Eyes on the prize

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30 Adar I 5768, Friday, March 7, 2008 0:22 IST

Eyes on the prize

Sir, - "Defeating Hamas" (Editorial, March 3) was absolutely right that the "facts are simple: Israel is fighting to stop the bombardment of its cities." When the far Left ignores Palestinian human rights crimes against Sderot and Ashkelon and concentrates on the inevitably ugly side-effects of the Israeli response, it uses deplorable double standards and does not serve the truth.

And yet one can still wish Israel would recognize more the difference between what it has every right to do, and what it is prudent to do.

Israel is a tiny dot on a huge and still-hostile map, and the inescapable conclusion to draw from that hostility is that the war of 1948 continues. The only way to security and peace is to change the map from hostile to friendly, or at least for the map to be amenable to overall agreements - on withdrawal, the 1967 borders and east Jerusalem.

Mutual concessions that generated larger peace agreements would eventuate in the resolution of so many problems, like in Gaza, which would be enfolded in the more basic momentum and pressure toward moderation and peace and security.

As the American Civil Rights song goes: "Keep your eyes on the prize."

JAMES ADLER

Eyeless in Sderot and Gaza

Sometimes the conflict seems like a house of mirrors. Is it possible to see what is going one beneath the excruciating suffering in order to help end it?

One source emphasizes that the power outage was only in Gaza City. Another emphasizes it says Gaza because Gaza city is the main and largest city. One emphasizes that Hamas, not Israel, shut down the power. Another says Hamas shut the power because it says Israel denied it the fuel to maintain the power. One says this is Hamas grandstanding. Another says the fuel shortage is real and bitter. One says all the Gazans need to do is stop the Qassams on the innocent Israeli people of Sderot to get their fuel. Another says it's not the Gazans but Hamas, and Gazans shouldn't suffer for Hamas. Another emphasizes that the people support Hamas, and that both want to destroy Israel. One emphasizes that the people wanted Hamas for its clean government and social services and despair over decades of unjustified poverty and refugee camps dating from 1948 and "gated community" affluent finger-in-their-eye Israeli settlements, and that the people never deserved this and built up cumulative anger that any other people would have also built up and accumulated, and have expressed their anger through Hamas.

One emphasizes that the shelling of Sderot is also collective punishment and an outrageous war crime against innocent civilians, and notes this is a poor and ungrateful and scandalous response to Israel for the pullout of the settlements and total withdrawal from and renunciation of the occupation of Gaza; and there could have instead been a peaceful response, and peaceful responses all along, from long before now up through today, that could have made by now -- and still could make -- a garden of peace and prosperity; but that Israel will defend its citizens like any other country and people, such as the United States after 9/11 with its own airport checkpoints and military retaliations against Al Qaeda in Pakistan. And that especially Jews after the Holocaust: that the few surviving Jews who were able to flee from Hitler's ovens to Israel, and now their children and grandchildren, will under absolutely no circumstances permit Jews to be victims of unprovoked and pogrom-like attacks again, either by inflamed mobs or armies from the ground or by lethal missiles from the air-- and even more, never again as a reminiscent and humiliating and passive and acquiescent potential first step down the Road to Hell of a Second Shoah. Absolutely--Never Again. Another emphasizes the long injustice and displacement and occupation of the Palestinians back to the 1948 partition of Palestine and back even farther to the First World War-era Balfour Declaration that colonially stole from them their own country, and has disempowered and impoverished and ethnically cleansed and made refugees of them in successive stages since, and that it is the return of the refugees and one free and democratic country that would have made by now -- and still could make -- a garden of peace and prosperity. One turns it around and says Israel's 1948 defense was a defense against Arab ethnic cleansing and a still worse imminent genocide. Another says it was the Balfour and Partition and Statehood plans, not mere and innocent immigration, that led to legitimate war from the Arab side. One denies and says the mere immigration and flight from persecution and without anywhere else to go but to Palestine led to violence against those peaceful immigrants. Another denies and says the immigration was never a mythical "pure immigration" but always inextricable from Balfour and planned Partition. One says, Americans, look at yourselves, in your condominiums and homes on stolen Indian land. Another says, that that is by now "ancient history."

One says that Balfour in 1917 and the Partition of 1948 are also by now "ancient history" and that the Gazans, like Palestinians in general, have, in Abba Eban's words, "never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity" to move beyond the past and look to the future and show that their people can concentrate on their own nation-building. They say that not only has Israel now withdrawn from Gaza, but further that most of the West Bank as well would by now have been freed from occupation if the Gazans and the Palestinians in general had looked ahead and worked more comprehensively and positively toward that free and prosperous nation of their own. And they quote Golda Meir that if only the Palestinians would try to build up their own country and raise wisely their own children rather than try to destroy Israel and murder Israel's innocent children--once again innocent Jewish children. Not Never Again, but Again and Again. Another denies that this case is "ancient history," and claims that instead it is a case of one of the world's last colonial outposts, and foresees that violence and massive civil unrest will not end, any more than it did in French colonial Algeria and during the Algerian War, or (they say) apartheid South Africa, until this very late (they say) outpost of segregation and colonialism and apartheid also ends, and claim it to be just another basic pulse and actuation -- in the broadest possible strokes -- of all (--they say--) recent modern history's anti-segregationist and colonial and post-colonial struggles. One denies this and says it is singled out, that the Jews are so conveniently and as usual singled out for media lynching and condemnation, ignoring the long historical perspective and plight of the Jews, who only want peace and security... Another denies this and says that the media lynches the Arabs and Muslims and ignores any historical understanding and the current plight of the Palestinians, who only want their land...

One says... The other says... This sometimes seems a house of mirrors, and Gaza, as many other aspects of the conflict, crystallizes it. Sometimes it brings me to despair about how most objectively for it to be analyzed, and then for it to be resolved in order eventually to bring healing, reconciliation, justice, security, and hope and peace for all.

Despite All, Israel's Cogent Case

www.harvardsquarecommentary.org

adapted from

HARVARD SQUARE COMMENTARY

December 31, 2007

James Adler

I

On the same day and page last week that the online Jerusalem Post reported that Ha'aretz Daily's Editor-in-Chief said to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that "Israel wants to be raped,"* and that it had always been his "wet dream" to tell her, which was David Landau's horrifically offensive way of speaking the truth that pushing Israel would be good for peace, The Jerusalem Post also reports Daniel Pipes telling in his view "why a Palestinian economic collapse would be good for peace."**

So basically, on the same day, it reports Landau and Pipes saying essentially the same thing: That there will be required pushes to get to peace. But ironically, although Landau's phraseology was so horribly offensive as to be beyond all belief, it is possible (though a bit sickeningly) to get behind it to his actual idea, which would then seem benign, that a friendly US should push to help get peace and security for both peoples; while both Pipes' language and his idea as well were offensive, that one side (the Palestinians) to suffer an economic collapse would be good for peace.

Sadly Pipes' offensive comment does not surprise me. But Landau's does.

Consider the reaction if anyone said that Israel that needed an economic collapse to bring peace, in order to see how callous it would be to wish it upon either people. Neither side deserves an economic collapse to bring peace. As for Ha'aretz's David Landau, when freed of his deeply insulting and offensive mischaracterization of his own idea, he is correct that a trustworthy and honest friend, the United States, is needed to push both sides forward a bit to help to bring peace and security for everyone.

But for all people who want the US to intervene more compassionately and persuasively and urgently on both sides of the conflict in order to help Israelis and Palestinians alike, not hurt them, this could be one of the most harmful and insulting comments in the history of the conflict. It is appalling. And how "sophisticated" could what he has said been, as The Post reports he insists it was, if he actually made use of such language?

It was a grave and outrageous insult to women (as well as to Rice personally, and to all men who support women); it was a grave and outrageous insult to Israel; and it was both a crude and outrageously inaccurate political analogy, because rape fundamentally harms, and the goal of US involvement is fundamentally to help.

One wonders whether Landau will be able to keep his Editor-in-Chief's job at Ha'aretz after such a comment to Rice.

The biggest tragedy could be its injury to the region's people if it causes significant damage to the progressive cause of getting the United States more forcefully to prevail upon both sides to bring about confidence-building, compromises, binding agreements with verifiable internal steps and external guarantees, and lasting peace. Since these steps are indispensable for any future of Israeli and Palestinian peace, there is no telling how much (or, hopefully, little) Landau, by perhaps so preposterously setting back their realization, has set back peace and security for both Israel and Palestinians.

*Article on David Landau's comments (Link)

**OP-ED column by Daniel Pipes (Link)

II

Does Post Editorial Page Editor Saul Singer really believe that Israeli settlements have been only minor and Palestinian radicalism by far the most major obstacle to peace?

That 550,000 settlers and Likud's claims to the Palestinian lands have not in fact further radicalized the Palestinians and made peace harder over forty years? Israel did need a defensive army in the Territories after 1967, but not civilian settlements, and without any settlements ever, peace momentum produced by just any small bump or nudge could have easily generated peace.

The Sadat-Begin peace process could have ended in peace if Begin had not claimed what he called "Western Eretz Israel" along with the settlements.

Before Jordan relinquished the West Bank to the West Bank, Israel could have relinquished it to Jordan, except that the always abiding Likud Platform claims Greater Israel's eastern boundary to be the Jordan River and the Kingdom. Sadat championed peace in the Knesset, and without Israeli claims and settlers it could have happened, and then also perhaps Sadat would have lived as part of less general Arab radicalization. Israel has peace with its two main 1967 foes Egypt and Jordan, and if there were no settlements, then with a returnable West Bank and no Settler movement's fury, there could have long easily been peace. When Sharon denounced the occupation, his Likud Party was also furious, and Netanyahu and others pointed to a basic same Likud Platform. Now rightists call for an independent state of Judea and Samaria. Similarly the Oslo process and later Camp David in 2000-- if built on a more solid and long foundations of moderation and trust with Israel always in its '67 borders--could have much more easily produced both a groundswell of moderation (the withering of radicalism) and peace.

Sharon and his cabinet repeatedly expressed fear that disengagement of just 30,000 settlers in Gaza could produce full-fledged Civil War. If that was so hard, how ever could there be a half a million further settlers returned back to Israel?

How could there have even been 30,000 without Ariel Sharon himself doing it?

In sum, how much simpler peace without the settlers. Israel has peace with Jordan and Egypt; and Sadat might have still been alive: How can Singer claim the 550,000-strong settlements are not at least as big an obstacle to peace as radicalism but also itself a major factor in the continued radicalism?

Saul Singer's column (Link)

III

Israel has a cogent case that would more appeal to the modern West if didn't use so many endlessly repeated false arguments that only undermine it.

Recently I've read these things in Post opinion pieces, letters, and talk-backs:

1. That it was "unfair to excise Jordan from Palestine in 1922." But Daniel Pipes notes (in "Commentary", Oct. 1988) that Jordan was part of the Palestine Mandate "for a mere eight months, from July 1920 to March 1921". Eight months is a nanosecond in historical time. Pipes also points out that the Balfour Resolution only first became legal with Britain's formal reception of Mandatory responsibilities 16 months later, in July 1922.

And even this response concedes too much. Why should the 85% of Palestine that was at that time Palestinian, and had been for eons, have accepted the Balfour Resolution in general, even for Palestine itself, much less for Jordan as well?

And what if instead the Balfour Mandate had indeed included Jordan?-- or included even more lands like Syria and Iraq? Even the Occupied Territories have proven too large to absorb, and Israel should thank its lucky stars that in 1948 and 1967 it didn't capture or annex them, much less try to swallow those still larger outlying elephantine nations.

2. That "we (Jews) created Jerusalem." But the Bible says David took for a capital a pre-existent city (2 Sam. 5:6-7, 1 Chr., 11:4-9).

3. And that the Canaanites, Philistines, and Jebusites "all disappeared and only we continued." But nobody "disappeared." Instead everyone simply intermarried with everyone else, including later with the Arabs, to become today's Palestinian melting pot with its ancient roots.

And there is no reason to think this intermarriage and melting pot of all ethnicities would not also include those of the "Ten Lost Tribes of Israel." Which could be a startling but rather inspiring lever for reconciliation between the two peoples, since it would then make sense that the Palestinians were themselves a little Jewish.

And any rate these types of apologetics, the first based on modern land claims and the second on alleged historical ancient precedents, rightly appear deeply problematicto the modern west, and so do not help Israel's case but harm it.

IV

But, as I've noted before in this space, in virtually the same words, Israel's has a cogent case, as seen in Theodor Herzl's, Old/New Land, that it was a peaceful and liberal movement of refugees fleeing for their lives with a dream of a multiculturalism in for them a new land. If there had been no native Arab anti-Jewish-refugee violence that began -- and this is significant -- many decades before partition, and included the 1948 war of attempted genocide against a people understandably and understatedly sensitive about having been already recently almost exterminated, a war Arabs fought not for any return of Arab refugees since there were no Arab refugees anywhere but all remaining in their own homes and villages throughout the Mandate, and also no Arab expulsions of Jews to Palestine from all other parts of the Middle East, then the area would now be so heavily and peacefully Arab in population, and the Jewish refugees likewise so peaceful and liberal, that the area would be so completely peaceful and demographically mixed as to be completely unrecognizable today.

For instance there would be no violence-- Palestinian or Arab no terror, invasions, bombings, or vile and foul threats; and there would be no current -- very strong -- Israeli need for security fences, checkpoints, by-pass roads, and border and access impediments; and again, and most fundamentally, there would have been no Arab refugees in the first place. And instead there would be the fruits of peace-- everyone in their own homes, and economic modernization and prosperity and dignity for everyone.

And now Israelis are now mainly either Sephardic Middle Easterners from time immemorial or innocent Sabras -- Middle East native-borns. Russians and some American Jewish idealists or right-wing adventurists probably constitute the main exceptions.

So that in sum, it was the Arab anti-Jewish-refugee violence, and not the peaceful and liberal Jewish refugees, that destroyed Herzl's liberal dream. And it is this that constitutes the "Case for Israel." (Rather than all the tendentious and spiteful and petty and expansionist territorialist and historical arguments). It is precisely this case for Israel that the modern liberal West could empathatically understand, and the terrible Palestinians' plight as well, and whose decisions getting them into this nadir were made by dictators (as the Israelis themselves claim) long since dead.

And it is now an ethnic conflict, a "cycle of violence" between, on the one hand, the Occupier Establishment and Settler Extremist maximalists, and, on the other side, and Hamas and Islamist and secular terrorist and likewise extremist maximalists.

The proof of the comprehensibility of Israel's case is that the modern liberal West did understand and outright (even) "loved" Israel before the more recent post-1967 decades of extravagant land claims, settlement, incessant building projects in Palestinian Jerusalem and on other central Palestinian land, and occupation.

If these issues were resolved, there is no reason the West could not love Israel again, as it did in those quaint and innocent and yet hopefully -- not beyond hope -- rehabilitable pre-1967 days. And Palestinians could get back their lives and their entire future.

What's the best Annapolis can yield?

Ha'aretz Daily
Tel Aviv

Wed., November 14, 2007 Kislev 4, 5768|

|Israel Time:

14:07 (EST+7)

			Efforts like at Annapolis, though at best they may advance us just one small step, would seem grounded not on some empty vapid idealism, but on the most tough-minded of concrete necessities for the long-term future of Israel.
			James Adler, Boston, U.S.A.

Sometimes the pundits claim that the difference between the liberals and moderates, and conservatives, is that the first see negotiations such as at Annapolis as potentially -- even if only at best -- one small step toward peace and security, and conservatives don't see anything constructive about them.

But if conservatives are correct, that Israel is at war with the Palestinians and seventeen Arab states and a world of a billion Muslims, and that these are implacable enemies who will be determined sooner or later to acquire Iranian and also Arab nuclear weapons and never rest until Israel ceases to exist, then according to the conservatives' own logic, it becomes inevitable that sooner or later Israel will -- terrifyingly -- cease to exist.

The irony is that conservatives raise alarms so fatalistic and terrifying that they box Israel into this long-term self-destructive cage. If conservative anti-Annapolis pessimists and cynics are right that peace plans will never work, because there are only two alternatives, a Palestinian Terror State or Israeli absorption of the Occupied Territories, how again is Israel not ultimately doomed?

Moderates and liberals ask Israel supporters of all political views this: Before hopelessness radicalizes, and turns to Islamism, all the Palestinians and Arab countries, including Egypt and Jordan -- makes them implacable and also ultimately nuclear-armed enemies, why not put aside our differences and negotiate for Israel's peace and security?

Efforts like at Annapolis, though at best they may advance us just one small step, would seem grounded not on some empty vapid idealism, but on the most tough-minded of concrete necessities for the long-term future of Israel.

James Adler

Had Rabin lived, would he have forged peace?

www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ArticleNews.jhtml?itemNo=916161&contrassID=13&subContrassID=1&sbSubContrassID=0 Fri., November 02, 2007 Cheshvan 21, 5768|

| Israel Time:

12:20 (EST+7)

Had Rabin lived, peace?

			All the dominoes were lined up for peace and security for Israel and Palestine. Both sides would have likely made the further needed concessions.
			James Adler, Boston, U.S.A.

It is impossible to know. But peace was never more likely. It was before the second intifada, before 9/11, before the spread of Islamic extremism, before the ascendancy of Hamas. The Israeli public was less cynical, less skeptical less tired, less beaten down, and was for giving peace a chance.

The giant peace demonstrations in (now) Rabin Square show how much the Israeli public wanted peace.

Arafat was a strong unchallenged leader, unlike Abbas, and his total power went unchallenged by Hamas or Islamist extremism, and so he could have
delivered. The handshakes in front of the White House were high-profile and world-famous and the world pressure was visible and intensive.

The Gulf States and Saudi Arabia were in recent deep debt to the United States and Western powers and Arab coalition for the First Gulf War and liberation of Kuwait. Even Syria had fought for the allies in the war. Russia was still in the middle of its pro-Western Boris Yeltsin days and
was as helpful as it has been before or since. The indomitable King Hussein of Jordan was still on the scene as a powerful, influential, and trusted moral force for peace in Jordan, and just as much in Palestine and Israel alike. President Clinton was at the height of his power and influence, still in his first term with the second to go, and as far from being a lame duck as you could get.

All the dominoes were lined up for peace and security for Israel and Palestine. Both sides would have likely made the further needed concessions-- for example Israel about division of Jerusalem, and Palestinians about getting no more than a face-saving but only symbolic and token right of return.

There were even some ingenious possibilities being floated as trial balloons, such as God being declared sovereign of Jerusalem and the Israelis
and Palestinians making a division of Jerusalem into merely pragmatic administrative districts, and God recognized as in charge of an officially
united Jerusalem.

Maybe that specific idea wouldn't have worked, but it shows the creativity and optimism and spirit of peace of that era. Tens of thousands of ordinary
Israelis held a massive peace demonstration in central Kings of Israel Square, led by the Prime Minister of Israel himself. And then a brutal
fanatical right-wing assassin destroyed the hope and possibility.

James Adler

Muslim hearts & minds

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15 Elul 5767, Wednesday, August 29, 2007 0:33 IST

Muslim hearts & minds

Sir, - Barry Rubin and David Horovitz have both recently written wise pieces on our not learning from the failure of various peace processes and hopes, and our not being able to get it together in the Middle East ("Come and let us reason together," August 27, and "Wishful thinking," August 17). But still I think both pieces are ultimately unsatisfactory.

I agree with the writers' frustrations but see no alternative to trying for peace and reasonableness, however long it may take.

The enemy is not like in World War II. Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan were each compact, insular, isolated, centralized states that were unpopular, even despised, on their respective continents. This enabled us to try to defeat them militarily and unconditionally, using any means, and to do what we wanted to them afterward. So to win we used atomic bombs and indiscriminate urban firebombing; and afterwards, the changing of Japan's state Shinto religion and the denazification of Germany.

Today could not be more different. There are a billion Muslims worldwide, whose (often irrational and extremist) anger is decentralized, amorphous and comes from the street. They are not in small, centralized, isolated states but represent a worldwide and popular state of mind. Muslim groups could become increasingly more militant, and want nuclear weapons. In any war we fought Israel would be the first target.

If there was ever a situation in which a people's "hearts and minds" must be won over, skillfully and with determination, this seems to be it - however frustrating the process, however much time it takes.

JAMES ADLER

Beyond the Blame Game in the Middle East

First, it is safe to assume is that neither Israeli opinion leaders like Israeli progressive novelists and essayists Amos Oz and David Grossman, nor Palestinian opinion leaders like PA President Abbas and PLO ambassador to the US Afif Safieh, are moral imbeciles.

For centuries the Palestinians were 95% of the people and land of Palestine, and then Jews from Europe took over.

But the Jews were refugees fleeing persecution who were peaceful and liberal.

Without decades of Arab anti-Jewish-refugee violence including a war against partition, which was not fought over return of Arab refugees, since there were then no Arab refugees, the area would be so demographically heavily and peacefully Arab, and the Jewish refugees also so peaceful and liberal, it would be unrecognizable today:

Without these Palestinian refugees out of Israel (and without the Jewish refugees from the rest of the Arab world into Israel), there would probably long have been two (yes, two) peaceful Palestinian-majority states — Israel, majority Arab but with a large and safe- and-sound minority of Jewish refugees, Jews back home, and Palestine, largely Arab but also with a large number of safe and secure Jews, and also back home.

In such currently entirely unrecognizable circumstances, they may even have reunited or federated by now.

As seen in Zionist founder Theodor Herzl’s classic, “Old/New Land,” Zionism was originally a peaceful and liberal movement of fleeing refugees and a dream of a multiculturalism in one land. It was Arab anti-refugee violence, not peaceful and liberal Jewish refugees, who ruined the liberal dream.

The refugees’ right to have children who did not have all their throats slit open forced them to circle their wagons.

But the Arabs, to be blunt, had the right not to welcome strangers and immigrants-- they had the right to be inhospitable, the right to be xenophobes, the right to be unwelcoming, the right to be isolationist.

On the other hand, the Jews, facing extermination in Europe, had the right to live, the right to life, and the right to escape where they could-- come hell or high water.

And so it became both hell and high water-- the basis of this terrible conflict.

Still, since the Arabs had the right to sovereign resistance to immigration, and to a state, it would be unfair not to ask ourselves how many Third World countries have enough trouble with their states and societies without their people also having been squeezed into a 20 per cent corner of their land, covered with camps of their own refugees, and with their administrative infrastructure repeatedly smashed to pieces by an external settling and occupying power, as the Palestinians have suffered over recent years.

Both sides have been scared and suspicious of each other, and sometimes treated each other mercilessly-- the Arabs often merciless to the escaping Jewish refugees from the European pogroms and then the holocaust; the Israelis often merciless as occupiers.

But the Israelis have probably treated the Palestinians better than the Arabs have treated the Jews, and better especially than the Arabs would have if they had instead been winners, since the Jews would probably have faced mass slaughter.

But if the Jews have probably behaved better, it was the Palestinians’ land first, and they rightly feel cheated of their country. But the Jews went because they were fleeing for their lives.
What a terrible conflict.

If only people’s sympathies extended to both sides, especially since much of what anyone says, if qualified by the other side’s case, is true.

Though weighted toward the Palestinian need to stop the violence.

Partisans for the Palestinians need to understand that much of the undoubted — and ongoing — Israeli harshness during the occupation has, underneath, been a terrified response of Holocaust survivors to the threat of violence, and their deep-seated panic that at any time it could escalate out of control into a genocidal nightmare.

Ironically, but understandably, many Palestinians don’t see why they shouldn’t violently revolt, including immorally against innocent Israeli civilians themselves, which also makes things much worse.

And also ironically, and just as understandably, many Israelis don’t see why they should withdraw when (as after the withdrawal from Gaza) it doesn’t seem to lead to cessation of threats and violence.

But which doing so anyway would still in the long run things better.

And finally, even the moderates, who realize each side needs respectively to refrain from violence against Israelis and and to withdraw from Palestinian land, think the other side should go first.

While extremists don’t think their side should have to do anything.

And therefore, on the one hand, with each side’s extremists, and, on the other hand, with both sides’ self-righteous and defiant and mistrustful attitude that “the other side should have to do it first,” this nightmarish mother of conflicts continues with no end in sight.