Progressives: Are you tired of the never-ending stalemate surrounding the two-state solution?
Are you wondering if Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) is a non-violent way to solve the conflict?
Do you think that the clean-cut, attractive young BDS proponents that are everywhere on campuses lately have a different goal than the terrorists that have been murdering Israelis since the founding of the state?
Watch this:
Technorati Tags: BDS
The BBC World Service commissions a yearly poll in which respondents are asked whether they think various countries have a positive or negative influence in the world. Here are the results by country:
It’s a little depressing to see that Israel is ahead only of Pakistan, North Korea and Iran. Israel’s overall rating actually improved slightly since last year. These numbers have been almost constant since 2008, although 2007’s were significantly worse, probably reflecting attitudes toward the second Lebanon War.
But look at the ratings for Israel by respondents in various countries:
For important English-speaking countries, the results are worrisome:
Perhaps the most interesting shift is the change in American opinion, as the US public is now divided rather than favourable in its rating. While positive ratings have remained quite stable since 2010 (43%), negative ratings are up by ten points (41%)…
Negative perceptions grew sharper in the United Kingdom (66%, up 16 points), Canada (52%, up 14 points), … Australia (58%, up 11 points).
Someone recently said that “this is proof that Israel’s hasbara [‘explanation’, ‘public relations’ or ‘propaganda’, depending on your point of view] isn’t working.”
Of course it isn’t, and the reason is simple and obvious.
Israel’s efforts at telling its story take two forms: one is ‘branding’ — showing that Israel is a modern state with beautiful women, a great economy, fascinating tourist sites, absolutely world-class science and technology (including medical research, in which Israel might be the most advanced nation in the world).
Naturally this has no effect when the other side is arguing that they are oppressed and prevented from developing by ‘racist apartheid’, etc.
The other type of hasbara is what I call ‘apologetics’. For example, “We tried to be gentle to the Turkish peace activists on the Mavi Marmara, but it didn’t work out. Sorry, we did our best.”
OK, perhaps I’m exaggerating (only a little), but you get the idea. Israel sometimes even apologizes preemptively for something it didn’t do, like the faked death of Muhammad al-Dura or the Gaza beach explosion.
The problem is twofold. First, actual policies are based on the assumption that Israel must avoid giving offense at all costs. So the commandos landing on the deck of the Mavi Marmara were given paintball guns. Second, when outrageous accusations are leveled afterward, Israel tries to refute them rationally, point by point. The refutation simply gives prominence to the original charge, and the other side just says Israel is lying.
Diaspora Jews throughout history tried to protect themselves by not making the antisemites mad. It didn’t work, but they didn’t have a lot of options. Israel does not have to behave this way. Take the Mavi Marmara incident: the commandos should have been appropriately armed, and rules of engagement should have allowed a pipe-swinging thug to be shot. Possibly there would have been fewer injuries to the ‘activists’, and certainly to the commandos. Hasbara afterwards should have taken the form “you’re lucky we didn’t just sink the ship.”
Today Israel is engaged in a charade in which it pretends that a peaceful two-state solution with the Palestinian Authority (PA) is possible.
A peace agreement with the Palestinians does not stand in contradiction with Israel’s security needs, Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Israel Radio on Monday, saying that immediate action needed to be taken to advance peace efforts…
“Nothing of value was ever achieved without taking risks,” the defense minister said, adding that Israel could not afford to continue down the “slippery slope” of its own international isolation. — Ha’aretz
The only way such a ‘peace agreement’ would not be a disaster for security would be if Israel retained control of the Jordan Valley and strategic high ground. The Palestinians fully understand this and will not agree to it. There is also the not-inconsiderable problem of Hamas, which would have no problem taking over from the PA in a matter of days if the IDF leaves the territories.
The very slippery slope that Barak refers to — the international momentum toward unilateral recognition — is abetted by Israel’s pretense that a Palestinian state is acceptable.
Israel’s government officials have been making the same mistake since they studiously ignored Arafat’s violations of the Oslo agreements starting in 1993, and pretended that he wanted peace as much as they did. Barry Rubin tells a story (which I can’t find now) that Itzhak Rabin got a call immediately after the famous handshake on the White House lawn that Arafat had violated a prior agreement about which PLO terrorists would be allowed into the territories. No action was taken.
It was downhill all along, after Arafat made clear over and over again in speeches and broadcasts in Arabic that he intended to destroy Israel, and after there was clear evidence that he was not only not fighting terrorism as agreed, but actively supporting it.
Despite this, official Israeli behavior, in both policy and speech, promoted the idea that the Palestinian Arabs’ demands for a state were justified and would be met. Terrorism continued to claim victims until 2000, when it exploded into war, which claimed even more victims.
Kenneth Levin, about whom I wrote here, would say that Israel was operating on the basis of a pathological delusion that continued concessions would cause her enemies to stop wanting to destroy her (of course, the opposite is true).
Levin’s thesis is that Jews, battered by antisemitism, begin to believe the lies that are told about them and then try to end the conflict by “self-reform” — by making themselves into ‘better’ Jews that don’t fit antisemitic stereotypes. In psychological terms, says Levin, this is ‘grandiose’ behavior, a delusion that the Jews have the power to change the behavior of the antisemites.
Israel, too, does not have the power to change the attitude of the Arab world that hates her, especially by “self-reform”, which in this context means making concessions to the Arabs. But, unlike the Jews in 19th-century Russia, Israel does have the power to prevent her enemies from harming her people.
Unfortunately this power cannot be exercised when the primary consideration is “don’t make them angry,” or “how will it look to the world?” It’s necessary to get out of the Ghetto for once and for all and to act as other nations act, directly in support of Israeli interests and national goals.
Both policy and hasbara must reflect this.
One more point: everyone loves a winner, and everyone wants to bet on the “strong horse.” An honest assertion of power in pursuit of national goals will win Israel more friends than apologetics.
Technorati Tags: Israel
Yesterday’s post, “An Israeli looks at US policy” included a comment from ‘an Israeli friend’. The friend didn’t mention that he was quoting an article by Victor Davis Hanson!
I’ve deleted the post, although my friend indicates that he entirely agrees with Dr. Hanson!
A couple of years ago a guy asked me to contribute to a project to make a film about why Israel should hold on to the territories. “We’ll give strategic, political and biblical reasons,” he said. I disagreed — I thought biblical arguments would hurt his cause. “After all, anyone who will listen to them is either an Orthodox Jew or an Evangelical Christian, and almost all of them are already on our side,” I told him. “You’ll just turn off the secular people.”
But now I’m not so sure. Because this is actually what the conflict is about. There is a reason that we haven’t been able to reach a compromise on borders, refugees, Jerusalem, etc. There is a reason that Arabs are prepared to die for al-Aqsa and Jews want to live in Hevron (other than “why shouldn’t they?” which is also a pretty good reason). There is truth in the remark of PLO official Abbas Zaki, whom I quoted in my post “The Jews and the Land”, that Zionism will collapse if we leave Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem, because our relationship to these places is at the heart of Zionism.
Secular Europeans — which today is most of them — and Americans don’t get it. To them, religious beliefs, especially religious beliefs that affect real actions in the world and not just abstract talk, are irrational or worse. But these beliefs are among the strongest motivators of human behavior.
Religious wars are stupid and pointless, they say. But war is rarely rational, despite the attempts of politicians to make it so. Religious belief is the model for all ideology — today’s progressive secular humanism that animates many of Israel’s left-wing critics is no more rational or better examined than Judaism or Islam.
The struggle for Jerusalem is an ideological one — and the struggling ideologies are religious.
An aside: People often distinguish between ‘religious’ (dati) and ‘secular’ (hiloni) Israelis. What I think they really mean are ‘observant’ and ‘not-so-observant’. I think a majority of the so-called ‘secular’ Israelis, as I wrote previously, have a strong — I would even call it ‘religious’ — connection to the Land of Israel, even if they rarely go to a synagogue and drive on Shabbat.
If we want to make people see our side of the argument, we have to be honest about what we are fighting for and why. We have to be honest about our ideology and our values, and about our story.
The most convincing of the spokespeople for the Arabs are the Islamists. That’s one reason their philosophy has been wildly successful in recent years. I was once told by a Palestinian Muslim (who at least purported to favor coexistence between Jews and Arabs) that he felt much more comfortable with religious settlers than left-wing academics. Why? “They believe in God,” he said.
The story of the Jewish people is written in the Torah. You can treat it as concretely or abstractly, as literally or allegorically as you wish, but it is the most fundamental source of the Zionist idea (even if Herzl wouldn’t have agreed).
This week’s quotation is a little longer than usual, but it’s right on target:
And yet, in the middle of this [Middle Eastern] storm there is one unalterable fact: the solution to Israel’s problems (whatever they may be), to the Arab world’s problems — and for many denizens of J Street, the solution to most of the world’s ills — is simply and only the creation, RIGHT NOW, of a Palestinian State. If that one thing happens then all will be well with the Jewish world, the Arab world, and much of the entire world; the lion (6 million Israeli Jews) will lie down with the lamb (338 million Arabs); the Muslims of France will eat croissants and stop setting fire to cars; the Muslims of London will drink tea and stop setting fire to the underground; and the Muslims of Chechnya will drink vodka and stop trying to set fire to Russia.
Rational political discourse tries to define problems and propose solutions — and we can assess the quality of the discourse by looking to see whether the problems and solutions are logically connected to each other. But when the same solution is offered to solve every problem in the world and its exact opposite, it becomes clear that what’s operating in the mind of the people proffering that solution is not logic. It’s an obsession with that solution. The J Street conference was not an exercise in political discussion; it was a ward, holding but not treating people suffering from an intellectual monomania.
— Lori Lowenthal Marcus, in American Thinker (entire article highly recommended)
There’s little that I can add; Marcus provides multiple examples of opposite diagnoses of various illnesses, all of which are said to require the same treatment. The monomania described is not limited to J Street — it’s the policy of the Obama Administration (hmm, maybe no surprise there, since J Street and the administration are joined at the hip) and of course of almost every country in Europe, the UN, etc.
Norway, which has been called the most antisemitic and anti-Israel country in Europe, has threatened that if negotiations don’t bear fruit, it will recognize ‘Palestine’ anyway. Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr told Israelis recently that
I would like to be the first to recognize the state of Palestine when negotiations have been completed. I say so as long as there is a prospect for those negotiations. If it is clear to people that there is no such prospect we will have to reevaluate. — Ha’aretz
Several South American countries have already announced that they recognize a state of ‘Palestine’ according to the 1949 armistice lines. Of course, just as lawyers are fond of pointing out that anyone can sue anyone else regardless of the merit of their case, any nation can say that they recognize whatever they want, whether or not it makes sense in the context of international agreements, etc.
Here are two reasons that unilateral declaration of a state of ‘Palestine’ or recognition thereof is problematic:
1. A state has to have borders. The area of the Palestine Mandate was under Turkish control for 400 years until the defeat of the Ottoman empire in World War I. The League of nations gave a mandate to Britain to create a Jewish National Home in the area and to promote ‘close settlement’ of Jews there. Shortly thereafter the British gave about two thirds of it to their client Abdullah to compensate him for the fact that France had grabbed Lebanon and Syria (they also had a mandate for Iraq which they gave to Abdullah’s brother Feisal).
Note, however, that the only agreed-upon disposition for the area that was left was for the Jewish National Home. Although it was not agreed that all of the area would be included, or that it would be a sovereign state, there was and is no other legitimate claim to this land.
As everyone knows, the Brits did their best to sabotage this intention, fighting bitterly against Jewish immigration, not to mention sovereignty, even to the point of deliberately and consciously condemning hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of European Jews to death at the hands of Hitler, in order to keep control of a corridor to British India (hmm, another imperial success story there).
After WWII, a weakened Britain was unable to hold on any longer, the UN recommended partition, the Arabs rejected it, and the Palestinian Arabs went to war against the Jews. When the British Mandate ended, Israel declared independence and was attacked by five Arab nations. Upon the Arabs’ defeat, the armistice lines were set on the basis of the positions of the armies, and were never intended — by any of the parties, particularly the Arabs — to be permanent borders.
Following the 1967 war, UN Security Council resolution 242 called for a peace settlement that would result in “secure and recognized boundaries,” not the arbitrary 1949 lines. There never was such a peace settlement, because the Arabs refused to talk.
In 1993, the Oslo Accords called for borders to be established in final status negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, but agreement was never reached on this either. A unilateral declaration of ‘Palestine’ according to 1949 lines would therefore violate the Mandate, resolution 242 and the Oslo accords.
It’s funny that the people who are always talking about ‘international law’ in connection with the (incorrect) application of the Geneva Convention to Jewish settlements haven’t noticed any of this!
2. A state has to have a legitimate government. The Palestinian Authority (PA) was set up by the Oslo Accords. If the Palestinian Arabs abrogate them by the unilateral declaration of a state, what makes the PA a legitimate government? The Fatah/PLO dominated PA presently has no authority over 40% of the Palestinian Arab population, under Hamas rule in Gaza. Elections are long overdue, with ‘President’ Mahmoud Abbas’ term having ended two years ago. The PA is primarily dependent on the US and Europe for financing, and the presence of the IDF in the territories to protect it from being overthrown by Hamas. So not only is the PA technically not a government, it would immediately be overthrown by the racist, genocidal, even-less-legitimate, terrorist Hamas.
But why should people in the grip of a monomaniacal obsession — which I believe, based on a consideration of history, to be a whole lot more about the Jews than the Palestinians — care about reasons?
Technorati Tags: Israel, Palestinian Arabs, Palestinian state, monomania
