EOZ Makes a Point

From DG:

"All or nothing"

Elder of Ziyon critiques a recent essay by Robert Lifton in Huffington Post. I have not read Lifton's piece, but Elder makes an excellent point well worth emphasizing:

Lifton uses the straw man that Thomas Friedman, Jeffrey Goldberg and others use: that the only choice is between Israel annexing the entire West Bank and Israel giving up the entire West Bank (with minor land swaps.) Yet this is not even close to true.

The concept of a Palestinian Arab state is not identical to the demand that Israel withdraw from all the crucial lands needed for defensible borders and to to maintain a Jewish presense in historically and religiously significant areas.


When Palestinian Arabs insist that the two are congruent, the Western reaction should be that, in that case, the demand for an independent state must not be all that important to the Palestinian Arabs.


But what this view means is that there's no real point to negotiations. It's the "everyone knows" what a peace agreement will look like. But if the final agreement is foreordained, what penalty is there for bad faith on the part of the Palestinians?

But the worst part is that this makes Israel's legitimacy dependent on the say so of the Palestinians. As long as the Palestinians claim that they're "legitimate aspirations" are not fulfilled by Israeli concessions, Israel's legitimacy is questionable. The idea that any nation's legitimacy should be dependent on the whims of its enemy is beyond absurd.

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