Cohen:
TO
cross the Atlantic to America, as I did recently from London, is to move from
one moral universe to its opposite in relation to Israel’s war with Hamas in
Gaza. Fury over Palestinian civilian casualties has risen to a fever pitch in
Europe, moving beyond anti-Zionism into anti-Semitism (often a flimsy
distinction). Attacks on Jews and synagogues are the work of a rabid fringe,
but anger toward an Israel portrayed as indiscriminate in its brutality is
widespread. For a growing number of Europeans, not having a negative opinion of
Israel is tantamount to not having a conscience. The deaths of hundreds of
children in any war, as one editorial in The Guardian put it, is “a special
kind of obscenity.”
In the
United States, by contrast, support for Israel remains strong (although less so
among the young, who are most exposed to the warring hashtags of social media).
That support is overwhelming in political circles. Palestinian suffering
remains near taboo in Congress. It is not only among American Jews, better
organized and more outspoken than their whispering European counterparts, that
the story of a nation of immigrants escaping persecution and rising from
nowhere in the Holy Land resonates. The Israeli saga — of courage and will —
echoes in American mythology, far beyond religious identification, be it Jewish
or evangelical Christian.
America
tends toward a preference for unambiguous right and wrong — no European leader
would pronounce the phrase “axis of evil” — and this third Gaza eruption in six
years fits neatly enough into a Manichaean framework: A democratic Jewish
state, hit by rockets, responds to Islamic terrorists. The obscenity, for most
Americans, has a name. That name is Hamas.
James
Lasdun, a Jewish author and poet who moved to the United States from England,
has written that, “There is something uncannily adaptive about anti-Semitism:
the way it can hide, unsuspected, in the most progressive minds.” Certainly,
European anti-Semitism has adapted. It used to be mainly of the nationalist
right. It now finds expression among large Muslim communities. But the war has
also suggested how the virulent anti-Israel sentiment now evident among the
bien-pensant European left can create a climate that makes violent hatred of
Jews permissible once again.
In
Germany, of all places, there have been a series of demonstrations since the
Gaza conflict broke out with refrains like “Israel: Nazi murderer” and “Jew,
Jew, you cowardly pig, come out and fight alone” (it rhymes in German). Three
men hurled a Molotov cocktail at a synagogue in Wuppertal. Hitler’s name has
been chanted, gassing of Jews invoked. Violent demonstrations have erupted in
France. The foreign ministers of France, Italy and Germany were moved to issue
a statement saying “anti-Semitic rhetoric and hostility against Jews” have “no
place in our societies.” Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German foreign minister,
went further. What Germany had witnessed, he wrote, makes the “blood freeze in
anybody’s veins.”
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Yes, it
does. Germany, Israel’s closest ally apart from the United States, had been
constrained since 1945. The moral shackles have loosened. Europe’s malevolent
ghosts have not been entirely dispelled. The continent on which Jews went
meekly to the slaughter reproaches the descendants of those who survived for
absorbing the lesson that military might is inextricable from survival and that
no attack must go unanswered, especially one from an organization bent on the
annihilation of Israel.
A
strange transference sometimes seems to be at work, as if casting Israelis as
murderers, shorn of any historical context, somehow expiates the crime. In any
case it is certain that for a quasi-pacifist Europe, the Palestinian victim
plays well; the regional superpower, Israel, a militarized society through
necessity, much less so.
Anger
at Israel’s bombardment of Gaza is also “a unifying element among disparate
Islamic communities in Europe,” said Jonathan Eyal, a foreign policy analyst in
London. Moroccans in the Netherlands, Pakistanis in Britain and Algerians in
France find common cause in denouncing Israel. “Their anger is also a low-cost
expression of frustration and alienation,” Eyal said.
Views
of the war in the United States can feel similarly skewed, resistant to the
whole picture, slanted through cultural inclination and political diktat. It is
still hard to say that the killing of hundreds of Palestinian children
represents a Jewish failure, whatever else it may be. It is not easy to convey
the point that the open-air prison of Gaza in which Hamas has thrived exists in
part because Israel has shown a strong preference for the status quo, failing
to reach out to Palestinian moderates and extending settlements in the West
Bank, fatally tempted by the idea of keeping all the land between the
Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River.
Oppressed
people will respond. Millions of Palestinians are oppressed. They are routinely
humiliated and live under Israeli dominion. When Jon Stewart is lionized (and
slammed in some circles) for “revealing” Palestinian suffering to Americans, it
suggests how hidden that suffering is. The way members of Congress have been
falling over one another to demonstrate more vociferous support for Israel is a
measure of a political climate not conducive to nuance. This hardly serves
America’s interests, which lie in a now infinitely distant peace between
Israelis and Palestinians, and will require balanced American mediation.
Something
may be shifting. Powerful images of Palestinian suffering on Facebook and
Twitter have hit younger Americans. A recent survey by the Pew Research Center
found that among Americans age 65 or older, 53 percent blame Hamas for the
violence and 15 percent Israel. For those ages 18 to 29, Israel is blamed by 29
percent of those questioned, Hamas by just 21 percent. My son-in-law, a doctor
in Atlanta, said that for his social group, mainly professionals in their 30s
with young children, it was “impossible to see infants being killed by what
sometimes seems like an extension of the U.S. Army without being affected.”
I find
myself dreaming of some island in the middle of the Atlantic where the blinding
excesses on either side of the water are overcome and a fundamental truth is
absorbed: that neither side is going away, that both have made grievous
mistakes, and that the fate of Jewish and Palestinian children — united in
their innocence — depends on placing the future above the past. That island
will no doubt remain as illusory as peace. Meanwhile, on balance, I am pleased
to have become a naturalized American.
