adapted from www.harvardsquarecommentary.org

HARVARD SQUARE COMMENTARY

December 31, 2007

Israel’s Baleful Fallacies and Settlements and Occupation,

and, Despite All, Her Cogent Case

I

On the same day and page last week that the online Jerusalem Post reported that Ha’aretz Daily’s Editor-in-Chief said to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that “Israel wants to be raped,”* and that it had always been his “wet dream” to tell her, which was David Landau’s horrifically offensive way of speaking the truth that pushing Israel would be good for peace, The Jerusalem Post also reports Daniel Pipes telling in his view “why a Palestinian economic collapse would be good for peace.”**

So basically, on the same day, it reports Landau and Pipes saying essentially the same thing: That there will be required pushes to get to peace. But ironically, although Landau’s phraseology was so horribly offensive as to be beyond all belief, it is possible (though a bit sickeningly) to get behind it to his actual idea, which would then seem benign, that a friendly US should push to help get peace and security for both peoples; while both Pipes’ language and his idea as well were offensive, that one side (the Palestinians) to suffer an economic collapse would be good for peace.

Sadly Pipes’ offensive comment does not surprise me. But Landau’s does.

Consider the reaction if anyone said that Israel that needed an economic collapse to bring peace, in order to see how callous it would be to wish it upon either people. Neither side deserves an economic collapse to bring peace. As for Ha’aretz’s David Landau, when freed of his deeply insulting and offensive mischaracterization of his own idea, he is correct that a trustworthy and honest friend, the United States, is needed to push both sides forward a bit to help to bring peace and security for everyone.

But for all people who want the US to intervene more compassionately and persuasively and urgently on both sides of the conflict in order to help Israelis and Palestinians alike, not hurt them, this could be one of the most harmful and insulting comments in the history of the conflict. It is appalling. And how “sophisticated” could what he has said been, as The Post reports he insists it was, if he actually made use of such language?

It was a grave and outrageous insult to women (as well as to Rice personally, and to all men who support women); it was a grave and outrageous insult to Israel; and it was both a crude and outrageously inaccurate political analogy, because rape fundamentally harms, and the goal of US involvement is fundamentally to help.

One wonders whether Landau will be able to keep his Editor-in-Chief’s job at Ha’aretz after such a comment to Rice.

The biggest tragedy could be its injury to the region’s people if it causes significant damage to the progressive cause of getting the United States more forcefully to prevail upon both sides to bring about confidence-building, compromises, binding agreements with verifiable internal steps and external guarantees, and lasting peace. Since these steps are indispensable for any future of Israeli and Palestinian peace, there is no telling how much (or, hopefully, little) Landau, by perhaps so preposterously setting back their realization, has set back peace and security for both Israel and Palestinians.

*Article on David Landau’s comments (Link)

**OP-ED column by Daniel Pipes (Link)

II

Does Post Editorial Page Editor Saul Singer really believe that Israeli settlements have been only minor and Palestinian radicalism by far the most major obstacle to peace?

That 550,000 settlers and Likud’s claims to the Palestinian lands have not in fact further radicalized the Palestinians and made peace harder over forty years? Israel did need a defensive army in the Territories after 1967, but not civilian settlements, and without any settlements ever, peace momentum produced by just any small bump or nudge could have easily generated peace.

The Sadat-Begin peace process could have ended in peace if Begin had not claimed what he called “Western Eretz Israel” along with the settlements.

Before Jordan relinquished the West Bank to the West Bank, Israel could have relinquished it to Jordan, except that the always abiding Likud Platform claims Greater Israel’s eastern boundary to be the Jordan River and the Kingdom. Sadat championed peace in the Knesset, and without Israeli claims and settlers it could have happened, and then also perhaps Sadat would have lived as part of less general Arab radicalization. Israel has peace with its two main 1967 foes Egypt and Jordan, and if there were no settlements, then with a returnable West Bank and no Settler movement’s fury, there could have long easily been peace. When Sharon denounced the occupation, his Likud Party was also furious, and Netanyahu and others pointed to a basic same Likud Platform. Now rightists call for an independent state of Judea and Samaria. Similarly the Oslo process and later Camp David in 2000– if built on a more solid and long foundations of moderation and trust with Israel always in its ‘67 borders–could have much more easily produced both a groundswell of moderation (the withering of radicalism) and peace.

Sharon and his cabinet repeatedly expressed fear that disengagement of just 30,000 settlers in Gaza could produce full-fledged Civil War. If that was so hard, how ever could there be a half a million further settlers returned back to Israel?

How could there have even been 30,000 without Ariel Sharon himself doing it?

In sum, how much simpler peace without the settlers. Israel has peace with Jordan and Egypt; and Sadat might have still been alive: How can Singer claim the 550,000-strong settlements are not at least as big an obstacle to peace as radicalism but also itself a major factor in the continued radicalism?

Saul Singer’s column (Link)

III

Israel has a cogent case that would more appeal to the modern West if didn’t use so many endlessly repeated false arguments that only undermine it.

Recently I’ve read these things in Post opinion pieces, letters, and talk-backs:

1. That it was “unfair to excise Jordan from Palestine in 1922.” But Daniel Pipes notes (in “Commentary”, Oct. 1988) that Jordan was part of the Palestine Mandate “for a mere eight months, from July 1920 to March 1921″. Eight months is a nanosecond in historical time. Pipes also points out that the Balfour Resolution only first became legal with Britain’s formal reception of Mandatory responsibilities 16 months later, in July 1922.

And even this response concedes too much. Why should the 85% of Palestine that was at that time Palestinian, and had been for eons, have accepted the Balfour Resolution in general, even for Palestine itself, much less for Jordan as well?

And what if instead the Balfour Mandate had indeed included Jordan?– or included even more lands like Syria and Iraq? Even the Occupied Territories have proven too large to absorb, and Israel should thank its lucky stars that in 1948 and 1967 it didn’t capture or annex them, much less try to swallow those still larger outlying elephantine nations.

2. That “we (Jews) created Jerusalem.” But the Bible says David took for a capital a pre-existent city (2 Sam. 5:6-7, 1 Chr., 11:4-9).

3. And that the Canaanites, Philistines, and Jebusites “all disappeared and only we continued.” But nobody “disappeared.” Instead everyone simply intermarried with everyone else, including later with the Arabs, to become today’s Palestinian melting pot with its ancient roots.

And there is no reason to think this intermarriage and melting pot of all ethnicities would not also include those of the “Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.” Which could be a startling but rather inspiring lever for reconciliation between the two peoples, since it would then make sense that the Palestinians were themselves a little Jewish.

And any rate these types of apologetics, the first based on modern land claims and the second on alleged historical ancient precedents, rightly appear deeply problematic to the modern west, and so do not help Israel’s case but harm it.

IV

But, as I’ve noted before in this space, in virtually the same words, Israel’s has a cogent case, as seen in Theodor Herzl’s, Old/New Land, that it was a peaceful and liberal movement of refugees fleeing for their lives with a dream of a multiculturalism in for them a new land. If there had been no native Arab anti-Jewish-refugee violence that began — and this is significant — many decades before partition, and included the 1948 war of attempted genocide against a people understandably and understatedly sensitive about having been already recently almost exterminated, a war Arabs fought not for any return of Arab refugees since there were no Arab refugees anywhere but all remaining in their own homes and villages throughout the Mandate, and also no Arab expulsions of Jews to Palestine from all other parts of the Middle East, then the area would now be so heavily and peacefully Arab in population, and the Jewish refugees likewise so peaceful and liberal, that the area would be so completely peaceful and demographically mixed as to be completely unrecognizable today.

For instance there would be no violence– Palestinian or Arab no terror, invasions, bombings, or vile and foul threats; and there would be no current — very strong — Israeli need for security fences, checkpoints, by-pass roads, and border and access impediments; and again, and most fundamentally, there would have been no Arab refugees in the first place. And instead there would be the fruits of peace– everyone in their own homes, and economic modernization and prosperity and dignity for everyone.

And now Israelis are now mainly either Sephardic Middle Easterners from time immemorial or innocent Sabras — Middle East native-borns. Russians and some American Jewish idealists or right-wing adventurists probably constitute the main exceptions.

So that in sum, it was the Arab anti-Jewish-refugee violence, and not the peaceful and liberal Jewish refugees, that destroyed Herzl’s liberal dream. And it is this that constitutes the “Case for Israel.” (Rather than all the tendentious and spiteful and petty and expansionist territorialist and historical arguments). It is precisely this case for Israel that the modern liberal West could empathetically understand, and the terrible Palestinian plight as well, and whose decisions getting them into this nadir were made by dictators (as the Israelis themselves claim) long since dead.

And it is now an ethnic conflict, a “cycle of violence” between, on the one hand, the Occupier Establishment and Settler Extremist maximalists, and, on the other side, and Hamas and Islamist and secular terrorist and likewise extremist maximalists.

The proof of the comprehensibility of Israel’s case is that the modern liberal West did understand and outright (even) “loved” Israel before the more recent post-1967 decades of extravagant land claims, settlement, incessant building projects in Palestinian Jerusalem and on other central Palestinian land, and occupation.

If these issues were resolved, there is no reason the West could not love Israel again, as it did in those quaint and innocent and yet hopefully — not beyond hope — rehabilitable pre-1967 days. And Palestinians could get back their lives and their entire future.

www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ArticleNews.jhtml?itemNo=920945&contrassID=13&subContrassID=1&sbSubContrassID=0

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Wed., November 14, 2007 Kislev 4, 5768|

|Israel Time:

14:07 (EST+7)

			Efforts like at Annapolis, though at best they may advance us just one small step, would seem grounded not on some empty vapid idealism, but on the most tough-minded of concrete necessities for the long-term future of Israel.
			James Adler, Boston, U.S.A.

Sometimes the pundits claim that the difference between the liberals and moderates, and conservatives, is that the first see negotiations such as at Annapolis as potentially — even if only at best — one small step toward peace and security, and conservatives don’t see anything constructive about them.

But if conservatives are correct, that Israel is at war with the Palestinians and seventeen Arab states and a world of a billion Muslims, and that these are implacable enemies who will be determined sooner or later to acquire Iranian and also Arab nuclear weapons and never rest until Israel ceases to exist, then according to the conservatives’ own logic, it becomes inevitable that sooner or later Israel will — terrifyingly — cease to exist.

The irony is that conservatives raise alarms so fatalistic and terrifying that they box Israel into this long-term self-destructive cage. If conservative anti-Annapolis pessimists and cynics are right that peace plans will never work, because there are only two alternatives, a Palestinian Terror State or Israeli absorption of the Occupied Territories, how again is Israel not ultimately doomed?

Moderates and liberals ask Israel supporters of all political views this: Before hopelessness radicalizes, and turns to Islamism, all the Palestinians and Arab countries, including Egypt and Jordan — makes them implacable and also ultimately nuclear-armed enemies, why not put aside our differences and negotiate for Israel’s peace and security?

Efforts like at Annapolis, though at best they may advance us just one small step, would seem grounded not on some empty vapid idealism, but on the most tough-minded of concrete necessities for the long-term future of Israel.

James Adler, Boston, U.S.A. Read the rest of this entry »