The State of the Jews

Henry Siegman, former head of the American Jewish Congress, continues his effort to punish and pressure Israel into more concessions toward the Palestinians. Writing in The Nation, he warns:

Israel’s relentless drive to establish “facts on the ground” in the occupied West Bank, a drive that continues in violation of even the limited settlement freeze to which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu committed himself, seems finally to have succeeded in locking in the irreversibility of its colonial project. As a result of that “achievement,” one that successive Israeli governments have long sought in order to preclude the possibility of a two-state solution, Israel has crossed the threshold from “the only democracy in the Middle East” to the only apartheid regime in the Western world.

Don’t believe it. Siegman’s vision suffers from a disparity between the real Israel and the Israel he believes he knows.

For example, he argues that “it is now widely recognized in most Israeli circles–although denied by Israel’s government–that the settlements have become so widespread and so deeply implanted in the West Bank as to rule out the possibility of their removal (except for a few isolated and sparsely populated ones) by this or any future Israeli government unless compelled to do so by international intervention, an eventuality until now considered entirely unlikely.”

Really? When over 80% of settlers live on 5% of the West Bank, most of it adjacent to the Green Line, when the popular reaction to the Disengagement from Gaza was an overwhelming yawn – no Galilee bed-and-breakfast and no Tel Aviv beach was empty during those two ostensibly traumatic weeks in August 2005.

The settlements can be removed, and the vast centrist Israeli mainstream that has so far escaped the notice of an ignorant world media will implement this removal. But only when it knows that the Palestinians won’t use the withdrawal from the West Bank the way they used the one from Gaza.

In short, Siegman is not a serious observer of Israel.

In 2008, he wrote another piece in the Nation seeking to prove Israel’s dishonesty in peacemaking. His sole proof: the settlements. Always the settlements.

It would be one thing if Israeli governments had insisted on delaying a Palestinian state until certain security concerns had been dealt with. But no government serious about a two-state solution to the conflict would have pursued, without letup, the theft and fragmentation of Palestinian lands, which even a child understands makes Palestinian statehood impossible.

I’m a big fan of American Jews taking Israel to the cleaners. I am genuinely mystified at their failure to protest the corrupt Israeli rabbinate’s efforts to define who is Jewish, or the complete absence of education about the Diaspora in all 12 years of an Israeli’s schooling, or the lack of Israeli support for Diaspora education while Israel joyfully drinks up American Jewish love and money with barely an acknowledging nod.

But the criticism on the peace process is not serious, and is repeatedly disproven by events. To insist on punishing Israel at this stage, Siegman must ignore the simple glaring fact that the Palestinians are refusing to prove the Israelis’ intransigence through, um, negotiating.

Yes, there are settlements. And yes, the settlement movement is a serious constituency with a resonant narrative. So it would be excruciatingly difficult for Netanyahu to take on the entire far-right unless he can show the mainstream that there is a reason to do so.

But it is also true that the settlers have lost every time they were challenged – in Sinai, Gaza and the current extra-Jerusalemite freeze. The broader culture war within Israel over the past two decades has left them marginalized politically. It is only Palestinian brutality that has left the majority of the settlements intact.

To seriously suggest further punishment of Israel without giving even casual consideration to the simple fact that the Palestinians have yet to concede anything in 17 years of negotiations – not even simple rhetorical gestures such as recognition of the Jews’ right to self-determination – is either stupid or willfully disingenuous.

You don’t trust Netanyahu? Fine. But right now, it isn’t Netanyahu that has to prove his good faith and capacity for peacemaking.

Pressure Israel all you want. As Obama has discovered in recent months, the Palestinians will only up their demands and push off the inevitable compromise.

We’ve already noted that the Obama administration’s demands for a settlement freeze wreaked havoc on the peace process by undermining the moderate Palestinian leadership.

The demand was ridiculous – Obama wanted not just a geographic freeze to the size of settlements, which Bibi Netanyahu gave him, but a demographic freeze. Israel was not to build kindergartens for the 960 children born each year in settlements. And “settlements” included Jerusalem.

No Israeli leader, on Left or Right, could agree to this as a pre-negotiation concession. And once uttered by the Americans, no Palestinian leader could demand any less. By undermining the Palestinians, Obama has set back all of us.

Or so I believed.

But now I’m starting to wonder if my thinking on this may have been premature. Yes, the Obama administration goofed as only self-righteous fools can. But maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

Dr. Alex Yakobson of Hebrew University, my teacher on these issues and a family friend, made some important points in Ha’aretz last week, suggesting that acceding to Obama’s demands now would leave Israel better off strategically even in the short term.

First, he notes, the American public’s support for Israel is strong and getting stronger:

…According to the poll, 64% of Americans continue to believe that Israel is serious about reaching a peace agreement with the Palestinians. By a 3:1 ratio, the American people express more sympathy with Israel than with the Palestinians: 45% to 15%.

This support, however, is based on the perception that Israel genuinely sought and continues to seek peace. The settlement debate, says Yakobson, is getting in the way:

The support of a majority of Americans is still a much more important factor than all the attacks on Israel and the calls for a boycott. The American people would never have awarded such support to a country they viewed as not pursuing peace.

This is an asset of enormous importance, and it should not be wasted on a dispute with the Obama administration over the expansion of the settlements. The settlements are the main cause for questioning Israel’s desire for peace and its willingness for a two-state solution. Even among our best friends in the United States and elsewhere, the great majority disagrees with Israel over this issue.

…

There is no real gap between the Obama administration’s positions on the settlements and those of the Bush administration. The only difference is that Obama has decided to focus public and diplomatic attention on this issue. From the moment this happened it became clear – beyond any ideological or political dispute – that it is an essential Israeli interest to find a way to reach an agreement with the Americans on a formula for a settlement freeze.

He concludes:

Such a prolonged and public dispute with the United States over the settlements harms Israel. It is a battle where even victory would be a serious defeat. Netanyahu understands America well enough to know that. The question is whether such a critical national interest is a good enough reason in his eyes to confront the extremists within his coalition and party.

Devil’s advocate for a moment: What can Bibi give Obama on settlements without paying an exorbitant political price? And is it worth the trouble just to make the Palestinians willing to talk?

Don’t worry so much about JStreet. That’s my advice to all the fretting over Michael Oren’s probable snub of the organization’s October 25 conference.

Like the Obama administration it so avidly supports, JStreet’s education on the Middle East has been swift and brutal. Created “to promote meaningful American leadership to end the Arab-Israeli and Palestinian-Israel conflicts peacefully and diplomatically,” the group was a cheerleader for President Obama’s disastrous policy of demanding a total demographic settlement freeze from Israel.

This policy was disastrous for Obama in Israel because it was spectacularly disconnected from reality. This wasn’t a demand for no geographic expansion of settlements (something Netanyahu has already committed to), but of no population growth.

Why is that shockingly stupid, you ask? For one thing, American officials publicly refused to distinguish between far-flung towns like Emmanuel and generations-old Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem. For another, 960 children are born each year in settlements. Presumably Israel was expected to snatch these from their parents and sell them to the Chinese?

But none of that was as serious as the profound damage this elephant-in-a-china-shop policy did to the Palestinian Authority. With America demanding of the Israelis more than the PA seemed to demand, and then, because the demand was demonstrably stupid, suddenly withdrawing it, US diplomats left the PA with hat in hand facing an unprecedented wave of Arab excoriation for its “collaboration.”

I’m not saying Obama shouldn’t lead on peace, but he should do so competently and carefully. It wasn’t Bush’s Zionism that prevented peace in the past eight years, as Obama suggested to Jewish leaders back in July. It was Palestinian political dysfunction and ideological rejectionism. Remember the suicide bombings? Those were in Bush’s term, too.

Whether or not Obama gets this basic reality barely matters, since the Palestinians will explain it to him in short order. We know how to extract concessions from Israel for peace treaties, territorial withdrawals – even on the dismantling of settlements. Has anyone figured out how to extract a “yes” from the Palestinians?

So I couldn’t bring myself to share the excitement about JStreet, either for or against. It won’t bring peace because it’s barking up the wrong tree. But neither will it “undermine” or “betray” Israel’s security, since the ball will always stop, motionless, in the Palestinians’ court.

At some point, I figure, it is the Palestinians who will set the JStreet folks straight.

As I noted a month ago:

J-Street is not “Left” because its fundamental point of disagreement with AIPAC has nothing to do with the old division of peace vs. territorial redemption. Rather, J-Street stands out in the American Jewish landscape because it trusts Palestinian intentions and capabilities – a trust that, ultimately, it cannot convincingly explain to the rest of us.

Whatever its power becomes in Washington – and I suspect it will not be very great until J-Street wisens up on the only issue that distinguishes it – it will remain irrelevant on this side of the Atlantic. Lacking a healthy distrust of the intentions of the intransigent Palestinian leadership, it will lack any shred of credibility when it tries to convince Israelis to compromise once more for the sake of Palestinian freedom.

Now if only I could be as confident vis-a-vis JStreet’s stance on Iran, where its lack of support even for sanctions is just plain dangerous…

Bear with me. I’m catching up after a busy work week and holiday. Here are a few posts of interesting things you may have missed in recent days.

First, Shmuley Boteach, publicist-rabbi extraordinaire, tackles the moral conundrum that is Jimmy Carter. Boteach has a habit of saying things in a succinct and clever way, so it’s a pleasure to read how he structures the argument.

The take-away: It’s one thing to worry about Palestine, quite another to blame Israel alone for the lack of peace. It’s one thing to seek dialogue, quite another to side with a string of failed dictators over four decades. So what’s Carter’s deal, anyway?

You’ve got to hand it to Jimmy Carter. No matter how wrong he is, no matter how many times he is refuted, no matter how inane his ramblings, he just keeps on coming back. Forget that he was eviscerated in a landslide election. And forget that historians and the public rate him as the worst president of all time. Carter doesn’t seem to have gotten the message. We’re stuck with him forever.

For example, on Carter’s accusation of racism in the opposition to Obama, Boteach notes:

Obama himself disagreed. More importantly, Obama’s biggest critics like him a lot more than the ex-president, even though Jimmy is a white man.

Is Carter criminally naive?

Carter, I have argued, is not so much an anti-Semite as he is what Lenin famously called, ‘a useful idiot,’ his mistake being to always side with the weaker party, notwithstanding their immorality. Let us never forget that the Carter administration tried to view the Khmer Rouge as the rightful government of Cambodia even though they slaughtered one out of three Cambodians. For Carter, weakness is itself a sign of righteousness.

Or is he an anti-Semite?

Therefore, when Carter said in 2006 that Israel’s policies in the West Bank were actually worse than apartheid South Africa, I began to question whether my readers were right. When he added in his 2009 book The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy that due to “powerful political, economic, and religious forces in the US, Israeli government decisions are rarely questioned or condemned, voices from Jerusalem dominate our media,” I said to myself that anyone who rolls out the old Jews-control-the-world theory probably is an anti-Semite.

But no, Boteach concludes. He’s nothing so dramatic. He’s just a man who accepted “millions of dollars”

from leading Arab sources, including Saudi King Fahd, the now-defunct BCCI bank, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahayan, and Agha Hasan Abedi, among others. These millions, some of which even went to bail out the Carter peanut business in the late 1970s, finally vindicated my earlier theory.

Jimmy Carter is not an anti-Semite. He is simply a man with a price.

So claims a brand new American Jewish Committee survey:

The AJC survey revealed that 56% of American Jews would support, and 36% would oppose, United States military action against Iran to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons. A year ago, the AJC survey found that 42% would support the U.S. taking military action against Iran, while 47% were opposed.

And, in another sign of heightening concern about Iran’s nuclear program, 66 percent would support, and 28 percent would oppose, Israel taking military action against Iran to prevent it from developing nuclear weapons.

On the peace process:

In response to a new AJC survey question, 94% of American Jews agree that the Palestinians should be “required to recognize Israel as a Jewish state in a final peace agreement.”

Demonstrating American Jews’ skepticism of Arab intentions regarding Israel, 75% agree, and 19% disagree, with the statement, “The goal of the Arabs is not the return of occupied territories but rather the destruction of Israel.” In the 2007 survey, 82% agreed and 12% disagreed.

Nonetheless, regarding the establishment of a Palestinian state, 49% favor that outcome, and 41% are opposed. In AJC’s 2007 survey, 46% were in favor and 43% opposed.

On settlements:

The AJC survey found that a majority, 51% of U.S. Jews, disagree with the Obama Administration’s call for a stop to all new Israeli settlement construction, while 41% agree with that tactic.

Among the denominations, 74% of Orthodox, 62% of Conservative, and 46% of Reform Jews disapprove of the call for a full settlement freeze.

Still, there is wide recognition among American Jews that the question of settlements is a topic to be resolved in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. When put in that context, most American Jews say Israel should be willing to dismantle all (8%) or some (52%) of the settlements as part of a permanent peace settlement with the Palestinians. 37% oppose dismantling any.

Lenny Ben-David, former AIPAC man and Israeli diplomat, writes a kind of “expose” of J-Street in today’s Jerusalem Post. While he’s right to complain about the apparent inability of journalists to ask hard questions and seek real answers about J-Street’s financing and policy prescriptions, I think he draws the wrong conclusions about the organization.

Ben-David’s key point is that J-Street is not “pro-Israel,” but a pro-Obama infiltrator into the pro-Israel camp. Now, I don’t know J-Street’s top honcho Jeremy Ben-Ami personally, so I can’t say with confidence whether Ben-David is right or wrong. But I think the criticism is misguided in the sense that J-Street’s error is even more fundamental if its intentions are good and honorable.

J-Street is not so much wrong on Israel as it is lost.

When it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, there is no real division nowadays between Right and Left, only between those who understand that Palestinian intransigence and dysfunction make the price of an Israeli pullout too high, and those who don’t. After Gaza and Sinai, with some 35 settlements uprooted and tens of thousands of settlers resettled, how can anyone believe that settlements are permanent and Israel, given the prospect of genuine peace, wouldn’t remove them?

I’m not saying settlements are right or wrong – that’s a different discussion. I’m saying that the settlements would certainly be gone by now had the past 10 years not included hundreds of dead Israelis due to terror assaults on our pizzerias and the near-certain reality that the withdrawal of the IDF from Kalkilya will result in rockets falling on our only international airport.

It’s easy to see why the terror of the past decade has gone out of sight and out of mind for most in the West ever since the IDF forcibly dismantled the Palestinian terror infrastructure – including the Fatah’s – and took the issue out of the news cycle. But we Israelis haven’t forgotten quite so easily what was, on an Israeli scale, almost three-dozen 9/11s.

J-Street is not “Left” because its fundamental point of disagreement with AIPAC has nothing to do with the old division of peace vs. territorial redemption. Rather, J-Street stands out in the American Jewish landscape because it trusts Palestinian intentions and capabilities – a trust that, ultimately, it cannot convincingly explain to the rest of us.

Whatever its power becomes in Washington – and I suspect it will not be very great until J-Street wisens up on the only issue that distinguishes it – it will remain irrelevant on this side of the Atlantic. Lacking a healthy distrust of the intentions of the intransigent Palestinian leadership, it will lack any shred of credibility when it tries to convince Israelis to compromise once more for the sake of Palestinian freedom.

UPDATE: J-Street has launched an initiative to campaign for a two-state solution on American campuses. Once again, it shows how strangely disconnected it is from reality. There are few things Israelis and Palestinians agree on more than that they do not want to live in each other’s state. The two-state solution is a given – even for Bibi.

How about campaigning to make sure that any future Fatah-Hamas reunification does not oust Prime Minister Salam Fayyad, the man bringing real reform and economic revival to Palestine?

UPDATE 2: Lenny Ben-David responds via Facebook:

Haviv — good questions and good blog. I don’t share your belief in J Street’s naivete. I respect (don’t have to agree) transparent orgs like Peace Now America and IPF — after the hate-full Rosenberg left. But too much is hidden in J Street – $, motives, backers. They don’t reflect the opinion of anyone in Israel unlike other orgs. J St isn’t lost; they’re following a path mapped out and paved for them. But by whom?