Or is something else at work here? Is it as simple as partisan politics? Would the left be as up in arms if the war in Iraq had been launched by the Clinton administration? I can’t prove it, but I don’t think so. Or is that the left opposes American military action only when it is undertaken for the sake of America’s perceived national interests? Is that why they are always calling for the U.N. to act? Are they revealing their antipathy toward the nation-state system and a bias in favor of some form of world federalism? Is that what they mean by the “global community”? Did the left harbor a confidence that Bill Clinton would use the military only for transnationalist and “humanitarian” motives, but fear that George Bush, in contrast, is motivated by nationalist sentiments?
I don’t have an answer to these questions. I am still working my way through them. But there must be something that accounts for the selective indignation of the American left, for their flip-flops from calls for American “humanitarian” activism around the world, to condemnations of American imperial arrogance — and back again.
James Fitzpatrick's new novel, The Dead Sea Conspiracy: Teilhard de Chardin and the New American Church, is available from our online store. You can email Mr. Fitzpatrick at fitzpatrijames@sbcglobal.net.
(This article originally appeared in The Wanderer and is reprinted with permission. To subscribe call 651-224-5733.)
I have in mind the way certain elements of the right and left have united in their opposition to the U.S. policies in the Middle East. I don’t know about you, but I never expected to find conservative commentators such as Pat Buchanan and Charley Reese making the same case as the new left theorist Noam Chomsky and leftwing Catholic groups such as Pax Christi and the Catholic Worker.
Let me give you an example of what I mean. In late April, Reese wrote a syndicated column on the implications of America’s ties to Israel. At about the same time (May 3rd), an article entitled “An Occupation Hazard” appeared in the Jesuit’s America magazine. It was written by Angie O’Gorman, who identifies herself as freelance writer who provides legal representation to immigrants and refugees. Reese is a man of the right, with a populist bent. Ms. O’Gorman would call herself a “progressive.” But see if you can find any difference worth noting between their views.
Let’s start with O’Gorman. She writes she is “neither Israeli nor Palestinian” and that her only personal involvement in the Palestinian issue “is that my tax dollars are paying for large swaths of the current bloodshed and horror.” In her article, she describes what she found on a recent visit to the Palestinian territories. She tells of being stopped by Israeli soldiers at checkpoints that did not “divide Palestine from Israel, but two Palestinian villages from each other,” of Palestinian ambulances being denied passage, of Palestinians being shot for attempting to “cross the Israeli security roads that crisscross the area,” of Israeli soldiers discharging raw sewage into a freshwater creek needed by a Palestinian village.
She tells of how the “Great Wall” being built by the Israelis forces children to “pass through a gate in the wall, controlled by Israeli soldiers, on their way to school and back” and of how it separates Palestinian farmers from their farmland. She reports on the funeral process of “four teenage rock throwers, shot by Israeli soldiers.” One of the “pallbearers himself was shot in the head. Three other marchers were shot in the back. Perhaps the teenagers were suspected of terrorist activity or were even known terrorists. Perhaps they were innocent. But there is no chance for anyone to know, because there was no trial to test the suspicions against these youth. Due process before death would be in order. But everything is out of order here in Israeli-occupied Palestine.”
Actually, whether or not these teenagers had “ties to terrorist groups” is not central to O’Gorman’s case. She writes, “Why is a Palestinian suicide bomber a terrorist but the Israeli commander who orders missiles fired into a car in a residential Palestinian neighborhood not a terrorist?” She ponders, “How much of this I would put up with before opting to become a human bomb?” She laments the extent to which she, as an American, is “paying for the Israeli occupation” and how the occupation “has inexorably pushed Israel and the United States to accept atrocities as a road map to Israeli security.” She concludes: “Dare I say it? The Israeli occupation is giving ethnic cleansing an acceptable rationale.”
And Reese? He takes a stance very similar to that taken by Pat Buchanan over the last few years. He argues Muslim terrorists are a threat to us because we back Israel: “Terrorists the world over did not declare war on us. The overwhelming majority are concerned with local issues in their own countries.” He does not shrink from the idea of giving in to their demands. “They want us out of the Arabian Peninsula. That’s not a bad idea.” All that would mean, he says, is that the United States would “join the rest of the world in demanding that Israel obey international law and remove its settlers and its forces from the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem. We should have done that a long time ago.” Then he throws his haymaker: “Israel has become nothing but a pain in America’s rear end.”
Reese proposes that America say to the world: “If you need food or medicine or civilian infrastructure, we are ready to help, but we will no longer sell you arms, station military forces in your territory, interfere in your internal affairs or take sides in your quarrels with others. What kind of government you wish to adopt is your business, not ours.” Following these recommendations would, of course, end the American military support that makes possible the Israeli occupation of Palestine that rankles Angie O’Gorman. Arguably, it would mean the end of Israel.
Well, should Reese be uncomfortable with the fact that he is taking the same position as left-wing activists? Or is it the American left that should be squirming over the implications of its new-found allies on the right? I say that the left has more explaining to do. Is that my bias showing? I don’t think so.
Why? Because the American right has a long record of opposing “Wilsonian interventionism.” States rights, federalism, distributism, and agrarianism were prominent strands in the fabric of American conservatism in the years before the Cold War. It was the fear of Soviet expansion that led American conservatives to back our interventions in Korea, Southeast Asia and Latin America, not the desire to remake the world in the American image. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, many conservatives reverted to form. They no longer saw Soviet sponsorship of world revolution as a threat requiring a major American military presence around the world. Pat Buchanan frequently makes the point that his brand of “isolationism” is based on the same principles as those championed by the America First movement in the first half of the 20th century.
But what about the Catholic left? It seems to me that, except for uncompromising pacifists, they have a harder case to make. Check the record. They did not protest Bill Clinton’s intervention in the Balkans, certainly not in numbers worth mentioning. They condemn the United States for not intervening in Rwanda. They call for a more active role by the United States in Haiti. And why is it that the Catholic leftists who speak out against the Israeli government’s treatment of the Palestinians find little time to speak out against the persecution of Christian minorities living under Muslim rule?
Why these inconsistencies? At times, one could get the impression that the left’s animus against Israel can be explained by that country’s relationship with the United States; that our support is what makes Israel an “imperialist presence” in the Middle East; that that is why the Palestinians get more sympathy from the left than Christian minorities suffering under Muslim rule.
