Calling all Israel advocates! Danger ahead!
I’m fairly unhappy with the pro-Israel community in the United States. (I refuse to blame simply the “lobby,” for it assigns the pro-Israel community too much coordination and ignores non-expert opinions.) Many of the people with whom I’ve sided in the past (positions I do not renounce) appear dreadfully shortsighted these days. They have fallen for Bibi’s act, unaware of the danger in which he is placing Israel and too readily believing that the Obama administration is making radical shifts in Middle East policy. I can see for the first time how center-right Zionist voices are castigating the left and center-left in irresponsible ways.
If there was one kernel of truth in Peter Beinart’s NYRB essay last year, it was that mainstream Jewish voices haven’t vocally confronted the disturbing rise of some deeply unsavory influences on Israeli politics and society. Beinart partially attributed a weakening of Israel’s liberal character to demographic shifts — including the exponential growth of Haredi Jews and post-Soviet immigrants. (This is difficult to dispute.) And yet Ron Kampeas of the JTA is seeing conspiracy where there is none:
Matt Yglesias, at Think Progress, writes about the Daily Caller op-ed in which Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Gevalt) castigates American Jews for not being his kind of American Jew. … But Yglesias seems to have contracted Walsh’s unseemly “they’re all alike” affect in this passage:
Israeli politics has drifted toward the hawkish right over the past ten years even as Jewish Americans remain on the progressive left. That change in Israeli politics, meanwhile, has been in part driven by a demographic shift away from the kind of secular ashkenazi Jews who predominate in the American population.
Say what? Ashkenazim have a genetic predisposition toward liberal democracy?
Yglesias said nothing about any “genetic predisposition.” What he said is that secular Ashkenazi Jews, who make of a large proportion of American Jewry, tend to have more liberal views than the demographic groups mentioned before.
Beyond failing to raise concerns about Israeli attitudes, staunchly pro-Israel elites in this country (save for a few brave souls, like Jeff Goldberg and even Leon Wieseltier) have yet to call out Bibi Netanyahu for leading Israel into an abyss. Netanyahu is the most passive of Israeli leaders, aimless and meandering. He is a master of tactics and an amateur in strategy. In this respect, his leadership style resembles Yasser Arafat.
In a few months, Israel will be presented with bad options and will have saved itself no goodwill against which to make its decisions. The Palestinians might declare statehood at the UN, placing America to take a huge fall for Israel by vetoing it. Alternatively, the Palestinians will face their people at the conclusion of Salaam Fayyad’s two-year state-building initiative and have no diplomatic achievements to show for it. In either of the above scenarios, a third intifada is a strong possibility: 70% of Palestinians expect one if diplomatic processes fail. (And a third intifada could well strain the U.S.-Israel relationship to the breaking point.)
The world is not generally charitable to Israel, but the wind is at the Palestinians’ backs more now than ever. Bibi’s failure to make Israel a credible peace partner has in effect saved the Palestinians from becoming one themselves. So Netanyahu has the next few weeks to roll out a policy that could stave off disaster. It would have to go beyond the token gestures of the past like releasing prisoners. He instigate a modest handover of territory in the West Bank from Israeli security control to Palestinian control (making more Area A and less Area B), or make a serious offer to resolve a core issue of the conflict (borders being the easiest). It’s hard to imagine anything else placating the PA, if even that will. But the alternative — doing nothing — is a surefire way to get all the wrong results.
