Peace Process
The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East
By Caroline B. Glick
Crown Forum, 352 pages
Devotees of the two-state solution will surely dismiss Caroline Glick’s The Israeli Solution out of hand. They shouldn’t. Whether or not one agrees with Glick’s conclusions, it’s hard to dispute her premise: The two-state solution has failed repeatedly for more than 80 years, starting with serial British partition plans in the 1930s. Each time, it has foundered on the same obstacle: Arab rejection of the Jewish state’s right to exist within any borders. And there’s no reason to think this will change anytime soon. So anyone who truly considers the status quo unsustainable needs to explore alternative solutions.
Glick, a longtime columnist for the Jerusalem Post, spends almost half the book detailing the two-state solution’s repeated failures, in her trademark take-no-prisoners style. Then she presents her solution: Israel should apply Israeli law to Judea and Samaria (the West Bank) and grant its Palestinian inhabitants permanent residency, with the right to become citizens if they so desire.
Many of her arguments in support of this plan were once widely accepted both in Israel and the West: Judea and Samaria are the Jewish people’s religious and historical heartland. Israel has a better legal claim to them than anyone else does, Palestinians included. These areas are essential for defense against both terrorism and invasion. And, for those who care about Palestinian self-determination (which Glick doesn’t much), there’s also the fact that a Palestinian-majority state already exists in 80 percent of the original Palestine Mandate; it’s called Jordan. Since Israel has shamefully allowed these arguments to be forgotten during two decades of peace-processing, Glick’s recap is necessary and important, but not groundbreaking.
The crux of the book, therefore, is to refute the two main objections to a one-state solution: the demographic and the diplomatic.
Glick relies on the work of the American-Israel Demographic Research Group, which concluded that the West Bank and Gaza contain about 1.3 million fewer Palestinians than the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics claims. If the group’s methodology is sound—and leading American demographers have approved of it—then Jews make up two-thirds of all inhabitants of Israel, Judea, and Samaria, and 59 percent if you include Gaza.
Like Glick, I find AIDRG’s work persuasive, not least because its opponents’ predictions of demographic doom have persistently proven to be wrong for decades. AIDRG also discovered some errors so glaring that even its die-hard opponents were forced to admit them, such as the double-counting of 200,000 East Jerusalem Arabs. Nevertheless, Israelis would probably be reluctant to bet their country’s future on any single study, given that annexing Judea and Samaria could erase Israel’s Jewish majority if AIDRG were wrong.
Neither AIDRG nor Glick addresses another relevant demographic matter: how many Israeli Jews would back this sizable Palestinian minority’s demands to eliminate Israel’s Jewish character. The radical leftists who would do so gleefully are relatively few in number, but their claim that Israel’s Jewish character is “discriminatory,” “undemocratic,” and “contrary to human rights” has already infected parts of the Zionist left. And that worrying trend would probably accelerate if left-wing organizations intensified their existing campaign on the issue, which they surely would under a one-state solution. Finally, Glick’s proposal excludes Gaza. That’s clearly reasonable for now: Hamas won’t cede power voluntarily, and Israel won’t invade. But it may not be tenable long-term.
None of this makes a one-state solution inherently demographically unfeasible—especially since no demographer disputes that Jewish birthrates are rising while Palestinian birthrates are falling. But it does mean further research is needed.
A related question is whether, even if the math works out, Israel could assimilate such a large Palestinian minority. States with large, hostile national minorities don’t have good track records. Here, Glick’s answer is eye-opening. Israeli Arabs and East Jerusalem Palestinians, she notes, overwhelmingly reject Israel’s right to exist. Yet very few become terrorists, and polls consistently find that most want to remain Israeli. Indeed, Israeli Arabs overwhelmingly oppose becoming citizens of a Palestinian state even if territorial swaps would allow them do so without leaving their homes. In short, much as they dislike the Jewish state in principle, Israeli Arabs seem to prefer it to a Palestinian one in practice. Thus, given the same option, Glick argued, Palestinians might well reach the same conclusion.
Her response to the diplomatic objection is also thought-provoking, but ultimately, less convincing. Essentially, she argues that though Israel would suffer a short-term diplomatic hit by annexing Judea and Samaria, in the long run, this would bolster its diplomatic position. She is certainly correct that Israel’s pursuit of the two-state solution has been diplomatically devastating (a subject I explored in a 2010 Commentary article, “The Deadly Price of Pursuing Peace”), and more of the same will only worsen the damage. She’s also right that annexation would have some diplomatic benefits. For instance, it’s hard to make the case for Israel’s legal rights to Judea and Samaria while saying these areas should be a Palestinian state; thus annexation would actually help Israel fight the pernicious libel that it stole the Palestinians’ land. Letting Palestinians become Israeli citizens, moreover, would eliminate the argument that Israel’s “occupation” is uniquely evil, because Palestinians are stateless, whereas Tibetans and Kashmiris, say, are at least Chinese or Indian citizens.
Nevertheless, long-term gains are valuable only if you survive to reap them. I think Glick underestimates the short-term diplomatic consequences. Though she recognizes that Europe might impose economic sanctions, she believes Israel can survive them, thanks to its new natural-gas wealth and burgeoning trade with rising Asian powers. Someday, perhaps, that might be true. But right now, Europe still accounts for a third of Israeli exports. Israel’s export-dependent economy would have trouble absorbing a loss of that size.
The bigger problem, however, is America. Glick recognizes that America’s diplomatic backing is indispensable but argues that unilateral annexation wouldn’t cost Israel this backing because America, too, would benefit from ending its futile pursuit of the two-state solution. She may be right about the benefits to America, but there remains the minor problem of persuading Americans of this.
As she herself admits, America’s decades-long commitment to the two-state solution is bipartisan and deeply entrenched. That’s true not only for the foreign-policy establishment, but also for the American people, including American Jews. Thus gambling that Israel could retain American support while unilaterally jettisoning this solution seems wildly irresponsible, unless it’s preceded by a massive (and successful) diplomatic campaign to erode the two-state consensus. I suspect Glick realizes this, and intends her powerful book to be the opening shot in such a campaign rather than a blueprint for immediate action.
But the diplomatic unfeasibility of her plan (at least for now) doesn’t negate the importance of her demographic arguments. For as she correctly noted, Palestinians have spent two decades successfully using their self-created demographic data “to coerce Israel to bend to [their] political will.” Fear that Israel will soon become South Africa, with a Jewish minority ruling over a Palestinian majority, has spurred successive Israeli premiers—all of whom previously opposed a Palestinian state—to offer ever more egregious concessions in a desperate bid to persuade the Palestinians to accept one.
Yet as two decades of failure have amply proven, there’s no way Israel can negotiate successfully from such a position: As long as Palestinians, Western leaders, and Israelis themselves all believe “that Israel needs a Palestinian state…even more than the Palestinians do” (as Glick put it), the Palestinians have every incentive to continue holding out for even more concessions, while Israel will face ever increasing pressure to concede even its most vital interests.
Consequently, Israel has a supreme interest in doing the additional research necessary to determine whether Glick is right about a one-state solution’s demographic feasibility. For if she is, that would be a real game-changer—because an Israel no longer vulnerable to demographic extortion would be much better placed to protect its essential interests in any negotiation. And that’s something even (pro-Israel) advocates of a two-state solution ought to welcome.
Why are Palestinians the only refugees in the world denied the right of third-country resettlement?
Last week, I argued that the growing importance of demographic arguments for ceding territory makes it vital for Israel to determine what the demographic facts really are. This, incidentally, is true even for supporters of a two-state solution: There’s a big difference between having to withdraw immediately, at any cost, to avoid imminent demographic doom and having another few decades in which to seek an agreement.
In reality, there are three ways to change demographic balances: immigration, emigration and natural increase. But only the first receives any attention at all from Israeli policy-makers, because in a brilliant feat of brainwashing, the other two have been successfully branded as racist, anti-democratic and contrary to human rights.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees, which deals with all refugees worldwide except Palestinians, resettles tens of thousands of people every year (about 70,000 annually from 2008-2012). But UNRWA, the agency created to deal exclusively with Palestinian refugees, hasn’t resettled a single one in 66 years, because resettlement isn’t in its mandate. Instead, it seeks to keeps both the original displaced persons and all their descendants as perpetual refugees, vainly awaiting a “return” to Israel that will never happen unless Israel ceases to exist. And the rest of the world – especially the “enlightened” West, which funds most of UNRWA’s budget – shamefully abets this gross violation of Palestinian rights.
To understand the nature of this abuse, consider Yoav Sorek’s account in Mosaic of what ensued when he and a friend, citing surveys showing that 40 percent of Gazans want to leave, asked a representative of ECHO, the European Union’s humanitarian aid agency, why the agency didn’t try to help them do so.
His reply was startling in its candor. “Are you kidding? 40 percent? It’s probably 99 percent. All of them want to leave!” Well, we repeated, have you thought of helping them? “No, never.” Why not? “Because if they leave, it’d be like releasing Israel from its responsibility for the nakba.”
In other words, Palestinians are being denied a fundamental right enjoyed by all other refugees for the sake, as Sorek aptly put it, “of a political vendetta.” Or to put it more bluntly, in a vain effort to undo Israel’s establishment in 1948. For on that very day, five Arab armies aided by Palestinian irregulars invaded the newborn state, resulting in the refugee crisis Palestinians term the Nakba. Only by deeming Israel’s very creation a crime could you hold it responsible for the outcome of a war started by the Arabs themselves with intent to annihilate it.
But whether or not Sorek’s 40 percent figure is accurate, many Palestinians clearly don’t want to be sacrificed on the altar of this vendetta. Even PLO executive committee member Hanan Ashrawi inadvertently admitted as much in an October 2012 interview with Haaretz: “The worst thing that can happen to Palestinians is to keep having this hemorrhage of people leaving,” she complained. And if Palestinians are “hemorrhaging” even in the absence of any resettlement aid, more would likely leave if offered the same assistance given other refugees worldwide.
But at the very least, Israel and its overseas supporters should be demanding loudly and clearly, in every possible venue, that the “international community” give Palestinians the same rights as other refugees. While forcing Palestinians to leave if they don’t want to would obviously be unacceptable, it’s neither “racist” nor “anti-democratic” to demand that they receive the same resettlement assistance given to other refugees. Indeed, it’s racist and anti-democratic to deny them this right.
Personally, I’d rather end this anomaly, dismantle UNRWA and strip these fictitious refugees of their status. Among other reasons, the world’s real refugees would benefit greatly if all the money now wasted on fake refugees were spent on them instead.
But since the “international community” shows no signs of being willing to do this, Israel should at least stop letting its hypocrisy go unchallenged. If the world insists on treating these Palestinians as refugees, then Israel should insist it grant them the same right granted to all other refugees – the right to internationally assisted resettlement.
As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu aptly noted yesterday, it’s “strange” that even as European governments loudly condemn anti-Semitic attacks like the one on the Brussels Jewish Museum, they “speak about friendship with a Hamas unity government that commits these very same acts and glorifies them.” The same goes for the Obama administration, which condemns terror with one side of its mouth while rushing to recognize the new Fatah-Hamas unity government with the other, even though Hamas leaders openly refuse to recognize Israel, give up anti-Israel terror, or disarm.
Yet this willingness to whitewash and even reward Palestinian misbehavior isn’t confined to government circles. As examples, consider two recent art shows–one sponsored by the Ottawa municipality and the Ontario Arts Council, the other by a Pittsburgh museum.
The Ottawa municipality is currently hosting an exhibition by Palestinian-Canadian artist Rehab Nazzal. It features a video called “Target,” which, according to official publicity material, shows “artists, writers and leaders” who were “assassinated” by Israel. But when Israeli Ambassador to Canada Rafael Barak watched the video, he discovered that many of these “assassinated artists and writers” were actually leading terrorists. They include Khalil al-Wazir, planner of the 1978 Coastal Road massacre, in which PLO terrorists hijacked an Israeli bus and killed 37 civilians; Dalal Mughrabi, one of the perpetrators of that attack; Salah Khalaf, founder of the PLO faction that massacred 11 Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics; and Khaled Nazzal, a senior official of another PLO faction that massacred 22 Israeli schoolchildren at Ma’alot in 1974.
Moreover, several people featured in the video were actually killed by fellow Palestinians–including both Khalaf and one genuine artist, a caricaturist murdered for drawing derogatory cartoons of PLO leader Yasser Arafat. Still others were indeed killed by Israel, but hardly “assassinated”: Mughrabi, for instance, died in a shootout with Israeli soldiers who stormed the bus in an effort to stop the massacre. In short, Nazzal’s work is a piece of vile anti-Israel incitement and a glorification of terrorism, funded wholly by Canadian taxpayers.
No Western government would finance works glorifying, say, the 9/11 terrorists or the London subway bombers. But when Barak and local Jewish groups protested this exhibit, city hall trotted out the standard excuse: It was chosen by a committee of artists, and politicians shouldn’t interfere with artistic decisions.
The Pittsburgh museum’s behavior was, if possible, even worse. After Palestinian “anti-normalization” activists launched an online campaign to pressure Palestinian artists to quit a show featuring works by Palestinians, Israelis, and Americans, the Israelis–in my view wrongly, but certainly generously–offered to withdraw instead. Yet the Palestinians still withdrew, and one even published a vicious statement accusing the “Jewish lobby” of forcing them out.
Then, rather than letting the Israelis and Americans exhibit anyway, alongside a note explaining why the Palestinians withdrew, the Mattress Factory museum opted to penalize the innocent by canceling the entire show. Even worse, it cravenly issued “a public apology to all Palestinians everywhere for the misunderstanding of this exhibition.”
Both exhibitions thus sent the same message: Palestinians can engage in anti-Israel incitement, glorification of terror, and online bullying, but not only will they suffer no penalty, they will even be rewarded. Respected institutions will provide taxpayer funding for these activities, expel Israeli and American artists to accommodate them, and even issue fawning apologies for offending Palestinian sensibilities.
Needless to say, rewarding such behavior encourages Palestinians to continue it. And in so doing, well-meaning Westerners actually perpetuate the Palestinian-Israeli conflict by ensuring that Palestinians never have an incentive to develop the culture of peace needed to end it.
Last week, I discussed the need for widespread use of cameras in the Israel Defense Forces. But having footage of the IDF’s interactions with Palestinians wouldn’t be useful only to refute false claims of brutality. A no less important use would be to expose the Palestinians’ human shield industry to the world.
Here’s one example of how this industry works: On the night of September 30, 2013, IDF troops opened fire at two Palestinians who were trying to sabotage the Israel-Gaza border fence, killing one and wounding the other. Both men later proved to be unarmed, so that’s naturally how the story was reported: Israel kills two unarmed Palestinians.
Four days later, I happened to be visiting friends whose soldier son was home on leave. It turned out his unit was involved in this incident, and he was furious over what the media reports left out: Standing just a few hundred meters behind the two men, he said, was a group of armed Palestinians waiting to see whether the attempt to break through the fence succeeded. In other words, the soldiers had every reason to believe the men sabotaging the fence were part of a much larger infiltration attempt, even though they couldn’t be sure those two were themselves armed (it was night, they were moving, and they were partially obscured by the fence). Thus the soldiers did what responsible soldiers do when facing an attempted terrorist infiltration: They used lethal force to stop it.
I don’t know whether the two unarmed Palestinians were volunteers or unwilling conscripts. But either way, it’s easy to see why this methodology is a win-win for the terrorists. If the unarmed men succeed in breaking through the fence without being detected, the terrorists will know they can follow safely. But if the IDF does detect the unarmed men and tries to stop them, the Palestinians get a propaganda victory: Look, Israel shot unarmed men for no good reason! And without photographic evidence, there’s no way for the IDF to fight such propaganda: Outside of Israel, who’s going to believe the unsupported word of a random Israeli soldier?
This is standard operating practice for Palestinian terrorist groups–and, incidentally, for Hezbollah as well. In both the Second Lebanon War of 2006 and the war with Hamas in Gaza in 2009, for instance, a significant portion of the Lebanese and Palestinian civilian casualties resulted from the fact that Hezbollah and Hamas routinely fired rockets at Israel from the heart of civilian areas, thereby ensuring that when Israel returned fire, there would be civilian casualties as well. Israel pointed this out at the time, but absent convincing footage to back up its claims, what most of the world believed was the Hezbollah/Hamas propaganda: that Israel wantonly massacres civilians.
This narrative has been devastating to Israel’s international image, and fighting it is essential. Yet the only way to fight it is for Israel to provide clear photographic proof of the use of human shields–not just in response to Palestinian or Lebanese allegations, but on an ongoing basis. And the sooner, the better.
A rational Palestinian policy needs demographic facts; but Israel hasn’t done the requisite research
In a Bloomberg interview earlier this month, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu observed that due to the stalled peace process, “the idea of taking unilateral steps is gaining ground, from the center-left to the center-right.” Prof. Efraim Inbar has a counter-proposal, succinctly encapsulated in the title of his May 15 column in Israel Hayom: “Let’s do almost nothing.”
Nevertheless, I’ve become convinced that “doing almost nothing” is impossible unless Israel first does one big something – convinces Israelis themselves that time is not on the Palestinians’ side, but on theirs. Inbar, the director of Bar-Ilan University’s Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, makes a start on this in his article, pointing out the conflict’s declining importance to Arab countries dealing with more urgent problems; Israel’s deepening relationships with numerous countries worldwide that care little about the Palestinians; and the waning influence of “the political actors most obsessed with the Palestinian issue, the Israeli political Left and the Europeans.” But he fails to address the issue that concerns Israelis most: demographics.
As Netanyahu keeps repeating, Israelis “don’t want a bi-national state.” Thus as long as most Israelis believe Jews will shortly become a minority in the land west of the Jordan River (Israel, the West Bank and Gaza), they will continue to find the idea of unilaterally shedding areas with large Palestinian populations attractive. Otherwise, they fear, Palestinians will be able to destroy the Jewish state simply by demanding to vote in Israel – a demand that would surely win massive international backing.
Hence the only way to avert this fate is to tackle Israelis’ demographic fears head-on – i.e., to determine conclusively whether the Jewish majority west of the Jordan is endangered or not. And that means conducting independent research rather than simply accepting Palestinian statistics as fact.
But while leading American demographers approved AIDRG’s methodology, leading Israeli demographers like Sergio Della Pergola and Arnon Soffer vehemently rejected it. Despite admitting that AIDRG had uncovered some errors too egregious to be ignored, like the double-counting of 210,000 East Jerusalem Arabs, they insisted the PA data was otherwise unimpeachable.
Moreover, AIDRG’s study was completed a decade ago. No demographer disputes that since then, Israeli Jewish birthrates have risen while Palestinian birthrates have fallen; so even if AIDRG were wrong, the demographic situation has presumably improved in the interim. The question is how much. While the Jewish fertility rate, currently 2.99, isn’t in dispute, the Palestinian rate definitely is: Some estimates show it converging rapidly on the Jewish rate; others believe the decline has been less drastic.
Thus the most useful thing the government could do right now is commission a blue-ribbon demographic research study – one that doesn’t simply accept the PA’s figures as gospel truth and gives due weight to how rising Jewish and falling Arab birthrates affect old assumptions about Arab demographic momentum. For unless Israelis are convinced that their country isn’t facing imminent demographic doom, they are liable to be seduced into disastrous unilateral moves rather than heeding Inbar’s sensible advice.
I’m a longtime fan of the Wall Street Journal. But I confess to mystification over why a paper with a staunchly pro-Israel editorial line consistently allows its news pages to be used for anti-Israel smear campaigns–and I do mean smear campaigns, not just “critical reporting.” A classic example was its assertion in an April 7 news report that Israel had agreed “to release political prisoners” as part of the U.S.-brokered deal that restarted Israeli-Palestinian talks last summer. The Journal was sufficiently embarrassed by this description of convicted mass murderers that it issued a correction in print, yet the online version still unrepentantly dubs these vicious terrorists “political prisoners.”
A more subtle example was last week’s report titled “On Middle East Visit, Pope Will Find a Diminished Christian Population.” While Israel is the glaring exception to this Mideast trend, reporter Nicholas Casey elegantly implies the opposite in a single sentence that’s dishonest on at least three different levels: “Syria has seen an exodus of nearly half a million Christians, and in Jerusalem, a population of 27,000 Christians in 1948 has dwindled to 5,000.”
First, while Casey never says explicitly that Jerusalem’s shrinking Christian population reflects the situation in Israel as a whole, it’s the obvious conclusion for the average reader–especially given the juxtaposition with Syria, which implies that both countries are treating their Christians similarly and thereby causing them to flee. This impression is reinforced by the only other statistic he gives about Israel: that Christians have declined as a percentage of the total population.
The truth, however, is that Israel’s Christian population has grown dramatically–from a mere 34,000 in 1949 to 158,000 in 2012, according to Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics. That’s an increase of almost fivefold. And while Christians have fallen as a share of the total population, that’s mainly because they have significantly lower birthrates than either Israeli Jews or Israeli Muslims.
Second, even his statistics on Jerusalem are dubious. Since he doesn’t source them, it’s not clear how Casey arrived at his figure of only 5,000 Christians nowadays. But the most recent figure published by Israel’s internationally respected statistics bureau, in 2013, put the city’s Christian population at 14,700 as of the end of 2011. It is, to say the least, highly unlikely that after remaining stable at about that level for 44 years (more on that in a moment)–decades punctuated by repeated wars, vicious terrorism and deep recessions–the Christian population would suddenly plunge by two thirds in a mere two years at a time of strong economic growth and very little terror.
Third, while Jerusalem’s Christian population has undeniably plummeted since 1948 even according to Israel’s statistics, Casey neglects to mention one very salient point: The entirety of that decline took place during the 19 years when East Jerusalem–where most of the city’s Christians live–was controlled by Jordan rather than Israel. By 1967, when Israel reunited the city, Jerusalem’s Christian population had fallen by more than half, to just 12,646, from Casey’s 1948 figure (which does roughly match other available sources). Since then, it has actually edged upward, to 14,700.
Throw in the de rigueur innuendos that the Palestinian Authority’s declining Christian population is mainly Israel’s fault, and Casey’s verbal Photoshop job is complete: The one country in the Middle East whose Christian population is growing and thriving–a fact increasingly acknowledged by Israeli Christians themselves–has been successfully repackaged to the average reader as a vicious persecutor that is driving its Christians out.
Last week’s incident in which two Palestinians were killed in the West Bank–allegedly by Israel Defense Forces soldiers who opened fire without provocation–is still under investigation. But the IDF continues to maintain that the video footage purporting to back this allegation was doctored.
As Jonathan Tobin noted on Wednesday, this isn’t inconceivable; such things have happened before. Even Amnesty researcher Donatella Rovera recently admitted that Palestinians have been known to falsify evidence (though it doesn’t seem to stop her organization from treating every Palestinian claim as gospel truth). Nevertheless, the IDF’s claim would undeniably be more credible if it could produce its own footage showing what really happened.
But of course, it can’t–because one of the most technologically sophisticated armies in the world has somehow proven incapable of equipping its soldiers with the kind of simple cameras found on every cell phone. And so, day after day, week after week, it’s confronted with Palestinian allegations to which the only response it can offer is its soldiers’ unsupported testimony.
A year ago, I thought the penny had finally dropped: The IDF announced with great fanfare that it had finally decided to train soldiers to film operations in the field. But it now turns out this vaunted project comprises all of 24 cameramen–24 people to provide round-the-clock coverage of the entire West Bank plus the Gaza border. It’s a joke. And not a very funny one.
There’s no reason why every single soldier couldn’t be equipped with a small, wearable camera that would operate automatically. This would have the additional benefit of cutting down on real abuses, from which no army is completely immune. Indeed, several Western countries have experimented with policemen wearing such cameras, and they have generally led to reductions in both real brutality and false claims of brutality.
But what seems like a no-brainer to me evidently isn’t so obvious to Israel’s chronically public-diplomacy-challenged government and army. Otherwise, they would have done something about it by now.
Consequently, this is an issue on which American Jewish help is badly needed. Jewish groups and individuals frequently meet with Israeli officials, both in the U.S. and in Israel, but it probably never occurs to them to raise a minor issue like IDF cameras at those meetings. If they thought of it at all, it would doubtless seem too obvious to need saying.
Unfortunately, it isn’t. And therefore, U.S. Jews would be doing Israel a big service if they started raising this issue at every single meeting with Israeli government officials or army officers. If Israeli leaders keep hearing about it from American Jews, maybe they’ll finally realize how important it is.
Or maybe they still won’t. But it’s worth a try–because waiting for them to figure it out on their own certainly isn’t working.
As I noted yesterday, there’s no lack of evidence that even “moderate” Palestinians aren’t interested in ending their war on Israel. Yet most of the world will go through contortions worthy of the rubber man rather than admit it. A classic example is the interview a “senior American official” (widely reputed to be special envoy to the Israeli-Palestinian talks Martin Indyk) gave to Yedioth Ahronoth earlier this month.
The official spent about 3,000 words blaming the talks’ breakdown on Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, and specifically its authorization of settlement construction during the negotiations. Only then did he describe what actually happened during those crucial final months when Secretary of State John Kerry was trying to broker a framework agreement:
“In February, Abbas arrived at a Paris hotel for a meeting with Kerry … He rejected all of Kerry’s ideas. A month later, in March, he was invited to the White House. Obama presented the American-formulated principles verbally – not in writing. Abbas refused.”
Then, in the very next sentence, came this astonishing defense: “The claim on your side that Abbas was avoiding making decisions is not true. He wasn’t running away.”
So long before the announcement of 700 new housing units that Kerry later termed the “poof” moment when everything blew up, Abbas had rejected all Kerry’s ideas and all President Barack Obama’s ideas. Yet he wasn’t “avoiding making decisions” or “running away”; he was a committed and engaged peace partner. Then who is to blame for his serial rejections? Why, Netanyahu, of course: Those “announcements of new housing tenders in settlements limited Abbas’ ability to show flexibility.”
In other words, if Netanyahu is intransigent, it’s Netanyahu’s fault. And if Abbas is intransigent, it’s also Netanyahu’s fault. Under this administration’s definition of “honest brokerage,” only one side is ever to blame; the Palestinians have no agency of their own.
But it gets even worse–because it turns out Netanyahu wasn’t intransigent. As interviewer Nahum Barnea noted, even chief Israeli negotiator Tzipi Livni–whom the American official termed a “heroine” who “fought with all of her might to promote the agreement”–says Netanyahu “showed flexibility.” The American pooh-poohed this, insisting Netanyahu hadn’t moved “more than an inch.” Yet addressing the Washington Institute the following week, Indyk admitted that Netanyahu actually evinced dramatic flexibility and was in “the zone of a possible agreement” when he met Obama in early March.
So the bottom line is that Abbas rejected every proposal Kerry and Obama offered, while Netanyahu was in “the zone of a possible agreement.” Yet the administration nevertheless blames the breakdown on Netanyahu. In short, no matter what happens, the Palestinians will never be blamed.
The reasons for this are numerous. As Jonathan Tobin noted last week, it helps deflect blame from the administration’s own mistake of wasting so much time and diplomatic energy on a dead end. Additionally, as Michael Doran perceptively argued this week, keeping Netanyahu on the defensive over the Palestinian issue undermines his ability to pressure the administration over Iran’s nuclear program. Nor can anti-Israel animus be ruled out, given the American official’s shocking claim, when Barnea drew a comparison to China’s occupation of Tibet, that “Israel is not China. It was founded by a UN resolution”–the clear implication being that unlike other countries, Israel’s right to exist is revocable.
The most important reason, however, is simply that if the main barrier to peace is the settlements, then the problem is easily solvable and peace is achievable. But if the main barrier is Palestinian unwillingness to end their war on Israel, the problem is unsolvable and peace is unachievable. And to most of the world, blaming Israel unjustly is infinitely preferable to acknowledging that unpleasant truth.
Haaretz reported yesterday that if the Palestinian Authority’s planned Fatah-Hamas unity government actually arises, the U.S., like the European Union, will probably recognize it. Since Hamas has repeatedly said it will neither recognize Israel nor renounce violence, Israel is understandably upset at American and European willingness to peddle the fiction that a government in which Hamas is a full partner complies with those requirements. But Israel itself has helped to peddle a no less outrageous fiction for years–that PA President Mahmoud Abbas’s Fatah party, unlike Hamas, is a “partner for peace.” To understand how ridiculous this claim is, consider two recent developments: last week’s Haaretz op-ed by chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat, and a decision by Al-Quds University’s academic union two weeks earlier.
Erekat’s op-ed consisted mainly of standard Palestinian lies and half-truths about the Nakba–like omitting any mention of the five Arab armies who invaded Israel in 1948, thereby starting the war that created the Palestinian refugees. Nevertheless, one sentence stood out: “In my own home town, Jericho, there are two refugee camps where thousands continue to live in miserable conditions.” That happens to be completely true. What Erekat neglected to mention, however, is that Jericho was the first city Israel turned over to Palestinian rule, way back in 1994. In other words, Jericho has been under Palestinian rule continuously for the last 20 years, during which time the PA has been the largest per capita recipient of foreign aid in the world. Yet not one cent of that money has been spent on improving conditions in Jericho’s refugee camps. Instead, 20 years later, Erekat is still blaming Israel for the “miserable conditions” in those camps.
This is not a trivial issue, because the entire peace process is predicated on the theory that Fatah actually wants a Palestinian state. Yet having a Palestinian state means taking responsibility for the Palestinians’ problems, including the refugees living in those camps, rather than continuing to blame Israel for them. And as Erekat’s statement shows, the Fatah-led PA has no interest in doing any such thing: It prefers leaving the refugees in their misery as a way to score points against Israel with international public opinion. In other words, it would rather pursue its war against Israel than actually exercise sovereignty by improving its people’s lives.
This preference for continuing the war on Israel over making peace also emerges from an April 30 decision by Al-Quds University’s academic union to expel a professor for the “crime” of taking his students to Auschwitz. By so doing, the union said, Prof. Mohammed Dajani was guilty of “behavior that contravenes the [union’s] policies and norms.”
Al-Quds isn’t some Islamic university deep in Hamas-controlled Gaza; it’s a flagship PA institution, located in East Jerusalem, that even had a partnership with Brandeis University, and whose president for almost 20 years (until his resignation in March at age 65) was prominent Fatah member Sari Nusseibeh, considered a leading Palestinian moderate. Yet for this “moderate” university, simply daring to expose students to the historical truth of the Holocaust is a crime worthy of expulsion from the academic union. Why? Because, as another teacher explained, it might lead students to have some sympathy for “the false Zionist narrative.” Or in other words, it might actually contribute to peacemaking by facilitating mutual understanding.
As long as the “moderates” of Fatah are unwilling either to accept the basic responsibilities of sovereignty, like helping their own refugees, or to acknowledge basic historical truths like the Holocaust, they are no more “peace partners” than Hamas is. And by peddling the fiction that they are, Israel and the West aren’t bringing peace closer. They’re merely ensuring that Fatah has no incentive to change.
Yesterday, I wrote about a crucial legal fallacy behind the “Israeli apartheid” canard. But you don’t actually need to know anything about the Geneva Convention or international law to know how ridiculous this slur is; it’s enough to ask yourself one simple question: How many black Africans in other countries spoke admiringly about South African apartheid as a model they’d like their own countries to follow? The answer, of course, is not many–and if Israel really practiced apartheid against Arabs, Middle Eastern Arabs would respond similarly to an equivalent question about Israel. Yet in fact, Arabs throughout the Middle East persistently cite Israeli democracy as the model they’d like their own countries to adopt.
Back in 2011, when the Arab Spring revolutions were at their height, Haaretz correspondent Anshel Pfeffer reported being stunned to hear from demonstrators in both Tunis and Cairo–neither of whom knew he represented an Israeli newspaper–that they wanted “a democracy like in Israel.” Just two weeks ago, the Middle East Media Research Institute published excerpts from articles in the Arab press over the last year that held up Israel as a model Arab states should learn from–in some cases, because of its economic, scientific, and democratic achievements, but in others, because of its democracy and even its morality.
Even the Palestinians themselves consistently voice admiration for Israeli democracy. From 1996-2002 (the last year the question was asked), Palestinian pollster Khalil Shikaki conducted annual polls of what governments Palestinians admired. “Every year Israel has been the top performer, at times receiving more than 80 percent approval,” the New York Times reported in 2003. “The American system has been the next best, followed by the French and then, distantly trailing, the Jordanian and Egyptian.” And that’s not because those years, in contrast to today, were a time of progress and optimism in the peace process: They were the years of Benjamin Netanyahu’s first government (1996-99), the collapse of the Camp David talks (2000) and the height of the second intifada (2000-03).
What’s truly astonishing about this admiration is that the Arab media is virulently anti-Israel, and routinely reports the wildest anti-Israel fabrications as fact. Hence most Arabs believe Israeli treatment of both Palestinians and Israeli Arabs to be much worse than the reality–and even so, they admire Israeli democracy.
As Pfeffer perceptively noted back in 2011, this is an ironic side effect of the Arab media’s obsession with Israel. Because Israel receives so much more coverage than other Western countries, Arabs end up seeing more of Israeli democracy in action than they do of other Western democracies: a president convicted of rape and a prime minister of corruption; hundreds of thousands of demonstrators taking to the streets (in the social justice protests of summer 2011) without suffering any violence from the police or military; a robustly free press in both Hebrew and Arabic; even the fact that Israeli hospitals offer first-class medical treatment to all, Jews and Arabs alike. And the Arabs like what they see.
So next time someone tells you Israel is an “apartheid state,” try asking them why Arabs throughout the region–unlike blacks in the days of South African apartheid–view the “apartheid state” as a model democracy to be emulated. You won’t convince the diehard anti-Israel crowd. But you might provide food for thought to the merely uninformed.