Wieseltier’s worries

Leon Wieseltier is starting to worry about Israel:

Yet in the Jewish state now I detect a coarsening of conscience–for example, in the commonly heard extenuation that Hamas hides its murderers behind children. So it does; but this means only that another way at them, another course of action, must be found. It cannot mean that children may be killed. Morality is a restraining consideration. Will Hamas therefore have exploited the finer sensibilities of Israel? Absolutely; but Israel can hardly repudiate the very qualities for which it asks to be admired. In the struggle between Hamas and Israel, it is Hamas that is the party of dehumanization…

Perhaps the most troubling development in Israel now is the collapse of its diplomatic imagination. Its faith in itself seems almost entirely a faith in its force. This is itself a strategic failure. The most perfect representative of this hopelessness is Benjamin Netanyahu, who cannot bring himself to say a good word about a two-state solution, which is the sole solution there can be, now or ever. He is for Palestinian economic development, which is fine but evasive. He warns about Iran, which is right but also evasive. The only peace process that interests Netanyahu is the one with Washington. Otherwise he and the rest of Israel’s intellectually paralyzed leadership are quite relieved to intone that there is "no partner," as if the insistence that there is no partner is not also a way of insuring that there is no partner; and soon, yet again, at a late hour, and mainly for the Americans, an Israeli government will try to shore up the weak but real partner it had all along in Ramallah…

All that said… he’s under no illusions about Hamas ("Hamas’s view of peace is loud and plain, and only a meretricious credulity can suggest otherwise"), readily admits that "Netanyahu’s fears are not all fantasies" and steers clear from a direct moral equivalency between the state of hate between the two sides ("There are racist rabbis in Israel, and may their matzah rise before their very eyes; but there are many more racist mullahs in Palestine and beyond"). As for Israel’s critics…

Israel’s critics, who are having the time of their life, have forgotten, or have chosen to forget, that unless sympathy for the predicament of the Palestinians is attended by sympathy for the predicament of the Israelis, it is not sympathy for peace. Anti-Zionism is not a contribution to the future. But here is Richard Falk, reporting to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva that Israel’s use of force in Gaza was "potentially a crime against peace." A crime against peace! This is not the idea of a war crime, but the idea that war is a crime: is there any other state in the world that is arraigned for a want of pacifism? And those rockets from Gaza? Crimes against love, perhaps. And here is Roger Cohen in The New York Times, reporting glowingly and gullibly from Iran that its Jews are happy. He was there, so he knows. After all, they told him so. This is not quite of the same magnitude as, say, Owen Lattimore’s report on the merry workers of Kolyma, but it is of the same tradition of willing dupes, and ideological tourists, and politically inspired pseudo-empiricism. All this is not decent and not helpful.

So what to do?

I am reminded of David Ben-Gurion’s old prescription for meeting a multiplicity of dangers, and so I propose to fight Avigdor Lieberman as if there is no Richard Falk and Richard Falk as if there is no Avigdor Lieberman.