Explaining The Kooks on Israel

Stephanie Gutmann was a journalist in Manhattan for about 16 years. She is the author of The Kinder, Gentler Military: Can America's Gender-Neutral Fighting Force Still Win Wars? and The Other War: Israelis, Palestinians and the Struggle for Media Supremacy and this is from her op-ed:

Israel is just too successful for the losers of the Leftist intelligentsia

...George Gilder has just come out with a new book, entitled The Israel Test...The thrust of The Israel Test is that the real issue behind support (it doesn’t have to be unconditional support) or disapproval of Israel (he’s talking about significant disapproval, the kind we see marching in Trafalgar Square draped in keffiyehs) are people’s deepest, most primal feelings about achievement. Do you admire achievement and think it should be encouraged? Or do you reflexively distrust it, think it comes at the expense of someone else, and seek to limit it? The issue comes up because Israel, against formidable odds, has become a powerhouse in the fields of bio tech and high tech (industries Gilder particularly admires) while also hosting healthy music, design, and literature sectors.

...his tone is a bit too over-the-top for me, but I think he’s getting at something important here. For me it’s the more basic point that attitudes about Israel often don’t really seem to be about Israel, that tiny scrap of rocky land, squeezed between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

After spending several years doing research for a book on media coverage of the conflict, I began to sense that Israel/Palestine is like a Rorschach test, a projective screen for peoples’ personal sense of grievance. There was the housewife in Tennessee who apparently devoted all her time in between laundry loads and dishing out Hamburger Helper to her kids to a website which meticulously catalogued Israel’s supposed injustices against Palestinians. There was the retired man in New York state who used hallucinogenic Nazi imagery (”the storm troopers ascend the stair; there is the knock on the door…”) in a newspaper letter to describe what he “knew” Israel was doing to Palestinians on a daily basis in the disputed territories of the West Bank.

Criticisms of Israel are legitimate – as are criticism of the US, the UK, and the Republic of New Guinea – but you have to suspect that “something else is going on” as the psychologists put it, when you see the level of passion, the seething, usually coming from people who’ve spent little time in the area. There are dozens of human rights and disputed territory issues about which they could stew and fume – Darfur, Tibet, Kashmir – but it’s Israel/Palestine that seem to attract people like a magnet.

...Gilder identifies the out-sized and misplaced passions as coming from conditioned distrust of achievement. But world attitudes are also based on a canonization of victimhood. In these days of canonized victimhood, survival, particularly if it has involved aggression (even if that aggression is in self defense) is always suspect. At the start of the period known as “the second intifada”, a Palestinian leader told New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, “We will win this conflict because we die better.” He was right...Israelis simply aren’t dying well enough for the intelligentsia of the world.