RIGHT IN THE FIRST PLACE

...But its branches grow in more diverse directions, and it is the branches which prompt the manner of our defense of Israel these days...

...The fact of Israel's treatment of prisoners of war, the fact of Israel's humane administration of the territories it acquired in 1967, even taking account of the occasional excesses in that administration, the fact of the dignity with which the elderly are treated in Malben institutions, the fact of the priority given education, the fact of the tenderness with which the wounded are treated and the sensitivity with which the bereaved are approached, the fact that after all these years, there is still no disposition, none at all, either in the schools or in the media, to caricature the Arabs, to teach hatred of them, the fact that a society so dependent on its military has not become, in any significant way, militaristic — all these are facts, not idle wishes, not sly propaganda...

...Scratch a goy, the saying goes, and you will find an anti-Semite...

...Indeed, for all the talk of a new isolationism in the United States, there has been insufficient attention paid to the isolatedness of the United States...

...Finally, others are frankly skeptical when we describe ourselves as survivors...

...We are not concerned, most of us, with the location of boundaries per se...

...That action may have saved three days, and, thereby, countless lives during the Yom Kippur War...

...But the stinginess of Israel's concession that Arabs, too...

...Is this because we have failed to tell the story...

...Outwardly, we simply do not look like what survivors are supposed to look like...

...How can delegates to an international women's conference walk out on Leah Rabin, how can Israel be lumped together with South Africa, how, especially, can the Left ignore Israel's association with decency...

...The self-image of the nation depends upon it, and those who pay attention to national security cannot be blind to the relationship between self-image and security . It may be the case that the United States needs Israel, for any or all of these four reasons, quite as much as Israel needs the United States, if less obviously...

...But between us and the Arabs...

...Six million here, two million there, another million elsewhere, tomorrow the world...

...Nor will it help, having insisted upon the centrality of strategic considerations, to cry "anti-Semitism" if and when those in power reach different conclusions regarding the national interest...

...Moreover, the recitation of the factsof the Holocaust has by now outlived its utility...

...The issue here is both purity and politics...

...But our flowers are part of a garden so small that others might well be overwhelmed by its rare fragrance...

...While it is not possible to imagine America being subjected to the rudeness which has come to be Israel's daily fare, there are important respects in which America stands virtually alone in the warring family of nations...

...we are concerned only with Israel's permanent security, with getting this awful time of uncertainty behind us all, with the establishment of Israel as an enduring fact and not merely a hypothesis, of international life, of our own lives...

...But the singular fact that Israel Has managed to retain so firm a grasp of its highest ideals, in the face of provocation that is extreme by any standard — that is the glad tiding of these past twenty-seven years of Jewish statehood...

...What arguments have we chosen to employ at a time when we feel we need the strongest arguments of all...

...American stereotypes of Arab culture are utterly primitive, and make convenient villains of the Arabs, and the explosion in Is it really the Richard Nixons, with their infatuation with Israeli "moxie"—and their contempt for American Jews—that we want as our champions...

...It was during John Kennedy's Camelot that we began to prefer the "tough-minded," the "hard-nosed," those physiological freaks who could position their eyeballs next to the enemy's and not blink...

...Israel should have been the very first nation — out of its own experience, out of its own political needs — to acknowledge that Palestine was not less just a cause than Israel itself, that the issue was not either Jews or Arabs, but, instead, how to reconcile the equally profound passions, the equally legitimate claims of both...

...Fortunately, the Arabs are not easily perceived by Americans as heroic...

...As one leading Israeli intellectual has argued, even if the Arab-Israel dispute were a moral stand-off when viewed strictly in its own terms, the nod should be given to Israel because of the recent murder of one-third of our folk...

...Nor have the Jews of the United States served the cause of Israel more wisely these past years...

...And there may still be some whose views of us are colored by their understanding of our loss...

...The first is our lingering paranoia, according to which we cannot adequately bring ourselves to believe that others will really appreciate the moral claims of the Jewish State...

...In the New York Review of June 12, 1975, Garry Wills tried to tell us something about the nature and power of our claims: "Support for Israel, natural and easy in America, has a moral base...

...Others did not see—happy others...

...Hardly...

...Israel & Justice_ If the novel Exodus were being written today, there is at least some reason to believe that its hero would be a Palestinian refugee...

...While most of us accept the underlying justice of Israel's existence, we have great difficulty with the proposition that Israel's accomplishments are so very special as to make that nation one of the few, the very few proud chapters of the twentieth century...

...No small part of the tension between Blacks and Jews in the United States derives from the fact that the Blacks simply do not know what we are talking about when we describe ourselves as powerless...

...it is not what the Germans did, but what the Jews have done, and what the Israelis do, that establishes the Jewish claim to Israel...

...Meir may have had important political reasons for such a statement, but it was, let it be said, a terrible mistake...

...But how shall we respond when the Arabs insist that Europe's depravity and Germany's genocide cannot legitimately require reparation from the Arab nations...

...Its roots lie in our renewed awareness of Jewish vulnerability, now widely perceived as permanent, perhaps even ultimate...

...it is the flowers of our present...

...It is the celebration of that success that makes the strongest and most certain case for Israel in the councils of the mighty...

...Let us rejoice that the Richard Nixons support Israel, but let us remember that they will fall, that others will replace them, and that we will need those others...

...Are we not, after all, uncomfortable with Israel as darling of the Right, with what that does to our own community...

...There was a time when the witness world was so sensitive to our trauma that people went to considerable lengths to avoid the accusation of "anti-Semitism...

...How dare we accuse America of insensitivity to Israel's moral claims if we ourselves have come to disbelieve those claims, if we ourselves do not know them...

...especially relevant to the Middle East today...

...Finally, Israel is America's only stable ally in the Middle East, a more reliable partner than any of the assassination-prone leaders of other countries in the region, whose words reflect only their own positions of the moment rather than commitments widely shared by their people...

...If decisions were now to be made in terms of cost-benefit analysis, if sentiment was now passe in the councils of the mighty, why then, we would show how vital was the defense of Israel to America's own security...

...As Richard Reeves has suggested, "One does not instinctively feel sorry for his dentist or for the chairman of CBS...

...It surely no longer makes sense to think of this, as so recently so many did, as "the American century...

...Most Americans admire the guts of the Israelis and relate to a small democracy surrounded by modern feudalism...

...Of course there are facts that point in other and less positive directions...

...We are, we want to be, realists...

...In the main, we have been afraid to assert the moral case for Israel, retreating instead to imperfect articulations of controversial strategic doctrines, arguing, thereby, from our weakest position rather than our strongest...

...Then, too, it was difficult for the world—difficult for the Jews, as well —to deal with the image of the Jew as victor, so central a concept had the Jew-as-victim been in Western culture...

...When such a sentiment is proposed, we blush, and imagine it a forgivable hyperbole...

...Had the Arabs not alienated large numbers of people through their persistent terrorist activity, the situation today might be worse still...

...Now, at last, the Israeli government itself sees that Palestine will not be denied...

...But both of these arguments are flawed, substantively and tactically, and together they may say more about us and our perception of ourselves and of others than about Israel and why it deserves to be...

...In our rhetoric, we sometimes play the part...

...There is another, and smaller problem involved in the strategic argument...

...But much of the world has come to view the United States as a curse rather than a hope...

...But it is also a place where lives have been reclaimed on a mass scale, with a skill and a tenderness that deserves not only to be noticed, but to inspire us all...

...Further, Israel remains the best barrier to Soviet domination of the Middle East, a domination which would virtually destroy NATO...

...The United States is a protector of those rights . . . the moral imperative and the tactical advantage are...

...Whatever the merits of Israel's moral case, those merits are clearly no longer perceived as substantial in very many parts of the world...

...If, in fact, there were no Palestinians, who was it that was killing Israelis and innocent bystand ers in an endless series of terrorist attacks...

...And the present reality is that the Middle East conflict has been globalized, has spilled far beyond the boundaries of the region, and that there is, therefore, no assurance that Israel's defense will remain a plausible American priority...

...What came as a revelation, as a shock in 1945 does not even surprise in 1975, so much have we since learned about horror...

...Add the increased sophistication of Arab propaganda, add the need of some Jewish leaders of the New Left to act out their hostility to their parents, add Arab bribes and threats to the countries of the Third and Fourth Worlds, and one is already halfway home...

...The terrible isolation of Israel, the dramatic ascendance of the Arabs, the moral collapse of Western Europe, Israel's near-total dependence on the United States—all these are aspects of our present gloom...

...Let us rejoice that a coherent strategic argument can be made in Israel's defense, but let us remember that doctrines change...

...So what else is new...

...in fact, identical...

...And if we so proclaim throughout the land, the people—and their representatives— will respond, and we—and Israel— will be both the cleaner and the safer for it...

...For either they would have had to enter into a bargaining relationship with Israel, or they would have had to acknowledge that, unlike the Israelis, they saw themselves as exclusivists, the sole legitimate occupants of the land where Israel now exists...

...We think ourselves sophisticated if we smirk at the depiction of Israel as especially humane, and it is, of course, important that we learn of Israel's imperfections...

...And if less obviously, then the strategic case needs to be argued, and argued well...

...Israel is the collective effort of the Jewish People to create a humane nation state, and to do so in a most unlikely place, under most trying circumstances, with a most improbable population...

...The surprise is not in our death, but in our life — yet we persist in arguing from death and not from life...

...In the premiere issue of moment, Stephen P. Cohen tried to tell us something about the nature and power of our claims: "American strategic arguments are rooted in a moral premise...

...True, John Foster Dulles had rejected the argument when it had been tried on him in the 1950's, but the conditions which led Dulles and Eisenhower to require Israel's withdrawal from Sinai in 1957 were not the conditions of the 1960's and 1970's...

...in our behavior, happily, we do not...

...It is an argument with weight, with merit, put forward by serious people who lay plausible claim to knowing about such things...

...Have we forgotten how uncertain all of us were during the weeks of terror that preceded the Six Day War, how limited was our confidence that the United States would come to Israel's aid in what so many of us assumed would otherwise be a catastrophic war...

...The effort cannot yet be proclaimed a success, but surely there is much success to celebrate...

...We have the right to expect Arabs, as others, to pay attention to what happened to us, for their sake as for our own...

...In short, though we may know ourselves to be victims, to be survivors, we violate every image of what survivors and victims are supposed to be...

...We know about oversell, we have learned that cynicism is most often warranted, that disbelief will serve us better than innocence...

...The most miserable Jew in Israel is a prince when compared to the average citizen of fifty other countries, a splendid king when compared to the driven refugees of Southeast Asia...

...The reality is not alliance, but a rocky friendship that falls far short of intimacy...

...The plain — and ennobling — fact is that it is not what the Germans did, but what the Jews have done, and what the Israelis do, that establishes the Jewish claim to Israel...

...The example of Taiwan is not so far behind us that we can plead ignorance of the suddenness with which strategic assumptions and conclusions can change...

...Whether the Arab masses and Arab leaders wished the Nazis well or not, the Holocaust is, at most, peripheral to the relationship between Jew and Arab...

...Which makes the loss of moral preeminence by Israel the more shocking, the more distressing...

...Yet: Friends are not necessarily allies, and the suggestion that there has always been an intimate alliance between the United States and Israel is born of our desires, not of international reality, past or present...

...Let us do what we can with the argument from strategy, but let us take care not to create a situation in which losing that argument — for it can be lost, and may be—will leave us mute...

...With all its mistakes, with all its imperfections, there is not the slightest doubt that were Israel an island state, surrounded by neutral waters instead of implacable enemies, all mankind would stand in awe of its achievements, and find sustenance in them...

...For it is only, or so we suppose, such an American commitment that will insure Israel's survival...

...Israel and American Politics Ears have they, we know, but they hear not, we think...

...Arab wealth has added resentment to the earlier dislike...

...neither should it require the sympathy it solicits...

...No people has suffered what we have suffered...

...what we saw with them...

...Centrally, the capacity of the Soviet Union and the nature of its relationship to the United States, as also of its interests in the Middle East, have changed dramatically...

...We are like the old Zionist activist, well known for his impassioned speech-making and fund raising, who made his first trip to Israel in 1970...

...Our public statements know no such caution...

...It is the obvious derogation from the majesty of Israel's own claims...

...And even where useful, neither is the strongest argument we have...

...We have been afraid to make the stronger case for two reasons...

...There had not been so vulgar a calumny announced from so prestigious a podium in decades, and the sheer force of repetition began to chip aw.ay at Israel's status...

...For if the question were allowed to become "Which of the two aspiring peoples holds legitimate title to a piece of land...

...Or have we forgotten the Dulles years, or the more recent years, the first of John Kennedy's administration, before Hawk missiles were made available to Israel...

...Yet we have tongues, and speak not...

...Israel is not a myth and not a mood...

...To these three basic propositions we may add a fourth, less often stated, quite possibly more important than the others: There are not many nations these days which unashamedly proclaim a fundamental affinity to the United States...

...The other half has been the result of our own mistakes...

...And have we not the need to feel at one with ourselves, with our own finest political instincts, as we make the case for Israel...

...it is at least as much — more, we may hope — the country of Archibald MacLeish and Peter Rodino, of Frank Church and Elizabeth Holtzman and Bayard Rustin, of tens of millions of people who yearn for decency, who want a reason for hope and a cause for celebration...

...Shall we, therefore, swallow the insult, seek alliances with the General Browns of this nation...

...There is none of the generosity of the victor, none of the empathy of the once-oppressed, none of the decency of a nation that seeks to be seen as decent, whose very existence, as I shall shortly argue, may well depend on its being seen as decent...

...It is primarily on the basis of this large commitment . . . not because six million Jews were killed by the Nazis, not because Jews, too, can, like others, scream and place bombs in inconvenient places, and not because it is in the American interest as a great power to support Israel (for that also can be disputed) — that Jews should argue for a continuation of American support of Israel...

...Our case, should we choose to make it, would not fall on deaf ears, but would instead find an audience already inclined to be sympathetic, an audience that can remain devoted to Israel despite Arab money, Arab threats, Arab boycotts—if it is given a compelling reason to do so...

...They're true...

...But we are like that Zionist before he made his trip...

...we love them...

...We have left the moral case unargued because we do not believe others will listen, and also because we ourselves are not convinced of its power...

...them less true...

...And what is it that we announce, in this season of distress...

...it should affect the attitudes and behavior of all the principals who might have done more, but chose instead to avert their eyes...

...No nation, not even a nation so powerful as this, can afford to ignore such rare friendship...

...It is not the tombstones of our past that give us right to Israel...

...Especially in an era of intended detente, the United States must insure that there is no major shift in the delicately balanced international power structure...

...And if people who were prepared to carry out such attacks called themselves Palestinians, and announced that they were in search of Palestine, were those who had chosen to call themselves a Jewish nation, who had created Israel, required to be so utterly insensitive to their claims...

...The same General Brown whose absurd sociology distressed us just a year ago, when he announced that the Jews in this country control the banks and the media, had a year earlier, as the story is told, on his own authority, prepared American cargo planes to deliver much-needed equipment to Israel...

...It is life that teaches us that the holy places of Jerusalem are tended with respect and with care by Israel, and would be even if the world were not watching, UNESCO's perversity notwithstanding...

...It is not easier for the rest of the world to appreciate the claim on its sympathy that is made by a country whose army is generally considered one of the world's very best, whose air force is brilliant, whose standard of living is Western rather than Middle Eastern, whose levels of medical care, of education, of arts and letters are so very high...

...to support of the free world, a term which we must learn again to pronounce without apology...

...They do not understand, they cannot understand, how deeply each of us knows himself a survivor, how profoundly precarious-ness has been bred into us...

...First came the Big Lie, the accusation in the United Nations debate following the Six Day War that Israelis were the new Nazis...

...We proclaim, we assert, we announce...

...To the world at large, and to the American public, we rest the case for Israel chiefly on the facts of the Holocaust...

...So utterly vulgar a proposition that it embarrasses to write it, but surely an accurate description of how many of us feel...

...Only if there were no other place from which to argue would the emphasis now put on the strategic argument be sensible...

...So, also, Louis Harris in the New York Times of April 6, 1975, cited data — since confirmed in other polls—that the American public, and the American elite, are overwhelmingly supportive of Israel...

...In a century otherwise marked by death and by devastation, by sins of omissiori and commission so vast as to make cynics of us all, Israel has — despite all temptation, despite all provocation — created a record so proud as to offer hope to all mankind...

...then the world could be excused for turning its back on both...

...Besides, our tombstones are now part of a graveyard so vast that one must walk for miles to reach our particular section of it...

...And Nathan Glazer, in Commentary ofJune, 1975: "American policy . . . has been based on a large commitment...

...Or have we come so far, fallen so far, really, that it no longer gives us pause to find ourselves allied with the most resolute of the cold warriors, with the most bellicose elements in American society...

...But: There is no way of telling the story of Israel accurately without leaving oneself open to the accusation of sentimentality, of naive exaggeration...

...We have told it in prose and in poetry, in fact and in fiction...

...He goes on to indict Israel's leaders for undercutting this moral basis, for endorsing instead the notion that Israel promises America temporary advantage against the Russians...

...That is the major reason that the rise in oil prices was laid at the Arab, rather than the Jewish, doorstep...

...And the American people will respond more quickly and more willingly to the argument from decency, to the evidence of humanity...

...Speak to the goyim in a language they will understand, we think, and so we speak of global strategy, for we will not believe that goyim understand morality...

...Reeling from insult, stumbling from injury, we cast about uncertainly for a way of making the case for Israel, a way that will be sufficiently compelling to overcome the threat of an oil embargo, of Arab economic reprisal, of still more war in the Middle East, a way sufficiently compelling to persuade a post-Vietnam America to assume the burdens and the risks of Israel's defense...

...In our private conversations, we speak tentatively, testing the strength of one approach against another, watching carefully to see the reaction of our fellows...

...And to the leadership of the United States, we rest the case on a series of assertions regarding American strategic interests...

...This is not, after all, the country of John Mitchell and Spiro Agnew, or even of Richard Nixon...

...Perhaps, even, that is one of the reasons for the invective now so conventionally hurled at Israel: afraid of antagonizing the giant, the nations insult the giant's surrogate, the one nation that has at every opportunity asserted its friendship for America...

...III...

...One of its apparent side-effects is to put us in league with a most strange, and somewhat unpalatable group of political bedfellows...

...First, we suggest that the American commitment to Israel has by now so often been stated that to renege on that commitment, the more so after Vietnam, would be to destroy utterly an already wounded confidence in America's commitments...

...Israel does not deserve the hostility it encounters...

...have claims has cost Israel dear...

...In New York magazine (December 23, 1974), Richard R. Reeves tried to tell us about the nature and power of our claims: "American Jews have to take the offensive and argue the merits of their case for Israel without apology or self-pity...

...Let the sophisticates smirk...

...But can there be any doubt that the announcement of the Prime Minister of Israel that "there is no Palestine, there are no Palestinians" was a shocking and exceedingly damaging assertion...

...But there is another place...

...The stakes, we have come to feel, are not less than that...

...Auschwitz should govern Germany's relationship to the Jews and to Israel for generations to come...

...It is not, after all, propaganda but life that speaks of a people ingathered from the four corners of the world, and then, slowly, laboriously, lovingly, made whole...

...But from attention to territory—and disputed territory at that—and in the Middle East at that: how can a history of unspeakable tragedy in Europe more than a generation ago be thought decisive, or even...

...And the world sees that...

...You don't have to be Jewish to love Israel...

...Had Israel taken such a position, with all its moral reverberation, the Palestinians instead of the Israelis would today be on the defensive...

...No single loss that Israel has suffered, save for the loss of its sons — no piece of territory, no exclusion from international councils, no loss of international support—has been so consequential as the loss of its acknowledged claim to the notion of justice...

...With the stakes so large, and the perils so manifest, we search for the most powerful arguments of all...

...We may find ourselves — sooner rather than later — back in the Dulles days, arguing strenuously but unconvincingly against an interpretation of America's interests that is very different from our own...

...By any standard, we are successful...

...for their own internal merits and their positive claims on us—and not as a byproduct of our hatred for Russians...

...They do not understand, and sometimes suppose we are lying, when we seek to associate ourselves with them on the grounds of common persecution...

...The fact that statements such as this are most often made in the context of fund-raising speeches does not make Speak to the goyim in a language they will understand, we think, and so we speak of global strategy, for we will not believe that goyim understand morality...

...Nor is the argument from strategy specious...

...But the world of 1975 is not the world of 1945...

...Perhaps there are Americans still who regard the United States as the last, best hope of mankind...

...Israel is such a reason, such a cause...

...And the American Jews — do we appear to be victims...

...What Reeves was saying is that Christian America is prepared to admire Israel, but that America's Jews have been too self-conscious to argue their case...

...I. Israel and the Holocaust Does the Holocaust provide us a special entitlement to Israel...

...Indeed, our wholly understandable insistence on our status as a persecuted people is so distant from our visible accomplishment that others can make no sense of it...

...It remains, and should, an issue between us and the Germans, between us and the Church, between us and God...

...These principles are still firmly held by most Americans...

...To them, we appear exceedingly powerful, and they envy us our power...

...And . . . though we may know ourselves to be victims, to be survivors, we violate every image of what survivors and victims are supposed to be...

...Historians will debate whether Israel might have moved more audaciously towards peace in the immediate aftermath of the 1967 War...

...When he returned, his friends asked him what he thought, and he said, "You know those lies I've been telling all these years...

...And our eyes, still brimming with tears, were inadequate to the task...

...Victims are supposed to cower, survivors to quake...

...Strategic _Interests_ In the age of computers, literature and history come to seem the province of old men, querulous, musty, and poetry the province of the maudlin...

...Nations wishing to live in freedom and independence from foreign domination have a right to do so...

...We do not dress in rags, we do not scrounge for food, we do not sleep in the streets...

...But, by and large, the Holocaust has become a bore, has been reduced from a unique event to simply the most extreme example of a century of depraved aberration...

...We knew Richard Nixon to be evil before we knew him to be criminal, yet just three years ago leaders of the American Jewish community were criss-crossing this country urging that we support him, for Israel's sake...

...So, mumbling the kaddish still, we began to learn the language of international strategy...

...For Exodus, that marvelous horse opera, hinges on a simplistic morality that has, beginning in June of 1967, been associated more with the Arabs than with the Israelis...

...Have we not the responsibility to insure that Israel is perceived as worthy by a broad coalition of Americans, to avoid a situation, now rapidly developing, in which the only endorsements Israel gets are from people we knew not so long ago as politically regressive...

...It is a place, and people push in line, and the jails are overcrowded, and there is much cheapness in the culture, and the economic gap between Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews is far too wide, and the Orthodox establishment tyrannizes, and on, and on...

...So vast was the horror that even those who were not directly implicated in it might well be expected to take note of it and to treat us with special kindness...

...Not at all...

...A simple political calculus, for those who consign morality to poets: No government of the United States will take major risks on Israel's behalf or make major sacrifices in Israel's support without the support of the American people...

...Israel and U.S...

...And so we have come to argue a case that most often rests on some combination of three basic propositions...

...Is it really the Richard Nix-ons, with their infatuation with Israeli "moxie" — and their contempt for American Jews — that we want as our champions...

...If we say, as some of us have begun to, that American support for Israel rests on vital strategic considerations, and that such considerations alone should govern American policy, we leave ourselves wide open for a terrible reversal of fortune...

...And, whether or not it does, will people imagine that it does, so making it a "useful" weapon...

...they understand even less that we perceive them as having some kinds of power — the power of numbers, the power to threaten physical violence— that we actually envy them...

...How is it that a nation widely admired for its fierce devotion to life, widely appreciated for its moral legitimacy, has come upon such hard times, is now so widely associated with the most regressive elements of the world order...

...It is not the insult to the Palestinians that is at issue here...