Left-of-Center or Left Is Center

The secret of the radical Left, our progressives, is that, through their ability (an analysis I can't go into here right now) to commandeer the position of "elite" in the crucial communicative public opinion fields and then self-praise themselves in it (media, theater, literature, culture) to further enhance their reputations. They are Left but appropriate the center.

I say this after reading Leonard Fein's mea culpafor having allowed the Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria to grow which turned the Six Days War victory into something else in The Forward:-

Few sweet victories have ever turned sour quite so quickly or comprehensively.

That’s not the standard view, I know, though it is increasingly accepted by Israelis to the left of center — not that any of them would have preferred defeat. True, peace with Egypt and Jordan have also happened and would perhaps not have without the 1967 victory. No small thing. But the victory left Israel the unwelcome occupier of 26,000 square miles of additional territory — the Sinai, Gaza, the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.

The occupation, it was widely assumed, would be temporary. In Sinai, it lasted 11 years; in Gaza, 38. But the West Bank lingers, a tumor that grows. As Gershom Gorenberg brilliantly details in his book “The Accidental Empire,” just seven months after the war there were already 800 Jewish settlers in the West Bank. The settlement project was advanced by Shimon Peres, Yigal Allon and Moshe Dayan, all stalwarts of the left, and soon enough it was taken up as a messianic project by Gush Emunim, then advanced with varying degrees of enthusiasm by Begin, Rabin, Netanyahu, Barak and Sharon.

Now, 40 years later, there are some 250,000 Jewish settlers in 120 officially recognized West Bank settlements, an indeterminate (but relatively small) number in 102 (or so) illegal outposts, many of them on land privately owned by Palestinians, 16,000 on the Golan and 180,000 in annexed areas of East Jerusalem...

...The passions of the settlers have become a central fact of Israeli public life, rendering the settlements a trap, and the misery and hatred of two generations of Palestinians are a constant sorrow and an ongoing threat. Forty years: Here and there, a lush oasis. But mostly a desert; wandering, stumbling, no promised time in view.

I repeat - the desert is the Arab refusal to recognize Jewish nationalism and all that it means: a free, sovereign political power controlling its national homeland.