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Jewish World Review
May 11, 2009
/ 17 Iyar 5769
Missing the ‘piece process’
By
Jonathan Rosenblum
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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
I never thought that I would long for the days when talk of preserving the
"peace process" was all the rage. Though the "peace process" was always a
good deal more about process — negotiations, signed agreements, more
negotiations — at least the name implied that peace was the ultimate
desideratum. Today, the creation of a Palestinian state has become the
be-all-and-end-all of America's Middle East strategy, and Israeli Prime
Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is called upon to express his acquiescence
daily.
But a Palestinian state is not the ultimate goal nor should it be. At best,
in a world far different than that in which we happen to live, it would be a
means to Israel finally being able to live in safe and secure borders.
Today, it would assuredly be the opposite.
The exclusive emphasis on the "the two-state solution" is misbegotten for
many reasons. The most basic is that there is absolutely no reason to
believe that the Palestinians want a state, unlike the Jews in 1948, who
were prepared to accept anything, no matter how truncated, in order to have
a state. Robert B. Kaplan, who makes clear that he has little sympathy for
the current Israeli government, nevertheless writes in the April 21 Atlantic
that there is no evidence that the Palestinians really want a state. They
have far more power without a state, for without a state, they can lob
missiles at Israel without ever taking responsibility. Hamas's absolute
control over the Gaza Strip — i.e., its quasi-state status — made it easier,
not more difficult, for Israel to launch Operation Cast Lead.
The behavior of Arafat at Camp David makes clear that he preferred the role
of revolutionary leader, true to his cause to the last, to the messy
responsibility of trying to build a functioning society. The diversion of
massive international aide to the pockets of top Fatah officials and for the
maintenance of multiple militias, rather than using that aide to improve the
lot of the average Palestinian, is another indication that the Palestinian
leadership, such as it is, is not really interested in a state.
The focus on what Israel must do sends the wrong message on a number of
counts. It totally fails to acknowledge what Israel has already done,
including the withdrawals from Lebanon, Gaza, and let us not forget much of
the West Bank, and how little it received in return. Lebanon and Gaza became
Iranian proxy quasi-states, and the West Bank too became a launching pad for
suicide bombers. Only when the IDF took back control of the West Bank did
the terrorism abate. Nor have those withdrawals improved Israel's
international standing, which was always one of their principal
justifications. Rather by rendering Israel more vulnerable to missile and
terror attacks, they virtually guaranteed an eventual Israeli response sure
to be condemned by all and sundry as "disproportionate."
The focus on Israel's acceptance of the "two-state solution" further takes
the spotlight off of what the Palestinians have never done — to wit move one
iota from any of their traditional positions since the handshake on the
White House lawn. In recent weeks, leading Fatah (yes, Fatah not Hamas)
figures have reiterated that Fatah never has and never will recognize Israel
as a Jewish state. And Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas refused to
acknowledge Israel as a Jewish state at Annapolis. I wonder how far Prime
Minister Netanyahu would get if he agreed to a Palestinian state on
condition that all Jews now living in that state can stay where they are.
By placing the onus on Israel for moving forward, the mantra about "the
two-state solution" conveys to the Palestinians precisely the wrong message:
That they must do nothing. More than 15 years after Oslo, the Palestinian
media and textbooks are still infected with a culture of martyrdom and
pervasive hatred of Israel and Jews. How can a generation raised on such
propaganda be a generation to make peace? And how can anyone think that
peace will be easily attained? Instead of telling the Palestinians that they
will have to clean up their act, President Obama engages in false
equivalencies about "hatred" on both sides that have no relationship to
reality, and suggest that all that is needed is a bit more kumbaya feeling.
The message the Palestinians are hearing is: Just sit tight and we [the
Americans] will get you your state, without you doing anything. The
obsession with Israel's acceptance of the "two-state solution" is based on
the assumption that the eventual outcome is known in advance, and it might
as well be sooner than later. That is what the President means when he says
that at some point the parties have to stop talking because we can't wait
forever.
And when Obama praises the Saudi plan as a brave initiative, with which he
may have a few cavils, he not only raises panic in Israel about the easy
assumption that the eventual solution is already well-known but about the
content of that solution. The Saudi plan calls for a complete Israeli
withdrawal to the '49 armistice lines — and with that the uprooting of
hundreds of thousands of families and the destruction of everything built in
Jerusalem since '67 — and the return of millions of Palestinian refugees.
And only then will the Arab states begin negotiations over normalization.
Outside of the editorial pages of *Ha'aretz, *it would be hard to find a
minyan of Israelis willing to sign off on anything remotely resembling that
plan. (And if you will ask me, what then did President Peres mean when he
praised the Saudi plan at the AIPAC convention, I will be struck dumb.)
Remember that this generous plan is being propounded by the Saudis, whose
representatives refuse to so much as exchange hellos with any Israeli and
heatedly deny any suggestion that they might have done so. Doesn't that
level of hatred for Jews and Israel sort of make the focus on how
forthcoming Prime Minister Netanyahu is or isn't seem a bit ridiculous?
Everything coming out of Washington today betrays an incredible naivete
about how intractable the issues are between Israel and the Palestinians and
how far away any viable peace is. The administration acts as if nothing
happened in the last sixty years and the only problem until now was the lack
of involvement of people with their depth of understanding. Yet a moment's
attention would suggest that, if anything, peace is further away than ever.
For one thing, there are two Palestinian entities rather than one, and the
more "moderate" one — the one that acknowledges the existence of Israel, if
not its right to exist as a Jewish state — is the weaker of the two. The
only thing that is propping up the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank
and protecting it from a Hamas takeover at present is Israel's continued
presence there. And then there is the not insubstantial matter of Israelis
experience from previous experiments along the lines they are being asked to
proceed — i.e., missiles falling all around
The American linkage of action against Iran with progress on the
Palestinian-Israeli front again betrays the same dangerous naivete, and puts
things backwards as well. The time frame for serious action — economic or
military against Iran — is months, a year at most. Can anyone possibly
imagine that major steps will be made towards a Palestinian-Israeli
agreement in that time?
Moreover, why should such progress be a condition of action vis-a-vis Iran?
The Sunni regimes are scared witless by Iran, which threatens their regimes
both internally and externally in a way that Israel does not. If it is in
their interests to do so, and if they believe that America intends to act
forcefully against Iran (and not just leave them at Iran's mercies), they
will be part of any coalition. But if either of those conditions are not
met, they will not. Israel is irrelevant. Similarly, the United States
either acknowledges that Iran poses a significant threat to a wide variety
of American strategic interests, which have absolutely nothing to do with
Israel, or it does not. But any Israel leader who acts against his better
judgment on the Palestinian front in the hope that the United States will
then act to prevent Iran from going nuclear is building castles in the sand,
given the current resolve shown by Washington vis-a-vis Iran.
No decent lawyer would allow a client to sign an agreement, no matter how
attractive, without a due diligence as to both the reliability of the other
party and its capability of performing according to the terms of the
contract. Yet President Obama (Harvard Law) and Secretary of State Clinton
(Yale Law) are pushing Israel towards an agreement where the unreliability
of the other side is well-established by virtue of two decades of broken
promises about ending incitement and stopping terror and its ability to
perform is beyond doubtful, given the likelihood of a Hamas takeover of the
West Bank as soon as Israel withdraws. Hopefully Israel has better lawyers.
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JWR contributor Jonathan Rosenblum is founder of Jewish Media Resources and a widely-read columnist for the Jerusalem Post's domestic and international editions and for the Hebrew daily Maariv. He is also a respected commentator on Israeli politics, society, culture and the Israeli legal system, who speaks frequently on these topics in the United States, Europe, and Israel. His articles appear regularly in numerous Jewish periodicals in the United States and Israel. Rosenblum is the author of seven biographies of major modern Jewish figures. He is a graduate of the University of Chicago and Yale Law School. Rosenblum lives in Jerusalem with his wife and eight children.
© 2007, Jonathan Rosenblum
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