Failed State
Jacqueline Rose
- Death as a Way of Life: Dispatches from Jerusalem by David Grossman
Bloomsbury, 179 pp, £8.99, April 2003, ISBN 0 7475 6619 4
- Someone to Run With by David Grossman
Bloomsbury, 374 pp, £7.99, March 2004, ISBN 0 7475 6812 X
In David Grossman’s 1998 novel, Be My Knife, an antiquarian book-dealer starts a passionate correspondence with a woman whom he has barely caught sight of across a room. The unlikely circumstances of their relationship, its unusual fusion of intimacy and distance, allow them to say, or rather write, things which neither of them has ever admitted before. Lost to each other and themselves, mostly they seem out of touch with the world. But just occasionally you get a glimpse of how each one’s peculiar and cherished form of insanity might be inseparable from the nation that spawned their virtual love affair. ‘Somewhere in the universe,’ Yair muses in one of his letters, ‘there must be that other world we once talked about – a world of light.’ But some people, ‘unfit for such generous bounty and goodness’, would find a world like that intolerable and commit suicide. ‘Here, where we are,’ he asks – ‘is this the penal colony of that other world?’ Perhaps every person here, ‘man or woman, it doesn’t matter, old or young’, has already committed suicide.
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Letters
Vol. 26 No. 8 · 15 April 2004
From Edward Luttwak
Jacqueline Rose finds in David Grossman's writing a record of Israel as a 'failed state' (LRB, 18 March). That is an interesting way of describing a state that from 1948 till the present has advanced from poverty to a GDP per capita in the European range, even while its population increased tenfold. Very few states have done better (Ireland, Singapore) and for all their virtues, they would not pretend to compete with Israel in scientific research or overall cultural achievement, however that may be judged. But of course Israel's greatest accomplishment has been to restore the broken morale of Jews worldwide by winning its wars and battles against all comers – although I do understand that some are repelled by that very thing, seemingly viewing an incapacity to fight, if only to protect oneself from violence, as a positive moral attribute in itself. Such people see great virtue even in plain cowardice. They would no doubt find a weak and defeated and thus non-existent Israel altogether more attractive.
Edward Luttwak
Chevy Chase, Maryland
Vol. 26 No. 9 · 6 May 2004
From Jacqueline Rose
Edward Luttwak questions the description of Israel as a 'failed state' on the grounds of its GDP per capita and its scientific and cultural accomplishments, and suggests that Israel's main achievement has been to restore the morale of Jews worldwide 'by winning its wars and battles against all comers' (Letters, 15 April). He assumes that anyone challenging this view would prefer Israel not to exist. David Grossman sees his country in a potentially irreversible decline, in thrall to a militarism that is destructive of both the Palestinians and itself. He is not alone. 'Our country is going into a decline, nearing a catastrophe in all areas of economy, politics and social services and security,' Yaakov Perry, who ran Shin Bet from 1988 to 1995, commented recently. 'If we continue to live by the sword, we will continue to wallow in the mud and to destroy ourselves.' These people are passionate in their allegiance to Israel.
It is, on the contrary, Luttwak's view that Israel is never the aggressor that has been so damaging to the country since its founding in 1948. The notion of Israel as 'poor little Samson' (it is in military terms the fourth most powerful nation on earth) has placed the country under the domination of a military ethos that threatens the material well-being of its citizens, which Luttwak sees as evidence of its success. When the finance minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, recently proposed to slash NIS 4.5 billion from other ministry budgets to support the Defence Ministry, Shimon Peres said that it was as if the government were telling hundreds of thousands of elderly people facing starvation: 'If you don't have bread, eat television sets.'
More important, to describe Israel as a 'failed state' (my expression, not Grossman's) is to suggest that we are too ready to speak of 'failure', with its undertones of moral inferiority, in connection with nations that do not conform to a Western vision of civilisation. Just as it is crucial to acknowledge that terrorism is not practised only by those who don't share Western values and faiths, and that there is such a thing as state terrorism (Israel's policies in the West Bank and Gaza are an obvious example), so it might be crucial to acknowledge that a nation can be powerful and can also fail, because of the way it exercises that power. Power is not always benign, as the consequences of US and British policy in Iraq attest. Sharon may well succeed in his unilateral withdrawal from Gaza and annexation of vast swathes of the West Bank, but if he does so his success will be a catastrophe for the Middle East.
It is doubtless the case, as Luttwak suggests, that the creation of Israel in 1948 restored the morale of many Jews all over the world. The tragedy was that this imperative took such brutal precedence over Palestinian rights, and is still used to ride roughshod over them. For many Jews today, among whom I include myself, it is this continuing reality – which one could indeed describe as Israel 'winning its wars and battles against all comers' – that saps morale, while also placing the nation's future in jeopardy.
Jacqueline Rose
London NW6
From Lauro Martines
In spinning an apotheosis for Israeli achievements, Edward Luttwak forgets to mention not only the American arms and money that pour into Israel, but also the fact that so many of its scientists and engineers were born and trained in Eastern Europe and the US. If Ireland and Singapore – to take his two comparisons – had been similarly blessed, who can say how much more they might have accomplished?
Lauro Martines
London NW1
