This review – by the Times of Israel’s Matti Friedman of Fortress Israel: The Inside Story of the Military Elite Who Run the Country – and Why They Can’t Make Peace, by Patrick Tyler – is worth reading::
In the version accepted on Israel’s left and abroad, on the other hand, the Arabs are passive bystanders and victims, and the story is the Jews’ abuse of force, their repetition of the crimes once perpetrated against them. In my years covering Israel as part of the international press corps, I came to understand that this latter view has become the default framework in which the story is covered for foreign audiences, shaping the way it is seen by millions of people.
This take eschews political and historical complications in favor of moralizing, and tends to believe Israel is not rationally responding to external threats but surrendering to internal weaknesses. Israel is too religious, or too scarred by the Holocaust. It is too Western, or not Western enough. It is too influenced by the ultra-Orthodox, or the settlers in the military’s officer corps, or by eastern Jews and their hardline politics or — this has become a popular one recently, put forward by Bill Clinton and the editorial page of The New York Times –because of the anti-democratic tendencies of immigrants from the former Soviet Union. The reason there is no peace, this thinking goes, is because something is rotten in Israel’s soul.
This bit is particularly perceptive:
Fortress Israel exists in the broader context of today’s discussion of “Israel” — an imaginary place quite unlike the actual state of Israel — in which Western observers use the country and its conflicts as a blank screen onto which they project discomfort about certain aspects of their own societies. At the moment, these seem to mainly involve problems of race and the use of force.
I do not see anti-Semitism lurking behind all or most criticism of Israel, and I don’t see anti-Semitism here, but I do believe it would be remiss not to point out that this discussion itself exists in a historical context that often goes unmentioned: For centuries, the Jew has played the role of blank screen in Christian societies – a lightning rod for negative sentiment, usually expressed as harsh moral judgment. If cowardice was a negative attribute, Jews were cowardly. If greed was to be condemned, Jews were greedy. If the poor were to be mocked, Jews were paupers, and if the rich were to be hated Jews were bankers. For capitalists Jews were communists, and for communists they were capitalists. These days, the issues that animate liberals in the West tend to be linked to colonialism, racism, and militarism, and thus it is in these contexts that the Jewish state now appears.
