Politics And Betrayal: A Defense Of The “Traitors” Of Compromise

-Essay-

BUENOS AIRES — The Israeli writer Amos Oz once told the BBC’s Newsnight, “I’ve been called a traitor many times in my life … I think I’m in wonderful company.”

He said he wore the charge, which was thrown at him for supporting a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict “like a badge of honor on my lapel.” History, he told his interviewer, “is full of people, men and women, who happen to be ahead of their time and were accused of treason by some of their contemporaries.”

His autobiographical novel Panther in the Basement recounts his childhood in Jerusalem in 1947, a year before the UN vote to divide the UK’s Mandatory Palestine into the states of Israel and Palestine (by October 1948).

At the age of 12, he wrote, he befriended a British sergeant, which prompted his friends to call him a traitor, since Jews were then fighting to expel British forces from the region. Later, he would take part in the Six-Day War, and then the Yom Kippur War, as a reservist. And yet, he always had sympathy for the Arabs, insisting the Palestinians had a right to their own state and rejecting fanaticism on both sides.

The three “traitors” of Spain

The Spanish writer Javier Cercas published in 2009 Anatomía de un instante (“Anatomy of an Instant”) on the 1981 attempted coup in Spain. Planned by sympathizers of the rightist Spanish Falange a few years after the death of the country’s military ruler, General Francisco Franco, it yielded memorable images of an army convoy outside parliament in Madrid, and the Civil Guard Colonel Antonio Tejero, firing shots inside as legislators cowered under their seats.

But as Cercas’ historical novel relates in gripping detail, three personalities remained standing, namely the prime minister, Adolfo Suárez, himself a member of the Falange, his deputy (and a soldier), Manuel Gutiérrez Mellado and the secretary-general of the Communist Party Santiago Carrillo.

The concept of traitor is intrinsically linked to fanatical constructs.

All three were in some ways “traitors” to their respective sides: Suárez abandoned the conservatives keen to maintain Franco’s order, Gutiérrez Mellado opposed an attempt to restore military rule, and Carrillo renounced Leninism (accepting a constitutional monarchy), or the authoritarian path to socialism. They were “betrayals” that would allow the consolidation of a nascent Spanish democracy and Spain’s entry into the concert of democratic nations.

What is a “traitor”?

The concept of traitor is intrinsically linked to fanatical constructs. Fanatics need to impose their views and beliefs on others, and see dissent or differing loyalties as a personal affront. For them, the worst is when “one of your own” disagrees with them.

So when France’s General de Gaulle, a hero of the country’s 20th-century patriots, decided to allow Algeria’s independence from France, he made himself a target for some nationalists. Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister, was denounced as a traitor for meeting with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, and was later murdered, by a fanatic.

Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat, who spoke in Israel’s parliament after the two states signed a peace treaty, was also shot in Cairo. Many Americans considered President Abraham Lincoln a traitor for abolishing slavery in the Southern U.S., which led to his assassination in 1865. And the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, was considered a traitor by many citizens for implementing reforms that ended the Soviet Union. The threat of a coup was a constant factor in his time in power.

Fanaticism and treason are cousins that incite each other, poison the atmosphere and cast a veil over realities, hiding the real problems we must tackle.

Abandoning black-and-white terms

In our country, Argentina, divisions have a very strong element of fanaticism, and are largely, though not entirely, fueled by social media.

We have stigmatized our adversaries and turned them into enemies, and denounce as traitors anyone who might agree on something with them. This makes it difficult to find a way out of the country’s economic and political impasse, and turns alternating governments into nothing more than a harmful pendulum.

We must stop persecuting those who simply disagree.

When divisions take schismatic proportions, parties will find it hard to forge state policies based on broad agreements that include different, but also diluted, opinions.

We need to abandon the black-and-white to see the shades of gray, and hear things outside the noisy, provocative echo chamber of online media. We must stop persecuting those who simply disagree. Expect nothing good to come out of a society where one half hates the other, and which labels critics of their chosen government as traitors.