(2 of 5)
But what exactly does "Western standards" mean? Here we come to complication No. 2. There is not a single Western standard, there are two: what we demand of Western countries at peace and what we demand of Western countries at war. It strains not just fairness but also logic to ask Israel, which has known only war for its 40 years' existence, to act like a Western country at peace.
The only fair standard is this one: How have the Western democracies reacted in similar conditions of war, crisis and insurrection? The morally relevant comparison is not with an American police force reacting to violent riots, say, in downtown Detroit. (Though even by this standard -- the standard of America's response to the urban riots of the '60s -- Israel's handling of the intifadeh has been measured.) The relevant comparison is with Western democracies at war: to, say, the U.S. during the Civil War, the British in Mandatory Palestine, the French in Algeria.
Last fall Anthony Lewis excoriated Israel for putting down a tax revolt in the town of Beit Sahour. He wrote: "Suppose the people of some small American town decided to protest Federal Government policy by withholding their taxes. The Government responded by sending in the Army . . . Unthinkable? Of course it is in this country. But it is happening in another . . . Israel."
Middle East scholar Clinton Bailey tried to point out just how false this analogy is. Protesting Federal Government policy? The West Bank is not Selma. Palestinians are not demanding service at the lunch counter. They demand a flag and an army. This is insurrection for independence. They are part of a movement whose covenant explicitly declares its mission to be the abolition of the state of Israel.
Bailey tried manfully for the better analogy. It required him to posit 1) a pre-glasnost Soviet Union, 2) a communist Mexico demanding the return of "occupied Mexican" territory lost in the Mexican War (Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, Nevada and California) and 3) insurrection by former Mexicans living in these territories demanding secession from the Union. Then imagine, Bailey continued, that the insurrectionists, supported and financed by Mexico and other communist states in Latin America, obstruct communications; attack civilians and police with stones and fire bombs; kill former Mexicans holding U.S. Government jobs ("collaborators"); and then begin a tax revolt. Now you have the correct analogy. Would the U.S., like Israel, then send in the Army? Of course.
But even this analogy falls flat because it is simply impossible to imagine an America in a position of conflict and vulnerability analogous to Israel's. Milan Kundera once defined a small nation as "one whose very existence may be put in question at any moment; a small nation can disappear and knows it." Czechoslovakia is a small nation. Judea was. Israel is. The U.S. is not.
It is quite impossible to draw an analogy between a small nation and a secure superpower. America's condition is so radically different, so far from the brink. Yet when Western countries have been in conditions approximating Israel's, when they have faced comparable rebellions, they have acted not very differently.