Black Earth(141)

These forms of counterglobal thinking increase the possibility that particular groups can be blamed for planetary phenomena. In large parts of the world, hundreds of millions of Muslims are likely to face, as a result of climate change, a collapse of possibilities for life that will have no local explanation. Places that contribute almost nothing to climate change are battered by its consequences. Bangladesh, a Muslim country with half the population of the United States, is wracked by storms and floods exacerbated by the rising seas. In Libya, by contrast, the annual drought is expected to lengthen from one hundred to two hundred days. The people of Egypt depend upon the Nile, which runs four thousand miles through desert before it reaches Cairo. Forces beyond the control of Egyptians have made ours a planet where the Nile can run dry.

It is already the case that North African Muslims bring antisemitic beliefs to Europe. But what if such Muslims in North Africa and the Middle East actually blamed Jews for environmental disasters? In Exodus 4:9, a text shared by Muslim, Jewish, and Christian traditions, God warns that “the water which thou takest out of the river shall become blood upon the dry land.” The Jews who live in the Middle East, citizens of Israel, might be at risk in a time of water shortages. One element of the struggle for control of the West Bank and the Golan Heights is concern about water supplies. Israelis drink from aquifers under the occupied territories. Although Israel has the military and technological capacity to protect its population from the consequences of climate change, the continuing desertification of the Middle East might generate both regional conflict and the demand for scapegoats. In a Middle Eastern war for resources, Muslims might blame Jews for both local problems and the general ecological crisis; that was, after all, Hitler’s approach. Naturally, Israelis could also blame Muslims and seek to draw their American allies into a larger conflict.

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Zionists of all orientations were correct to believe that statehood was crucial to future national existence. The destruction of European states in the 1930s was a precondition to all of the major Nazi crimes, including the Holocaust itself. Most Zionists of the Left and Center believed that a state of Israel could be established by some arrangement of international law. This proved to be correct, but only after the perpetration of the Holocaust. The Revisionist Zionists of the Far Right were correct in fearing an imminent catastrophe in the 1930s and reasoned that covert cooperation with the Polish state was therefore justified.

Since 1977, when Menachem Begin came to power in Israel, national terrorism has moved closer to the center of Israeli national myth. What the glorious retellings of the history of Irgun and Lehi often omit is the Polish connection. The careers of Irgun’s commander Begin and Lehi’s leaders Avraham Stern and Yitzhak Shamir are inconceivable without their Polish background and backers. After Begin, Shamir would serve as prime minister from 1983 to 1984 and then again from 1986 to 1992. Other comrades in arms and Polish clients resurfaced in positions of authority. Eliahu Meridor, once trained in the tactics of terrorism by the Poles, would be elected to the Israeli parliament three times. Lankin, also trained by the Poles, would be Israel’s ambassador in South Africa. Their political tradition, Likud, was the extension of the Revisionist Zionism that had flourished under the protection of the Polish state in the second half of the 1930s. The Polish connection might seem to have been broken with the rise of Benjamin Netanyahu, the first Israeli prime minister born in Israel and the first from Likud who is not a native speaker of Polish. Netanyahu speaks American English instead, in line with his own education and with Israel’s present geopolitical affiliation. Yet even here the link to Polish policy is strong: During the high tide of cooperation with Poland, Netanyahu’s father was the private secretary to Vladimir Jabotinsky, the founder of Revisionist Zionism.

The ambivalence of interwar Polish support for Revisionist Zionists suggests a similar tension within American support for an Israel governed by their successors. In the late 1930s, Polish leaders and much of the Polish population were pro-Zionist because they wanted Jews to leave Poland during an economic crisis. Some Americans of the early twenty-first century are pro-Israel because they want Jews in the Holy Land during the coming apocalypse. The United States of today resembles Poland in the 1930s in the sense that more Christians are active supporters of the Zionist idea than are Jews. Some of Israel’s American political allies—evangelical Christians—tend to deny the reality of climate change while supporting hydrocarbon policies that accelerate it. Among these American evangelicals are millions of dispensationalists, who support Israel because they believe that disasters there herald the second coming of Jesus Christ. In the 1940s, dispensationalists maintained that the Holocaust was the work of God because it forced Jews to reconsider their errors and move to the Promised Land. Although such a sharp substitution of politics by apocalypse is a minority view, a displacement of the political history of the State of Israel within a story of the end times is common in American society.