Jeffrey Goldberg know what ails Israel and tells us in Israel’s America Problem:
When I spoke to Mr. Olmert a few days after his meeting with the Conference of Presidents, he made only brief mention of his Diaspora antagonists; he said that certain American Jews he would not name have been “investing a lot of money trying to overthrow the government of Israel.” But he was expansive, and persuasive, on the Zionist need for a Palestinian state. Without a Palestine — a viable, territorially contiguous Palestine — Arabs under Israeli control will, in the not-distant future, outnumber the country’s Jews.“We now have the Palestinians running an Algeria-style campaign against Israel, but what I fear is that they will try to run a South Africa-type campaign against us,” he said. If this happens, and worldwide sanctions are imposed as they were against the white-minority government, “the state of Israel is finished,” Mr. Olmert said in an earlier interview. This is why he, and his mentor, former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, turned so fiercely against the Jewish settlement movement, which has entangled Israel unnecessarily in the lives of West Bank Palestinians. Once, men like Mr. Sharon and Mr. Olmert saw the settlers as the vanguards of Zionism; today, the settlements are seen, properly, as the forerunner of a binational state. In other words, as the end of Israel as a Jewish-majority democracy.
Except what this ignores is that every effort to separate Israel from the Palestinians has succeeded in strengthening those who deny Israel’s right to exist.
First of all, now that Israel has cut all ties with Gaza the demographic problem – if it exists – has been put off some. Israel is not responsible for Gaza. But the “disengagement hasn’t helped Israel. More of Israel is subject to frequent rocket fire. Israel is condemned for defending its citizens and Hamas has been strengthened. Exactly what has Israel gained by this set of consequences?
Israel has long ago ceded control of Bethlehem, Jericho, Tulkarm, Qalqilya, Jenin, Ramallah, Nablus and most of Hebron to the PA. Ceding control of those cities to the PA led to the increase in terror in 1996 and made the “Aqsa intifada” possible. Again, it’s hard to see why Israel is responsible for these areas anymore. That the Palestinians have failed to create a functioning government is not Israel’s responsibility.
So all this talk about “apartheid” Israel is not out of concern for Israel, but rather to blackmail Israel into ceding territory to its enemies, not just in the name of a chimeric “peace” but also to save its soul; regardless of the cost to its body.
PM Olmert certainly is being dramatic when he accuses some American Jews of seeking to “overthrow” the Israeli government. American Jews have been involved in Israeli politics for a long. time. Nor would I be surprised if Mr. Olmert also had plenty of support from American Jews in one fashion or another. (I don’t believe that it’s legal for foreigners to donate directly to Israeli campaigns, so this help – financial and otherwise – is not necessarily direct. But then PM Olmert is no doubt familiar with what’s legal and what isn’t.)
Goldberg goes on to show his sophisticated grasp of the issues facing Israel:
This is an existentially unhealthy state of affairs. I am not wishing that the next president be hostile to Israel, God forbid. But what Israel needs is an American president who not only helps defend it against the existential threat posed by Iran and Islamic fundamentalism, but helps it to come to grips with the existential threat from within. A pro-Israel president today would be one who prods the Jewish state — publicly, continuously and vociferously — to create conditions on the West Bank that would allow for the birth of a moderate Palestinian state. Most American Jewish leaders are opposed, not without reason, to negotiations with Hamas, but if the moderates aren’t strengthened, Hamas will be the only party left.And the best way to bring about the birth of a Palestinian state is to reverse — not merely halt, but reverse — the West Bank settlement project. The dismantling of settlements is the one step that would buttress the dwindling band of Palestinian moderates in their struggle against the fundamentalists of Hamas.
So why won’t American leaders push Israel publicly? Or, more to the point, why do presidential candidates dance so delicately around this question? The answer is obvious: The leadership of the organized American Jewish community has allowed the partisans of settlement to conflate support for the colonization of the West Bank with support for Israel itself. John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, in their polemical work “The Israel Lobby,” have it wrong: They argue, unpersuasively, that American support for Israel hurts America. It doesn’t. But unthinking American support does hurt Israel.
Since 1993 Israel has been openly (longer still if one counts the preliminary negotiations conducted in contravention to Israeli law at the time) involved in a “peace process” with the Palestinians. Since that time we have seen Fatah strengthened, then Hamas. (Hezbollah too, if indirectly.) We saw more and more terror result from Israeli concessions until Israel fought back in 2002 and reduced the terrorist infrastructure created by the “moderate” Fatah movement.
The position of the Israeli government now is quite a far cry from the Israeli government of twenty years ago. What was then a vision of the far left wing group, Peace Now, is now the mainstream view in Israel. No Israeli government will refuse to negotiate with Fatah even though the group never disavowed the terror that was to be a precondition for its achieving legitimacy. And it’s hard to say that this softening of Israel’s position has made it more secure or accepted.
On the Palestinian side we’ve seen no softening of positions. Oh sure Arafat would say just enough to be awarded, legitimacy, army and money, but his actions never comported with hits professed declarations of accepting Israel.
No, the single biggest impediment to a Palestinian state is the Palestinian rejection of the Jewish one and the attendant terror. Mr. Goldberg’s mantra about settlements has been repeated for decades, but what happened when Israel abandoned Gaza? (Asked and answered above.)
Palestinian nationalism isn’t about self determination or freedom. It’s about destruction. The failure of the Palestinians to create a functioning society to live in peace beside Israel has nothing to do with a lack of contiguity but a lack of interest in building such a society.
The unthinking supporters of Israel, as Goldberg would have it, were right about Arafat. They were right about the Palestinian commitment to peace.
Finally there’s another question that Goldberg begs. He accuses AIPAC of not pushing Israel to dismantle settlements. But every action for peace that Israel has engaged in, AIPAC has been supportive. AIPAC supported Oslo. AIPAC supported the Israeli withdrawal from southern Lebanon. AIPAC supported disengagement. Exactly how has AIPAC’s agenda differed from Goldberg’s over the past fifteen years is a mystery.
The people of Aipac and the Conference of Presidents are well meaning, and their work in strengthening the overall relationship between America and Israel has ensured them a place in the world to come. But what’s needed now is a radical rethinking of what it means to be pro-Israel. Barack Obama and John McCain, the likely presidential nominees, are smart, analytical men who understand the manifold threats Israel faces 60 years after its founding. They should be able to talk, in blunt terms, about the full range of dangers faced by Israel, including the danger Israel has brought upon itself.But this won’t happen until AIPAC and the leadership of the American Jewish community allow it to happen.
So Goldberg considers it important for AIPAC to lecture Israel, to tell Israel what it must do. (Even if the past fifteen years have shown those policies to be counterproductive to peace.) Goldberg’s honest about his arrogance: I know what’s better for you than you do, and AIPAC ought to understand that too. I don’t know if that makes him pro-Israel. (In fact I dispute it.) It does make him (and his J-Street allies) a smug know-it-all.
Related thought (with different targets) at YidWithLid.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
