Six on History: Israel and Palestine
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1) The Israeli-Palestinian conflict won’t be the same again, WAPO
"After the shooting war over Gaza wound down early Friday, it seems that the Israelis and Palestinians may be poised to return to their fragile, if febrile, status quo. Israeli officials are already claiming their military objectives were met after close to two weeks of relentless bombardment of the blockaded Gaza Strip. After firing more than 4,000 rockets into Israeli territory, the Islamist group Hamas, which rules the Gaza Strip, may also declare a kind of victory. It is likely to emerge from the fighting as it has after previous rounds, battered but unbowed, and perhaps boosted in the eyes of some of its brethren for having confronted an Israeli state that maintains an unflinching occupation over millions of Palestinians. Never mind the hundreds of Palestinians and dozen people in Israel who lost their lives in the process.
The coals were stoked far from Gaza, by the provocations of Israeli police and emboldened Jewish far-right vigilantes marching through Jerusalem. Palestinian protests against planned evictions in the contested holy city and the clashes that ensued all came to a head when Israeli security forces decided to storm al-Aqsa Mosque. Hamas then saw an opportunity to don the mantle of the defender of the third-holiest site in Islam as well as broader Palestinian claims to Jerusalem, and launched its attacks. The resulting war sprawled across the land between the river and the sea, with clashes in the West Bank as well as between Arab and Jewish Israelis in cities inside Israel’s 1967 borders.
The explosion of tensions exposed the internal dysfunctions among both the Israeli and Palestinian political camps. For the former, two years of ceaseless electioneering and the failure to form a stable ruling coalition either with or without Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu weakened governance and has brought far-right groups once considered too extremist into the political mainstream. For the latter, a crisis of legitimacy facing the beleaguered Palestinian Authority and its aging President Mahmoud Abbas has only intensified. Hamas’s renewed militancy followed a decision by Abbas to scrap the first planned Palestinian elections after more than a decade and a half.
Israeli and U.S. officials may tout the return of “calm” after a cease-fire, but experts fear the opposite. There is no meaningful dialogue between an unpopular, enfeebled PA and a right-wing Israeli government where many politicians now openly reject the idea of an independent Palestinian state. Israel’s entrenched system of control over the Palestinian territories and its creeping annexation of Palestinian lands, unchecked for years by an acquiescent United States, may only provoke more angry resistance.
“Given Israeli efforts to marginalize Abbas and the PA, it will not be easy to keep the West Bank out of the next conflict or even the current one,” wrote Khalil Shikaki, a Palestinian political analyst and pollster. “Security coordination between Israel and the PA will not be enough to contain the rising flames. And given the rhetoric around annexation, no right-wing Israeli government will be willing or able to renew a political process that would require negotiations with the PA leadership, even for small incremental steps.”
This state of affairs was a long time coming. In a recent survey of U.S.-based Middle East scholars, a majority now viewed the two-state solution as an impossibility. The population of Jewish settlers in the West Bank and East Jerusalem — where a Palestinian state is supposed to emerge — has grown sevenfold since the 1990s. Once on the fringes of Israeli politics, the settler movement now makes up the vanguard of the Israeli right. And, like its U.S. allies in the Republican Party, the Israeli right has no interest in pursuing the two-state goals enshrined by the Oslo accords in 1993.
“The official Israeli abandonment of negotiated compromise, alongside continued settlement expansion and the forcible relocation of Palestinian families in East Jerusalem and communities in the West Bank, made a new crisis almost inevitable,” wrote Tamara Cofman Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “It made inescapably obvious what was already clear to many: that the Oslo framework was exhausted, and the rationale for the prevailing order in the West Bank, including the existence of the Palestinian Authority, was defunct.”
Now, a growing number of dignitaries and diplomats who staked their careers on building two states recognize that the facts on the ground make it a fantasy. “The Oslo framework is done, it’s over,” said Marwan Muasher, a former Jordanian diplomat and politician who played a lead role in the Arab Peace Initiative two decades ago, at a virtual event hosted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on Wednesday. “I’m a two-stater by training. I’m a one-stater by reality.”
Other veterans of the post-Oslo era who participated in the same event were less emphatic. Tzipi Livni, a former Israeli foreign minister, hoped “pragmatic moderates” on both sides could revive the peace process. In current circumstances, that seems more a wish than a solution.
“Let’s make the rights the central argument for people,” Muasher countered, pointing to an evolving conversation within the Palestinian movement and abroad, including among U.S. Democrats, where the focus is shifting away from the Palestinians’ lack of statehood to their lack of equal rights within Israel. “Let’s keep talking about the shape of a solution, but ignoring the rights of the people is not sustainable.”
Palestinians themselves are trying to make that last point clear. A mass general strike this week saw the joint participation of Arab Israelis — almost all of whom see themselves as Palestinians — and Palestinians in the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza. Analysts of the Palestinian scene see the glimmers of a new era of mobilization.
“For years, Israelis have made peace with the notion that they can manage, however brutally, their relationship with Palestinians instead of resolving it,” wrote Yousef Munayyer in the New York Times. “This has been aided by a process of walling off the ugliness of their rule: Gaza, caged and besieged, might as well have been on a different planet; Israelis could drive throughout the West Bank practically uninterrupted by the sight of Palestinians; Palestinian citizens of Israel have largely been relegated to neglected, concentrated areas.”
Our politics are stalled. Our democracy is in tatters. Blame the occupation.
"Although many Israelis scoff at the left-wing tendency to blame the occupation for the country’s problems, and Mr. Netanyahu has insisted for years that the conflict doesn’t control our lives, reality says otherwise. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict dominates Israeli politics, muscling out sound policymaking in other critical areas of life. The conflict is suffocating liberal values, eroding Israel’s democratic institutions. Israeli leadership at large is collapsing under its weight.
Once again, with help from the conflict, Israel has normalized a leader standing trial for corruption charges in three cases, who refuses to resign. (He has pleaded not guilty). Since a sufficient number of parties over the past two years have refused to join a government led by Mr. Netanyahu, his recalcitrance is the reason Israel has had no permanent government despite four elections. He has also opportunistically joined the attacks on Israel’s judiciary in an effort to undermine the court cases against him.
Decades of Palestinian suffering should have brought Israel’s occupation to an end by now. But the folly of territorial conquest and international realpolitik has been stronger.
Perhaps a cleareyed view of how the conflict is suffocating Israel can add urgency. There is certainly no easy or ideal solution. But the “stand back” approach, or any “not now” complacency, is definitely the wrong one."
"With the rockets coming out of Gaza, my inbox overflowed in recent days with requests, even demands, to donate money, write letters and attend rallies showing my “support for,” “loyalty to” and, especially, “love of” Israel.
There are things in this world that I do love. But Israel is not one of them. I don’t “not love” Israel. I just think it’s a pointless, and perhaps even dangerous, word.
My kids attended a Hebrew-language camp, spent chunks of high school and college in Israel and visit frequently. My wife just returned from taking 60 adolescents to a high school outside Jerusalem where they’ll spend a semester, and where she is vice principal. I took some 20 congregational groups to Israel, and I’m headed back next February with a couple of dozen youngsters from northern New Jersey.
The Hasbara Fellowships, which train Israel advocates on campus, offer “Ten Reasons Why I Love Israel.” They include food, scenery and the “start-up nation” reputation, which has made Israel a tech giant. I like the food, the scenery is gorgeous, and Israel’s tech prowess is indeed impressive. But these are reasons to love?
More sober usage comes from the Haredim, the very traditional Jews who see Israel as the modern incarnation of God’s will, which is at least serious and consistent, as these are the folks intent on building ever more settlements on the West Bank to fulfill God’s promise.
The Israel they love has gotten a boost during the Netanyahu years, and may get even more of one in the next government, whose ruling coalition will likely have right-wing extremists like we’ve never seen before: the Kahanists, who don’t believe in rights for non-Jewish Israelis and have emboldened violence toward Arabs and gays.
Theirs is an Israel I would find difficult to love.
Similarly, evangelical Christians love Israel — they really love Israel. Their money and influence outweigh the fabled “Jewish lobby.” But the Israel they love is the one that will herald the second coming of Jesus; in the words of Israeli historian Anita Shapira, they are imbued with “the idea of the Jews returning to their ancient homeland as the first step to world redemption.”
This is an Israel I am supposed to love?
I am an American, born and raised here, and as such I am obligated to cheer what I admire, criticize what I don’t, serve if needed and participate in American civil society knowing that what’s best for us as a people may not always be best for me as an individual. That’s fine. My responsibility is not to “love” the U.S.; it’s to be a citizen.
Same thing with Israel.
Many argue that Israel has no choice but to use force to rout Hamas from Gaza. I agree Hamas is an evil terrorist organization; I spent much of an early major rocket attack — the debut of Iron Dome — in a mamad (safe room) at Kibbutz Erez, on the Gaza border. But the furthest many will go in assigning some responsibility to Israel for the current situation is, as one pundit put it, to say that Israel made “miscalculations” along the way. The blockade of Gaza, the passing of the Nation-State law, the relentless growth of the settlements, the evictions from Sheikh Jarra and other Arab neighborhoods — did these not play a role?
The “Israel can do no wrong” mentality so prevalent today scares me because it is not in Israel’s best interest. It is based on half-truths, accentuating the positive, rewriting or playing down the negative. Israel is not a mythical place. It is an actual flesh-and-blood country — which is how we Jews must see it: a real place, sometimes glamorous, sometimes anything but.
A new Pew Research Center study and a recent UCLA study underscore what is already widely known: More young Jews feel ever less connected to Israel. Much of that is because, on the one hand, they see morally questionable actions by Israel — the occupation being the big one — while on the other, they are told they must idealize, honor and, yes, love Israel. With such cognitive dissonance, can we blame them for seeking refuge in apathy?
Clifford M. Kulwin is rabbi emeritus of Temple B’nai Abraham in Livingston, N.J.
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"It is three days into the cease-fire between Hamas and Israel and as of this writing it seems to be holding. All this means is that this particular front in Israel’s nearly 80 year war of conquest is “quiet” while Israel’s efforts to "Judaize" all of Palestine continue uninterrupted, just as it has since 1948 and before (by pre-state Zionists who had already expelled most of Palestine’s native population before Israel declared independence).
And now that Israel has terminated its latest exercise of “mowing the lawn” we don’t hear much from Gaza and we certainly don’t hear very much about Israel's latest war crimes. Israel wiped out entire families, again, and what sort of response do we get from establishment figures of the American Jewish community? We get gross sacrilege and profane war worship. Don’t expect any moral leadership from these people, nor from their allies who shape secular opinion.
It’s evident that Israel has suffered a significant loss of prestige and decent people are feeling empowered to speak truth to power. The backlash, however, is just getting started."
Thanks for reading,
Scott Roth
