What Peace Process?

Now that Avigdor Lieberman and Benjamin Netanyahu have signed a coalition government in Israel, get ready for a new round from Middle East “experts”. The pundits will lament the death of the “peace process” brought about, they will tell you, by Netanyahu’s opposition to a “two-state” solution, or the creation of a Palestinian Arab state alongside of Israel on territories that Israel occupied in the 1967 Six Day War. The appointment of Lieberman as Foreign Minister, who favors subjecting Israeli Arabs to loyalty oaths, will be portrayed, perhaps not unjustly, as anti-Arab bigotry, making him unqualified to negotiate with the Palestinians or Israel’s other neighbors.

Writing in this Saturday in Canada’s Globe and Mail, Yossi Klein Halevi, a senior fellow at Jerusalem’s Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies provides a fair-minded and well-reasoned assessment of why Israeli writers voted for right-wing parties. Israeli voters, he argued, gave up on the left’s ability to deliver successful peace negotiations that would succeed:

Though much of the international community continues to blame [Jewish] settlements [in the West Bank] for the absence of peace, Israel has twice proved that settlements are a secondary issue – first, when it accepted US president Bill Clinton’s peace plan of 2000, which called for the dismantling of dozens of settlements, and then, in 2005, when it uprooted all of its settlements in Gaza. Yet, at precisely the moment the Palestinians won their struggle for a state in 2000, their movement shifted to jihadist terror.

Halevi says, “the real obstacle to an agreement is the continuing refusal of the Palestinian leadership, and much of the Arab leadership generally, to accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state in any borders.” Furthermore, Halevi claims, even “moderate Palestinian leaders such as Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas” have never acknowledged to their people that the Jews are here to stay, and the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River must be shared by two people. Instead the media run by Fatah and the supposedly more militant Hamas continues to tell the Arabs that the Jews are thieves and usurpers, and in the end the Arabs will get all the land.

Halevi is no fan of Lieberman. He has told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria that Lieberman constituted “the worst political phenomenon that has happened in Israel in 60 years”, and maintained that Israelis “need to own up and take responsibility for this educational and moral failure.” Still he says that he understands why Israelis turned to right wing parties, like Lieberman’s in their recent election. Halevi, in the Globe, claims that for the first time since the fearful days immediately preceding the 1967 War they thought that they were existentially threatened. The Israeli army has largely been ineffectual in stopping rocket attacks from Lebanon in the north and Gaza in the south. “In principle most Israelis support a two-state solution – 70 percent, according to a recent poll,” Halevi maintains. But now Israelis wonder about what would happen, if after an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, which borders the country’s main population centers, rockets fall on Tel Aviv and the busy Ben Gurion International Airport? After the condemnation that rained down on Israel during the Gaza War, “any Israeli attempt to defend itself against terrorists embedded among Palestinian civilians will result in international ostracism.”

The outbreaks of Arab violence in 2000 and 2005 should not have been a surprise. Arab attacks on the Jewish residents of Palestine were not a response to either the “occupation” or Jewish settlements. This violence preceded by many decades the capture of the territories, the establishment of the settlements, and even the creation of Israel. On two occasions before 2000, the Palestinian Arabs forfeited the opportunity to get their own state, solely in order to deny Jews one. It’s hard to attribute this virulent hostility to anything other than the anti-Semitic sentiments that have been endemic to Arab culture for at least a century. Only this explains: a century of unrelenting violent Arab opposition to Jewish immigration to Palestine; the forcible expulsion of Jews during and after Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, not only from the parts of Palestine that the Arabs controlled but from almost every country in the Arab world; the prohibition against any Jews even traveling to any of the parts of Palestine that were controlled by the Arabs (including East Jerusalem which contained Judaism’s holiest shrine, during the 19 years in  which Palestine was divided between Jewish and Arab rule), and the proliferation in Arab textbooks and media filled with negative stereotypes of Israelis and Jews.

Only Arab anti-Semitism explains why the Arab-Israeli conflict has not been resolved. Just this weekend Hezbollah’s spiritual leader in Lebanon, Grand Ayatollah Muhammad Hussein Fadullah told the Wall Street Journal, “there is an impression in the region” that “America was one of the Jewish colonies.” When asked whether he agreed with this view, the Ayatollah said, “I am close”. The Obama Administration clearly wants to return to Clinton’s policy of intensive intervention in Arab-Israeli negotiations. If Israel gives in to Obama’s prodding, it will end up making concessions on territories and settlements without getting anything in return.  If Obama’s ignores Arab anti-Semitism, his diplomacy, like Bill Clinton’s dabbling, can only result in needless shedding of blood.