Can a society maintain its internal decency while oppressing a large population living alongside it?
By Herbert Rothschild
In my column last Friday, I said that nothing Israel has done, does or will do can affect the flow of our tax dollars into its coffers. As if the Israel lobby, our strongest foreign policy lobby, wasn’t by itself sufficiently powerful to stymie any efforts to end our military assistance (currently $4 billion annually), Israel’s obligation to spend those dollars on American-made weapons means that the military-industrial complex also lobbies for it.
Congress recently demonstrated how unshakeable our commitment to Israel remains. On July 15, Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), tried to quiet people holding Palestinian flags at a conference for the progressive Netroots Nation. She said, “I want you to know that we have been fighting to make it clear that Israel is a racist state, that the Palestinian people deserve self-determination and autonomy, that the dream of a two-state solution is slipping away from us, that it does not even feel possible.” The next day she apologized for using the term “racist.”
In vain. Her Republican and Democratic colleagues fell over themselves in the race to distance themselves from her. On July 18, the U.S. House of Representatives voted 412-9 for a nonbinding resolution declaring that “the State of Israel is not a racist or apartheid state,” that “Congress rejects all forms of antisemitism and xenophobia,” and that “the United States will always be a staunch partner and supporter of Israel.” The very next day, Israeli President Isaac Herzog addressed a joint session of Congress during his two-day visit to D.C. Almost all the legislators repeatedly rose to their feet in what the PBS News Hour characterized as “thunderous applause.”
It remains to be seen whether the Israeli people have been well served by our complicity in the continuous theft of Palestinian land and the exercise of force such theft requires. As Israel’s territory has expanded, its politics have coarsened. The Labor Party, which embodied the Enlightenment values of the European Jews who emigrated to Israel, was the dominant party through 1977. Since then, however, it has experienced a long decline, and with it any talk of making peace with the Palestinians has vanished. In the 2022 election, Labor won only four seats in the 120-member Knesset, Israel’s parliament. Parties with very different values and disposition toward the Palestinians hold most of the seats.
The question I’ve been asking myself is whether it’s possible for a people to sustain a culture of decency while simultaneously engaging in a thoroughgoing and brutal occupation of a large population living alongside it. That’s another way of asking whether the ascendance and dominance of Benjamin Netanyahu was inevitable and whether it will last into the foreseeable future.
My historical knowledge is too slight to answer that question with confidence. I’m mindful that democracy and social equity, deficient as they were, flourished more in Victorian England than on the European continent. But the populations the British were oppressing, even the Irish, lived at a considerable distance, and the stolen wealth that poured in from the colonies mitigated class tensions at home. Perhaps the better analogy is apartheid South Africa, but I have little knowledge of what life was like for its white population during that period.
I do have firsthand knowledge of life in Louisiana, having grown up there in the 1940s and 1950s. Despite greater natural endowments than states like Kansas, it was materially poor, educationally backward and almost universally closed-minded. Politics were very corrupt — for example, the commissioners of insurance almost always left office en route to federal prison — and dominated by extraction industries, which laid waste to the air, water and soil with impunity. Life was pleasant for well-off white people like me. It had a patina of social graciousness, which barely hid the violence that would boil up whenever Black people resisted their subjugation.
In the late ’50s and into the ’60s, in response to the Civil Rights movement, Louisiana was on the verge of establishing a police state. Fortunately, we were rescued by a federal government that imposed the rule of law, changing the South from a closed to an open society in the span of a decade.
I would guess that life for Jewish settlers in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem — now about 680,000 strong and a major component of Netanyahu’s base of support — is akin to life for white Southerners during the Civil Rights movement. Their security is threatened by a people whom they have grievously injured, and the only way to justify the violence with which they meet that threat is to view Palestinians as subhuman and savage. In their case, though, there will be no brake on their behavior and thus no change in their attitude. Rather, the influence is flowing in the other direction, setting the general tone for Israeli society.
Since Netanyahu’s coalition has acted to destroy the power of Israel’s independent judiciary, there has been talk in the public forum about how the relationship between our two countries had been based on shared values and is now in jeopardy. Not so. Large numbers of white Americans and Jewish Israelis continue to share the belief that we were divinely destined to appropriate the land of those who dwelled on it before we arrived.
Herbert Rothschild is an unpaid Ashland.news board member. Opinions expressed in columns represent the author’s views and may or may not reflect those of Ashland.news. Email Rothschild at [email protected].
