In 1949, historian Arthur Scheslinger Jr., referencing the development of postwar liberal politics, lauded the tendency of Americans to embrace “the vital center.” Unlike many other nations around the world, the United States rejected political extremism, choosing instead a via media, or third way, to moderate between those on the far left and those on the far right. What America might have lost in free-spirited debate, it gained in a stable democracy rooted in consensus ideals and an accommodationist political culture.
Recent calls for boycotts against the state of Israel challenge Scheslinger’s vital center and are part of the growing normalization of political extremism in the United States and around the world. Boycott defenders have constructed a revisionist narrative of Israeli history and politics that is rooted more in their underlying anti-Zionist ideology than it is in offering a complex and textured understanding of the Jewish state and its Arab neighbors. It recasts victimization, replacing Jews, who have historically been perceived as quintessential outsiders, with Palestinians, who are cast as sufferers from Jewish colonialism, imperialism and abuse of power. With this narrative, ideology trumps complexity and the political extreme drowns out the vital center. Fortunately, the boycott efforts appear to be failing as even liberal-left leaning organizations, such as the American Federation of Teachers, have rejected the rhetoric of boycott organizers. Here in the Bay Area especially, where the notion of a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict enjoys strong support, the rhetoric, tactics and ideology of boycott organizers should be rejected as well.
What was in Scheslinger’s era a call for Cold War unity translates in our time and place to a peaceful, moderate and centrist political path to a two-state solution in the Middle East. The boycott movement, and the rhetoric of its supporters, fails in each of those regards.
A more complex understanding of the history must consider the fact that pluralist democracies, especially those that have faced repeated military threats from their neighboring countries, must engage a two-track civic challenge. They must preserve civil rights while, at the same time, protect the sovereignty of their nation. The state of Israel has achieved remarkable success in the most challenging conditions. Eschewing the militant radicalism of nations such as Iran and Syria, Israel took Scheslinger’s vital center to heart, empowering the Israeli Supreme Court to review political decisions made by the government, enfranchising Arabs, who represent 20 percent of the Israeli population, with representation in parliament and civil society, and, just last June, maintaining the rule of law over the interests of Orthodox Jewish dissenters when thousands of Israeli police protected marchers in Jerusalem’s gay pride parade.
In at least one way, though, anti-Israel boycott rhetoric does play on American political sensibilities. Inaccurate comparisons between Israeli policy and South African apartheid, for example, seek to exploit American concerns about racism in advance of anti-Zionist ideology. This is ironic because, on the American political scene, Jews have been in the forefront of the civil rights movement and the boycott as a political tool. Jews have voted more liberal and Democratic than any other white ethnic group in the 20th (and 21st) centuries. American Jews tied their political future to the end of segregation in the 1950s, and when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Ala., bus in 1955, Jews backed the ensuing boycott and, at great personal risk, began a decadelong connection to the movement.
The anti-Israel boycott movement is misplaced. In both the United States and Israel, there is hope for finding a via media. At a time when boycott supporters are rejecting compromise and understanding, the notion of a negotiated two-state solution holds the center. Rather than join the ideologues intent on demonizing Israel, let’s take a centrist path, reject these anti-Zionist diatribes and find a middle ground.
Marc Dollinger holds the Richard and Rhoda Goldman Chair in Jewish Studies and Social Responsibility at San Francisco State University.