Blaming the Jews. Bernard Harrison
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a mere confusion of thought, a maggot of the mind.
The same is true of the central contention of Article 22 of the Hamas charter, that the Jews control every apparently non-Jewish institution in the world, from the United Nations to the Rotary Club, and do so in the service of an organized pursuit of world domination. One might argue against these concerns that the Jews, of all people, given their general character, hardly seem best placed to conduct a world conspiracy of the kind envisaged. For one thing, such a project would require, on the part of those conducting it, an unusual degree of willingness to subordinate rationally grounded dissent to the demands of political unity, and such willingness is not something that, with the best will in the world, one readily associates with Jews. “Argument is the life of Judaism,” say the rabbis, to which the Jewish man in the street notoriously responds, spreading his hands, “Two Jews, three opinions.” But to argue in that way would be tacitly to grant to the authors of Article 22 that if they are deluded, it is only in the first sense: to grant, in other words that it remains a real possibility, though one happily unrealized on grounds of incapacity, that the Jews might be in secret control of the world. But why should anyone grant the reality of such a possibility when plainly it savors of lunacy! The Jews are, indeed, not in control of the world but that they are not is not a mere consequence of their not being up to the job. Rather, it is a consequence of the evident fact that nobody, no nation, no state, no movement—not the United States, not international socialism, nor anybody else—could conceivably be up to such a job. Humanity is manifestly too diverse, economically, politically, socially, and ideologically, for any unified control of it to be feasible. In even envisaging such a possibility, we, like the authors of Article 22, have strayed into cloud cuckoo land.
What about the famous Eurobarometer poll that created such a stir in the world press in 2003? Might the majorities that fingered Israel as the greatest threat to peace in the world have been, and be, then and now, right about that?
One needs for a start to ask what the vague phrase “threat to peace in the world” is supposed to mean. Are we talking about peace in the Middle East, or are we speculating about World War III?
Let us begin with peace in the region. In fact, the Middle East has been convulsed by an endless series of wars since 1948. Some of these have involved Israel, but these, as I will argue in chapters 7 and 8, have been brief, minor, and from Israel’s standpoint, overwhelmingly defensive in character. The others, all very much more enduring and far more serious both in terms of loss of life and destruction of property and infrastructure—from the Iran-Iraq War of 1980, which lasted eight years and devastated both countries, to the more recent but equally enduring and even more destructive wars in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen—have arisen entirely out of conflict between the major Muslim regional powers, motivated in part by rival territorial claims and in part by the religious conflict between Sunni and Shi‘a Islam, and having in either case virtually nothing to do with Israel.
Israel, in short, has hardly shown itself in practice to constitute even a major, let alone the major, threat to peace in the region. And this is hardly to be wondered at, given that the main object of the State of Israel since its foundation has been to provide a safe space within stable frontiers for Jews (not to mention several other groups recently subject to abuse of quasi-genocidal proportions under neighboring regimes) to inhabit in freedom from persecution. This has been manifest in the readiness of Israel to exchange land for peace—by the withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula after the 1967 war, in the unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip under Ariel Sharon, and in the readiness of Israeli politicians to engage in repeated negotiations aiming at the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank. A state with as its main aim security within any borders capable of securing an agreed and enforceable peace can hardly be said intelligibly to “threaten peace” with its neighbors—unless of course its neighbors would wish, if they could, to destroy it. The latter condition certainly holds true in Israel’s case; however, that can scarcely justify blaming Israel for any resulting breaches of the peace.
Leaving aside war and peace in the region, then, are there any grounds for crediting the existence of a Jewish state in Israel with the potential to set off World War III?
Serious debate on that question has mainly concerned Israel’s nuclear options. Israel is widely believed to have possessed an effective nuclear deterrent since just before the 1967 war. Israeli government policy, however, has always been to neither confirm nor deny that it possesses nuclear weapons, although it does affirm that it will never be the first to use them. The most serious and widely believed book on the issue is Avner Cohen’s 1998 Israel and the Bomb.9 Cohen, who has written widely on a range of moral and political issues concerning nuclear deterrence and proliferation, argues against Israel’s policy of secrecy concerning its nuclear abilities, on the grounds that it is undemocratic, violates the public’s right to know, undermines the principle of public accountability, and hinders the effort to achieve internationally recognized and accepted norms for the control of nuclear weapons. However, even were one to admit the force of these charges, they by no means suffice to identify Israel’s possession of nuclear weapons as any more likely to lead to World War III than the possession of nuclear weapons by other countries, such as Russia, the United States, Britain, France, China, India, Pakistan, and North Korea—the last three of which are not even signatories to the Non-Proliferation Treaty of 1968–70.
That is not, perhaps, the end of the matter. In 1991, the celebrated Washington-based investigative journalist Seymour M. Hersh published a book called The Samson Option, largely based on information supplied by Ari Ben-Menashe, a former Israeli government employee who claimed to have worked for Israeli intelligence.10 It explores the idea that Israel might be ready and willing to launch a devastating nuclear strike on an enemy state, possibly Iran, in the event of its suffering an attack so great as to threaten its survival as a Jewish state. The thought expressed in the book’s title is that Israel would in this respect be harking back to the celebration, in the Book of Judges, of Samson’s final act of pulling down the pillars of the temple of Dagon, crushing both himself and all the Philistines.
In 2011, the same idea was explored again by the American journalist Ron Rosenbaum in a book titled How the End Begins: The Road to a Nuclear World War III.11 The tone and the quality of Rosenbaum’s reasoning can be gauged by the following extract: “A Samson option is made possible by the fact that even if Israel has been obliterated, it can be sure that its dolphin-class nuclear submarines cruising the Red Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the Persian Gulf, at depths impervious to detection, can carry out a genocidal-scale retaliation virtually anywhere in the world. … [The policy] presupposes a rage on the part of post-second Holocaust survivors in possession of nuclear weapons determined to reduce the entire temple of civilisation to ashes for having complacently allowed two Holocausts to be inflicted on our people.”12
The second half of this passage argues that the policy outlined in the first “presupposes” a willingness to “reduce the entire temple of civilization to ashes,” that in turn can only issue from a rage so great as to be peculiar to those who have survived a Holocaust and hence to be something that only a Jew could possibly feel. This, of course, echoes several themes of antisemitism as a pseudo-explanatory theory: that the Jews are a uniquely vengeful people, that Jews care nothing for the sufferings of non-Jews, and so on.
But this is absurd, because the policy complained of has nothing to do with rage of any kind, let alone the rage, if such there be, peculiar to Holocaust survivors. The possession of some means of ensuring the possibility of delivering a devastating blow to a nuclear aggressor even after a first strike by that aggressor is essential to the policy of mutual assured deterrence, which is why nuclear powers, such as the United States, Britain, France, and Russia, take steps, including the deployment of nuclear-armed submarines, to secure the possibility of such a blow independently of the continued territorial integrity of the nation wielding it. That is just a feature of where we sit in the modern world. If nuclear deterrence is to work, that is how it must be organized. To give a spuriously Jewish tinge to the policy by labeling it a “Samson option” is to employ the most debased