"How Israel Lost" by Richard Ben Cramer

This startling new book asks brave, naive and absolutely necessary questions. They must be answered if Israel is to save itself from destruction.

By Baruch Kimmerling

Jul 19, 2004 | Richard Ben Cramer is an enormously able storyteller who displays great moral sensitivity and personal bravery. He was, no doubt, very much aware of the fact that his new book would not make him very popular among the Jewish readership of Los Angeles, and even less so in New York, which constitute the major markets for this book. The book is a passionate love letter to Israel, albeit one written by a disillusioned, distant and bitter lover. "How Israel Lost" is a very important book because, beyond the emotions and the rich mosaic of small anecdotes, Cramer detects and diagnoses, with high precision, the potentially lethal maladies afflicting Israeli society.

In 1979, while a correspondent for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Cramer won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Middle East, including the peace deal with Egypt and the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. He is also author of the bestseller "What It Takes: The Way to the White House," a classic work on Washingtonian inside politics. His well-researched biographies of Ted Williams, Bob Dole and Joe DiMaggio were enthusiastically received and won him a reputation as a serious journalist and writer.

Raised as a "zionist" (he now avoids writing the word with a capital letter) on the slogan of "a land without a people for a people without a land," Cramer was shocked to learn, during his first visit to the "Holy Land," just how false that slogan was. He was not too deeply concerned by this realization at the time, though. This was, after all, the period when Anwar Sadat made his historic visit to Jerusalem, when the newly elected ultra-nationalist Menachem Begin made a deal that returned every inch of Sinai's land to Egypt and even guaranteed "full autonomy" to the Palestinians within five years. It took Cramer years to realize that Begin had made that deal in the hope of being rewarded with full and eternal control over Greater Israel -- including the West Bank and Gaza.

The lessons that Cramer learned regarding the cynical interest-based politics behind Israeli peace negotiations inform "How Israel Lost." This book is divided into four chapters, each of which poses a different question -- an obvious reference to the "four questions" asked at Passover: Why do we (Americans) care about Israel? Why don't the Palestinians have a state? What is a Jewish state? Why is there no peace?

The first question -- Why do we care about Israel? -- would have been sharpened if Cramer had acknowledged that the Bush administration's unconditional political, economic and military support for Israel is, in fact, a new phenomenon, and one that could disappear just as quickly as it has emerged. Cramer does not acknowledge this fact, and his answer seems extremely superficial. He suggests that American support for Israel derives from the fact that the Americans have traditionally felt that they were like the Israelis, and warns: "Somewhere along the line, we got the feeling, 'they aren't like us.' Or maybe we don't want to be like them. And this is just one of the ways -- one big one -- how Israel lost." In the light of the invasion of Iraq and the Abu Ghraib scandal, perhaps both statements are correct. Nonetheless, they cannot really be thought of as having a deterministic explanatory power. The truth is that no one yet has come up with a truly satisfactory answer to this question, which calls out for deeper research. This is the weakest part of Cramer's thesis and it is not supported by any provided evidence based on the American scene.

The three additional questions Cramer poses can be thought of as one single big question. They are mostly focused around Cramer's correct assertion that 37 years of occupation and subjugation of millions of Palestinians and the colonization of their land have fundamentally corrupted, militarized and brutalized Israeli society, as well as the occupied people. The conflict, argues Cramer, is the only reason that, regardless of which party or coalition is in power in Israel, a military junta controls the political, economic and most of the cultural spheres within a supposedly democratic country. The reserve generals and colonels of this junta (whether they consider themselves "rightists" or "leftists") fill almost every important position in Israel. The perpetuation of the conflict, which is good for every kind of business directly or indirectly connected with the permanent condition of warfare, is thus in their vested interests. Cramer provides ample evidence to prove and illustrate this thesis.

Next Page: Is the failure of Israel's "melting pot" a crisis -- or a welcome move away from quasi-fascist collectivism?

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