Flags

Flags

Michael Walzer: Flags

Left-wing politics is sometimes drearily repetitive?the same mistakes again and again. I suppose that right-wing politics is no different, but I haven?t lived through those repetitions. Here in Jerusalem, I am watching leftists arguing about flags in much the same way that we argued about flags in the Vietnam era, and the spectacle is depressing.

In the 1960s, some American leftists insisted on carrying Vietcong flags in our demonstrations, and other leftists insisted on burning the American flag. Some of us thought this was crazy. We defended the ?right? to burn the flag, which the courts eventually vindicated, but we knew that this defense was a political disaster for us. The Vietcong flags were also a political disaster; carrying them was a sure way to lose hearts and minds in the USA. They were a moral mistake too, for the Vietnamese communists were not our comrades, and we should have sustained a political opposition to them even while we were fighting to end the military opposition.

I always believed that the flag wars contributed, in some small but not insignificant way, to the split between leftist opponents of our Vietnam engagement and those patriotic Americans who had, since the days of the New Deal, voted with us. We lost the support of much of the white working class?the people who became, years later, the ?Reagan Democrats? and helped to shift the country rightwards. No doubt, there were many reasons for the shift. Still, the lesson of the flag wars seems obvious: never surrender the symbols of the nation to your political opponents.

But that is exactly what Israeli leftists, or some of them, are doing today. In a ?solidarity? march for an independent Palestinian state earlier in July, roughly 90 percent of the marchers were Israeli Jews, but all the flags were Palestinian. Israeli flags were banned at the insistence of the Palestinians, who said that they wouldn?t join the march unless their flags were the only ones carried. In the event, not many of them joined anyway. The Israelis agreed to the ban (though many of my friends were unhappy about it), arguing that their flag had become the symbol of occupation and oppression. But that was only true because the settlers and their far-right supporters always march with the flag, while the Left has given it up. And that may help explain why leftist demonstrations and marches are so small these days.

There are many reasons, of course, for the current weakness of the Left. But its militants might begin to overcome their weakness if they were seen by their fellow citizens to be insisting, with a strong (rather than a bleeding) heart, that solidarity has to be a two-way street. They should say to the Palestinians: we will march with your flag only if you march with ours. And they should say to all Israel: our program, two states for two peoples, offers the best hope of securing the national sovereignty that this flag, which we carry proudly, is supposed to represent.

I tell this to my friends, but I am writing it only for the Dissent blog. Leftists here have to work this through for themselves. No one learns from what happened to someone else, half a century ago.