In 1954, the year following Josef Stalin?s death, the French intellectual Jean Paul Sartre, author of the classic existential novel Iron in the Soul, wrote in the journal Liberation, ?Soviet citizens criticize their government much more effectively than we do.?
Furthermore, he later added, ?Soviet citizens do not travel abroad, not because they are prevented from doing so, but because they have no desire to leave the country.? This was at a time when the Stalinist iron fist was still as tightly clenched around the people?s throats as ever. Freedom of speech had been brutally extinguished. Labor camps, filled with hundreds of thousands of war veterans, writers, middle class professionals and political enemies groaned under the weight of their failing capacities. Spies were everywhere, with children reporting their parents and students their teachers. Yet Sartre, together with his equally famous paramour Simone de Beauvoir, remained oblivious. Convinced of the superiority and righteousness of the communist cause, Josef Stalin?s regime stood as a model of human progress, unsullied by damning reports to the contrary.
Sartre and de Beauvoir and their socialist coterie reigned at the pinnacle of Europe?s intellectual community for decades and stood as unrepentant Stalin boosters until the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn?s case-closing denunciation, The Gulag Archipelago, in 1973. But revisionism and denial among intellectuals did not die with Sartre and de Beauvoir. Its spirit lives on in myriad academic and left wing incarnations. Nowhere more so than in the left wing intellectual community?s assessment of the Arab-Israeli dispute. One needs only to read recent revisionist accounts of last summer?s Camp David summit by such writers as Deborah Sontag (New York Times), Robert Malley (New York Review of Books) and Yossi Beilin (Ha?aretz) to be convinced that the members of the left wing intelligentsia have staked a claim to the same morally muddied terrain as their predecessors.
That should not be surprising. Today it is possible to read Middle East commentary in the Economist, Le Monde, the New York Times and Ha?aretz with the kind of bewilderment we once reserved only for tabloids. Here is argued, in all seriousness, that Yasser Arafat?s resort to terror and violence in September 2000 was a natural result of the absence of Israeli flexibility at Camp David and, remarkably, should even be excused. Here we read from a Clinton adviser to Camp David his impression that Clinton and Barak trapped Arafat and that Barak?s unprecedented offer of 95% of the West Bank together with most of East Jerusalem was not a serious proposal. Here we have an Israeli political leader telling us that his negotiations with the Palestinians at Taba in December 2000, while Israelis were being murdered on the roads by Palestinian snipers, was the prelude to a historic peace treaty.
This is in spite of evidence, which has bubbled to the surface since the summit, that Arafat and his henchmen may have been plotting the Intifada even as Camp David was taking place. Arafat?s team did not bother to make even one counter-proposal at the summit and the relentless Palestinian insistence on the right of return for 3 million refugees is an obvious deal breaker that no Israeli government, even one of the far-left, could ever accept.
The British historian, Paul Johnson, who wrote a fascinating examination of the private lives of celebrated intellectuals, has shown that certain members of the intelligentsia, whose prime motivation is either ego gratification or self publicity, will take stands that vitiate against both logic and their own principles in order to advance their careers. But the level of cognitive dissonance necessary to bury one?s conscience so completely must require something more. Certainly the way in which the Cliveden Set (Hitler apologists) and the Fabian Society (Stalin apologists), who were thinkers, leaders and champions of freedom, remained so unmoved by mounting evidence of concentration camps and forced labor gangs, is one of history?s more egregious examples of moral blindness. The Arafat apologists, however, have succeeded in raising that brand of denial to a new level of acceptability. How these liberal commentators, who have access to far more graphic depictions of daily events, could excuse Arafat?s resort to terror, his tolerance for targeting babies and children or the continued incitement and anti-Semitism of the Palestinian media - no matter what the Palestinian leader did or did not do at Camp Damp David - is truly a thing of wonder. But is the repeated incidence of self-delusion an example of career advancement or is it just plain heartlessness?
Given the apparent drift of U.S Middle East policy into neutrality and the tacit endorsement of Arafat that it suggests, we should now pay heed to American literary critic Lionel Trilling?s admonition that ?what begins as failure of perception among intellectuals, finds its fulfillment in policy and action.? In the meantime, those intellectuals who still consider Arafat a worthy or even a possible peace partner, might check their own spiritual barometers for a malignant condition that should be recognized, unmistakably, as a classic case of iron in the soul.
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Avi Davis is a senior editorial columnist for Jewsweek.com and a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Center for Strategic Studies. His book on the West Bank will appear in the Fall.
Furthermore, he later added, ?Soviet citizens do not travel abroad, not because they are prevented from doing so, but because they have no desire to leave the country.? This was at a time when the Stalinist iron fist was still as tightly clenched around the people?s throats as ever. Freedom of speech had been brutally extinguished. Labor camps, filled with hundreds of thousands of war veterans, writers, middle class professionals and political enemies groaned under the weight of their failing capacities. Spies were everywhere, with children reporting their parents and students their teachers. Yet Sartre, together with his equally famous paramour Simone de Beauvoir, remained oblivious. Convinced of the superiority and righteousness of the communist cause, Josef Stalin?s regime stood as a model of human progress, unsullied by damning reports to the contrary.
Sartre and de Beauvoir and their socialist coterie reigned at the pinnacle of Europe?s intellectual community for decades and stood as unrepentant Stalin boosters until the publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn?s case-closing denunciation, The Gulag Archipelago, in 1973. But revisionism and denial among intellectuals did not die with Sartre and de Beauvoir. Its spirit lives on in myriad academic and left wing incarnations. Nowhere more so than in the left wing intellectual community?s assessment of the Arab-Israeli dispute. One needs only to read recent revisionist accounts of last summer?s Camp David summit by such writers as Deborah Sontag (New York Times), Robert Malley (New York Review of Books) and Yossi Beilin (Ha?aretz) to be convinced that the members of the left wing intelligentsia have staked a claim to the same morally muddied terrain as their predecessors.
That should not be surprising. Today it is possible to read Middle East commentary in the Economist, Le Monde, the New York Times and Ha?aretz with the kind of bewilderment we once reserved only for tabloids. Here is argued, in all seriousness, that Yasser Arafat?s resort to terror and violence in September 2000 was a natural result of the absence of Israeli flexibility at Camp David and, remarkably, should even be excused. Here we read from a Clinton adviser to Camp David his impression that Clinton and Barak trapped Arafat and that Barak?s unprecedented offer of 95% of the West Bank together with most of East Jerusalem was not a serious proposal. Here we have an Israeli political leader telling us that his negotiations with the Palestinians at Taba in December 2000, while Israelis were being murdered on the roads by Palestinian snipers, was the prelude to a historic peace treaty.
This is in spite of evidence, which has bubbled to the surface since the summit, that Arafat and his henchmen may have been plotting the Intifada even as Camp David was taking place. Arafat?s team did not bother to make even one counter-proposal at the summit and the relentless Palestinian insistence on the right of return for 3 million refugees is an obvious deal breaker that no Israeli government, even one of the far-left, could ever accept.
The British historian, Paul Johnson, who wrote a fascinating examination of the private lives of celebrated intellectuals, has shown that certain members of the intelligentsia, whose prime motivation is either ego gratification or self publicity, will take stands that vitiate against both logic and their own principles in order to advance their careers. But the level of cognitive dissonance necessary to bury one?s conscience so completely must require something more. Certainly the way in which the Cliveden Set (Hitler apologists) and the Fabian Society (Stalin apologists), who were thinkers, leaders and champions of freedom, remained so unmoved by mounting evidence of concentration camps and forced labor gangs, is one of history?s more egregious examples of moral blindness. The Arafat apologists, however, have succeeded in raising that brand of denial to a new level of acceptability. How these liberal commentators, who have access to far more graphic depictions of daily events, could excuse Arafat?s resort to terror, his tolerance for targeting babies and children or the continued incitement and anti-Semitism of the Palestinian media - no matter what the Palestinian leader did or did not do at Camp Damp David - is truly a thing of wonder. But is the repeated incidence of self-delusion an example of career advancement or is it just plain heartlessness?
Given the apparent drift of U.S Middle East policy into neutrality and the tacit endorsement of Arafat that it suggests, we should now pay heed to American literary critic Lionel Trilling?s admonition that ?what begins as failure of perception among intellectuals, finds its fulfillment in policy and action.? In the meantime, those intellectuals who still consider Arafat a worthy or even a possible peace partner, might check their own spiritual barometers for a malignant condition that should be recognized, unmistakably, as a classic case of iron in the soul.
----------
Avi Davis is a senior editorial columnist for Jewsweek.com and a Senior Fellow at the Freeman Center for Strategic Studies. His book on the West Bank will appear in the Fall.