Julián Schvindlerman. Editor de “Coloquio” (Revista del Congreso Judío Latinoamericano)
The Existential Solitude of Israel
Criterio - June/July 2024
By Julián Schvindlerman
A significant gap separates the way the international community and Israelis view Israel and its surroundings.
To a large part of global public opinion, Israel is a Spartan state, militarily powerful and politically abusive, entirely insensitive to the humanitarian suffering it inflicts on the Palestinian people while advancing its military campaign against the fundamentalist Hamas movement in the Gaza Strip. The International Court of Justice considers whether Israel is a genocidal state. The International Criminal Court issues arrest warrants against its prime minister and defense minister. The entire United Nations system points an accusing finger at Jerusalem with each critical report, condemnatory resolution, or adverse debate in any of its forums. Many press editorials question its policies, while calls to boycott Israeli products or citizens accumulate from supermarkets to universities. Israel is accused of deliberately starving the Gazans and ruthlessly attacking Palestinian civilians. The Jewish state, it seems, is on the road to becoming an international pariah.
Israelis observe this situation with incomprehension, if not consternation. They remember that a war was imposed on them by a ruthless enemy who attacked them by surprise, invading their borders and massacring their brothers and sisters in the most sadistic manner possible. They know that Hamas is determined to destroy them, not merely subjugate them. They understand that the jihadist ideology that animates its tens of thousands of fighters is inflexibly supremacist and part and parcel of a broader offensive against the global liberal order. Painfully, they understand that they are engaged in a war for survival, threatened by a fundamentalist constellation bringing together Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and other pro-Iranian Shiite militias in Syria and Iraq; all directed by tyrannical ayatollahs who have been preaching Israel's annihilation from Tehran for forty-five years.
They are bewildered at how their concrete efforts to preserve Gazan civilian lives - in an extremely complex urban war and despite Hamas's attempts to manipulate them as human shields - are vilified by global public opinion, which only demands zero collateral casualties from this nation at war. They fail to understand how, even after increasing the amount of humanitarian aid sent to Gaza (a hostile entity) compared to pre-war levels, they still receive unfounded accusations of causing mass famines (the UN had to correct its own disproportionate projections from just a few months ago). They look sorrowfully at the world's indifference towards more than a hundred Israelis still kidnapped in Gaza and the more than eighty thousand internally displaced from the north and south of the country due to the Hamas invasion and Hezbollah missiles. And they are puzzled by the selective moral outrage of their critics. Why do they never complain to Egypt for closing its border with Gaza and thus trapping the Palestinians in a war zone? Why do they not demand Qatar and Turkey stop hosting Hamas leaders? Why do they not organize demonstrations in the universities of the free world against the Islamic Republic of Iran for arming, training, and financing regional terrorism? Why is the focus placed on Israel and only on Israel?
In short, global and local perceptions of Israel do not align. Hamas and Israel form a broken mirror. Unfortunately for some, the point of balance cannot be reached in the middle; just as there was none between Hitler and Churchill, there is simply no moral equidistance between Israel and Hamas et al. Between two sets of values so powerfully and irreducibly opposed - a fallible liberal democracy on one side, and a fanatically anti-Western terrorist movement on the other - only one can truly - existentially - prevail. The people of Israel endure a double suffering: being at the forefront of the fight against international jihadism and being incessantly undermined in their endeavor; ironically not by their enemies' henchmen, but by their theoretical allies, those who would still be in the line of Islamist aggression if Israel were to collapse. It is a sign of our times that antisemitism has dramatically increased in the West after the worst anti-Jewish attack since the Holocaust and the most severe terrorist attack in Israel’s history.
The perceptual gap extends to the field of diplomacy. The family of nations seems to believe that the absence of a Palestinian state is the root cause of this political and military misfortune. According to this ideological current, if Israel allowed Palestinian independence, peace would reign; if it ceased what it sees as an occupation of foreign lands, the violence would disappear. Many well-intentioned observers believe that the Palestinian leadership longs to have a sovereign state next to Israel. More and more Israelis are convinced that the Palestinians desire a state of their own over Israel. They know their history: they know that Arab-Palestinian leadership has been rejecting sovereignty offers for almost a century. They did so in 1937, in 1947, in 1967, in 2000, in 2008, and up to the present. And no, Netanyahu has not always governed Israel. The Palestinian rejection of the peace project was especially against Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, and Ehud Barak; all figures from the center-left Labor Party. Israelis also remember that each recent territorial withdrawal distanced them even further from the prospect of peace. Israel unilaterally withdrew from southern Lebanon in 2000 and from Gaza five years later. Since then, neither of those borders has known even a remote shred of peace. On the contrary, the evacuated areas were quickly captured by radical Islamists (Hezbollah in the north, Hamas in the south) who initiated several very bloody wars against Israel.
So, Israelis reasonably ask if they can risk withdrawing from the West Bank to allow the establishment of a Palestinian state there. Who could assure them that history will not repeat itself? That they will not be attacked once again? And that when that happens and they are forced to defend themselves, they will not be condemned, criticized, and vilified as they are now? To make matters worse, in this potential scenario, the threat would be exponentially greater. Israel is approximately the size of Tucumán, Argentina's smallest province. At its narrowest point, the distance from the West Bank to the Mediterranean Sea is less than fifteen kilometers. Israel has no strategic depth. It has no margin for error, be it diplomatic or military. If its neighbors were Finnish, it could presumably take a calculated risk. With its current Palestinian neighbors - who supported Hamas's savage invasion on October 7 by more than 75% and whose government of Mahmoud Abbas has yet to condemn it - the calculated risk would become an irrational gamble. And yet, Norway, Ireland, Spain, and other countries are seeking to force Israel to recognize a Palestinian state… which, for Israelis, besides being dangerous, is an immoral reward for political intransigence and jihadist terrorism.
Almost a quarter of a century ago, when Israel was immersed in the turbulent second Palestinian intifada after the collapse of the peace process, a Washington Post columnist noted that Israel was not hated by its Middle Eastern enemies because of its actions, but because of its mere existence. George Will aptly wrote: "It is not that Israel is provocative; the fact that Israel exists is provocative." Israelis know this. It only remains for the rest of the world to admit it too.
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Full professor in the international relations career at Palermo University (Argentina) and visiting professor at the Hebraic University (Mexico). Editor of the magazine Coloquio (CJL). Writer and international lecturer. Member of Republican Professors and the Argentine Forum Against Antisemitism
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