Is Israel Below Criticism?

By Roger Rosenblatt

One of the few salutary side effects of the killings and beatings in Gaza and the West Bank has been the emerging willingness of thoughtful American Jews and non-Jews to criticize Israeli policies. Maybe it had to take events of such high repugnance to get the words in the air. Always a tricky business. How to criticize Israel? Meaning: How to cast a cool eye on America's one kindred ally in the Middle East without seeming to turn one's back on that ally, or to jeopardize its survival, or to arouse or pander to the anti- Semitic impulses of those who would dearly love to see criticism of the Jewish state confused with a baiting of the Jews?

Sensing this reluctance, Israeli officials have plucked at our skittishness like harpists. Foxy strategy. Who can blame them? But what has our caution presumed? That Israel would be offended. Sure enough, some Israelis now are much offended. Countries do not take kindly to criticism, from allies especially. They tend to mount unified defensive fronts, even when, as is the case here, millions of Israelis feel the same anguish and displeasure.

And then our former skittishness has presumed that latent in America's cheerful pluralistic soul lies a hot well of anti-Semitic bile, waiting to shoot into a geyser. There's no sure way of telling. In social terms, the eruption of that sort of hatred could be ugly, violent, divisive. In practical terms, blatant anti-Semitism could result in a withdrawal of American tax dollars, leaving the nation that made a garden from a desert as vulnerable to its enemies as a flipped turtle.

All these dangers exist; and until recent weeks the ensuing unspoken policy has been for Americans to keep as stony-faced as palace guards whenever Israel does something that we do not like. Either that, or to blurt out some whiny silliness as Woody Allen did on the New York Times op-ed page in January, detailing a comedian's personal distress over a complicated international tragedy. Allen's plaint encouraged equally irrelevant counteraccusations of Jewish self-hate but this time did not reinstate the old cautionary mode. Unswervingly pro-Israel publications such as the New Republic, several Jewish organizations, 30 U.S. Senators sympathetic to Israel and last week President Reagan have expressed their impatience with Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir's hardheadedness. People seem to be catching on that to dance on eggshells about Israel is not only weirdly awkward, it opposes all that one understands both Jewishness and Americanness to be.

If it is true that anti-Semitism bubbles deep in America, it is also true that no place on earth is better suited to Jewish values and predispositions. Folklore has it that New England parsimony means thrift, whereas Jewish parsimony means miserliness, but the qualities are exactly the same. A dogged middle-classedness; a passion for education; a faith in individual enterprise; a near hysterical sense of family; a driving impulse toward nationalism and security; a belief in individual rights and expression, in reason, in the rule of moral law; a lust for self-celebration; a boisterous embracing of life, underlain by a fearful morbidity; a sentimentality grounded in iron. Of such things is America made, and so are Jews. Above all, Jewish and American tradition delight in looking at oneself critically. If there are any tribes in history more mired in self-study, my heart goes out to them.

Our wariness in dealing with Israel has thus contradicted our normal noisy, scrutinizing attitudes. Constraint has prevailed, as a sign not of manners but of dishonesty. Most of America has a strong familial affection for Israel (inasmuch as any country has affection for another) as a people, a democracy or both. We have finally started acting as if we do. The advantages are already evident.

First, responsible criticism knocks the wind out of irresponsible criticism, especially those who liken Israeli soldiers shooting back at rock-throwing Palestinians to Nazis in extermination camps. Martin Peretz, editor in chief of the New Republic, suggests that those who wield corrupt analogies of Jews to Nazis seek to expel the Holocaust from memory by diminishing its significance. That alone would justify our straight talk.

Second, America has more than self-respect to lose by refusing to talk turkey with its friend. It also could lose its friend, since the uncompromising right wing in Israel is only emboldened by America's failure to speak its mind. Eventually America, Jewish and Gentile, would not stand for destructive adamancy. If we failed to say so now, when there is still a chance to use criticism for positive results, we would surely say so later in a furious about-face that would appear sudden when it happened but that in fact would have been born in a deadly nervous silence.

Third, talking straight says that a special relationship is not a pretext for condescension. Israel is a powerful, sophisticated state. Why should it not be accorded the respect due any friendly nation that one felt was going blind to its own best interests? Is Israel below criticism?

Fourth, open talk begins to break the ice between Jewish and non-Jewish Americans, thus displaying exactly how much or how little anti-Semitism is being concealed. Anti-Semites and Jews alike may be shocked to discover that for most Americans, being opposed to one or another aspect of Israel's behavior is just that and no more, having nothing to do with deep- or shallow- seated anti-Jewish feelings.

America does not always have such a hot record when it comes to dealing with foreign governments of which, on moral grounds, it should loudly disapprove. The rationale is familiar: at least they're our sons of bitches. Israel has never been in that category. It is a nation that America should and does applaud, making any moments of dissatisfaction exceptions that prove the rule. Half a world away lives a remarkable civilization born of a moral issue, suffused with moral questions, most of whose people know perfectly well when their government is right and when it is wrong. The present government in Israel has been wrong, America is telling it so, and the truth may set both free.