Israel's isolation is now complete

Without seeming to overdo the comparison, I'll say this: Israel is the most isolated — and in certain quarters the most reviled — entity in the world today. Even in the United States, where it has for years enjoyed the status of a sacred cow that commentators would not dare subject to moral scrutiny lest they be branded anti-Semitic, this compelling fact is now beginning to be broached in public debate.

The Israeli ambassador in Washington, Michael Oren, is convinced, however, that Israel is not isolated at all. In a piece on the op-ed page of the Washington Post recently, he said that "Israel does not stand alone". Far from it. "Many democracies stand staunchly with it", he wrote. And the devil, he posited, with those political analysts in the national media, like John Heilman, Nicholas Kristof and Thomas Friedman, not to mention the newly appointed Secretary of Defence, Leon Panetta, who asserted recently that Israel is indeed "increasingly isolated" in the international community.

To be sure, Oren is no dummy. Israel always makes sure that its ambassadors in Washington, a pivotal capital for Tel Aviv, are experienced diplomats as well as accomplished academics and intellectuals. The American-born Oren is a former historian by calling and the author of several books, including Power, Faith and Fantasy: A History of American Involvement in the Middle East (2002). A predecessor of his at the embassy was Itimar Rabinovich, yet another academic who had authored several books, including Brink of Peace: The Israeli-Syrian Negotiations (1999).

Darling of the West

All of which brings us back to Israel's beleaguered condition as an isolated state, with few, if any, friends, left to stand by it. The isolation is all too clear. Thus, when someone like Oren avers, with a straight face, that this not a fact for all to see, he is raising very serious doubts — as former prime minister Golda Meir had done in June, 1969, when she claimed that "the Palestinians do not exist" — about the professional skills of his optometrist.

There was a time, not so long ago, when Israel was the darling of the western world, whose establishment in Palestine in 1948 expatiated Europeans of their guilt over the treatment they had meted out to Jewish communities in their midst. And "tiny Israel" was an underdog surrounded by dreadful Asiatics hell-bent on "driving it into the sea". For two decades Israel was seen as a new nation with a pioneering people, alluring and glamorous as they "turned desert into orchard". And why bother consider the fact that any meaningful assessment of Israel's creation could not — should not — be advanced independently of the impact that such a creation has had on the lives and destiny of the native people of Palestine? Then came 1967, and with it came the true face of Israel — the coloniser, the occupier, the warmonger.

The problem for Israel is that, in the post-colonial world, no country does what it has done over the last 44 years and hopes to get away with it. In the olden days, a colonial master could put down, exploit and subjugate the "restless natives" with the swish of a few muskets, with nary an objection from anyone. Not in our time, when colonising another people is seen as an anomaly. But here's Israel, a century after the Wilsonian principle of self-determination was propounded at Versailles, occupying that hazy terrain between colonial values, that suffuse its Zionist tradition, and a modern world that sees those values as anathema.

Well, the 21-gun salutes have stopped. This entity, like the proverbial guest from hell, has long since worn out its welcome. And just as apartheid South Africa found itself a beached whale on the shore in 1994, so is Israel beginning to find itself today. And, yes, it is isolated, alone and beleaguered, precisely because its practices are out of tune with the times we inhabit.

The chilling and violent quest for wealth and power that the Euro-American states conducted beyond their borders in the middle of the 19th century, for example, gave way in the middle of the 20th to a shadowy kind of hegemonic leadership; where a hegemon like the US creates legitimacy by establishing rules for other states to which it also presumably submits — a far cry from colonial times when Britain's consul general in Egypt sent British troops and tanks to surround the Abdeen Palace in Cairo, in 1942, in order to force King Farouk to accept London's choice of a prime minister (from the Wafd Party), at pain of being presented with a decree for abdication. Those times are gone forever.

Not for Israel, though, which continues to draw its weld of sensibility, whether consciously or not, from its archetypal roots in the shtetl, the isolated ghetto communities of Central and Eastern Europe, where Jews lived apart, bedevilled by constant existential fears of an outside world with which they shared a hidden fraternity of mutual loathing. Yes, Israel is beleaguered and isolated. All for good reason. 

Fawaz Turki is a journalist, lecturer and author based in Washington. He is the author of The Disinherited: Journal of a Palestinian Exile.