Peretz: Israel not as bad as Iraq suicide bombers

Marty Peretz's remarkable article in the New Republic shows just how close to the bottom of the barrel Israel's apologists have to scrape this week, and we should perhaps be encouraged by that.

He writes: "I am sorry to break the gloom, but I don’t think that the death of nine highly aware intruders into a war zone is actually a tragedy. The death by suicide bombing of an old woman in a mosque in Iraq or of more than 75 people at a volleyball game in Pakistan … these are true human catastrophes. But the fate of the Islamic jihadists was a mishap, nothing more than a mishap".

The number of errors is striking: the boats were not in a war zone, they were in international waters; the dead were nonviolent activists acting in self-defence, although if he wants to call this "jihad" so be it; thirdly, contrary to his suggestion that nobody would say Israel started it, to claim anything other than that Israel began the fighting is ludicrous. In any case, when does the fighting begin? When the concussion grenades are fired? When pirates actually board a ship? Or when those on the ship attempt to prevent their access?

That such a wilfully lazy presentation of events should be allowed in the proudly Zionist NR is no surprise. But it is astounding that an article should be printed in which Israel is being compared favourably with suicide bombers in Iraq, even if such an implication is presumably inadvertent.

So let's spell it out for Mr Peretz. The suicide bombers in Iraq are the enemies of every government in the world, they are viewed by the international community of the empowered as criminals and they are being pursued by the world's mightiest military. Israel, meanwhile, is the largest recipient of US aid, a "good friend" (as we are reminded with nauseating regularity) of the Western economic powers, a trading partner, and, as the refrain goes, 'the Middle East's only democracy'.

Israel: 'the West' in miniature?
Which brings us to the key point. I have heard Israelis describe their borders as the point at which the West meets the East. In an unabashed claim to orientalist we-feeling, Israel portrays itself as 'our' outpost 'over there'.

The cultivation of solidarity between Israel and their Euro-American allies on cultural grounds can be observed in self-presentation at home and abroad, and this is not wholly cynical. Israel's image of itself is as a 'Jewish state', and Jews and Judaism have contributed immeasurably to our cultural life (as they have, incidentally, to Islamic and Middle Eastern culture). What's more, the powerful in Israel are almost exclusively Euro-Americans. The symbiotic link between Israel and the West is manifested materially but it is bound up deeply in a shared imagination.

But in its Zionist incarnation, as Akiva Orr ably demonstrates, Israel retains less of the Jewish than of the imperial. Zionism makes more sense as a Eurocolonialist endeavour than as a nation's pursuit of self-determination. Its ability to use the rule of law toward ethnic cleansing is, I suppose, the civilisationist project distilled.

And that, alongside the material support of our governments, is why honesty with regard to Israel is of the utmost urgency: we are very directly complicit in their abuses. I have argued elsewhere that Zionism simply could not have prevailed without the support of Westerners, especially enthusiastic Christians. So when we criticise Israel it is not because they behave worse than the Burmese Junta or Kim Jong Il or Al-Qaida militants. It is because of our investment in their crimes.

The parallels with apartheid South Africa are compelling and we should perhaps heed Yitzhak Leor's bold argument that Israel's is the more barbaric of the two systems. The resilience of black resistance was eventually met by the robust (if derided) support of people in the most complicit countries, including the UK. Monday's horror may yet prove not to have been in vain if it motivates the kind of clear thinking necessary to draw Israel's day-to-day strangling of the invisible other, and our prejudicial sympathy, into the light.

Marty Peretz has lent us a hand.