The Mideast Is America’s New Wild West. By Ira Chernus. History News Network, December 4, 2013.
Exodus as a Zionist Melodrama. By Rachel Weissbrod. Israel Studies, Vol. 4, No. 1 (Spring 1999).
Canaanites in a Promised Land: The American Indian and the Providential Theory of Empire. By Alfred A. Cave. American Indian Quarterly, Vol. 12, No. 4 (Autumn, 1988).
The Right to Expel: The Bible and Ethnic Cleansing. By Michael Prior. Chapter 1 of Palestinian Refugees: The Right of Return. Edited by Naseer Aruri. London: Pluto Press, 2001.
Demystifying the Quest for Canaan: Observations on Mimesis in the New World and the Holy Land. By Steven Salaita. Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Fall 2002).
Frontier Myths and Their Applications in America and Israel: A Transnational Perspective. By S. Ilan Troen. Israel Studies, Vol. 5, No. 1 (Spring 2000).
Chernus:
The “special
relationship” between the U.S. and Israel rests on an old myth of “civilization”
versus “savages.”
Why the
enduring “special relationship” between the U.S. and Israel? Cultural
historians, who look at symbols and stories more than politics and policies,
say a big part of it goes back to the late 1950s, when Leon Uris’ novel Exodus reached the top of the bestseller
list and was then turned into a blockbuster film, with an all-star cast headed
by Paul Newman.
Scholar
Rachel Weissbrod called it a “Zionist melodrama.” M.M. Silver devoted a whole book to the phenomenon: Our Exodus,
with the subtitle, The Americanization of
Israel’s Founding Story.
A
preeminent historian of American Judaism, Jonathan Sarna, came closest to the
truth in his blurb for Silver’s book: Exodus
“consciously linked brawny Zionist pioneers with the heroes of traditional
American westerns.” The protagonist, Ari ben Canaan (“lion, son of Canaan”), is
the Jewish Shane, the cowboy of impeccable virtue who kills only because he
must to save decent people – especially the gentile woman he loves – and
civilize a savage land.
Screenwriter
Dalton Trumbo (in his first outing after years of being blacklisted) did add a
penultimate scene missing from the novel: Ari swears that someday Jews and
Arabs will live together and share the land in peace. But then he heads off to
fight those very Arabs. Who could resist rooting for Paul Newman, no matter how
bad guys he was forced to wipe out?
Just a
year later the Israelis kidnapped, tried, and executed Nazi bureaucrat Adolph
Eichmann. Who could resist seeing fiction come to life, with the increasingly
common equation, Arabs = Nazis?
Thus
cultural myth combined with historical event to set the stage for widespread
support of the Johnson and Nixon administration's sharp pro-Israel tilt, when
Israel went to war with its neighbors in 1967 and 1973.
I’m
writing about this history now because it still lives, today (December 4), in
our flagship newspaper, the New York
Times.
The
influential columnist Thomas Friedman tells us that the Middle East is a “merciless,
hard-bitten region” where everyone is out to get everyone, and “it is vital to
never let the other side think they can ‘outcrazy’ you” – because the craziest
people will be the most violent and thus the winners, one assumes. Apparently
those Middle Easterners don’t settle their differences politely and rationally,
as we do here in “civilized” America.
Are you
beginning to see the melodrama of old-fashioned Westerns yet? Wait, there's
plenty more:
The
Jews and the Kurds are among the few minorities that have managed to carve out
autonomous spaces in the Arab-Muslim world because, at the end of the day, they
would never let any of their foes outcrazy them; they did whatever they had to
in order to survive, and sometimes it was really ugly, but they survived to
tell the tale.
Today,
just as in the days of Exodus,
Israelis must be threatened, Friedman assumes, and they must be willing to be
crazy killers to survive. In fact, it’s this old mythic narrative that must
survive.
Now the
plot has been updated to make the Iranian part of “the Arab-Muslim world” the peril to Israel’s
very existence. (Friedman must have missed the episode of Homeland where Dana Brody informs her high-school classmates that
Iranians are not Arabs, so there is no monolithic “Arab-Muslim world.”)
Friedman
is sure that all the reports of Iranian leader Ali Khamenei supporting the
moderate president Hassani (even in the Times
itself) are not to be trusted. As evidence, he cites three acts of mass killing
attributed to “Iran and Hezbollah” two or three decades ago. For him, this is
proof enough that “the Iranians will go all the way” in irrational slaughter
and that “the dark core of this Iranian regime has not gone away. It’s just out
of sight, and it does need to believe that all options really are on the table
for negotiations to succeed.”
How to
show with “the dark core” at the heart of the “Arab-Muslim world” that we can
be violently crazy too? Friedman nominates Israeli Prime Minister Bibi
Netanyahu to do the job, to continue being “crazy” with “his Dr. Strangelove
stuff and the occasional missile test.” How else can we tame the savagery in
the Wild West that we call the Middle East?
Well,
that’s the view from the authoritative moderate voice not only of our flagship
newspaper but of the liberal foreign policy establishment here in the U.S.
What
about the moderate view in Israel? The Times’
website is now giving us that view from Shmuel Rosner, a veteran centrist
Israel journalist who specializes in “the special relationship” between his
nation and the U.S.
In his Dec. 4 column, Rosner writes about the controversy between the Israeli
government and the “thousands of Israeli Bedouins and Arabs [who] staged
demonstrations, some of them violent, against a government plan to resettle the
Bedouins of the Negev desert.” By the third paragraph of the column, you can’t
help feeling you are back in America’s Wild West – this time with the decent
folk facing not crazy gunslingers but primitive “Injuns.”
Rosner
hastens to tell us of the dreadful poverty of the Bedouins and shows his
sympathy by asserting that their “community needs help to advance” – help that
can come, apparently, only from the civilized Israeli government. Bedouin
communities are “more clusters of huts than real villages.” Theirs is
a
historically nomadic society[,] and its relationship to land clashes with the
state’s notion of ownership and its need for planned development. . . . They
claim the land as their own, based on a long history as its residents. They
have no legal documents proving ownership, and the country has been reluctant
to formalize their claims.
Why
that reminds me of the early Puritan minister who opined that the natives’ “land
is spacious and void, and they are few and do but run over the grass, as do
also the foxes and wild beasts.” And the Jamestown settler who described the
natives as “only an idle, improvident, scattered people, ignorant of the
knowledge of gold, or silver, or any commodities.”
John
Winthrop, head of the Puritans’ Massachusetts Bay Colony, explained that since
the natives “inclose noe Land, neither have any settled habitation, nor any
tame Cattle to improve the Land,” the whites could take pretty much as much
land as they wanted, leaving the natives just what his government deemed “sufficient
for their use” – which wasn’t much at all, of course. No doubt he agreed with
another Jamestown settler who said, “Our intrusion into their possession shall
tend to their great good, and no way to their hurt, unlesse as unbridled
beastes, they procure it to themselves.”
Yes,
America's Wild West myth started way back when all the whites lived in towns
hugging the East coast, wanting only to do “great good” for all those native “beasts.”
In
today’s Israel, under the so-called Prawer Plan, “the government is ready to
give the Bedouins title to some land.” Their “clusters of huts” will be
replaced with houses with running water and electricity and officially
recognized as settlements.
There’s
just one catch: “Between 30,000 and 40,000 Bedouins will have to relocate to
existing or new towns in the same area.” That’s why Bedouins and their
supporters are protesting.
But,
hey, Rosner urges us to believe, that will be in no way to their hurt (unless
as unbridled beasts, they procure it to themselves, I suppose). And “Israel
will also have to pay a high price.” Not only will it give Bedouins land. “It
will also spend considerable taxpayer money — about $2 billion for the entire
effort, including over $330 million on economic development — to improve their
living conditions . . . bringing much-needed help to one of the country’s most
disfavored groups.”
The
link will take you to the Israeli government's website, describing its “comprehensive
policy aimed at improving [Bedouins’] economic, social and living conditions,
as well as resolving long-standing land issues. . . . a major step forward towards integrating the
Bedouin more fully into Israel’s multicultural society, while still preserving
their unique culture and heritage.”
You
might hear Ulysses S. Grant murmuring approval from the grave – Grant being the
president who did more than any other to promote the idea of putting native
Americans on reservations to “improve their conditions.” Maybe “The Great White
Father” is now Jewish.
To be
fair, the parallel is far from complete. The Israelis are not talking about “reservations”
in the sense that Americans know them. And not even the most Orthodox Jews in
Israel are talking about converting the Bedouins to Judaism. They don’t have
anyone like the Puritan missionary John Eliot, who created “praying towns” to
bring Christian civilization to the indigenous people – who were doomed, he
said, if they continued to live “so unfixed, confused, and ungoverned a life,
uncivilized and unsubdued to labor and order.”
In fact
many Orthodox Israelis reject the Prawer Plan as a giveaway to the indigenous
people. One of their icons, Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman, called the situation simply “a battle for the land. . . .We are fighting for the national
lands of the Jewish people.” You might hear Andrew Jackson murmuring approval
from the grave; after all, his USA was still “the New Israel.”
Of
course Jackson got huge resistance from whites for his Indian removal program.
So does Liberman. Just as Americans long debated, sometimes fiercely, about “the
Indian problem,” Israelis now debate fiercely about “the Arab problem.” Yet in
the U.S. that debate gets little media attention. The media are more likely to
oversimplify the issue, casting it through the lens of a centuries-old American
mythology.
That’s
why I’ve gone into such detail about these two Times columns – not because there’s anything extraordinary about
them, but precisely because that they are so ordinary. It’s just another typical
day in American journalism’s coverage of “our friend Israel versus the
Arab-Muslim world.” From the Times,
the pinnacle of our journalism, these old Wild West stereotypes trickle down to
all the rest of the media and thus to the public at large.
The particulars
of Israeli policy toward Arabs are quite different from the specific ways the
U.S. has dealt with its indigenous peoples. But the myths that shaped U.S.
whites’ attitudes toward native Americans for four centuries or more (and to
some extent still do) are strikingly similar to the myths that shape American
public attitudes toward Israel and “the Arab-Muslim” world.
Especially
the conservative public. The old idea that “the Jews” are responsible for the
U.S. government’s pro-Israel tilt has been put to rest by recent polling data
from CNN, the Huffington Post, and Pew. All show that, in the U.S., the
strongest support for Israel’s right-wing policies now comes not from Jews but
from Republicans.
That’s
especially true for white evangelical Christians. In one recent poll, 46% of
those evangelicals said the U.S. is not supportive enough of Israel, while only
31% of Jews held that view. Half of the evangelicals said Israel could never
coexist with an independent Palestinian state while only a third of Jews
doubted it.
But the
conservative pressure on any U.S. president to tilt toward Israel – a pressure
Barack Obama feels every day – is not primarily a matter of religion. It’s much
more about a cultural affinity Americans have long felt for the story of Israel
that they learned so long ago – especially conservatives, who are most likely
to love that story of the innocent good guys, who just want to civilize the
wilderness, constantly threatened by "the dark core" of savage
evildoers.
That’s the
story at the heart of the myth of insecurity so fundamental to political
culture in both Israel and America. But in America the media rarely cast the
native people as savages any more, at least not explicitly.
So
perhaps many Americans are clinging to their old familiar myth vicariously by
projecting it onto what Friedman calls the “merciless, hard-bitten” Middle
East, where most everyone seems crazy – if you accept the mass media’s story as
the truth. As I’m finishing this piece, the Times’
website is featuring yet another in the endless string of frightening
headlines, which all sound so much the same: “Jihadist Groups Gain in Turmoil
Across Middle East.” Meet the new news, same as the old news.
The
only good news is that myths do change. For years the best historians have been
describing a native American culture, going back to pre-contact days, that was
fully as rational and advanced a civilization as the whites’, and deserves to
be understood on its own terms.
Indeed
there’s a persuasive theory that the British colonies of North America created
pejorative myths about the native peoples to negate the lure of native ways,
since so many immigrants found the natives’ life more civilized – and
comfortable – than the European life they’d brought across the sea.
That
more accurate story of the American past is beginning to filter into history
textbooks that millions of students will read in the coming years. Some of them
will become journalists who will eventually control and revise the story line
in the mass media. So there’s hope that, some day, a more accurate story of
Arabs and other Muslim peoples will also find its way into our mass media, too.
Meanwhile,
let’s be aware of the old story that still prevails about “the Arab-Muslim
world” and recognize how it appeals to many Americans, letting them hold on to
a new version of an old narrative that they kind of hate to give up. And let’s
be aware that the appeal of this narrative plays a huge role in the public
demand for a pro-Israel tilt from Washington. At a time when the Obama
administration is immersed in potentially world-changing negotiations, both
with Iran and at the Israel-Palestine table, the role of myth in political life
is too important to ignore.
