Paul Berman tells some pretty good stories, but you have to wait for the punch line. No one will be astonished to learn that Breyten Breytenbach, the celebrated South African novelist and homme de gauche, last year published (in Le Monde) an open letter to Sharon, and began with the now-rote observation that when any criticism of Israeli policy is vilified as anti-Semitism, free speech is imperiled. You may be mildly surprised to learn that Breytenbach thinks the Israelis, a people with a notorious tin ear for the way they sound to foreigners, are nonetheless manipulating American public opinion with fantastic success. But read on in the Breytenbach letter, and you will be diverted to learn that the “used-car salesman doppelganger, Netanyahu, ploys this craft of crude propaganda more openly, as if he were a dirty finger tweaking the clitoris of a swooning American public opinion.” While this sort of language does evoke the bad old days, one can look on the bright side: Breytenbach’s trope arguably bolsters the distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. Even sixty years ago, few people implied that assimilationist Jewish fingers, however dirty they might be when probing and manipulating literal or metaphorical gentile women, were also prehensile. As for Zionists–uniquely blessed with the ability to tweak things with a single finger–well, who knew?
It can be difficult to keep straight that much-urged distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism. When Nobel laureate Jose Saramago described last year’s siege of Arafat’s compound as “a crime comparable to Auschwitz,” I confess that my confidence in the distinction briefly faltered. I imagine that Berman’s confidence in the distinction sometimes falters, too: when he googled “Jenin” and “Auschwitz,” he got 2,890 hits; when he googled “Jenin and Nazi”, he got 8,100 hits; “Sharon and Hitler” got 63,100.
It is not the smallest virtue of Terror and Liberalism that its argument establishes a plausible motive for these linguistic tics. On Berman’s account, while anti-Semitism infiltrates this sort of anti-Zionist polemic, the anti-Semitism is beside the point. Berman establishes a fascinating inverse correlation: last year’s hysterical anti-Israeli passion rose with Palestinian atrocities, specifically with the rise of the suicide bombers’ attacks on civilians, and fell with the largely successful Israeli repression of the suicide bombers, and the accompanying vast increase in Palestinian misery and oppression. So it was not Palestinian suffering that produced the Left’s demonization of the Israelis; only Palestinian crime had that effect. How did this happen?
Berman argues that a significant portion of the Left cannot abide evidence that large numbers of people adopt mad and murderous politics‹and have never been able to abide such evidence. The resulting parody of reasoning is by now wearily familiar: if a political group is given to serial atrocity, its members must surely have been grossly provoked. If they have been so grossly provoked, those who have provoked them more or less deserve the atrocities inflicted on them. The impulse to serial atrocity is thus understandable, at least partially extenuated, and in some sense rational.People who are rational and aggrieved can be appeased, or better yet, persuaded. People who are rational, unappeasable and un-persuadable can be deterred. If you live in the shadow of the Somme, or Nagasaki, or Vietnam, it is very appealing to think that your enemies can be persuaded, or appeased, or deterred.
On the strength of Berman’s analysis, we can also make sense of some of the first (and very imperfectly-remembered) responses to September 11th. For example, that lively issue of the London Review of Books, where Cambridge classicist Mary Beard startlingly observed that after the first unreflecting reactions wore off, “when the shock had faded, more hard-headed reaction set in. This wasn’t just the feeling that, however tactfully you dress it up, the United States had it coming. That is, of course, what many people openly or privately think. World bullies, even if their heart is in the right place, will in the end pay the price.” When some of the London Review‘s American correspondents expressed their irritation and incredulity at this little homily, and doubted that the incinerated office workers and crushed firemen “had it coming,” Mary Beard’s circle of acquaintance was by no means eager to back away from her summary of its pithy moral calculus. The exchange ran for months‹and the LRB‘s circulation allegedly rose on the strength of it. It is important to remember, as we hear repeated warnings that our subsequent actions have cost us the almost-universal sympathy September 11th is supposed to have earned us, that the comments cited above were among the earlier reactions to the attacks. Assertions of near-universal sympathy for our losses are fantasies; what was most striking about the first reaction to September 11th was what seemed to be the venomous Schadenfreude it evoked. But on Berman’s reading, it wasn’t Schadenfreude: it was the recurrent, seductive desire that the world be less terrible than the world turns out to be.
So a year and a half ago, it was necessary to look a little carefully at those bullying acts we had committed in the immediate run-up to September 11th. Which bullying had so offended al-Qaeda? We had (very belatedly) rescued the Muslims of Bosnia from their Christian tormentors, the Muslim Kossovars from their Muslim tormentors, the Muslims of Kuwait from a secular Arab invasion, attempted to rescue the Muslims of Mogadishu from a famine–the list went on. American history was not without spot or stain, but if Osama bin Laden was on the 11th of September attempting to avenge Wounded Knee, or My Lai, or the sundry injuries the Palestinians have suffered at the hands of American proxies, he’d kept it to himself. Although it seemed grotesque, bin Laden, vexed not least by Ataturk’s abolition of the Caliphate–in the early 1920s–had commissioned mass murder in Manhattan late in 2001. Mary Beard and her friends, who were not in any simple sense strikingly stupid or villainous people, could not imagine the real.
Berman argues that Breytenbach mistook the Israelis for a would-be Herrenvolk (his own usage), and Saramago mistook Jenin for Auschwitz, for the same reason that an earlier generation of the Left mistook the Gulag for a tough-minded version of the New Jerusalem, and the horrors of the Cultural Revolution for more of the same; for the same reason that Noam Chomsky, after failing to discredit the horrific reports coming out of Cambodia, settled for conflating Pol Pot with Suharto. For Berman, Chomsky is the most indefatigable example of the type:mad rationalists, people who lack the courage to imagine the real.
Terror and Liberalism attempts a lot in a short book. Berman very quickly anatomizes totalitarianism, locates some of its roots in European Romanticism, traces a genealogy, and extends that genealogy to include the progenitors of what has come to be called Islamo-fascism: to Hassan al-Banna, and Sayyid Qutb, and Michael Aflaq.He insists on the inevitable link between totalitarianism and terror. There is much to argue with, and much to commend. Alas, the book has received the treatment one might have anticipated: a protracted and spiteful attack in The Nation, one enlivened by a defense of Chomsky’s take on Pol Pot (a stirring display of Kadavergehorsamkeit in the face of an awful lot of real corpses), and what looks like a subtler bit of malice by the New York Times, where the book was assigned to the managing editor of Commentary, who (between sneers) damned it with very faint praise.
One suspects that the Commentary fellow was animated by more than mere tribalism. On occasion, Berman seems to suggest that Islamo-fascism may be more of a threat to Muslims than it is to us, and that we owe a duty of solidarity to its chief victims. This is not (to say the least) a popular line on the Right, where enlightened self-interest apparently remains a sufficiently radical notion to elicit howls of rage at newly-idealistic neo-cons, at least from the paleo-cons and the senior survivors of the first Bush Administration. Berman also suggests that a political campaign against Islamo-fascism must be fought on the classic liberal ground of human rights and feminism.These tones presumably grate on an ear trained at Commentary, where affectionate institutional memory presumably stretches back to the days when Mrs. Kirkpatrick was solidarizing with Argentine generals given to vivisecting nuns with chain-saws. Berman is uneasy about the durability of the neo-con commitment to human rights for Middle Easterners. His Times review suggests that he is right.
From June, 2003