A Retired U.S. Ambassador

In Choosing Tribalism, Israelis Have Rejected Role in World’s Future

By Carleton S. Coon, Jr.

Likud’s electoral victory, while narrow, is decisive. The momentum toward normalization of Israel’s relations with its neighbors has been stopped. Much will flow from that decision; it now appears highly unlikely that the peace process will be resumed in any serious way in the foreseeable future. Friends of Israel in America who supported the peace process must now regretfully conclude that the destiny of world Jewry lies in America, not in Israel.

America remains, despite many serious flaws, humanity’s best and brightest experiment in detribalization. Our immigrant tradition remains a catalyst, taking second-generation Koreans and South Asians and endowing them with attitudes that make them partners, not ethnic rivals just as was the case a couple of generations ago with the children of immigrants from places like Hungary and Ireland. I commend to my Jewish friends that this is where it’s at, America is the pilot project for the rest of the human race.

Now look at Israel. It was based on a dream, a dream dreamt by millions of European Jews who had been actively persecuted, hounded often even to death, for generations. They dreamt of a place of their own, where Jews could hold their heads high, where nobody could be persecuted for being a Jew, because the Jews themselves were in charge—they had their own land.

And look at what happened to that dream. They got their own land, but at what cost? The Palestinians they dispossessed were among the most talented, best educated people in the Arab world, and the land the Israelis took was some of the lushest, most productive and desirable territory in that world. The harshness of the Arab reaction was inevitable. The resultant hostility over the last two generations has gradually changed Israel from a nation of immigrants full of hope and idealism into a beleaguered, defensive, embittered group of settlers, snarling and spitting at the world around them. Instead of becoming a tribe that took the lead position in leading humanity out of tribalism, they became the toughest, most tribal tribe on the planet.

Until this last election there was still hope. Nearly 50 percent of the Israeli electorate was willing to reject the Masada mentality, to rely at least to a limited extent on the good faith of people who were not of their tribe, to gamble for peace.

Americans of all faiths must deplore the decision taken by the Israeli electorate. About all we can do now is ensure that if the Likud party does indeed march its embattled nation off the cliff of Masada, it will not be able to pull us into the abyss along with it.

Fellow Americans of the Jewish faith should reject the idea that Jerusalem is their Mecca. The heartland of their culture is right here, in New York City and elsewhere in the United States. Israel has voted that it intends to be a sideshow, albeit a rather noisy one. The Jews who help lead humanity into the next millennium will be the ones over here; the ones in Israel will be too busy just surviving to be much help.

Carleton S. Coon, Jr. is a retired career foreign service officer who served as U.S. ambassador to Nepal from 1981 to 1984. His late father, a prominent American anthropologist, was the author of a number of widely read books that dealt extensively with the peoples of the Middle East and South Asia and their histories.