Article published November 1978

Editorials in the Soviet Union’s chief propaganda organ, Pravda (the word means “truth” in Russian) ordinarily attract little serious attention outside the Soviet Union, and are likely to be tracked more by those who try to spot subtle shifts in Kremlin policy rather than those who seek, well, the truth. But a recent Pravda pronouncement has caused a stir. Aimed, obviously, at a wider audience than the usual captive one, its author avoided the customary good-Bolshevik polemics and won the accolade “sober and worried” from the perennially sober and worried New York Times.

Pravda‘s editorialist warns that “changes dangerous to the cause of peace are taking place in the policy of the U. S. A.” Two things disturb him. “There is no end to attempts at interfering in our country’s internal affairs”–a reference to America’s reaction to the trial of Anatoly Sharansky and other Russian dissidents. More ominous, however, are critics of détente who seek “a common language with the aggressive anti-Sovietism of the Chinese rulers.”

According to the editorialist, the motives of these “groupings that would like to undermine détente and return the world to the cold war” is not the alleged superiority of Soviet military power, but the fear of military equality. These malignant “groupings,” he argues, do not want the United States and the Soviet Union to be truly equal; they want the U. S. to return to its former state of military and geopolitical superiority. It is these motives that stand in the way of ratifying SALT II, and hope to stymie other arms limitation agreements.

Without speculating on the motives of the supposed anti-Soviet elements in the Carter Administration, it is easy to find in the writings of the most prominent among them, National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, much to reassure rather than to worry writers in the employ of Pravda and the Times. In his book Between Two Ages, published in 1971, Brzezinksi argued that “even if one is not a Marxist, it is not necessarily a cause for rejoicing to note that Communism–which helped to enlarge the collective consciousness of mankind and to mobilize it for social progress–has failed in its original objective of linking humanism with internationalism.”

Given this `humanist’ reading of Marx, no wonder Brzezinski recommends, in the same book, that “it would be wise for the United States to make an explicit move to abandon the Monroe Doctrine”; that “an extensive American military presence abroad is becoming counterproductive to American interests and to the growth of an international community”; that “it would be advisable to view the question of the political development of both communist and the developing countries with a great deal of patience”; indeed, that American foreign policy should become “increasingly depoliticized” or ideologically neutral.

Each of these recommendations have been, or are in the process of being carried out by President Carter, who has been tutored in foreign policy by Professor Brzezinski since 1973. And, remarkably enough, Brzezinski may well be the `toughest’ anti-Soviet voice in the Carter Administration. That alone should reassure Moscow about Washington’s motives.

The belief that gives the fizz to these and other Brzezinskian bromides is what’s called `convergence theory’–the hypothesis (it shouldn’t be dignified by the term `theory) that the regimes of the United States and the Soviet Union will become more and more similar. While the Soviets democratize politically the United States will socialize economically; the two countries will then have no more reason to quarrel, having become brother social democracies.

This strikes me as wishful thinking on the part of democratic socialists, whose mild and hazy Marxism substitutes meliorism for dialectics. Real Marxism has without exception yielded trannies. These tyrannies have varied in their severity from mere police-state brutality, as seen in today’s Soviet Union, to genuinely Hitlerian levels of degradation, as seem in China twenty years ago and Cambodia now. He who argues, as Marx does, that human nature has no innate dignity, that it is `historically’ determined by forces traceable to economic class struggle, can justify the most vicious attempts to remake human nature, all the while citing pseudo-philosophic `proofs’ to justify his barbarism.

What Pravda calls “our country’s internal affairs” means the Kremlin’s consistent policy of denying human rights to the Russian people. The Carter Administration has condemned the show-trials of Russian dissidents and the mistreatment of Russian Jews, but these policies flow from the Soviet regime, the Soviet form of government, which oppresses not only political and religious dissidents but all Soviet subjects.

It will be objected that the Soviets, being Marxists, have a very different conception of human rights than that held by the United States or the West in general. Correct, obviously: but that only reveals the fundamental problem with the policy of détente. Contrary to Pravda, America’s withholding of trade and its cancellation of joint scientific conferences aren’t quite the selfsame designs to undermine the socialist system that our people were compelled to encounter in one form or another beginning in 1917. Hitler was a bit more forceful and malignant than sober, worried liberal U. S. scientists and intellectuals. But such economic sanctions do damage Soviet interests. What needs to be emphasized, however, is that Soviet interests, insofar as they are Soviet and not simply Russian–for it’s in Russia’s interest to dismantle “Sovietism”–are fundamentally opposed to American principles.

Those principles are opposed to those of “Sovietism.” Arms agreements, worth only the arms that guarantee them, may come and (assuredly) go. But as long as the fundamental moral, political, and spiritual principles of the two regimes remain opposed, there will be no end to the conflict, whether understood as a `Cold War’ or masked under the misleading term, `détente.’ That is why so many liberals, especially in the West, dream of ideological `convergence.’ For better or worse, the only important dreamer of `convergence’ in the Soviet Union is the physicist-turned-dissident Andrei Sakharov. Needless to say, he is not President Brezhnev’s adviser on national security.

Article published May 1978.

 

Along with its corollary, self-determination, nationalism unites and divides the modern world.

It unites us with others by offering one of the few practical means remaining in modernity over overcoming what Tocqueville called “individualism”: the tendency of persons in large states to isolate themselves in a small group of family and friends, with little or no involvement in civic or political life. We individualistic moderns , so proud of our autonomy, nonetheless feel an obscure desire for what surpasses ourselves; we feel the pull of sociality, the attraction of the political community and passions. Nationalism promises to free us from our own limitations, to make our lives mean something larger, greater than an individual life would mean. For many, it does just that.

But nationalism also divides our world. Quebecan nationalism would sunder Canada; so abhorrent is this prospect that Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, that least violent of rulers, has promised to use force to resist it. Northern Ireland soaks in it own blood. France, the birthplace of modern nationalism and recently, with de Gaulle, its most eloquent defender, finds troublesome ferments of dispersion in its own provinces.

But Israelis need not search the world to know of this atomization. More than any place on earth, the Mideast feels not only the exaltation of nationalism but its agony. In that sense the Mideast, above all Israel—the alien nation in a sea of Arab nations—is the place where the character of the modern world reveals itself. Those who imagine that a mere high-sounding phrase like `national self-determination’ will justify the establishment of a `Palestinian’ nation-state should think again. The existence of such a state would threaten the existence of the Israeli nation-state.

What accounts for this inner contradiction of the principle of national self-determination, this principle that seems to create and destroy itself almost simultaneously? A comparison of Israel and the proposed nation-state on the West Bank reveals more than contemporary intellectuals and politicians prefer to consider.

Israel is a parliamentary regime, which is to say it is a regime on the primacy of speech. One may deride speech, as General de Gaulle did; it can’t defend a country against tanks. And of course de Gaulle was right. The stereotypical parliamentarian, jabbering while dictators act, was the tragicomic exemplar of Western Europe before each of the world wars and, to a lesser extent, since. But Israel more than any country has learned de Gaulle’s lesson. Israel has not committed suicide by talk. Israel talks while keeping her eyes open and her guard up.

But she does talk, and seriously. One can take Israeli talk seriously in part because it defends itself with deeds, but also because that talk reflects the meaning of Israel. Parliamentarians talk in order to win consent. Consent entails willingness, but it is no small thing to ask: on what basis do I will this policy or that? Needless to say, much parliamentary talk appeals to the passions—fear, avarice, most if not all of the deadly sins. But it also appeals to reason. Rightly understood, consent is reasoned willingness.

In talking and listening to one another, Israelis reflect and choose. By virtue of its parliamentary form their country minimizes the inevitable effects of chance and force. This produces a nation that admires merit—what is defended by reasoned argument. And because Israel admires merit it is less under the sway of comfort, money, the easy life—all of which may quickly yield to force and rhetoric. Speech inevitably lets reason in, as force does not. The cleverest rhetoricians fell to Socrates, who could only be silenced by force.

A regime like Israel bases itself on genuine self-determination. What is a human self if it is not one hat governs itself by means of the distinctively human attributes: speech and reason. Such a regime, though capable of dealing forcefully with other nation-states, prefers to deal with them by speech. But only if those nation-states share its fundamental understanding of human nature can this dialogue means anything other than a charade.

In contrast, the nation-state proposed by the Palestinian Liberation Organization shows no promise of meaningful parliamentarism, any more than seen in Egypt, Syria, or Iraq. The `self-determination’ proclaimed by PLO officers confines itself to the will of the ruling elites. That will has little to do with reasoned speech. For them, consent is a problem resolved by force garnished by violent rhetoric.

`Consent’ conceived that way reflects a radically different understanding of human nature than that displayed in real parliament. Not merit but chance rules such countries: the chance of who happens to get the power to impose his will for now. Reason serves force and force serves the ruler’s will–inverting the moral universe of genuine self-government. It is no accident that military, not civilian rule characterizes these regimes.

A country’s form of government—its true form, not always the form it shows the world—reflects its understanding of human nature. Whereas a nationalism based on true self-determination, on what is genuinely human, need not destroy itself by ever-escalating, irrational, absolutist demands both in the world and within its own borders, a nationalism based on will, on force, inevitably attacks the world and convulses itself. For the passions cannot restrain themselves. Absent reason, their only limit is exhaustion, destruction, or imprisonment.

The establishment of such a nation-state on the West Bank would strike at Israel’s heart geographically, militarily and, most of all, in spirit. By definition that nation-state could never satisfy itself; by its own character it could not. When I wrote that the Mideast is the place where the modern world’s character reveals itself, I meant that it is here and now that the genuinely human confronts absolutist irrationalism. It has done so before; it may do so again.

 

2018 NOTE:

Four decades later, not a word needs changing here. The problem remains the same: Palestinian Arabs want not only Gaza and the ‘West Bank,’ but Israel and Jordan, as well. While a ‘two-state’ solution may look good, considered in abstraction, it collides with that (so far) insurmountable fact.

Article published July 1978

 

Summer 1978 saw an impasse in the tripartite Mideast peace talks initiated by the Carter Administration upon taking office 18 months earlier. President Anwar Sadat of Egypt had requested an Israeli goodwill gesture–that is to say, a unilateral concession–in the Sinai Desert, which had been occupied by Israeli troops since the 1967 war. Prime Minister Menachem Begin rejected this request publicly. The Carter Administration sided with Sadat on the matter, and diplomatic pressure was exerted. Serious talks resumed in September, leading to the Camp David peace accords signed by Sadat and Begin in March 1979. One commentator who backed the Carter Administration in its campaign to pressure the Israelis was the conservative pundit, William F. Buckley, Jr.; what follows is a critique of a column he wrote that summer.

 

Since the June War of 1967, American conservatives have generally supported Israel’s aims and the methods Israelis choose to attain them. During this period the American Left has become increasingly critical of these aims and methods. In thel ast year or so, many American liberals have condemned what they call Israeli `intransigence’ vis-à-vis the Palestine Liberation Organization and the West Bank, which Israel seized during the war. Had Palestinian Arabs produced a Mahatma Gandhi to lead them, scarcely less sentimental guff would be heard.

But now William F. Buckley, Jr., the most famous American conservative journalist, has joined not the critics of Israel–he still admires Israelis and their country–but the critics of Prime Minister Begin. It is not, he writes, “that Israel does not want a just peace, but that Israel under Begin does not seek a just peace.” Begin is “a die-hard, defined in this case as someone who is prepared to let his country die with him.” Examples: “his stubborn settlements policy in the Sinai–inexplicable in the context of the delicately midwived conversation with Sadat”; his recent “idiosyncratic” interpretation of UN Resolution 242, which set the terms for Israeli-Arab relations following the 1967 war; and finally, the “massive retaliation against civilian residents of PLO-infested areas,” an action the avoidance of which would have been “a diplomatic finesse” assisting President Sadat’s attempt to buoy “the confidence of the other Arab states” in his peace initiative. “What [U. S. President Jimmy] Carter and the Senate need now,” Buckley concludes, is to persuade Begin “that whereas he has manifestly a problem in distinguishing between himself and his country, we Americans do not share that problem.”

Straw men burn easily. The real Begin, as distinguished from Mr. Buckley’s artifact, is no straw man, and his alleged intransigence doesn’t ignite and go up in smoke when journalists light matches.

Still,. in view of Mr. Buckley’s sincere admiration of Israel, if not Mr. Buckley, perhaps he can be persuaded that the Prime Minister’s `intransigence’ is really the sort of determined patriotism that he himself exhibits when confronted by threats to his own country’s existence. I shall take his three substantive criticisms in order.

Mr. Buckley finds the Sinai settlements policy inexplicable. I don’t. Leaving aside Mr. Begin’s campaign promises as well as legal and military arguments, one notices one important diplomatic fact: the settlements controversy arose just when the major issue at the peace talks had been reduced very nearly to the question of the West Bank. Mr. Begin had offered major territorial concessions to Sadat. His peace plan went so far as to concede Egyptian sovereignty over the Sinai, including strategic Sharm-el-Sheikh. Of course there were sticking points: demilitarization zones, the status of Israeli air bases, the timing of phased withdrawals among them. Instead of negotiating on these points, Sadat decided to shit ground and focus world attention on the issue of a `Palestinian’ homeland on the West Bank–not a word about which is mentioned in UN Resolution 242. Here he merely followed established Arab strategy, which is to con the United States into believing that the entire Middle East problem could be solved if Israel would only recognize the `Palestinians’ right to self-determination . Nothing could be further from the truth.

By reducing the larger strategic and geopolitical problems of the Middle East to the `Palestinian’ issue and by couching that issue in the democratic language of self-determination, Sadat provided the Western democracies with convenient moral cover for taking the side of Arab autocracies over against democratic Israel. Now the pressure could be applied in good conscience. And, indeed, Sadat’s tactics produced the intended results. Pressure on Israel did begin to increase. `Why not make one more concession?’ `Israel must take risks for peace.’

By reopening the Sinai controversy, Mr. Begin reminded Sadat and the rest of the world that Israel could also make demands, that Israel would not allow itself to be put on the defensive–especially by Sadat, who, we are frequently told, lacks the military and economic if not rhetorical means to demand anything of anyone. Here is something Mr. Buckley should be among the first to admire: a democratic statesman standing up against the world when, for more than a democratic leaders have been shamelessly appeasing one or another form of tyranny.

Turning to the “idiosyncrasy” of Mr. Begin’s interpretation of UN Resolution 242, this isn’t the piece of comedy Mr. Buckley believes it to be. Resolution 242 requires “the application of both of the following principles: (1) withdrawal of Israeli forces (and only armed forces) from territories occupied in the 1967 war, and (2) the right of every sovereign state in the area to live in peace within secure and recognized boundaries.” Mr. Begin’s “interpretation” of Resolution 242 is not so much an interpretation as a statement of a basic security dilemma: what Israel may regard as secure boundaries will not be recognized as such by its adversaries. Conversely, the boundaries which her adversaries would supposedly recognize–they say the pre=1967 ones–can hardly be regarded as secure by Israel (or indeed by any impartial observer), which means that Resolution 242 is an attempt to square the circle.

Regarding the recent Israeli military action in Lebanon, Mr. Buckley knows that it was aimed at PLO terrorists, not civilians. What he may not know is that the terrorists, with Soviet and Syrian support, were developing a fourth Arab front against Israel; that even a year ago Israel had wanted to attack PLO bases in southern Lebanon but refrained from doing so on request by the United States. Israel’s military action in Lebanon was not a mere act of retaliation for the bloody massacre of Israel civilians on the Jewish Sabbath; it was an act of national self-defense. Most of the casualties were in fact terrorists, not civilians. It would be absurd to deny that civilians did not sustain casualties, although it should be noted that Lebanese Christians welcomed the Israelis as liberators. But the unsentimental preventative for the recurrence of such casualties is to eliminate their cause: the PLO.

As for the Arab states’ confidence in Sadat’s peace initiative, are such realistic men as Syria’s Assad and Iraq’s Saddam Hussein really quite so hypersensitive? Hardened by many years of wars of their own making, they may use the Israeli action in Lebanon as a pretext for continuing hostility, but pretexts are never hard to find. If they want peace, they can have it; if they want land, they can negotiate for it. Which is not to suggest that this would sole the strategic problems of the Middle East.

It is trite to say that if only the Arabs would lie in peace there would be peace in the Middle East. One might as well say that if the Russian would lie in peace there would be peace in the world. But feeding land to Arabs and Russians seems not to quell their appetites. If the words of Mr. Sadat himself, “We should get all that we can get until we can get all that we want.”

Anyone familiar with the long history of intra-Arab rivalry knows that there would be more conflict in the Middle East, and therefore greater Soviet influence in the area, were it not for Israel. The truth is that Israel has been in the forefront of the global battle for freedom against servitude. So is Israel’s Prime Minister. Mr. Begin’s recent actions and statements are rather more realistic than Mr. Buckley contends. Far from being an egoist prepared to let his country die with him, Begin has shown that he is a man prepared to die that his country may live. Questioning Begin’s policies is one thing, questioning his character another. Israelis have known him for a long time and saw fit to entrust their safety to him. They are likely better judges of his character than Americans like Buckley or Morrisey.

 

As things happened, talks resumed without any of the concessions Americans and Egyptians demanded–demonstrating once again the inutility of unilateral concessions during diplomatic negotiations.  One point I missed: UN Resolution 242, which still forms part of the framework for any future negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Arabs, calls for Israeli withdrawal from “territories” won in the 1967 war; contrary to popular belief, and Arab propaganda, this does not mean that the Israelis are obligated to withdraw from all of those territories. During the negotiations, Begin stipulated that this language be used. The exact amount of land that may be relinquished by Israel remains subject to negotiations to this day.