Israel's Right to Fight

...The death of a child, Mohammed al Dura, in a crossfire was captured by television cameras and became a symbol of Israeli brutality (although a German television crew subsequently concluded that he had probably been killed by the Palestinians...

...European public opinion polls reveal that the Jewish state is seen as the most significant threat to world peace, and even in the United States there are those who regularly compare Israel to Nazi Germany...

...Israel keeps the Western Wall and adjacent plaza area...

...If any single American epitomizes this view of the world, it is Noam Chomsky—the man whose writing stands as the fulcrum between the Left's anti-Israel sentiment and its anti-Americanism...

...As Bass points out, Israel could fairly be termed an American "ally" by the end of Kennedy's administration...

...Clinton, forsaking diplomatic niceties, bluntly placed the blame for Camp David's failure on Arafat...

...What is behind this change in both tone and substance...

...In The Case for Israel, Alan Der-showitz provides a defense brief for Israel, systematically answering a thirty-two-count "indictment" against the Jewish state filed by an imaginary prosecutor...

...Israel is by no means the only victim of Chomsky's bizarre descriptions of world affairs...

...In the Middle East, "modest steps to address manageable problems, rather than bold leaps toward a comprehensive solution" generally have the best chance of success...

...The historic center of Jewish nationhood is not Tel Aviv, Netanya, or Haifa...

...After all, according to Chomsky's views now, Israel in 1973 was every bit as guilty as Israel is today...

...There is certainly precedent for this...

...Dershowitz has been characteristically unapologetic about this, but the controversy illustrates Der-showitz's tendency to sacrifice carefulness for speed and productivity...

...Lozowick sees that belief in the legitimacy of the Zionist project has been a contributing factor to Israel's military victories (in addition to the certainty that defeat would mean genocide for Israel's Jews...

...The conflict between Israel and the state of Palestine would be unlikely, at least in the short term, to be all-out armed conflict...

...Of course, as Lozowick, Dershowitz, and even many in Israel's Likud party concede, this does not mean that Israel can preserve its democratic and Jewish character while maintaining control over several million Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza...

...This is not farfetched when we remember the mufti of Jerusalem has issued a fatwa declaring that "no stone of the Western Wall has any connection to Hebrew history"—a falsehood of which Arafat tried to persuade Clinton at Camp David...

...He is a persistent critic of American foreign policy, which he regards as straightforward imperialism under a thin veneer of hypocritical idealism...

...As Bass notes, Kennedy "seems to have been immune to any sweeping temptations . . . to try to wrap up the entire Arab-Israeli conflict...

...A small number of Palestinian refugees are allowed to settle in Israel, while the rest are offered monetary compensation...

...It may start with a third intifada, this one blamed on the humiliation of Israel's economic domination of a less-developed Palestine or on the provocation that some religious Jews continue to pray at the retaining wall of Haram al Sharif...

...Lozowick contrasts the Palestinian predilection for targeting civilians with the tactics used by Israel during its wars, including the Al Aksa intifada...

...In his earlier essays Chomsky could blame misguided Israeli submission to an insidious American agenda for many of Israel's mistakes...

...Israel will have to figure out a way to divest itself of control over many of these people...

...It is Jerusalem—and not the modern neighborhoods of West Jerusalem, which Israel would keep under the Clinton plans...

...It's not clear Israeli resolve would have long survived the concessions contemplated at Camp David...

...This dynamic, however, should be familiar by now...

...The Oslo Accords committed the Palestinian Authority to fight terror and extradite terrorist suspects to Israel, but in all the years of terrorism since Oslo, the Palestinians have extradited no one...

...Israel was forced to reoccupy much of the West Bank, a campaign that culminated in the battle for Jenin in April 2002...

...It's the same worldview that caused some feminist groups in the West to oppose the United States' war against the Taliban despite its brutal repression of women...

...Middle East Illusions makes clear that Chomsky is most repelled by Israel's closeness with the United States...

...partition, and at the 2000 Camp David meeting, each of which would have established a Palestinian state...

...Chomsky, a professor of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has long been an icon of the American far left...

...Almost four years after Camp David, Israel is widely blamed for clinging to an occupation that it was willing to end...

...Even some Arab states, such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt, privately expressed disbelief at Arafat's failure to grasp the opportunity...

...Finkelstein's most serious accusation was an instance in which Dershowitz borrowed from a secondary source rather than the primary source he cited, and Finkelstein and other critics have seized on this to accuse Dershowitz of plagiarism...

...This possibility, and the many indications that it must be taken seriously, could not be acknowledged by most of the political Left between 1993 and October 2000...

...At the very least, the hope that peace is imminent or within reach seems dangerously naive...

...In March 2001, Chomsky lambasted Israel as an American "outpost" with economic arrangements "that look pretty much like the United States itself," and he noted that "Israel itself" was "becoming very much like the United States...

...In the earlier block, although Chomsky is critical of particular Israeli policies, he betrays vestiges of respect, even affection, for portions of Israeli society, particularly the institution of the kibbutz, Israel's communal farms...

...Arafat's refusal of the offer was shocking to Israeli supporters of the Oslo process, but they had one consolation: The world would recognize that the failure to reach an accord was Arafat's fault...

...Peace, or something approximating peace, reigns between democratic Israel and independent Palestine...

...If the Palestinian decision to fight a war whose only goal was the complete destruction of the Zionist project came early, so too did their preferred methods of waging this war—through "incitement, lies, and above all murder of the weak...

...In his 2001 Letters to a Young Lawyer, he wrote proudly of his "many imperfect books...

...Dershowitz notes that, while the gulf between Israel's record and its perceived record "is greater than for any other nation in history . . . for some America-bashers the United States may be a distant second to Israel...

...It also produced a cottage industry of anti-Israel propaganda, the most vicious of which (that Israeli troops massacred hundreds, or thousands, of unarmed Palestinian children, women, and men) has been disproved but not disbelieved...

...Like Dershowitz, Lozowick mines the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict and concludes convincingly that Israel's wars were generally wars of self-defense against an implacable foe...

...The degree of Israeli resolve in the face of the current intifada has surprised some Palestinians, who interpreted Israel's unilateral withdrawal from southern Lebanon in early 2000 as evidence of Israeli softness...

...Each chapter addresses a common charge against Israel, including accusations that Israel is a racist state and that it practices genocide against the Palestinians...

...It was an offer that could have been made only after Israel's unilateral ideological disarmament of the 1990s, when children in Israeli public schools were assigned readings from the Palestinian nationalist poet Mahmoud Darwish, while Palestinian children were taught that Israel had stolen Palestinian land and would one day be liquidated...

...Then came the war, or as the Palestinians call it, the Al Aksa intifada...

...More than three years after Yasser Arafat answered Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak's peace offer with a wave of violence, Israel has been returned to its pre-Oslo status as a pariah nation and the object of vituperative resolutions at the United Nations...

...The existence of such a fence around the Gaza Strip has meant that not one of the hundreds of Palestinian suicide bombers in Israel has come from Gaza...

...His book 9/11, in which he blamed American foreign policy for precipitating the terrorist attacks, was a bestseller, and he has now published a series of his speeches and essays dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, entitled Middle East Illusions...

...The conventional wisdom, then, is that a peaceful solution that satisfies the minimal requirement of both sides is possible, and that its broad contours are already widely known...

...But it may be an illusion that this will bring a quick and easy peace...

...Meanwhile, Chomsky alleges that "the United States itself...

...By the late 1990s, he could no longer hold out much hope that Israel would spurn its most important (nearly its only) benefactor, supplier, and ally...

...Considering Chomsky's social and political milieu, this is not surprising...

...Dershowitz's The Case for Israel is designed to sway liberals predisposed to side with Israel's enemies, while Lozowick's Right to Exist is aimed primarily at Jews and other supporters of Israel who are tempted to go wobbly in the face of relentlessly negative portrayals of Israel...

...Although Israel's critics often note that the Palestinians have lost more than twice as many people as Israel in the current intifada, Lozowick notes that the overwhelming majority of Palestinian casualties are young men who themselves were involved in violence, while the clear majority of Israeli casualties are children, women, and old people, who were killed while eating meals or riding buses...

...Jenin resulted in approximately fifty dead Palestinians and twenty-three dead Israeli soldiers...

...Israel's simple act of building a security fence between Palestinian and Israeli population centers is a good example of the necessary kind of pragmatic, imperfect steps toward peace...

...As Warren Bass writes in Support Any Friend, his informative new book on the Kennedy administration's Middle East policy, in the early 1960s, "progressive, democratic Israel was still widely popular in liberal circles," and some of this affection survived even the death of Israel's underdog status in the 1967 war...

...Palestinian murderers have done so again and again...

...Lozowick concludes there is an "inherent moral imbalance" at the "heart of the conflict...

...Lozowick sees the same dynamic today: Palestinians attack defenseless civilians, and Israel responds by targeting armed terrorists...

...Der-showitz's thesis, however, is a simple one: Although Israel's record with regard to adherence to international law, human rights, and civil liberties is less than perfect, it is nevertheless very good overall, and "the gulf between Israel's actual record of compliance with the rule of law and its perceived record of compliance with the rule of law is greater than for any other nation in history...

...As Lozowick observes, one reason Israel won its wars is that the Israeli population overwhelmingly believed in the right of the Jewish people to sovereignty in their ancestral homeland...

...It is this conviction that drives the Israeli doves, and it is this stubborn dogma that causes people of good will to close their eyes to unpleasant facts at odds with this preexisting belief...

...Yaacov Lozowick's Right to Exist: A Moral Defense of Israel's Wars is also a brief for the defense...

...Indeed, close association with the great imperialist hege-mon stands as Israel's worst crime...

...Dershowitz does a good job of tracing the history of Palestinian rejec-tionism through proffered partition plans suggested by the 1937 Peel Commission, in the 1947 U.N...

...Lozowick goes deeper, tracing anti-Israel and anti-American sentiment to the deconstructionist intellectual conceit...

...The reader can feel Dershowitz's bewilderment when he writes that he "cannot for the life of me understand why peace-loving people committed to equality and self-determination should favor the side that rejects all the values they hold dear and oppose the side that promotes these values...

...Thus, the Arab riots, which killed hundreds of unarmed, defenseless Jews between 1936 and 1939, become, in Chomsky's parlance, "the complex internal strife in Palestine...

...While promoting The Case for Israel on the leftist radio network Pacifica Radio, Dershowitz was ambushed by Norman Finkelstein, a far-left critic of Israel who has compared Israel to the Nazis...

...He condemns Saddam Hussein, but only to deplore American support for Saddam before 1990...

...In Chomsky's mind, this is the worst thing that can be said about a country...

...Much of this is familiar ground, but Dershowitz is effective in tying the history to his argument...

...Yet Lozowick was so disillusioned by the Palestinian rejection of Barak's unprecedented offer and ensuing Palestinian violence that, in subsequent Israeli elections, he has voted for Ariel Sharon, long the bogeyman of the Israel peace camp...

...ranks high on the scale of 'fundamental religious zealotry.'" One interesting aspect of Middle East Illusions is that it allows the reader to discern the evolution of Chomsky's thought over the last three decades...

...The extent of Palestinian territorial ambition almost ensures that Israel's granting of a Palestinian state will not buy peace...

...He is thus concerned that this resolve is being weakened by an insidious international campaign of disinformation and delegitimation—worrying that "rational people will begin to doubt the truth of what they know...

...He was one of the demonstrators who saw Barak off at the airport in the summer of 2000, encouraging the prime minister to make dramatic concessions to Arafat in pursuit of peace...

...Since 1993, successive Israeli governments were encouraged by the international community to "take risks for peace...

...But his attacks on Israel are truly vicious...

...Chomsky routinely compares Israel to Nazi Germany, and he has praised the "extensive historical research" performed by a French Holocaust denier, for whose book Chomsky contributed a foreword...

...Lozowick is less sanguine, as he predicts that Israel may have to weather at least another century of violent opposition before the Muslim world will conclude that the Jews have come back to the Middle East to stay...

...Then, at a summit with former President Clinton and Arafat in the summer of 2000, Barak made a breathtakingly expansive offer: In exchange for a Palestinian statement permanently ending the conflict, they would receive an independent state in all of Gaza and nearly all the West Bank—plus a divided Jerusalem, with Palestinian sovereignty over most of the old city, including the Temple Mount...

...Both Dershowitz and Lozowick recognize the connection between distaste for the United States and antipathy toward Israel...

...Some have yet to do so...

...Progressively larger waves of suicide terrorism targeting Israeli civilians led to the collapse of Barak's government and the landslide election of Ariel Sharon...

...Dershowitz has gone out of his way to market his book to left-leaning Americans, an effort that, in combination with some careless citations, has landed the author in trouble...

...But Israel and the United States were not close allies then, as they are now...

...While the pro-American government in Iran before 1979 is portrayed as an evil imperialist tool of violence and terror, the strongest words that Chomsky can summon to describe the terror-exporting Islamo-fascism that replaced the Shah is "independent nationalism...

...Bank and the Gaza Strip...

...Lozowick, the director of archives at Yad Vashem, Israel's Holocaust museum, is a longtime member of the Israeli peace movement...

...Citing statements by both the Arab intelligentsia and participants in anti-Jewish riots, Lozowick dispels the notion that this violence reflects Arab resistance to perceived colonialization, noting that "the Palestinians rejected Jewish aspirations not because they were European colonialists and foreign invaders, but because they were familiar, second-class locals who had suddenly dared to overturn the natural order...

...Some Israeli settlements are evacuated, and Jerusalem is divided, with Israel keeping "Jewish" West Jerusalem and the Palestinians taking "Arab" East Jerusalem...

...Materialistic, post-Zionist Israel, it was believed, cared only about the price of its tech stocks on NASDAQ—and had no stomach to fight a protracted guerrilla war...

...In fairness to Dershowitz, none of the criticisms from the Left have implicated the substance of his argument defending Israel...

...While "no Jew ever walked into a Palestinian child's bedroom and intentionally killed her...

...The real question would thus be what Israel will do in response to renewed Palestinian attacks...

...Seen in this light, a long-term American policy of benign neglect and conflict management might be best for the Israelis and Palestinians...

...As Lozowick writes, "what if the Palestinians intended to achieve their goals at a price beyond anything Israel could ever afford to pay...

...In fact, it's not even merely the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City...

...It is surrender...

...If the past is any guide, the odds are not good...

...The difference is startling...

...What has changed is that Israel is a closer ally of the United States than it was just after the Six Day War...

...The law-enforcement officials of the new state of Palestine will do little to prevent or punish attacks on Jewish civilians...

...Moreover, there is, as Dershowitz observes, a broad international consensus on what this solution would look like...

...The "fountainhead of the loss of truth," he writes, is Europe, "where it is intertwined in the major political undertaking of our era: the annulment of history in the name of peace...

...It is impossible to read Lozowick's book and conclude that his prediction is irrationally pessimistic...

...Ariel Sharon has endorsed the creation of a Palestinian state...

...Chomsky can carry this double standard to truly hilarious proportions...

...In these speeches and essays, Chomsky constantly paints Israel as a neo-colonialist occupier and serial abuser of human rights...

...The villains in Chomsky's world are exclusively those who share American values or interests...

...Despite early signals that Arafat had no intention of living up to Palestinian commitments, Israel signed a series of agreements ceding the Palestinians control of territory in the West A former clerk to Israeli Supreme Court Justice Aharon Barak, Aitan Goelman is a partner at Zuckerman Spader in Washington, D.C...

...The historical seat of Jewish nationhood is the Temple Mount...

...These days, nearly everyone (except groups like Hamas) believes in the two-state solution...

...It looks pretty much like Barak's plan at Camp David: Israel relinquishes Gaza and all the West Bank except concentrated groups of settlements, for which the Palestinians are "swapped" areas of southern Israel...

...In a June 1997 speech in Israel, Chomsky claimed that Taiwan, Britain, and "Argentine neo-Nazis," along with Israel and others, were part of an "international terror network" funded by Saudi Arabia...

...The criticism of Arafat for turning down Barak's offer vanished, replaced by international condemnation of "provocative" Israeli military responses...

...Israel's Right to Fight BY AITAN GOELMAN It is surely no coincidence that several recent books about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are explicitly styled "defenses" of the Jewish state's right to exist and right to defend itself against terrorism...

...Already, the unfinished fence in the West Bank has made it harder for would-be martyrs to reach major Jewish population centers...

...Or, as Dershowitz observes, a recent poll of Palestinians revealed that 87 percent favor "liberating" all of Israel...

...Dershowitz blandly concludes that "the best hope for peace is that time and progress" will persuade the Palestinians to abandon their goal of destroying the Jewish state...

...Abdication of that tiny piece of real estate is not compromise...

...Israel and the United States are international partners in crime...

...According to Chomsky, Israel's 1982 invasion of Lebanon was precipitated by its fear of Palestinian moderation, while the United States' greatest fear after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990 was that Saddam would withdraw before America had an opportunity to oust him by force...

...Such relative balance is entirely absent from Chomsky's late speeches, which are laced with anti-Israeli vitriol...

...Shortly thereafter, Arafat went on a tour of European capitals, where he was repeatedly informed that he was crazy for turning down Barak's offer...

...And, for a short while, this was true...

...The ten speeches and essays in the book can roughly be divided into two chronological blocks: those Chomsky wrote in the period shortly after the 1967 war and those Chomsky has written in the last six years...

...There are exceptions, such as the massacre of Palestinian villagers at Deir Yassin by an Israeli militia force in 1948, but these instances are so few and such a source of shame to Israel that, as Lozowick notes, every Israeli soldier is educated about them and taught that that they have a legal and moral obligation to disobey immoral orders...

...His use of history is selective, blaming Israel for military action against civilians while omitting any reference to, or whitewashing, the long history of Palestinian atrocities...

...The Arabs living in what became Mandatory Palestine decided early to accept no Jewish presence, Lozowick writes, and they have never genuinely wavered in that commitment...

...It wasn't supposed to go like this...

...Both Lozowick and Der-showitz acknowledge the unlikelihood of achieving true peace anytime soon...

...Will the international community blame Palestine for the renewed violence...

...In a region which has seen more than its share of brutal dictators and fascist tyrants, Chomsky abhors only those countries that do not hate the United States: Israel, Turkey, the Shah's Iran...

...By the end of Johnson's, the Arabs and Israelis had chosen their respective sides in the Cold War...

...There is thus good reason to conclude, as Lozowick does, that no potential solution to the conflict satisfies the current minimum demands of either side...