Telling Israel... and America

For the past several months, this column has focused on a single, volatile subject: Israel’s “culture of dominance."

By PHILIP GOLD
Harry Truman (photo credit: US NATIONAL ARCHIVES AND RECORDS ADMINISTRATION/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS)
Harry Truman
(photo credit: US NATIONAL ARCHIVES AND RECORDS ADMINISTRATION/WIKIMEDIA COMMONS)
As they used to say in journalism: “If everybody’s mad at you, then you must be doing something right.”
I do not know whether they still say it, nor even who “they” might be, if anybody, nowadays. However, I do have evidence to indicate that I’m doing at least a little something right. I also believe that, as the American election approaches, what I’m suggesting in these pieces might have some value.
For the past several months, this column has focused on a single, volatile subject: Israel’s “culture of dominance.” It’s ev - erywhere. From the daily shouting, interrupting and rudeness to the insults routinely directed toward the president (and the presidency) of the United States and American Jewry in general by senior governmental and religious officials. It is so common as to be utterly unremarkable.
Until somebody makes a remark about it.
Nobody defends this shtick, or denies its ubiquity; nobody but the utterly deluded believes that truth is measured in decibels, or that you win friends and influence people by insulting and antagonizing them. Still, responses to these columns have been almost entirely negative, in accordance with the standard Israe- li script for dealing with suggestions of imperfection: get loud, get mad, start tossing insults and dismissals. Throw up a wall of words maybe related to the subject at hand, maybe not, and nev - er miss a chance to flaunt yourself as the morally superior victim. I’ve taken my share. I’ve also drawn the expected “If you don’t like it here, go elsewhere.” As though my relocation would solve the problem. Plus the usual “Agree to disagree” evasion. About what exactly are we disagreeing? A few people have even stopped talking to me. Or so I am told. There’s no need to add much to the list of examples, both micro and macro; everyone can do that from their own experience. Nevertheless, one final item so engaged me that it bears re- porting. In a Facebook post by an immigrant from America, an older woman who is neither unintelligent nor uneducated nor inexperienced wrote something about how Prime Minister Ben- jamin Netanyahu must sit the next American president down for “a stern talking-to.” One can imagine the response of Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders to such an encounter. Or Harry Tru- man’s response. However, of greater interest might be the re- sponse of any number of sentient Americans who wish Israel well, but... “Just who the hell do you people think you are?” Maybe that’s the essence of it. Beyond the obvious. Just who the hell do we think we are? Jews, yes. Israelis, yes – but beyond that, what? We need to know. America needs to know. The world needs to know. Because, to put it simply, the world needs Israel – a world that Israel, ever more isolated and despised, must approach through America. Can Israel be the Israel the world needs, the Israel America can embrace as more than a difficult client state? Or is the real question, does Israel even care to try? Everybody furious once again? Great. Let’s press on. Especially those of you who cleave to the all-purpose “They’ll hate us no matter what, so let’s do as we please” self-justification. Indeed, some people hate us, and always will. Others spend far less time thinking about us than we think they do. Yet many more, especially those who wish us well, may be growing tired of listening to the same old/same old.
Perhaps Israel’s greatest enemy isn’t the world’s hatred. Per - haps it’s America’s growing indifference and distaste – feelings that have less to do with the Palestinian issue than with Israel wearing out its welcome via its culture of dominance.
Israel has created “facts on the ground.” It has also created facts in the American mind – and facts in the mind can be stub- born things.
In my previous column, I noted that in 60 years I have never once heard any serious expression of Israeli concern for Amer - ican welfare. Not even during the worst of the Great Recession, when even a symbolic Israeli “Buy American” program might have garnered far more good will than all that “Start-Up Na- tion” self-congratulation or dreary hasbara . I suggested that now might be a good time for such a program, and for Israeli small business to start dealing with American small business. Maybe we’d learn a bit from and about each other. The commercial amounts involved might be minuscule, but it would be a start toward what I believe to be the fundamental issue facing both Israel and the United States: good citizenship. Active, responsible secular citizenship in the world as it is today. In other words, the practice of 21st-century civic virtue. America needs to recover it.
Israel needs to discover it.
Maybe we can help each other out a bit. Maybe, just maybe, it would do us both, and the civilized world, and the planet, some good.