If a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of a little mind (Emerson), then Norman Podhoretz has a mind as big as all outdoors. After insisting for many years that American Jews had “no moral right to criticize Israel s security policies,” the editor of the esteemed monthly COMMENTARY has changed his mind and done just that. . . . With consummate gall disguised as touching humility, he has crossed a line he himself drew, erasing it to suit his intellectual convenience.

Thus spake Richard Cohen in a column in the Washington Post. He was gloating over my “Statement on the Peace Process” in the April issue of COMMENTARY, where I explained why I had finally decided to go public with my doubts and fears about the latest round of negotiations between Israel and the Arabs.

Cohen was far from alone in hitting me on this point. In a letter to the New York Times, Henry Siegman, the executive director of the American Jewish Congress, attacked me, along with two Times columnists, A.M. Rosenthal and William Safire, both of whom had supported my position, for “outrageous inconsistencies”:

[These] hawks, . . . and their right-wing colleagues, who carried on endlessly about the immorality of American Jewish criticism of Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, have suddenly and shamelessly discovered the virtues of democratic dissent now that their man is out of office.

And in comparably violent rhetoric, Siegman, in an interview with the Israeli daily newspaper Ha’aretz, accused us all of “intolerable hypocrisy.”

But not even Siegman’s hysterical outbursts matched the charge made, in an op-ed piece in the New York Times, by an eminent Labor member of the Israeli parliament, Ephraim Sneh. Similarly referring (though in this case not by name) to Rosenthal, Safire, and me, Sneh went so far as to declare that these “long-time friends” were now actually “turning their backs on Israel.”

All this, and more, was in the public prints. But I was also taken to task for inconsistency in private communications as well as in several of the letters sent to COMMENTARY for publication.¹

To a certain extent, I must admit, I had this coming. After all, I did indeed (as I fully and freely acknowledged in my “Statement”) strongly oppose those left-wing American Jews who, during the years when Likud was in power, presumed to lecture the democratically elected government of Israel on matters of physical security. Yet here I was doing the same thing to the Rabin government. How could these people resist the golden opportunity I was now handing them to get some of their own back?

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Having conceded that much, however, I also have to say (in language more natural to them than to me) that some of them still don’t get it. Tony Frank, for one, seems to imagine that I owe an apology to those he calls “supporters of the Israeli Left” like himself because I and my “ideological brethren” have so often “vilified” them as anti-Israel and as self-hating Jews. And Richard Cohen thinks I should have ended my “Statement” with a list (a kind of martyrology, I gather) of all the “dissenters” I have wronged by my “vituperative intolerance” in labeling them as “apostates” and in accusing them of criticizing Israel out of “some base motive, either political or, shall we say, psychoanalytic.”

Now I have long since lost count of the number of times it has been alleged that anyone who criticizes Israel is immediately denounced by me as an anti-Semite or a self-hating Jew. But the truth is that I have pinned the anti-Semitic label only on statements (whether made by Jews or non-Jews) which have (1) compared Israel with Nazi Germany or with lesser tyrannies; and/or (2) excoriated Israel on the basis of moral and political standards which neither the writer nor anyone else ever applies to any other country.

I have also repeatedly tried to show that Israel has often been attacked in terms that, knowingly or not, represent an adaptation of traditional anti-Semitic canards. In other words, the same defamations which have always been directed by anti-Semites against Jewish individuals and Jewish communities have, suitably translated, now been turned against the Jewish state. Encountering examples of this kind of thing, I have in the interests both of intellectual clarity and moral hygiene felt obliged to call it by its proper name—anti-Semitic.²

On the other hand, I have never applied the term anti-Semitic to any criticism of Israel, whether coming from Jews or non-Jews, which has been innocent of these pernicious elements, not even when I have disagreed categorically with it. What I have said when such attacks have come from Jews is that they strengthen the hand of Israel’s enemies, both by bolstering the ideological campaign to delegitimize it and by weakening political support in Washington. In addition, I have raised questions about the moral standing of Jews in the Diaspora to participate in debates on issues literally involving the life and death of their fellow Jews in Israel.

As I carefully made clear in my “Statement,” I still believe that the issue of moral standing remains. For that reason alone, I might have been spared the lecture to which I was treated by Ha’aretz. There, in an editorial entitled “Heroes at a Safe Distance,” I was gratuitously informed that

. . . Israeli Jews alone . . . and not American Jews are authorized to decide whether the welfare of Israel requires a peace initiative with Syria, since they are the ones who might have to send their sons out to war and it is the Israeli neck that might be bared to Syrian missiles if the Madrid process sinks into deep freeze. Whether the peace initiative requires territorial concessions, and what their scope should be—we alone are entitled to decide.³

I thank the editors of Ha’aretz for remembering me mine own conception. But as they were in turn reminded a few days later by one of their Israeli readers:

I cannot recall the editors of Ha’aretz opposing attempts to involve Diaspora Jewry in Israel’s internal controversies when, during the years of the Likud government, delegations from Peace Now and other battalions of the Left went abroad to mobilize world Jewry against the elected government of Israel.

Evidently I am not the only party to these disputes who is vulnerable to accusations of inconsistency and hypocrisy.

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Yet if—to repeat—I still have a problem with my standing as a participant in the debate over Israel’s security, it also seems to me that distinctions are in order. There is, for instance, all the difference in the world between attacking Israel as an immoral or criminal state, which is what has so often been done by American Jewish leftists, and expressing doubts and anxieties over the prudence of the policies being pursued by the Israeli government, which is what I am trying to do.

Furthermore, as I also emphasized in my “Statement,” the political dangers involved in Jewish criticism of Israel’s policies have for the moment faded. With the Rabin government only too eager to pursue the course favored by the Clinton administration, criticizing this course no longer has the effect of increasing pressure on Israel to take steps which it judges to be dangerous to its security. Nor does such criticism fortify those who want to weaken American support for Israel.

Amazingly, however, it is precisely these things of which I, along with Rosenthal and Safire, have been accused. According to Robert J. Lifton, the president of the American Jewish Congress, my “Statement” was part of “an orchestrated campaign to cut American aid to Israel.” This charge was repeated by Ephraim Sneh as well as by other members and supporters of the Israeli Labor party both in Israel itself and in the United States. Yet it is, not to put too fine a point on it, a paranoid fantasy.

To begin with, my “Statement” said nothing whatsoever about economic aid. As for the column in which Rosenthal endorsed that “Statement” in the context of a discussion of American aid, he advised there that, “at a time when the U.S. is cutting back on aid to some countries, and facing new costs in the Bosnias and Somalias,” Israel should make every effort to do without the nonmilitary component of the American package. This, wrote Rosenthal, would be good for Israel’s “pride, independence, and self-confidence,” and it also “might inspire Israel to move away faster from the musty Socialist dogma that has held back Israeli governments past and present.”

Lifton dismissed such reasoning as a subterfuge. The real purpose behind my “Statement” and Rosenthal’s column, he insisted, was to undermine Rabin and pave the way for the return of Likud to power.

I have been told by people in a position to know that Lifton’s theory has been accepted by a number of Laborites in Israel (including some in the government) and their supporters here. It is not surprising that they should find it plausible, since that is the very game some of them played when Likud was in power and they were in the opposition. Thus, in a dispatch from Israel for the New York Times in 1982, Max Frankel reported that opponents of then-Prime Minister Menachem Begin, acknowledging their own political weakness, were hoping that the United States would “help them to topple the Begin government. And to that end,” Frankel revealed, “leading opposition figures now risk political oblivion by counseling sharp cuts in America’s nonmilitary aid. . . .”

So transparent a case of projection borders on the comical.

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But the most extraordinary response to my “Statement” was a “Dear Friend” letter sent out by the embassy of Israel in Washington over the signature of Nimrod Barkan, Minister for Public Affairs. It read:

You may have already seen Norman Podhoretz’s article in the April issue of COMMENTARY which challenges Israel’s policy regarding the peace process. In the attached paper, I would like to present our thoughts on the peace imperative.

To the best of my knowledge, the Israel embassy in Washington has never before seen fit to circulate such a refutation, though God knows that columnists like Anthony Lewis and Evans and Novak, not to mention academics like Noam Chomsky and Edward Said, have provided it with innumerable provocations over the years. Perhaps I should be flattered, then, to have become the object of this unprecedented attention (supplemented, by the way, with a meeting of Jewish organizations in the embassy at which one of the topics for discussion was how to counter my “Statement”). But I do not feel flattered, especially as the explanation given privately by an Israeli diplomat to a person who wondered why this highly unusual action should have been taken was that I was out to cut American aid and to help topple Rabin.

Nor do I feel in the least reassured by the rationale offered by the Israel embassy (and echoed in Ephraim Sneh’s piece in the Times) for the policies about which I expressed doubts and anxieties.

First of all, instead of seriously addressing these doubts and anxieties—which, as is demonstrated by many of the letters on my “Statement,” both from American Jews and Israelis, I am not alone in feeling⁴—the document “talks Zionism” (to borrow the contemptuous phrase Israelis themselves apply to nationalistic hot air). Thus, it begins by invoking

the young pioneers who came to Israel in the first decade of the 20th century . . . committed to creating a new Jewish person in their ancient homeland . . . in harmony with himself, the soil, and his neighbors, both Jewish and Arab.

Having conjured up this technicolor vision, the document moves on to credit the current peace process with having “created a new chance for future generations . . . to get back to the task of creating the new Jew the founders dreamed about.”

All right, suppose I put aside my uneasiness at this species of unctuous utopian rhetoric. Suppose, too, I swallow my disgust at the insinuation running through both the embassy’s apologia and Sneh’s article that those of us who fear that the current peace process will lead not to peace but to another military assault against a diminished and weakened Israel can be disposed of with a patronizing sermon about “the horrors of war and the tough conditions of daily life in Israel” (Sneh)—things we are of course too callous to understand. Letting all that ride, let me confine myself to searching out the answers these authoritative spokesmen for the Rabin government give to the two main questions I raised.

The first concerns Syria. Why, I asked, is Syria suddenly so eager to negotiate with Israel, if not because Assad has reason to believe that he can get back most or all of the Golan Heights without even paying the price of a full peace with Israel? Not so, retorts the embassy document:

Israel will not engage in discussion over the dimensions of withdrawal until the Syrians clarify whether they are prepared for full peace and normalization of relations. . . . Once the details can be worked out, an Israeli withdrawal to secure and recognized borders on the Golan Heights would be an acceptable price to pay to remove Syria from the strategic equation.

So too Sneh:

A compromise with Syria on the Golan Heights will be based on Israel’s security requirements and depend on a revolutionary and profound change of relations between the two countries.

Yet neither the embassy nor Sneh offers so much as a smidgen of evidence that Syria is even remotely ready for such a change. Incredibly, all they cite is (in the embassy’s words) a “series of positive public expressions by senior Syrian officials about the peace process.” Nor do they explain why, if Syria is so eager to make peace with Israel, it has continued to arm itself with all manner of conventional and nonconventional weapons and has gone on supporting terrorist organizations openly dedicated to the destruction of Israel.

Worse yet, both the embassy and Sneh know—though they do not reveal—that Syria has thus far offered nothing beyond a declaration of nonbelligerence in exchange for complete Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights. Why then do they keep holding out the hope—nay, the confident expectation—that Syria is preparing to put an acceptable compromise on the table? May it not be because it is they who are preparing to offer an acceptable compromise—acceptable, that is, on Assad’s terms or something perilously close to those terms (while claiming, of course, that such a deal would amount to “a revolutionary and profound change of relations”)?

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Let me emphasize as strongly as I possibly can that I am not accusing these people of bad faith, let alone of indifference to the security of their country. God forbid. I am, however, expressing the suspicion that in their war-weariness after so many years of living under siege, and in their mounting anxiety over the future, they are deluding themselves about the chances of achieving the peace for which they so powerfully yearn.

Their anxiety, at any rate, is all too palpable. Desperate enough before, they seem to have been made even more frantic by the new dangers Israel now has to face. These dangers are succinctly and accurately described by the embassy:

The spread of ballistic-missile technology has expanded the military arena from hundreds to thousands of miles. Moreover, Israel has been swept up in a resurgent historic struggle in the Arab world between radical Islamic fundamentalism and secular nationalism. . . . [And] with a nuclear-armed Iran emerging as a major threat to the entire region, Israeli strategists must contemplate a scenario in which a reborn “Eastern Front” comprising both Syria and Iran confronts Israel.

So desperate, indeed, are the spokesmen for the Rabin government to find a way of defusing these new dangers that they confuse the desirability of doing so with the existence of an opportunity. Yet contrary to what the embassy imagines, it does not follow from the seriousness of this problem that negotiation is the road to a solution. After all, from Munich in the 30’s to the peace accords on Vietnam in the 70’s, we have seen “succcessful” negotiations which brought not peace but war.

Falling into the same confusion between need and opportunity, Sneh declares that “The introduction of weapons of mass destruction has enhanced the need to create an environment of peace in order to prevent war.” And compounding confusion, he assures us:

Most Arab states understand that Islamic radicalism, not Zionism, is the ideology that endangers their stability. The new situation creates an opportunity for a new alliance of sane countries against a common extremist threat.

The mind reels. For even if it were true that “sane” Arab countries (among which he includes Syria) no longer opposed Zionism (and there is no evidence that this is the case), surely selling out to Israel (as the fundamentalists would see it) is the last thing in the world that would guarantee their stability. A deal with Israel, even the one favorable to Syria that I fear Israel might conclude, would surely inflame the Islamic radicals and increase their already growing power. And what about Assad’s successor? Will he be “sane” too?

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The spokesmen for the Rabin government do just as poorly with the second group of questions I raised. How, I asked, can Israel prevent Palestinian autonomy on the West Bank and Gaza from developing in relatively short order into full-blown statehood? Here I get no answer at all from the embassy except the same illogical leap it makes with regard to Syria: since the problem is so serious, it must be possible to solve it through negotiation. As for Sneh, his answer is a flat and unsupported assertion that “the interim arrangement with the Palestinians will be based on self-government, not on a higher level of sovereignty.”

But what is the answer to the argument I put forward that the Palestinians will not settle for autonomy, that they will continue their campaign for complete sovereignty by means of terrorism as well as ideological and political warfare, and that the United States will then come around to endorsing the need for Palestinian statehood? On these points, not even the hint of a response can be found in Sneh, while the embassy takes refuge in moribund illusions about “confederation with Jordan, perhaps with Israel too” that I never thought I would live to see resurrected.

Finally, I search through both Sneh and the embassy document for a refutation of my contention that a new Palestinian state is far less likely to bring harmony and peace than it is to trigger instability and then another war. Such a war, I maintained, fought against a weakened Israel, would give the Arab countries (including the “sane” ones) one more chance to realize their dream—a dream they have not yet abandoned—of wiping the Jewish state off the map.

What do the spokesmen for the Rabin government have to say about that bloodcurdling scenario? Again, nothing; not a word; only another patronizing sermon reminding us that “If the peace process falters, Israel may find itself inexorably bound to a status quo of knives, bullets, and bloodshed.”

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I want to reiterate here what I said in my first “Statement”: I fervently hope that I am wrong and that the Rabin government is right. But suppose I am not wrong. What then?

Much as I appreciate S. Zalman Abramov’s defense of me in his Letter to the Editor (p. 23, above), I must disappoint him by confessing that, just as Alfred H. Moses guesses (pp. 17-18, above), I would be happy to see the peace process break down.⁵ But Mr. Abramov is correct in saying that I do not call for an Israeli withdrawal from the talks, since I am well aware that such a call would in effect advise Israel to isolate itself totally and to bring the wrath of Washington down upon its head.

On the other hand, since I regard the peace process as a great danger to Israel, I would have been relieved if the Palestinians had made good on their refusal to return to the table this past April, and the negotiations had thereby ended without too much political damage to Israel. But now that the Palestinians are breaking their famous pattern of never missing an opportunity to miss an opportunity, Israel can no longer rely on its enemies to save it.

In short, as Mr. Moses also guesses, my view is that the safest course for Israel is to buy as much time as possible by stalling as much as possible. I do not dispute Mr. Moses’s contention that this course also risks the erosion and conceivably even the loss of American support. But if my analysis is sound, the peace process carries even greater risks.

Even aside from the problem of American support, there are those who feel that the status quo is intolerable. Mr. Moses is one, and another is Jacob Amir (who, in his moving letter [pp. 18-19, above] makes the case for Palestinian statehood in a way that gives me pause and avoids lending aid and comfort to Israel’s enemies).

Well, unpleasant and uncomfortable the status quo certainly is, but compared to what is it intolerable? I remember hearing that the status quo in Iran under the Shah was intolerable, but then came the Ayatollah Khomeini; I remember hearing that the status quo in South Vietnam under Thieu was intolerable, but then came the Communists; I remember hearing that the status quo in Cambodia under Lon Nol was intolerable, but then came the Khmer Rouge. The status quo of “knives, bullets, and bloodshed” conjured up by the embassy is no picnic. But as I tried to show in my first “Statement,” the calamities that a Lebanonized Palestinian state would unleash—one likely scenario being a civil war between the PLO and Hamas, followed by Syrian intervention, followed by another Arab-Israeli war—would be far, far worse.

Does this mean that the Arab war against the Jewish state will go on forever? Not necessarily, but it does mean that this war can be called off only by the party that started it—the Arabs. As things now stand, they show no convincing sign of a willingness to do anything but get land at the bargaining table which they have been unable to win on the battlefield. And the growing strength of Islamic radicalism only makes matters even less conducive to peace than they were before. Nor, as I have already indicated, do I agree with Mr. Moses that “progress in the peace process bolsters moderate forces.” Just the opposite.

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Nevertheless, we who with our own eyes have seen the collapse of Communism know that great political miracles can occur. Therefore we have no right to rule out the possibility that a miracle will also occur in the Arab world, taking the form of a new political order which would truly be willing to live in peace with Israel. With such an Arab world, Israel could enter safely into arrangements that would be mortally dangerous today. The instructive analogy here is the arms-control agreements the United States can now make with a post-Communist Russia that it would have been reckless to conclude with a totalitarian Soviet Union.

Pursuing that analogy, I would say that those Israelis who today wish to rush into agreements with Syria and the Palestinians are comparable to the Americans who kept telling us and themselves that Khrushchev or Brezhnev or Andropov was eager to end the cold war and that it was the U.S. which stood in the way of a peaceful settlement. Like those Americans, the Israeli doves of today who are now in power in Jerusalem and who imagine that both Syria and the Palestinians are on the brink of a “revolutionary” change in their relations with Israel, are, in my judgment, guilty of the Jewish sin of “forcing the end.” They are acting, that is, as though the era of messianic deliverance were already here, and in doing so they are courting disaster.

The upshot is that Israel’s security—and its survival—can in my judgment best be served by holding steady and dragging the peace process out for as long as it takes for the Arab world to undergo the “revolutionary” change that Sneh imagines has already all but occurred in Syria. Since, however, I do not expect the Rabin government to follow my advice, I will conclude this second “Statement” as I did the first—by praying with all my heart and all my soul and all my might that my analysis is wrong and that the Rabin government and its spokesmen are right.

¹ See, for example, the ones from Tony Frank, Robert H. Asher and Michael C. Kotzin, and Aaron Goldman (pp. 19-20, above).

² For a detailed analysis based on a large number of specific quotations, see my article “J'Accuse” (COMMENTARY, October 1982). One of these quotations came from Richard Cohen, which is why he includes himself among the victims of my “vituperative intolerance.” But here, during the Lebanon war, is what he said: “Maybe the ultimate tragedy of the seemingly nonstop war in the Middle East is that Israel has adopted the morality of its hostile neighbors. Now it bombs cities, killing combatants and non-combatants alike—men as well as women, women as well as children, Palestinians as well as Lebanese.” I cited this passage—and two or three more by different writers—to show that, among certain self-professed friends of Israel, “the preponderant emphasis was no longer on the putative damage Israel was doing to itself by its wicked or stupid policies. The focus was now unmistakably on the evils Israel was committing against others.” And I went on to observe that “Israel's ‘true friends’ . . . were liberated by Lebanon to say much more straightforwardly . . . that Israeli intransigence and/or aggressiveness and/or expansionism are the main . . . source of the Arab-Israeli conflict. . . .” For this I owe Cohen an apology?

³ Incidentally, there is an egregious misquotation in this editorial. According to Ha'aretz, I wrote that “If Israel's policies are gaining support like this from the President of the United States, there must be something about them that isn't good for Israel.” But of course I neither wrote—nor do I believe—any such thing about President Clinton. What I actually said was that since these policies are meeting with approval by the Syrians, the “moderate” Palestinians, and other enemies of Israel, “it must mean that they are not good for Israel.”

⁴ See in particular those from Eugene V. Rostow, Kenneth L. Gartner, Sheldon F. Gottlieb, Leonard Horwin, Myron S. Rudd, Howard H. Waldrop, Manfred R. Lehmann, E. Weissbrot, and Jay Shapiro (pp. 20-23, above).

⁵ For the record, I would remind Mr. Moses that I did criticize the peace process, and in much the same terms, when Shamir was in office (“America and Israel: An Ominous Change,” COMMENTARY, January 1992). On the substance, then, I have not been inconsistent at all. But in the past I was able to confine my criticisms entirely to the Bush administration because then it was American pressures that were responsible for pushing Israel in what I considered a perilous direction.