Contra Robert Manne on Israel

Counterfactual fantasy and a penchant for beautiful losers

In his latest essay, Robert Manne enlists Hannah Arendt to argue that Israel’s creation was a mistake — or at least that it was done the wrong way. Better, he suggests, to have forgone statehood rather than provoke Arab wrath, and to have worked first toward a binational settlement with the Palestinians. He would have had Israel accept trusteeship under the US, Britain and the UN, throwing in his lot with Judah Magnes, founder of Ihud, and the cultural Zionists of Brith Shalom whose binationalism Arendt shared. What united them, Manne writes, was the conviction that “unless the Jews first made peace with the Arabs, the fulfilment of the Jewish claim to a homeland in historic Palestine…would end in disaster.”

Manne has not read how this story ends. The founders of Brith Shalom and even Magnes himself, who Manne so admires, ended their lives disillusioned following total Arab refusal to contemplate Jewish co-existence. And in subsequent decades the UN proved to be an impotent overlord.

Manne opens with two specific Arendt concerns: first, that the extinguishment of a new Israel would be the defining catastrophe of Jewish history. This did not happen! And this continues to not happen, much to the chagrin of Manne’s Arab mates. Second, in Manne’s words, that it would “destroy one of the great social experiments among the Jewish settlers in Palestine: the non-capitalist, collectivist kibbutz”. Lol. Well, that did happen. But it was not destroyed by Jewish militarism but by Jewish prosperity. Because socialism is bad, not because the Arabs quashed it. Sorry to wake you from your half-century stupor, but socialism lost.

As Manne concedes, it is a miracle that Israel managed to emerge at all. A convergence of political, military, and social dynamics provided a brief window for its emergence that any sensible person would have wagered against. Imagine wrangling Soviet and US and UN support for Jewish statehood. Britain, for example, which had provided such succor to the Zionist cause with the Balfour Declaration of 1917 proved mercurial. It subsequently changed its tune and supported Arab interests instead, preventing further Jewish migration to its Mandate in Palestine. Such were the turbulent and complex political winds of the time.

The idea of exchanging sovereignty for joint UN and US trusteeship is absurd. One can forgive it of Arendt, writing as she did contemporaneously. But for Manne — ludicrous. The US didn’t want it and the UN has repeatedly proven totally inept to manage such conflicts since. Concerning Israel alone, the record runs from U Thant's craven withdrawal of UN peacekeepers from Sinai the moment Nasser demanded it in 1967 — removing the one tripwire standing between Egypt and war — to the General Assembly's "Zionism is racism" resolution of 1975, to UNIFIL presiding over Hezbollah's rearmament in southern Lebanon. To call the UN competent in such matters is to live in a bizarro alternate reality.

Jewish statehood was not the catalyst for Arab bloodlust against the Jews. We know this because it long preceded it. The Nebi Musa riots of 1920 killed 5 Jews, the Jaffa riots of 1921 killed 47 Jews, the riots of 1929 killed 133 Jews, the Arab revolt of 1936 — 1939 killed around 500 Jews. As well as all the attacks in the lead up to statehood, where hundreds of Jews were massacred: the massacre of dozens of doctors, nurses, patients in the Hadassah medical convoy, the Ben Yehuda Street bombing killing dozens in Jerusalem, the massacre of ~150 Jews in Kfar Etzion, including surrendered defenders and civilians. No Jewish state! Just Jews.

Given this, it’s odd that Manne should wag his finger at the Irgun. As though violent resistance was not understandable in this context, and in light of a Britain blockade against Jews fleeing the killing fields of Europe to Palestine.

In One State, Two States Benny Morris writes that the massacre of the Hadassah medical convoy “was in effect the final nail in the coffin of Magnes’s binationalism”. Manne pines for the cultural Zionists of Brit Shalom, but Arthur Ruppin, a founder of Brit Shalom, concluded by 1936 that binationalism was “nothing more than a pipe dream”. The British Foreign Office’s Cadogan called it “pure eyewash”. Brit Shalom had effectively dissolved by 1933. After the 1929 riots — 130-plus Jews killed, 67 of them in Hebron — Ruppin kept his revolver at hand. Noble intentions punctured by harsh realities.

Magnes himself — the figure Manne most reveres in his piece — found “no Arab partners, or even interlocutors, who shared the binational vision”. In 1932 he wrote that “Arabs will not sit on any committee with Jews” and concluded in 1937 that “not even one Arab stood up,” and, despairing, that “Islam seemed to be a religion of the sword”.

The Jews accepted partition to a land much smaller than what they eventually got. The Arabs — arrogant and with vastly superior numbers — rejected it, invaded, and were defeated. Unfortunately, facilitated and subsided by organisations like the UN into perpetual grievance, the Palestinians have been kept as a useful bone in Israel’s throat ever since.

Would it have been better for Israel to have been founded elsewhere? Perhaps somewhere not surrounded by Arabs wishing to kill and subjugate Jews? Perhaps one of the mooted plans for an alternative in Uganda or Russia or Australia? Why not Hawaii? I like sand and surf.

Of course, this is absurd. And such fantasies are why the once dominant left of Israel has all but disappeared.

For better or worse, Israel was a Schelling point for global Jewry. Those who were skeptical or smarter than the scrappy Zionists perished in Galician killing fields and gas chambers. A nation for the Jews was unbelievably contingent and unlikely anywhere. Only armchair philosophers who have never made or built anything and have never led anyone, can point to the giants who willed that tiny state into existence then kept it alive against all odds and say — actually no, it would have been better to have done it like this or like that.

Manne would rather no state than an imperfect one. An impotent Jewry on its knees than one wielding its own destiny, however imperfectly.

Personally, I’d rather the Americans have found a way to live with the Comanches. Imagine the raiding and scalping bachelor parties. I’d also rather the dinosaurs still waltz about so I could have a pet triceratops. A man can dream!

Curiously, Manne’s reading of Arendt is incomplete. In the same book he quotes, Arendt notes that it was the Arabs that refused UN partition in 1947, and goes on to say:

The Arabs, however, instead of concluding at least local truce agreements, have decided to evacuate whole cities and towns rather than stay in Jewish-dominated territory. This behavior declares more effectively than all proclamations the Arab refusal of any compromise; it is obvious that they have decided to expend in time and numbers whatever it may take to win a decisive victory.

So even Arendt notes that Manne’s ‘Nakba’, the exile of the Arabs of the land, was at least meaningfully a result of Arab total intransigence.

Arendt was a sharp observer of politics and culture. She was also an Ashkenazi supremacist (no judgement). Totally dismissive of Arabs and Arab-esque Jews.

On top, the judges, the best of German Jewry. Below them, the prosecuting attorneys, Galicians, but still Europeans. Everything is organized by a police force that gives me the creeps, speaks only Hebrew, and looks Arabic. Some downright brutal types among them. They would obey any order. And outside the doors, the oriental mob, as if one were in Istanbul or some other half-Asiatic country. In addition, and very visible in Jerusalem, the peies and caftan Jews, who make life impossible for all the reasonable people here. (Hannah Arendt And Karl Jaspers Correspondence, Letter 285)

In this respect, she is to Manne what a wolf is to a poodle: by the time we get to Manne, we are left with a defanged, fluffy, and incomplete version of her condescension. I have no doubt he looks at brutish Jewish “half-Asiatics” with the same horror. Brutish Arabs are likely too exotic for him to treat as anything other than a fascination. Regardless, in his world, agency resides with the Jew, and specifically his lofty Ashkenazi kind (like Bibi). The Arabs kill because of the Jews, and the Arabs are killed because of the Jews. Never mind that over ten times the number of Arab Muslims have been killed by Arab Muslims since 1948, than have been killed by Jews. It’s not their statehood status that was the problem.

Arendt is one of the magnificent political writers of all time. Her errors have the excuse of contemporaneity. Manne’s do not. He might pearl clutch at the terrible choices facing Israel decade after decade, but the best he offers is the same fantasies that condemned his intellectual counterparts in Israel to historical and political oblivion. It is a terrible irony that the last vestiges of his kind in Israel — older Ashkenazi leftist Jews — were at the pointy end of Arab barbarism on October 7, tortured and massacred by the people they put such faith in.