Israel

There is something deeply humiliating about Israel- its very existence as such. It is this humiliation, I believe, that is at the root of the state's hyper-militarism which is unabated after nearly 60 years of statehood.

To draw a parallel as to why the Israeli consciousness is anchored in humiliation, let us turn today to Iraq. Thomas Friedman, myself, and others have argued that part of the motivation for the civil strife and anti-Americanism in Iraq is simply a response to the humiliation the Iraqis feel at the fact of being liberated at all. What an embarrassment. To live in fear for 30 years and then to have some external power walk in and in a couple of weeks have plucked out the great terror of your lives? What were you so afraid of if the US can just roll in and do what you, the Iraqi people, wish you could have done for so long. It is a concrete symbol of your impotence.

So. To combat that feeling within, one must turn on the liberators to make them feel your pain, to show them that you are a force to be reckoned with and not some weak, backwards nation. So you fight and lash out against the very people who "saved" you for the very reason that your needing to be "saved" was so insulting.

To feel one's power as a nation one wants to *earn* nationhood. Through warfare, through exploration, through revolution- whatever. It is not something to be bestowed if it is to have its grounding in virility. The Iraqis are now - and have been for 5 years - earning their country by driving out the tyrant-savior. The war will go on until the humiliation is expunged.

Israel, then. Israel was formed by a charter, not by war. It was granted. In the Jewish religion it is Yahweh who will grant us our nation- not the British. This arbitrary land grant, in response to collective European embarrassment at the holocaust (which could have happened in any European country experiencing the kind of recession Germany experienced in the 30's), feels sketchy under the feet. After all, if land can be granted it can be un-granted too, right? No one would think of revoking the British charter to England. They earned it through settlement and warfare over centuries. The American charter was won largely through measles and smallpox but it was won nonetheless. Greece, China, Japan, Mexico- these countries all have proud traditions of manly conquest to settle their territories. But Israel was a gift out of the goodness of the world's heart. Not convincing.

In fact it would appear to be another plank in the long line of Jewish complicity with the going master-power. Jews made deals with the Romans for political protection in exchange for subservience and compliance. Similar deals were made throughout history as an exchange for being guests in others' lands. The feeling is not so disimilar today, at heart. It is a permeating humiliation.

That Israel continues to rely today on support from the US and England, the current global master and its lapdog, reeks of history. And Israel will never feel like a true home so long as Jews are still entangled in this traditional role as serf- or really worse, "guest."

So how to overcome this feeling of emasculation? Well obviously through warfare. And like the Iraqis, it is not a matter of winning, but of venting, of raging until the manhood is restored, until one effectively can tell oneself, "If I had fought this hard, I would have won the land for myself in the first place." That is what Jews, Iraqis, and all "liberated" people (including, I would say blacks and women in the US) are fighting for- to feel as if they have the power to do for themselves what others have patronizingly done for them.

This struggle can last a lifetime. It can last forever. Ultimately, history can not be unwritten in this way, and so the wound of liberation is ongoing. Perhaps over time the memory will diminish, or perhaps, as in Iraq, the continuing pressure of Israel on the US will turn US opinion against the tiny nation. Perhaps this is what Israel really wants after all, a confrontation with the master. And the pushing, like a spoiled child, for every allowance and concession is unconsciously designed to push away the smothering parent. Would Israel want war with the US? Absurd. But to be freed from US protection, it would be free to test its own strength in the world as a truly independent nation, no longer an obsequious guest of the going king-state.

The Iraqis are ahead on this one. Jews haven't resorted to terrorism since the Maccabees in Greece, but perhaps they can learn something from their Arab cousins about how to stick up for yourself. It is a tricky situation, no doubt, but the stakes are real. The land grant was won some 60 years ago, but at huge cost. But that cost, that holocaust, was the anchoring on which the state's claim to be was laid.

But mass murder and victimhood do not form a stable basis for a nation. All other peoples who suffered such a fate gave up their nationhood and were absorbed by those who won. The German war crimes were horrifying but, sadly, only really by modern standards. Such barbarity was the daily practice for pre-modern cultures, many of whom, it should be pointed out, were barbarians. The scale and perversity of the crimes was new, commensurate with the technology and population of the time. But cultures have always killed their enemies (and their scapegoats), but those enemies are never given land in exchange for losing.

And this is the strange predicament of the Jews, the cultural anachronism that did not die but waited to receive its land from Yahweh as promised in the Covenant with Abraham. Have we lived to see that covenant fulfilled? I do not know.

But to me it doesn't feel right. The restoration of power was not granted by divine exaltation but by surviving holy hell. There is a strong connection between land, territorialism, and virility. To defend land you have been given is not the same as to defend land you have fought for. It simply isn't. And I feel sad that the Israelis will spend a good deal more time thrashing around on their gift before they can really call it their home. We shall see what happens.