ESSAY
page 1 of 7 | next
Gaza and After: An Interview with Paul Berman
PAUL BERMAN IS A writer on politics and literature, an editor at Dissent and The New Republic, a professor of Journalism at New York University, and a preeminent public intellectual. He has written or edited eight books, including, most recently, Carl Sandburg: Selected Poems, edited with an introduction, published by the Library of America in 2006.
Many of Berman's political writings have analyzed progressive political movements and their ideas as well as the political movements and ideologies that have challenged these ideas in the modern era. In two of his books - A Tale of Two Utopias, published in 1996 and Power and the Idealists, published in 2005 - Berman analyzed the intellectual evolution of the student radicals of 1968, both in the United States and Europe. In Terror and Liberalism, published in 2003, Berman examined the ideas which underpin radical Islamist political movements and illuminated the connections between Islamist and European totalitarian ideologies.
In the wake of Israel's war against Hamas, I sat down with Paul Berman to discuss the war, the Obama Administration and the Middle East, and the persistence of antisemitism in our own time.
How have you judged Israel's actions against Hamas? Do you think Israel used disproportionate force against Hamas?
There is an obligation to live, which means that Israel has not just the right but the obligation to defend herself. Judging the proportionality of the Israeli actions runs into a complication, though - something of a logical bind.
It is now and then noted in the press that Hamas, in its charter, calls for the elimination of Israel - though, actually, the charter goes further yet, which is almost never noted. Article Seven of the charter, citing one of the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, makes clear that Hamas acknowledges a religious duty to kill the Jews. It's all pretty explicit. Which Jews in particular must be killed, in order to bring about, as the charter puts it, the "Last Hour?" Article Seven merely stipulates "the Jews" - which leaves open the possibility, I would think, of killing all of the Jews, or at least (judging from other sections of the charter) the Jews who inhabit any place that is now or used to be Islamic. In any case, the Jews of Israel.
History has some experience with political movements that proclaim in their founding documents the intention of killing the Jews
What is Israel trying to fend off, then? Two possibilities. First: it's not so hard to imagine that, if Hamas were allowed to prosper unimpeded, and if its allies and fellow-thinkers in Hezbollah and the Iranian government and its nuclear program likewise prospered, the goal announced in Article Seven could be largely achieved. History has some experience with political movements that proclaim in their founding documents the intention of killing the Jews. And so, a first possibility is that Israel is up against military enemies who have every intention of committing a genocide, and who might conceivably succeed. The possibility that Israel is defending itself against a genocide ought to lead any reasonable person to grant the Israelis a degree of latitude in judging what is a proportionate action - even if, as Michael Walzer points out, an invocation of genocidal dangers could also end up as a justification for doing too much.
However, a second possibility. The Hamas charter is full of wild language - not just the part about killing the Jews, but also the invocation of the Protocols of Zion and of an antisemitic theory of history. But maybe all of this stuff should be regarded merely as an overwrought cry of pain - an expression of powerlessness. Maybe there is a kind of pathos of victimhood and suffering in Hamas' ideas, and not much more.
- page 1 of 7
- next
