seems equally blind to their national aspirations—and to everyone else's...
...Not many of them want to bring the American political system home...
...On page 24, the reference to "United States Security Council" should read "United Nations Security Council...
...Editors: Regrettably, by the time that President George Bush pardoned Caspar Weinberger and five others last Christmas Eve, it was too late to make any alterations in my review for the Winter issue of Dissent of Elliott Abrams's book, Undue Process...
...A few sentences later, she adds, "I do not know why the Arab refugees are a particular problem in the world...
...Those of the defeated groups remaining in the territory controlled by the new state do so in a situation of second-class citizenship, or (in the case of the occupied territories) no citizenship at all...
...An independent Palestine is likely to mistreat its minorities, and I will look to Jim Rule to complain about that (and join him when he does...
...Outsiders may, and should, protest such policies, but their words are apt to have about as much effect as on the Protestants of Belfast...
...But he averts his eyes from the really shocking point: Meir's denial of responsibility for the dispossession of the Palestinians and—above all—her rationale for that denial...
...The pardons do not alter my view that the indictment of Abrams was not fair because he never received fair notice that his deceitful testimony to Congress might constitute a crime...
...In fact, however, the case of Mr...
...That is, politics rather than considerations of due process of law united them...
...Michael Walzer apparently agrees: when he writes, "We should, of course, oppose discrimination against Palestinians," he apparently has some other sort of Palestinian in mind...
...A good many Israelis and Palestinians (and Croats and Armenians) want to come to the United States...
...He glories now in his pessimism: one can and no doubt should criticize these nationalist fanatics, but the criticism is bound to be without effect...
...The idea that people lacking self-consciousness as a national entity or lacking a state of their own are fair game for this kind of treatment ought to be intolerable to everyone on the left...
...If Bush had pardoned particular defendants such as Abrams on due process grounds, I would have had no complaint...
...And, looking on the bright side, he notes that Meir declares herself willing to consider territorial compromise with Palestinians—provided they do not seek a state of their own...
...To make my analogy with France work, imagine what the situation of Arab citizens and residents would be like were France engaged in an ongoing, forty-year war, which it was always in danger of losing, with all the countries of North Africa...
...One must indeed object to systems of ethnic, racial, and religious discrimination, and to institutions of second-class citizenship, whenever these things occur...
...But for Americans, Israel poses special problems...
...Weinberger was entirely different...
...If we are seriously committed to avoiding "injustice and strife," we need to look for a politics that they can democratically endorse and live with where they are...
...He dislikes this particular nation-state and perhaps all nation-states—though I am not sure that he really believes that the Left should campaign against the existence of France and Norway or even Croatia and Armenia, all of them states "dominated" by a particular nationality...
...It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them...
...Of course, there are problems with states of this sort...
...Asked by the interviewer whether Israel bears "a measure of responsibility" for the "plight of the Palestinians," she emphatically replies, "No, no responsibility whatsoever...
...Golda Meir was indeed blind to the national aspirations of the Palestinians...
...And for the displaced populations, at least one leader of the new regime acknowledges "no responsibility whatsoever...
...This discussion is now closed—Ens...
...This " . . . is not an evil view," he insists...
...This is, indeed, not my kind of country...
...He was accused of lying under oath, a circumstance in which it was made entirely clear to him that he would commit a crime if he perjured himself...
...As our argument has progressed, if that is the right word, Rule seems to me less and less clear about what he would replace it with and how the replacement might work...
...And yet the aim of Zionism was to bring the Jewish people out of a highly anomalous, and very dangerous, political position into a position of "normality...
...Nor has either country at any time in this century expelled members of their populations for being the wrong kinds of people in these respects—except in the deportation of Jews under Nazi occupation...
...What is the point of all his fierce sentences...
...Abrams became the beneficiary of the Weinberger pardon because they were both officials of the Reagan administration and both were involved in the Iran-contra scandal...
...Think what that money could have done, had it been SPRING • 1993 • 269 Letters invested in policies of social equality, either in this country or abroad, rather than ethnic supremacy...
...To realize this aim, enormous resources were mobilized from many corners of the world...
...q Erratum The printer's gremlin worked overtime in Mitchell Cohen's article on "The Problem of Intervention" (Winter 1993...
...They did not exist...
...We, after all, have paid for it, and we continue to do so...
...q Palestinians Editors: As the Scriptures say, Michael Walzer strains at a gnat and swallows a camel (Dissent, Letters, Winter 1993...
...But that is not, as Rule certainly knows, the issue between us...
...James Rule Replies: We are speaking of a country that was born of a social movement pursuing an extraordinary aim: to establish a state on behalf of one ethnic and religious group on territory then inhabited mainly by members of other groups...
...Israel today, at least so far as its internal life goes, is a normal nation-state, with all the normal problems of nation-states...
...I believe, by contrast, that there are a number of political arrangements that can be just (but often aren't) and that justice is most likely to come to the Middle East in the form of independent nation-states, Jewish and Palestinian...
...I would also guess that Jim Rule would be considerably less indignant about their condition...
...Everything that he has written in this long exchange suggests that his only model of a just political arrangement is the United States...
...The hard question has to do with the Palestinians living under Israeli occupation or in exile...
...JAMES B. RULE Princeton, N.J...
...Neither France nor Norway denies residence or citizenship to people born on its soil because they are of the wrong faith or ethnicity...
...Why bother then...
...These are the people who suffer oppression and injustice (though the responsibility for their suffering is not so easily assigned as Rule suggests...
...Zionism was an imitative politics, and the norm that governed its efforts was that of the European nation-state...
...In his penultimate sentence, Walzer implies that Meir's words convey something other than a vision of Jewish domination...
...According to one recent estimate, the United States has subsidized Israel and its policies to the tune of some fifty-six billion dollars since 1949...
...What does he hope will come of that...
...ARYEH NEIER New York, N.Y...
...It isn't even an issue between Rule and Golda Meir, who never doubted the 268 • DISSENT Letters "legitimate existence," indeed the citizenship, of Palestinian Israelis, who voted for her in large numbers...
...I would guess that French Arabs in such circumstances would be considerably worse off than Israeli Arabs are today...
...Does anyone else really doubt that Jewish domination over the territory and inhabitants of Israel is axiomatic either to that country's policies or to its public opinion, now or at any time in the country's existence...
...To this day, the new state devotes vast military efforts to resisting their return, while struggling to secure its status by immigration of more of the right kind of people...
...270 • DISSENT...
...At last, at the very end, he makes it all clear: what he wants is an end to American aid to Israel...
...I am stunned that Walzer does not dissociate himself from those words...
...In a violent spasm prefiguring what has lately come to be called ethnic cleansing, thousands of people of the wrong faith and ethnicity were expelled from the land of their birth...
...If freedom from the threat of dispossession or second-class citizenship—as I would put it, the right to a legitimate existence within the state—is reserved only to those of the correct "tribe," the stage is set for never-ending injustice and strife...
...This seems to me a gross abuse of the power to pardon...
...These problems are complicated by its hard regional environment...
...Contra Rule, that will be, for the time being, not forever, a nationalist politics...
...All of this goes to the heart of my objections to Walzer's doctrines on "tribalism...
...This is the evil doctrine: the notion that any people (with or without a self-conscious collective identity) may legitimately be dispossessed from the land of their birth and ancestry—or be rendered second-class citizens, should they remain in place—and that such actions entail no moral responsibility...
...But such a solution will tend to reinforce a situation in which each country considers it its prerogative to oppress its own "wrong kind of people," as in Northern Ireland...
Vol. 40 • April 1993 • No. 2
