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Israel and the Arab world. I don't think that's only because this is a top–
ical point at the moment, but because there are obvious affinities on
both sides. America tends
to
be more pro-Israel; the European intelli–
gentsia tends to be more pro-Arab. I wonder if the panel could draw any
comparison between the state of the European intelligentsia, which Liah
Greenfeld has described as being in search of the glory of nations that
they think has somehow been disappointed vis-a-vis the United States,
and the intellectuals of the Arab world, in terms of their view of Israel?
Liah
Greenfeld:
Thank you, Chand ler. We are dealing with the problem
of intellectuals in general. The problem of secular intellectuals all over
the world is the problem of nationalism-which is the explanation of
everything that is happening, including the Arab-Israeli conflict, includ–
ing September
I I
and the attacks on the United States, by people who
are called, for no good reason, Islamic fundamentalists . There is a very
close connection between nationalism and intellectuals. When we say
Europeans are anti-American, obviously we are not talking about all
Europeans or even most Europeans. The lower classes in Europe are not
anti-American, but pro-American. They like
to
wear American clothes
and American baseball caps. They listen
to
American music. Most of the
teenagers, a very large percentage of the population in European coun–
tries, are pro-American. To succeed, European rock stars have
to
make
it in the United States. And the only truly, wildly popular rock stars in
various European countries are those who adopt the American model
and continue the American musical traditions. The people who are
staunchly anti-American are the intellectuals and the people around
them. This is pretty homogeneous on the continent, that is, in France,
Germany, and Russia, where intellectual elites are not as homogeneous
as in the United Kingdom. They are anti-American for the same reason
the French were violently anti-English in the eighteenth century, for the
same reason the Germans in the early nineteenth century were violently
anti-French, and for the same reason the Russians have been so from the
moment of their self-definition. The intelligentsia, from the very begin–
ning of their self-definition as nations, have been violently anti-Western.
America now represents the strongest country in the world; it also has
the aura of moral dominance, not cultural dominance. It is the bearer of
the Western liberal values for which all the European nations desper–
ately compete. Israel is representative of the United States or of the
Western liberal values in the Middle East. In any case, Jews, from the
beginning of this modern process, first in Germany, and then in France
and Russia, were always considered the representatives of liberal
