Words Worth Quoting

The Obama administration’s decision to provoke a crisis with Israel is based on a profound misreading of the last decade in Middle East peacemaking efforts. Israeli disillusionment toward the peace process wasn’t, as you write, only a result of Palestinian violence. It was because the Second Intifada occurred after Israel accepted a Palestinian state. When Israel endorsed the Clinton Proposals of December 2000 and received in return the worst wave of terrorism in its history, most Israelis despaired of a negotiated settlement. One result was the near-total collapse of the Israeli left which, tragically, had won the domestic argument over the untenability of the occupation, only to lose the argument over the viability of a peace agreement.

For all the skepticism, though, Israeli attempts to end the occupation continued through the Bush years. Prime Minister Ariel Sharon uprooted Gaza’s settlements, and the result was that Palestinian rocket attacks shifted from those settlements to Israeli communities within the 1967 borders. Sharon’s successor, Ehud Olmert, offered the Palestinians the equivalent of one hundred percent of the West Bank, with East Jerusalem as their capital. Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, Olmert says, never even responded.

If the administration wants to make progress on peace talks, it should focus on the real obstacle—Palestinian refusal to confine the return of the descendants of the refugees of 1948 to a Palestinian state. That’s the reason why Palestinian leaders have rejected Israel’s offers for statehood. No Israeli government will agree to absorb descendants of Palestinian refugees into Israel proper. That would lead not to a two-state solution but to a bi-national state.

Yossi Klein Halevi


But I will comment on this of Yossi's:

In order to make your case against Israel, you have to ignore the fact that Israel tried—three times in the last decade—to create a Palestinian state.

It could be better put.

Israel, practically speaking, was the first to recognize an "Arab Palestine" when the Yishuv's leadership accepted the 1947 Partition Proposal. In 1978, Menachem Begin's Autonomy Plan was rightly seen as a corridor for a state for the Arabs of Eretz-Yisrael. In essence, in one way or another, every Israel government since 1967 has sought to surrender up territory it administered.

And given all these attempts, with the subsequent refusals by Arabs to accept such, indicate most strongly the futility of assuming a "Palestinian state" is part of any peace solution. It would only be an instrument of further destruction and terror.

And Marty Peretz gets it:

The real impediment to successful Israeli-Palestinians talks, even to unsuccessful talks, is that Palestine is a failed society.

In fact, it is really just another (and more inchoate) instance of other Arab societies stretching from the Maghreb to the borders of Iran. Palestinian factions are organized for pillage ... but pillage with ideological facades and theological tropes. It is true that there are refined and cultured elements in Palestinian society, elements with a normal range of political opinions and social habits. Many of these are inner exiles, as there were and are inner exiles in every public, however violent and corrupt its essences are. Among these inner exiles are men and women of great talent and subtle sensibilities. They will be the real victims of whatever kind of sovereignty and independence Palestine achieves. In a Gaza ruled by Hamas and smaller competing gangs of thugs, however, civil society has already come to an end. Whatever supplies Israel will be euchred into allowing past the blockade into the Strip (Egypt is permitted for raisons d’etat of its own to maintain an even more draconian closure) actually strengthens the rule of disorder, the parties of corruption (including UNRWA, another United Nations fraud, and other ideologically high strung NGOs) being the distributors of these supplies.