It is hard to imagine what would happen to the intellectual and moral style of the Left if radicalism ever became the dominant force in American politics. In the present circumstances, however hyperbolic and egregious its verbal and tactical excesses, the Left can always, and often does, explain or justify its hardened positions by reference to its minority status. Whether the issue is the Negro struggle, Vietnam, or—most recently—the Arab-Israel conflict, each and every new dogmatism, not excluding the most incendiary, lays claim to serious attention by characterizing itself as a courageous heresy. It may well be that all these years of unrequited love for the people have made the ethical sense of radicals dependent on the assurance of their marginality. With the stunning intrusion of the Middle East crisis onto a stage long monopolized by Vietnam, this habit has reached new heights of righteous arrogance and absurdity. For never before has a self-proclaimed heterodoxy, defiant and of course daring in its unpopularity, been so quickly established on the American Left as the ideologically correct view of a situation shrouded in ideological ambiguity. The American involvement in Vietnam is now commonly viewed on the Left as an exercise in genocide, a race war against coloreds, but that particular heterodoxy took some years to graduate into orthodoxy. And even now, the more sensible though no less committed in the peace ranks—i.e., those still insistent upon drawing important distinctions—are troubled by such vulgar and altogether gratuitous distortions of truths which are sufficiently horrendous in themselves.
Where the Middle East is concerned, the doctrine which has won so quick an acceptance—in the sectarian press of the Left, in the writings of occasional emissaries to the “outside” world, in discussions among movement activists, and in the resolutions adopted at the disastrous convention of the National Conference for New Politics in Chicago last September—is that Israel and Israel alone must bear the blame for the past and the responsibility for the future. Not, it should be clear, only for the plight of the Arab refugees, but for the behavior of the Arab regimes as well, and even (how powerful little Israel must have become!) for the policy of the Soviet Union, its sycophants (at least when Jews are in question), and virtually the entire Third World.
Now, it is decidedly not the case that, of the many hundreds of thousands who have marched and worked for peace in Vietnam and associated themselves in concrete ways with the battle for Negro rights, any very substantial percentage thought of themselves last spring as hostile to the state of Israel. A large number, in fact, shared the anxieties of those weeks for Israel's very survival and the relief at its liberation from imminent fear. It is precisely because so many of the Left rank-and-file feel both existential and rational ties to the people of Israel, while the radical ideologues at the top are in almost complete sympathy with the politics of Israel's enemies, that there have developed within every part of the peace and rights constituency fissures shattering the fragile unities cemented by the war in Vietnam.
Again, as so often in the past, the political and journalistic leadership of Left movements has isolated itself from the main body of its support and from its professed moral foundations. A cynicism bred of the frustrations of failure has combined with an ideological absolutism induced and continually strengthened by the persistent irrelevance of what the leadership thinks to whatever actually happens in history, and this lethal combination has forced much American radical opinion on the problems of the Israel-Arab area into the mold of Third Force socialist rhetoric. Ironically, this is true not only for the small and dreary bands on the Left still faithful to Moscow or Peking; it holds equally for the leadership of those diverse groups and groupings independent of Communist discipline and spiritual sway. But within the latter category, the orthodox notion of Israel as “imperialist” or as a neo-imperialist instrument makes sense only to those embittered rank-and-filers for whom the side in a dispute which engages the open and general support of Americans is ipso facto bound to be in the wrong. The Jewish radicals and other ideological agnostics who have been unable to accept this reading of Israel's role are being forced out of the movement. Yet their departure only succors the posture of unhonored prophecy which the leadership has always affected. At the same time, the theory that the middle classes are unreliable radicals gains currency, and another convenient betrayal is imagined to excuse the Left's declining fortunes. Meanwhile the myth that the wretched everywhere will rise some day allows for hope to spring eternal.
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If in describing the situation in such terms, one wonders for a moment whether one has constructed a caricature, one need only look at the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to be reassured of its verisimilitude. From the early days of the personality cult of Stokely Carmichael, SNCC had found itself continually allaying the apprehensions of its supporters. “Did Carmichael really call for the burning to the ground of Western civilization?” “Distortions of the reactionary press,” came back the predictable explanation. I was among those who eagerly accepted such brazenly offered blandishments. But Carmichael is an articulate and irrepressible young man. After a brief time, the comforting words no longer persuaded. And soon they were dropped; inflammatory invective had become the very stuff of SNCC's program. Indeed, there is a saddening parallel between SNCC and the Third World governments it apotheosizes. “From what at home does he now flee?” asks the poet Lermontov. As with the Nasser, Nkrumah, Sukarno, and perhaps even Boumedienne regimes, SNCC's hapless forays into international affairs were at once cause and effect of its failure as an indigenous radical movement. The inability to sustain the discipline and elan of cadres doing prosaic and largely unrecognized, though nonetheless revolutionary, work results in a politics of desperate fancy. From Hanoi and Havana, SNCC's leaders deliver ever more threatening and empty pronunciamentos; and James Forman, the organization's once dignified and decent long-time executive secretary, is consumed as its majordomo Foreign Minister, jetsetting through African capitals with his earnest message of solidarity from a few handfuls of people who do not work very hard.
SNCC's recent attack in its official newsletter on Israel and Zionism was met with shock, but it should have come as no surprise. The group's heroes—publicly avowed at last—had, after all, already secured Israel a central place in its demonology. The apocryphal writings of Che Guevara, for example, fit Israel into “the International of Crime and Treason.” By extension, of course, all its Arab enemies, however retrograde, become part of the nascent oppositionist—will it be called the fifth?—international. Since SNCC sees issues only in the grossest terms, there is not even in its position a concession of Israel's right to exist—a right which even the Soviet Union and Cuba reaffirmed in their otherwise belligerent and cruelly mendacious statements at the United Nations.
Nor is SNCC overly concerned, as some of Israel's critics are, with dissociating its anti-Zionism from anti-Semitism (though the distinction is not an always easy one, and though “anti-Zionism” has often been an all too transparent cover for anti-Semitism pure and simple). After questioning by the press, SNCC's spokesman, one Ralph Featherstone, suddenly seemed to be seized by such scruples, but his answers, no less than the original “fact sheet,” belie his claim of being interested in indicting “only Jewish oppressors.” The imagery in word and picture in this document is so shot through with anti-Semitic overtones that only the most benighted and willfully innocent can fail to see either its malice or the intent behind it. Rothschilds are clumsily juxtaposed with allusions to international conspiracy, Moshe Dayan's epaulets have dollar signs for insignia, and the dollar sign is again pictured helping the Star of David to strangle both Nasser and Mohammed Ali—all surrounded by a collection of sheer falsehoods and half-truths about Israel. It is a document reminiscent of a populist anti-Semitism as old as socialism itself—the “socialism of fools,” August Bebel termed it.
This tradition has always vexed radicals who do not own to its canons and it still does. (Many of these radicals, however, would not now be nearly so embarrassed had SNCC contented itself with its customary hostility against all whites.) Thus it is that for some of us the unique history of Jewish suffering still establishes limits on what can be tolerated from those whose faults we are anxious to overlook. Yet by the same token, radicals have by their indulgent silence up to now opened themselves to this most recent experience of race hatred from within their own ranks—and not only from SNCC.
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A certain naivete about the purity and virtue of the revolutionary world has characterized much Left and anti-war sentiment in America. In consequence of this naivete, the response of many radicals to the Middle East crisis was confused by the fraternal greetings from Ho Chi Minh to Nasser and the fantastic charge by a Cuban officer that Israel used Nazis in its drive through Sinai (a converse confusion was created by Marshal Ky's statement of support for Israel). Here, after all, was a little country, and a progressive one at that, threatened at its very foundations—and yet here too were all the countries the Left considers victims of American imperialism allied against it in a cabal of what Abba Eban aptly and inventively called politicide. The willingness to sacrifice small countries for large stakes was supposed to be a Washington specialty, but slowly it began to dawn on some elements of the Left that cynicism was amply distributed around the globe and around the political spectrum. Walter Laqueur has only hinted in these pages1 at the havoc wrought in Left alignments all over the world by such realizations. From Poland the case of the dismissed generals, from Czechoslovakia the campaign against Ladislaw Mnacko (recalling the Greek action against Melina Mercouri), stubborn rumblings here, cautious and politic retreats there, all testify to the difficulty with which the anti-Israel line went down in Left circles everywhere.2
Some demurrers from the official Left version of the war had a pathetically heroic quality about them—for example, the independent thrust of the Jewish Morning Freiheit, the Yiddish daily equivalent of The Worker. It cannot be easy, even if one is Jewish and Israel is involved, to end decades of fellow-traveling. Similarly, Jewish Currents, an occasionally intelligent though conventionally pro-Russian Left periodical (which had, however, already tested itself on the question of Soviet anti-Semitism at least on cultural matters), published an exhaustive account of pro-Israel sentiment throughout the “progressive” world. Those who automatically trooped behind Moscow are likely to find their capacity to work with broadly based Left groups, only recently somewhat restored, greatly impaired. As with the Communists in the nascent French popular front, American Communists may soon find themselves on the outside of an exclusionary policy that independent radicals will have little trouble in justifying.
There is hardly an issue on which the newspapers New America and the National Guardian agree. The former is a monthly publication representing the remnant of organized social democracy in this country; the latter, now terming itself “an independent radical newsweekly,” is a strident sheet on the far Left fringes of Third-Camp socialism. For some time now, the two have been at war over the modern variations on the old divisive themes. Early this summer, however, the National Guardian made a special point of telling its readers it was echoing New America's fears that the Israel issue would seriously rupture the Left just when it could least afford a split. The apprehensions were not groundless. But to argue at that point against a split in the ranks of the Left was in fact to urge that Israel's friends agree as to the relative insignificance of a matter that stirred their minds and hearts no less surely and genuinely than the agony of Vietnam. This could not help but awake in many the distressed sense that radicals, for all the humane sentiments they profess, are not above the callous politics of their own governments. It was unavoidable, once so much of the eminent Left had moved against Israel, and in particularly reprehensible ways, that the blessedly naive and the intransigently principled should, like Arnold Wesker in England, also begin to ask themselves desperate questions: about the individuals and periodicals they had come to trust; about the political positions and moral perspectives they had long thought of as their own. These months, then, have been trying ones; and it is not likely that the Left will soon recover from the malaise of lost confidence which, exemplified by bitter acrimony or nervous silence, now afflicts it.
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The strains in the radicalisms of Europe and the developing world are limited in number—deriving from a grand philosophic system, the crucible of some traumatic historic experience, or both—and they all have an obvious ideological character and a definitive institutional ancestry. Nothing of the sort can be said of our own radical insurgencies. The thought patterns of the American Left are a pastiche of many traditions. Because some of these have been quietly absorbed through the impact of a leading figure, or as fallout from an earlier crisis—in any case, largely without the imprint of a corporate identity or organizational sponsorship—the Middle East crisis found individuals involved in movements whose sometimes barely articulated precepts were, they now discovered, at odds with their deepest instincts. In the long weeks of Israel's heightening insecurity, one would turn to comrades from old struggles and find them full of reproach.
The confirmed pacifist was reproachful quite simply because he could not brook the idea of a just war which now appealed to many peace activists. Likewise, the principled isolationists, of whom there are still considerable numbers, were aghast at the calls for American action in the Middle East emanating from the very people who had along with them denounced intervention by Washington in Vietnam, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic. Lastly, those rare visionaries of universalism, some of whom had also opposed the establishment of the State of Israel, were horrified by the upsurge of nationalist and even chauvinist sentiment occasioned by Israel's conflict with the Arabs. That Jews in the peace movement, like Erich Fromm and David Riesman, were of this party, provoked many pro-Zionists to an irrational venom that does scarce justice to the real issues at stake (although it must be said that the effort to counter hysterical passions of the pro-Israel variety would not always be matched by any comparable intolerance of Arab xenophobia). This occasional asymmetry notwithstanding, such views were argued with an integrity that it is difficult to fault. Indeed, much less disillusionment would have set in had Left anti-Zionist sentiment generally been of this order. As it happens, however, no Left press or organization to speak of reflected these values (except to appropriate them in anomalous contexts).
Once Israel was off the front pages, or on them at its own instigation, it became possible to sort out one's emotions and thoughts. What became increasingly clear was that many on the Left had swallowed an ill-digested, even a thoughtless, pacifism. What had begun as an eminently reasonable nuclear pacifism slowly had been rendered into a pacifism pure and simple—or a pacifism which still allowed for the violence of revolutionaries. By its horrors, the Vietnam adventure indubitably hastened this process, and only something like the experience of Israel could have made respectable again in certain circles the notion that some countries fight some wars for good and sufficient reasons.
The question of American intervention was more complicated, in no small measure because Israel itself wanted no part of U.S. military action on its behalf. The Left taboo against American interventions had prospered on the confident surety that any decisive response by Washington to a political crisis was likely to be at the service of some landlord class or army junta. The refusal of the U.S. to act against the blockade of Eilat should tend, of course, to confirm this conviction. But in mid-May, the situation was such that an intervention at the Gulf might have averted a war and, ironically, brought down upon this country hardly more ire than its non-intervention. Moreover, as radicals had been saying whenever America sought to isolate a country by sea, a blockade was an act of war not only against the country blockaded but against all who wished to trade with it—that is, an act against the world's peace. Some critics of the Vietnam war saw this instantly and lent their names to statements appealing for American action, eliciting from both Mr. Johnson's friend John Roche and from William Buckley their characteristically impudent humor.
In the aftermath, it was only natural that there should be some vigorous rethinking of attitudes. Some would recall, for example, that H. Stuart Hughes, the first and most distinguished peace candidate, had, in An Approach to Peace (1962), delineated criteria according to which it would be a radical's imperative to support intervention in defense of certain countries. Israel clearly fit these criteria in almost every way, surely as much as Republican Spain had. Nor would there be any need, for those able to see the difference between Israel and Vietnam, to take refuge in fatuities like Arthur Schlesinger's statement: “I think it inconsistent to favor unilateral intervention in one part of the world when I'm already opposed to unilateral intervention in another. . . .” In any case, if radicals sought sanctions against Rhodesia or South Africa, then sanctions against a belligerent Egypt or support for a threatened Israel also made sense. As to the plenary isolationism of recent fashion, it will doubtless no longer have the easy appeal it had when only reactionary forces could be conceived of as a beneficiary of American power.
One's moral bona fides as a leftist has come to depend these days on some species of withdrawal position on Vietnam and a corresponding contempt for the more equivocating and politic approaches. If, after all, the war in Vietnam is viewed as an utterly indefensible enterprise, a crime against Vietnamese and Americans alike, then bombing pause stratagems are rightly seen as diversions from real issues. And even if the Left has been unduly rigid and exclusionary on this score, at least it cannot be taxed for lack of clarity. Those of us in the radical community, then, for whom Israel's rights are on the same moral plane as the rights of the Vietnamese, have drawn a kind of moral cut-off line on this issue; other radicals cannot deny or reasonably plead against it in the name of unity. For certain anti-Israel positions cast a shadow over the intellectual probity and political responsibility of men and movements which had commanded serious attention and strong loyalties as a result of their early and forthright stand against the war in Vietnam.
In general, it appears that the Left is still reluctant to face up to Russian mischief in the world. From the old and quasi-official party-liners, one has of course come to expect portrayals of the Soviet Union in colors similar to those Dean Rusk reserves for the United States. New World Review, a doctrinaire little monthly, did not disappoint these expectations in its analysis of the crisis, and the National Guardian was sensitive enough to the same expectations to omit from its coverage of the UN proceedings the more embarrassing aspects of Premier Kosygin's diplomacy. As part of the same syndrome comes a facile anti-Americanism. Thus Sidney Lens—echoing a widespread notion in the peace movement—asserts in a lead editorial in the June Liberation that he would not dismiss the possibility that Johnson sent planes to bomb Jordan or Egypt. This lie was subsequently to be disavowed by Hussein himself, but its falsity should have been obvious even in June from the behavior of the Johnson administration, which not only sought to keep Israel from military action, but was anxious to force a settlement of the Gulf dispute that would derogate Israeli sovereignty.
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Perhaps the most blatant (and influential) example of the tendency to shy away from a confrontation with Russia's inflammatory role in the Middle East can be found in I. F. Stone's ample writings on the Israel-Arab dispute—in several issues of his Weekly, in a long article in the New York Review of Books of August 3, and in a rambling essay in the July Ramparts, which according to the cheap coinage of its editor was nothing less than brilliant. A justification of the reluctance to judge Soviet behavior that one often encounters on the Left is that there is already too much criticism of the USSR from other segments of the population. In judging Arab behavior, Mr. Stone is motivated by analogous considerations. “I feel honor bound,” he explained in the New York Review, “to report the Arab side, especially since the U.S. press is so overwhelmingly pro-Zionist.” In the service of “honor,” then, he purges the anti-Zionist case of its usual vitriol, obfuscates it a bit, and makes it his own. One would think that a writer's compulsion would be to tell the truth, regardless of whether it has been aired or not. But as Marie Syrkin conclusively demonstrates in the current Midstream, Mr. Stone has, at least in dealing with the origins of the refugee problem, already shown that he is hardly a reliable guide. For if what he now argues on the testimony of others about a coerced Arab exodus is correct, then his own first-hand account of 1948 to the contrary must be wrong—or vice versa. His sleight-of-hand in the present discussion is in any event none too deft. Basing his contentions on British and U.S. monitoring records, he insists that there were no Arab radio appeals in 1948 to the Palestine Arabs that they leave their homes; yet it is he and no one else who has tried to create the impression that the case for Arab instigation of the exodus rests solely on the radio. Nonetheless, one is pleased to find that there are some official documents from the West which Mr. Stone does choose to believe.
The significance for the Left of Mr. Stone's apostasy cannot be overestimated. It may even be more important than the shift in attitudes of the Soviet government. Mr. Stone is widely thought of as an independent journalist,3 and his coverage of the Vietnam war (particularly his refutation of the State Department White Paper of 1965) has given the peace movement much of its bearings. Apparently, however, there is wide distress at Mr. Stone's inability to weigh the divergent claims of Arab and Israeli fairly. Quite understandably has he been “shocking many readers,” as he reported on July 3, presumably to demonstrate his courage yet again. He has shocked them by discerning a “cheerfully cynical” trend toward chauvinism and militarism in Israel which, he thinks, will turn that country “into an Ishmael . . . a minuscule Prussia . . . a new Wild West.” (The Newark activist Tom Hayden, only verbally less restrained, conjures up a Jewish Fascism; Lens evokes an expansionism, its heart set on Damascus and Cairo; the less imaginative refrain is about an Israeli Sparta.) Now given the entreaties of Mr. Stone and his friends all these years for us to realize that this Communist government or that Third World despotism is dictatorial or belligerent or both largely because of the hostility of its neighbors, are we not entitled to expect a like tolerance for Israel? Actually, however, no such tolerance would be appropriate here since the facts are not as Mr. Stone et al describe them. It is an old axiom that when there are enemies at the gates, there is terror in the cities. Yet in an Israel besieged by implacable foes for two decades, hampered in its trade, and harassed by virtually continuous violence on its borders, nothing like the garrison state of Mr. Stone's imaginings has come to pass. Even during the Six-Day War, the treatment of Israel's Arabs was almost unexceptionable. Moreover, internal democracy is as secure there now as ever before in the country's history. Leftists might be interested in noting, for example, that Israel alone in the Middle East has a functioning Communist politics with representation in the Knesset—and with two Communist parties at that. It seems that the Left, so patient with the political grotesqueries of its favored nations, would only be satisfied with an absolutely unflawed Israel, which would mean also an Israel willing to surrender its national existence. The abuse which Israel has long suffered for its fast receding and always limited theocratic aspects is reflective of how inordinately and obsessively critical have been those who have decided to be critical.
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Of late, the fixation has shifted from theocracy to General Dayan and the Israeli military. Mr. Stone, in line with this shift, is concerned to protect Israel's politicians from its generals, though he is favorably impressed by at least one of the latter. But it is a vulgar oversimplification to see Israeli politics in terms of a split along conventional dove-hawk lines between civilian and military. The more militant strategies were long kept at bay by military and politicians alike, undermined only by the Egyptian casus belli of mid-May and the international community's indifference to it. Even now, Dayan's authority is severely circumscribed, as the news reports amply show. And for all his Bonapartist posturings—which are by no means characteristic of his colleagues—neither his actions in war nor in troubled peace warrant the apprehensions they have created. Moslem authorities, as an instance, are probably much more secure in their rights and privileges dealing with Dayan's Defense Ministry than they would be with Warhaftig's Ministry of Religion. As for the war itself, we have the testimony of an observer attached to the Ligue Internationale pour les Droits des Hommes, confirmed by various Red Cross statements, about a scrupulously restrained military. (Parenthetically, all the wild figures of Arab military casualties have by now been scaled down. The New York Times of July 26 reported, for example, that Jordan lost no more than five hundred men, as opposed to the fifteen thousand or more charged by Amman earlier. Syria, to which, according to Paul Jacobs in an exceptionally uninformed report in Ramparts, the Israeli victory was “particularly punishing,” got off relatively unscathed.) All this makes the talk in left-wing circles about Israel's “mad hawks” (David McReynolds in the Village Voice of June 29) simply vicious hyperbole.
Israel's behavior in the aftermath of the war has also provoked much contention. But Martha Gellhorn, highly respected by radicals for her hard-hitting reports on the victims of the Vietnam war, has, in a series of articles in the Manchester Guardian of July 24, 25, and 26, systematically disposed of the most misleading misconceptions about civilian casualties, the refugees, and the administration of the West Bank. On these points, Mr. Stone betrays some very disconcerting research traits. In his Weekly of June 18, he quotes a London Sunday Telegraph dispatch testifying to a vague lack of compassion by the Israelis for the Arabs. Since Israel has failed to provide the world with the vengeful atrocities we have come to expect from victorious armies, the unavoidable callousness of war and its consequences are passed off by Mr. Stone as unmitigated horror. No doubt because it would subvert his tendentious argument, he does not refer to Colin Legum, faithfully and wisely cited for years on the Left for his judicious reporting from the Congo and elsewhere in Africa, who gives a detailed and rather different picture of Israeli behavior in several June numbers of the London Observer. That there is great suffering on Israel's border no one would wish to deny, but surely humane radicals like Mr. Stone should not be willing to countenance the grim cynicism with which the Arab states, by their own admission, have exploited the refugees for political ends. Thus the United Arab Republic has conceded that it would not allow the settlement of refugees in Arab lands since that would end the Palestine problem.4 A more “honor bound” I. F. Stone would not have been inclined to lay the entire blame for the refugee problem on Israel. At the very least, the cruelty of the Arab governments should have cost them his sympathies as a radical.
Interestingly enough, Mr. Stone has the temerity to insist that on these issues he writes, not as a radical, but as a Jew, and he carries this presumption very far. In his article in the New York Review, Mr. Stone especially commends the contribution of another Jew, Maxime Rodinson, to the Les Temps Modernes symposium on the Arab-Israeli conflict. Stone for some mysterious reason fails to identify Rodinson as a relatively doctrinaire Marxist,5 but he does say that Rodinson is “too much the humanist . . . and no doubt the Jew to welcome an apocalyptic solution at the expense of Israel's existence.” Too much the Jew indeed! In context, it appears rather that, being a Jew, Rodinson gives proof of his humanism to Mr. Stone by lending “strong support to every basic Arab historical contention.” Stone, the old Zionist, is now possessed by a curious nostalgia for the Jew “with a sense of mission as a Witness in the human wilderness.” One wonders by what right he presumes to tell the survivors of the camps, the children of the European ghettos, the escapees from the barrios of the Arab world that they should continue to bear Witness? Perhaps Mr. Stone will now counsel our mutual friends in the black freedom movement to content themselves with bearing Witness to the world's injustice.
A paradoxical dialectic is at work here, urging a universalism justifiable only on the most parochial grounds. (One is reminded of the anguished indictment of God by Reb Levi Itzhak of Berditchev, dissatisfied with the conditions of his people's chosenness: “What do you have against Your people, Israel?/Why do You afflict Your people, Israel?/ . . . There must be an end to this/ The exile must come to an end!”) The house of Israel must be the first people which, having won a war, should behave as if it were the loser. As metaphysics this may appeal to some temperaments; as politics in the real world, especially given the apparently inveterate irrationality of Arab leadership, it is dangerous cant.
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Where Stone is the éminence grise of American radicalism, Ramparts is its brash young voice. The magazine's dynamic editor, Warren Hinckle, has an intuitive feel for what he calls the “flippy.” Now flippiness has its merits, particularly if one is intent on stirring up cauldrons. But it also entails a sacrifice of intellectual rigor. As it happens, moreover, the flippy style coincides nicely with Mr. Hinckle's ideological predispositions. Having discovered anti-anti-Communism, he is now unable to perceive any justice or reason in American opposition to the expansion of Soviet power in the Middle East, though the July Ramparts wanly concedes that Russian motives were not of the most salutary in the recent crisis.
Big media journalists are notoriously lax on the matter of expertise, but surely no more on the Right than on the Left. (One astute observer, very sympathetic to the anti-Israel case, has noted the paucity of hard facts to back it up.) Because Paul Jacobs had visited Israel on several occasions and also meets the requirements of flippiness as a writer, he was chosen to provide Ramparts with its report on the sources of the crisis. Not surprisingly, his brisk romp through the record weighted the scales against Israel, with the help of numerous distortions and omissions. In discussing 1956, for example, he says that “Israel had made no public outcry about [the nationalization of] the canal,” suggesting that she had no interests in it; he fails to inform the reader that Israel's relative silence on this matter was a consequence of the fact that her rights of passage had been continuously violated even when British troops had occupied the zone, under Labor and Conservative governments, and in defiance of a United Nations Resolution of 1951. On the intrusion of the cold war into the area, Jacobs insinuates that Ben Gurion pushed Israel into the Western bloc; but he neglects to mention that before the die of Soviet-Israeli hostilities was cast, Israel had voted, despite the unmistakable displeasure of the United States, to seat Peking at the UN, for the complete independence of Libya, along with the Communist countries against a call for free elections throughout the Germanies, and in support of many measures aimed against the Union of South Africa. Nor does he point to the connection between the rupture of diplomatic relations with Moscow in February 1953 and Stalin's demented anti-Semitic campaigns. Most objectionable, finally, are Jacobs's stray remarks, echoed by Stone, on Israeli socialism, for whose spirit and concrete achievements he totally lacks any feel. Is it too much to hope that radicals who see more of socialism in Nasser's rhetoric than in Israel's kibbutzim and moshavim, will one day come to their senses and recognize the realities for what they are? (A reading of Georges Friedmann's judicious and probing The End of the Jewish People? might help.)
And why weight the moral scales against Israel? The motives of the Russians are clear enough. Having, through the establishment of the state of Israel, helped create a perpetual thorn in the flesh of American diplomacy toward the Arabs, and having dislodged Great Britain from Palestine, the Soviet Union is now free to employ any methods in courting the Arab world. But it has a good deal to overcome. Theodore Draper has, in his masterful study in these pages,6 somewhat understated the responsibility of the USSR for the birth of Israel. When the United States faltered in its support of partition, even on the very day of Israel's independence, when it wanted to retreat to still another plan of trusteeship or diminution of territory, the Soviet Union was unflinching in its support of the Israeli cause. And, most important, at decisive moments in the military struggle, Russia made available to Israel the arms which turned the tide of battle against the Arabs. Thus, to allay Arab resentment over the past, the Russian strategy must now be built on excess. The requirements of ideology are no less demanding.
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The new left's enchantment with the Third World will prove as costly as was its old enchantment with the second, for the erection of double standards inevitably leads to a corruption of the moral sense no less than the political. Stone, for example, can write: “The precedent of the cease-fire resolution at the UN is a most disturbing one. It accepts preventive war and allows the country which launched it to keep the fruits of aggression as a bargaining card.” Quite apart from sharing the peculiar American fixation with who fires the first shot,7 Stone here entirely ignores what even U Thant has conceded—that Egypt set off the events which led to the present conflagration. Should Israel not have fought for its rights? Should it have risked the bombing of its population centers and not have thrust through the desolate Sinai? Should it, upon victory, have retreated without guarantees?
Stone, of course, shrinks from this political medusa. But only because he seems unwilling as yet to tell us how far he would have Israel go in appeasing the voracious revanchism of the Arab world. In discussing this world, Stone has already given many signs of just how discriminating he is prepared to be. “It is Nasser,” he says, “who represents the future and who can create the internal stability so necessary to peace.” On what evidence? The fact that Algeria's Boumedienne more threateningly cries for justice to the last drop of non-Algerian blood? Robert Scheer, the Managing Editor of Ramparts and a 1964 peace candidate for Congress, is more specifically credulous. According to his on-the-scene report from Cairo, “Nasser was sincere in his resignation and acceptance of responsibility for his defeat.” As for Nasser's resignation, Mr. Scheer's certainty must raise some questions. As for the dictator's acceptance of responsibility for the defeat, one wonders why he punitively sacked so many of his officers. Scheer goes on to write that “the notion of exporting revolution to the other Arab countries was abandoned with the secession of Syria in the early '60s. . . .” Not a word about Yemen!
For the November issue of his magazine, Scheer has written what must be the most carefully selective and skewed history of the conflict to come from any source save possibly the propaganda machines of the respective parties. And while he occasionally takes note of Nasser's calculating politics, he settles the burden of tragic events squarely on Israel. Indeed, Israel is seen almost as an unmoved mover. A mere speech by one of its officials is enough, in this reading, to paralyze Nasser in his quest for peace, and indeed to foreclose on the possibilities of revolutionary socialism itself.
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By the time the American Left met as a corporate body in Chicago over Labor Day, the orthodoxy was securely entrenched. (A handful of Hashomer Hatzair members were to be seen wandering about, dazed by the antics of past allies.) Those who in other ages might have quoted Scripture now had recourse to I. F. Stone. The more sophisticated cited the last contribution of Isaac Deutscher in this vale, an interview in the July-August New Left Review in which the traditional intellectual pyrotechnics reduces the Israel-Arab conflict to a struggle between reactionary and progressive nationalisms. The Black Caucus had no patience for such refinements. The fifth of its thirteen resolutions, all submitted as one unit and voted on as such, condemned “the imperialistic Zionist war.” Scheer took exception to that one, saying, however, that he accepted the others, including: (1) an attack on the convention steering committee of which he was a member for rigging the gathering against black people; (2) a call for the establishment of “white civilizing committees to civilize and humanize the savage and beastlike character that runs rampant throughout America . . .”; and (3) support for the (unenumerated) resolutions of the Newark Black Power Conference (which inter alia denounced birth control). It was a perfect setting for someone of Scheer's considerable talents as a trimmer. But even his transparent maneuver in offering an alternative on the question of Israel, which he assured his hearers was the Egyptian position, did not satisfy the crowd, now so enthusiastically engaged in what Kenneth Rexroth has called “Crow Jimism.” Those who could not deny disagreement with at least the Israel resolution, but who voted for them all nonetheless, evoked the image of the Jews in the Narodnaya Volya welcoming the pogroms in 1881 as rehearsals for revolution. After the convention had handed over 50 per cent of its votes to an unknown number of unidentified Negroes, the phraseology was quietly changed to a condemnation of the Israeli government's aggression. The New Politics had not even the courage of its perversity.
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But Israel fortunately has nothing to fear—and had precious little to gain—from what the radical movement in its Walpurgisnacht of abasement did or said. Even the smallest and newest Third World country could affect her destiny more. This Third World which she has been said to have alienated is not, however, as monolithic as its partisans on the American Left seem to think. In the United Nations, roughly half of Africa, including the relatively creative governments of Ghana and Kenya, failed to go along with the chorus of condemnation against Israel. Of those that voted for the Yugoslav-resolution, Tanzania did so with a visible lack of relish and the Congo (Kinshasa) at least with one eye on the extradition proceedings in Algeria against Tshombe. Among the world's “progressives” could be counted the governments of Spain, Greece, Indonesia, and Nigeria—the latter now waging with the assistance of the Russians a truly cruel war against the Ibo state of Biafra.
The attitude of so many on the Left toward Israel and the Arab world has brought a welcome end of innocence to many other American radicals who will from now on be somewhat more skeptical of all the nostrums of the enragés which have been so readily and thoughtlessly accepted—as the desperation bred by the war and the riots in our cities intensifies. It remains to be seen whether out of the intellectual and moral debacle of these past months, a sensible movement with sensible perspectives for peace and human rights ran at last emerge.
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Ralph E. Samuel
1892-1967We mourn the passing of Ralph E. Samuel, who played a central part in the founding of COMMENTARY, and who thereafter, in two separate terms as Chairman of the Commentary Publication Committee, gave so generously of his time, his wisdom, and his vision to the editors of this magazine.
1 “Israel, the Arabs, and World Opinion,” August 1967.
2 On the twisting line of the French Communists, see also the article by the left-wing arabisant Roger Paret in the Wiener Library Bulletin, New Series, No. 8.
3 See, for example, my review of his The Haunted Decade in Dissent, Summer 1964.
4 See, for example, Information Department, U.A.R., The Problem of the Palestinian Refugees (Cairo 1962), pp. 92-93.
5 See his Islam et Capitalisme (Paris 1966), as well as his earlier evaluation of Nasserism in the April 1963 Les Temps Modernes.
6 Israel and World Politics,” August 1967.
7 See Robert W. Tucker, The Just War (Baltimore 1960).
