Israel’s myopic self-interest

DURING Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, and just after the gruesome Sabra and Shatila massacres were exposed, one of us was a visiting lecturer at a southern US university.

One afternoon an administrator phoned to ask if we would care to host a high-ranking Israeli politician as a speaker in our international relations course.

We welcomed the chance. It was near the end of term and by then most of the 50 or so undergraduates had acquired a basic reading background in the grim complexities of the madhouse of world politics. Given a few days’ notice, they could be assigned additional material addressing the Israeli action, including testimony by amazingly brave Israeli dissenters.

The great day arrived and in strode the burly Israeli politician, leader of a small religious party forming an essential component of the ruling Likud coalition, and also head of the Israeli equivalent of the American Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The format was that he would speak in defence of Israeli activities for 30 minutes and take questions over the remainder of the session. The students, with very few exceptions, ranged from conservative to centrist. Most were inclined to think alarmingly well of then President Ronald Reagan.

When the class commenced our visiting dignitary behaved remarkably like a Chicago machine politician (only more articulate), the blunt kind accustomed to calling in favours or putting the squeeze on wayward constituents. His case for Israeli policy was brute simplicity itself: pure unapologetic realpolitik. His aim was not so much to justify Israeli decisions as to persuade what he regarded as naïve young Yanks that Israel was a vital US asset in the Middle East, operating way out there on “on the front line” for their sakes, and therefore it required their unquestioning support. It was plainly in the average Americans’ self-interest to do so, he argued, so why quibble with how Israel acted?

Such ruthless honesty, or honest ruthlessness, though, failed to stir the desired response. A glaring contradiction in his argument is that if everyone is motivated only by self-interest then the Israeli government must do whatever it does for itself and not for the US. No need to be grateful for that. The students spotted this flaw and barraged him with challenging questions and ripostes. On reflection, this rough and tough fellow was utterly indifferent to perceptions that differed from his own, and could not imagine any other way of appraising matters. Everything boiled down to myopic self-interest and crude power.