21. Mai 2006

Vor wenigen Tagen veröffentlichte der renommierte britische Historiker Tony Judt einen glänzenden Artikel über die aktuelle Situation Israels im israelischen Haaretz. Der Artikel wurde gestern in deutscher Übersetzung von der „Süddeutschen Zeitung“ veröffentlicht, steht dort aber leider nicht online, weshalb wir auf das Original zurückgreifen müssen. Selbstverständlich ist der Beitrag in Gänze lesenswert; ich zitiere hier nur die wesentlichsten Passagen.

Zunächst einmal beschreibt Judt, dass sich Israel trotz seines 58jährigen Bestehens verhalte wie ein Jugendlicher in seiner Pubertät:

--- The social transformations of the country - and its many economic achievements - have not brought the political wisdom that usually accompanies age. Seen from the outside, Israel still comports itself like an adolescent: consumed by a brittle confidence in its own uniqueness; certain that no one "understands" it and everyone is "against" it; full of wounded self-esteem, quick to take offense and quick to give it. Like many adolescents Israel is convinced - and makes a point of aggressively and repeatedly asserting - that it can do as it wishes, that its actions carry no consequences and that it is immortal. ---

Judt führt zutreffend aus, dass Israel lange Jahre die volle Sympathie der westlichen Welt genossen hatte und dass sich das erst in jüngerer Vergangenheit zu ändern begann. Die Veränderung des westlichen Bildes von Israel hat insofern nichts mit einem internationalen Judenhass zu tun, sondern lässt sich auf ganz konkrete Entwicklungen zurückführen:

--- We can see, in retrospect, that the victory of Israel in June 1967 and its continuing occupation of the territories it conquered then have been the Jewish state's very own nakba: a moral and political catastrophe. Israel's actions in the West Bank and Gaza have magnified and publicized the country's shortcomings and displayed them to a watching world. Curfews, checkpoints, bulldozers, public humiliations, home destructions, land seizures, shootings, "targeted assassinations," the separation fence: All of these routines of occupation and repression were once familiar only to an informed minority of specialists and activists. Today they can be watched, in real time, by anyone with a computer or a satellite dish - which means that Israel's behavior is under daily scrutiny by hundreds of millions of people worldwide. The result has been a complete transformation in the international view of Israel. (…) Today only a tiny minority of outsiders see Israelis as victims. The true victims, it is now widely accepted, are the Palestinians. Indeed, Palestinians have now displaced Jews as the emblematic persecuted minority: vulnerable, humiliated and stateless. (…) Dead Israelis - like the occasional assassinated white South African in the apartheid era, or British colonists hacked to death by native insurgents - are typically perceived abroad not as the victims of terrorism but as the collateral damage of their own government's mistaken policies. (…) At a recent international meeting I heard one speaker, by analogy with Helmut Schmidt's famous dismissal of the Soviet Union as "Upper Volta with Missiles," describe Israel as "Serbia with nukes." ---

Strategische Manöver, die früher funktioniert haben, um Israel gegen alle moralischen Vorwürfe unangreifbar zu machen, greifen heute nicht mehr:

--- Even the Holocaust can no longer be instrumentalized to excuse Israel's behavior. Thanks to the passage of time, most Western European states have now come to terms with their part in the Holocaust, something that was not true a quarter century ago. From Israel's point of view, this has had paradoxical consequences: Until the end of the Cold War Israeli governments could still play upon the guilt of Germans and other Europeans, exploiting their failure to acknowledge fully what was done to Jews on their territory. Today, now that the history of World War II is retreating from the public square into the classroom and from the classroom into the history books, a growing majority of voters in Europe and elsewhere (young voters above all) simply cannot understand how the horrors of the last European war can be invoked to license or condone unacceptable behavior in another time and place. In the eyes of a watching world, the fact that the great-grandmother of an Israeli soldier died in Treblinka is no excuse for his own abusive treatment of a Palestinian woman waiting to cross a checkpoint. "Remember Auschwitz" is not an acceptable response. ---

Man möchte hier einflechten, dass für manche Polit-Grüppchen genau diese Strategie noch immer Allzweckwaffe Nummer eins darstellt. Aber das liegt lediglich daran, dass die Betreffenden noch nicht gemerkt haben, dass diese Waffe außerhalb ihres eigenen Umfelds zum Rohrkrepierer geworden ist. Und dass bis auf diese Waffe das israelische Arsenal zur Rechtfertigung seiner Taten komplett leer geworden ist:

--- And so, shorn of all other justifications for its behavior, Israel and its supporters today fall back with increasing shrillness upon the oldest claim of all: Israel is a Jewish state and that is why people criticize it. This - the charge that criticism of Israel is implicitly anti-Semitic - is regarded in Israel and the United States as Israel's trump card. If it has been played more insistently and aggressively in recent years, that is because it is now the only card left. ---

Allerdings werde Judt zuflge durch die Verwendung dieser rhetorischen Waffe der Antisemitimus nur gefördert:

--- The habit of tarring any foreign criticism with the brush of anti-Semitism is deeply engrained in Israeli political instincts (…). But Jews outside of Israel pay a high price for this tactic. Not only does it inhibit their own criticisms of Israel for fear of appearing to associate with bad company, but it encourages others to look upon Jews everywhere as de facto collaborators in Israel's misbehavior. When Israel breaks international law in the occupied territories, when Israel publicly humiliates the subject populations whose land it has seized - but then responds to its critics with loud cries of "anti-Semitism" - it is in effect saying that these acts are not Israeli acts, they are Jewish acts: The occupation is not an Israeli occupation, it is a Jewish occupation, and if you don't like these things it is because you don't like Jews. ---

Judt sieht mehrere Anhaltspunkte dafür vorliegen, dass die rückhaltlose Unterstützung der USA, die Israel bisher Carte blanche verschaffte, langsam zu bröckeln beginnt:

--- It seems to me of no small significance that the recent essay on "The Israel Lobby" by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt has aroused so much public interest and debate. Mearsheimer and Walt are prominent senior academics of impeccable conservative credentials. It is true that - by their own account - they could still not have published their damning indictment of the influence of the Israel lobby on U.S. foreign policy in a major U.S.-based journal (it appeared in the London Review of Books), but the point is that 10 years ago they would not - and probably could not - have published it at all. (…) The fact is that the disastrous Iraq invasion and its aftermath are beginning to engineer a sea-change in foreign policy debate here in the U.S. It is becoming clear to prominent thinkers across the political spectrum - from erstwhile neo-conservative interventionists like Francis Fukuyama to hard-nosed realists like Mearsheimer - that in recent years the United States has suffered a catastrophic loss of international political influence and an unprecedented degradation of its moral image. ---

Die Wiederherstellung dieses ramponierten Images könne nicht erfolgreich geschehen, solange sich die USA außenpolitisch dermaßen stark an einen Staat wie Israel bänden, der bei der Bekämpfung des weltweiten Terrorismus momentan immer mehr zu einer Belastung wird. Das war Teil der Analyse von Mearsheimer und Walt, die dafür prompt auch angegriffen worden waren:

--- Of course it has been met by a firestorm of criticism from the usual suspects - and, just as they anticipated, the authors have been charged with anti-Semitism (or with advancing the interests of anti-Semitism: "objective anti-Semitism," as it might be). But it is striking to me how few people with whom I have spoken take that accusation seriously, so predictable has it become. This is bad for Jews - since it means that genuine anti-Semitism may also in time cease to be taken seriously, thanks to the Israel lobby's abuse of the term. ---

Das haben also die Verteidiger Israels, die ständig mit ihrer Antisemitismuskeule um sich schlagen, ganz wunderbar hinbekommen: Genauso sinnvoll wäre es gewesen, sich mit dieser Keule immer wieder selbst eins überzubraten. (An dieser und anderen Stellen korrespondiert Tony Judt sehr stark mit meiner eigenen Analyse in „Warum Hohmann geht und Friedman bleibt“.) Inzwischen, so führt Judt anhand seiner Erfahrungen als Dozent weiter aus, stände Israel in den Augen vieler amerikanischer Studenten, einschließlich vieler Juden (offenbar die berüchtigten jüdischen Antisemiten, die überall in Scharen herumlaufen) moralisch auf einer Stufe mit dem Spanien unter der Diktatur Francos. Spätestens das müsse endgültig ein Weckruf für die Israelis sein.

Was also kann Israel in dieser Situation vernünftigerweise tun; wie sollte es reagieren? Judt hat hier konkrete Vorschläge anzubieten:

--- Precisely because the country is an object of such universal mistrust and resentment - because people expect so little from Israel today - a truly statesmanlike shift in its policies (dismantling of major settlements, opening unconditional negotiations with Palestinians, calling Hamas' bluff by offering the movement's leaders something serious in return for recognition of Israel and a cease-fire) could have disproportionately beneficial effects. But such a radical realignment of Israeli strategy would entail a difficult reappraisal of every cliche and illusion under which the country and its political elite have nestled for most of their life. It would entail acknowledging that Israel no longer has any special claim upon international sympathy or indulgence; that the United States won't always be there; that weapons and walls can no more preserve Israel forever than they preserved the German Democratic Republic or white South Africa; that colonies are always doomed unless you are willing to expel or exterminate the indigenous population. ---

Oberflächlich betrachtet mag es auf manchen so gewirkt haben, als seien die bedingungslosen Verteidiger Israels und aller seiner Handlungen die besten Freunde dieses Staates, während Israelkritiker als üble Antisemiten verunglimpft wurden. Judts Analyse legt die Vermutung nahe, dass die Mahner und Warner bessere Freundschaftsdienste geleistet haben und dass man vielleicht besser anfangen sollte, auf sie zu hören.