Israel’s weak debate

An article by Israel ambassador makes Palestinians out to be some sort of irrational, anti-Semitic barbarians.

The ongoing stalemate in Middle East peace talks has led to another op-ed in the New York Times by Michael Oren, Israel's Ambassador to the US.

As is often the case with Oren's op-eds, the piece is full of weak arguments, hyperbole and hypocrisy.




The introduction sets the tone for the entire piece:

Nearly 63 years after the United Nations recognized the right of the Jewish people to independence in their homeland — and more than 62 years since Israel’s creation — the Palestinians are still denying the Jewish nature of the state.

This, like the entire article, tries to oversimplify an incredibly complex issue and then make the Palestinians out to be some sort of irrational, anti-Semitic barbarians. Oren is talking about a "Jewish nature of the state" when clearly defining “Jewishness” is a problem in itself, let alone boiling the nature of a state down to an ethno-religious identity.

Back in 1948, opposition to the legitimacy of a Jewish state ignited a war. Today it threatens peace.

Sure, it threatens peace as much as Israeli intransigence over the demands of the Palestinians. That's what negotiation is. As for 1948, really Mr Oren? Was 1948 really so simple? If Israel had established a Christian state, a secular state or a Rastafarian state, I'm pretty sure the Arab reaction would have been much the same. When you establish a state on land occupied partly by those who have inhabited it for the last thousand or so years, they being outside your ruling class, and partly by a massive population of recent migrants, war kind of tends to happen.

Such a step by the Palestinian Authority would be a confidence-building measure,” Mr. Netanyahu explained, noting that Israel was not demanding recognition as a prerequisite for direct talks. It would “open a new horizon of hope as well as trust among broad parts of the Israeli public.

I'm pretty sure Israel wouldn't fight so hard for a "confidence-building measure". Building confidence takes a great deal more than that.

So what is the purpose of this new obsession then? Well Oren will actually tell you:

Indeed, Israel never sought similar acknowledgment in its peace treaties with Egypt and Jordan. Some analysts have suggested that Mr. Netanyahu is merely making a tactical demand that will block any chance for the peace they claim he does not really want.

The problem is, Oren then fails to actually refute this. And I don't mean robustly, I mean at all. Oren goes on to claim that Israel "recognizes the existence of a Palestinian people with an inalienable right to self-determination in its homeland", which sounds nice but the reality of it is very different. This is because Israel doesn't actually recognise a Palestinian homeland. How else would you explain its policy to settle Palestine's "inalienable homeland" with hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers?

Oren's position gets even more tenuous:

So why won’t the Palestinians reciprocate? After all, the Jewish right to statehood is a tenet of international law. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 called for the creation of “a national home for the Jewish people” in the land then known as Palestine and, in 1922, the League of Nations cited the “historical connection of the Jewish people” to that country as “the grounds for reconstituting their national home.” In 1947, the United Nations authorised the establishment of “an independent Jewish state,” and recently, while addressing the General Assembly, President Obama proclaimed Israel as “the historic homeland of the Jewish people.” Why, then, can’t the Palestinians simply say “Israel is the Jewish state”?

Oren's reference to "international law" seems to contain very little actual law. We can discount immediately a random speech by Obama, which could only have been intended as complete buffer. Citing the now extremely defunct League of Nations policy as a "tenet of international law" is tenuous at best. The Balfour Declaration too was a British policy statement, and though the British mandate over Palestine was accepted by the League of Nations in 1922, one would then also have to consider the McMahon-Hussein correspondence and the Churchill White Paper, which both repudiate much of the Balfour Declaration. Besides, Palestine had zero representation in the League of Nations.

Moreover, Mr Oren's extremely selective use of international law is galling. What about the whole host of UN Security Council resolutions that Israel routinely ignores? Not to mention the recent UNHRC fact finding missions into both Cast Lead and the flotilla incident? The hypocrisy is maddening.

The rest of the op-ed then collapses into fear mongering about "a two-stage solution leading, as many Palestinians hope, to Israel’s dissolution" and Palestinians failing to accept "that the millions of them residing in Arab countries would be resettled within a future Palestinian state and not within Israel". Why should they accept this? They have no hope of being "resettled" in Israel regardless of its identity, and why should they want to be resettled in Palestine? Should we forcibly resettle the Jewish diaspora in Israel? This is ridiculous beyond words.

Israelis need to know that further concessions would not render us more vulnerable to terrorism and susceptible to unending demands. Though recognition of Israel as the Jewish state would not shield us from further assaults or pressure, it would prove that the Palestinians are serious about peace.

And equally the Palestinians need to know that Israel is serious about peace, that it is willing to accept the right of a Palestinian state to exist and immediately halt the illegal settlement of occupied land within that future state. Though a halt to that settlement would not shield Palestine from further assaults or pressure, it would prove that the Israelis are not suicidally inclined towards an inevitable one-state solution. That's how easy it is to turn this ridiculous argument on its head.

Mr Oren concludes his op-ed with a paragraph that neatly sums up the tone and content of the rest of it, namely unabashed propaganda without meaning, logic or sense.

The core of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been the refusal to recognize Jews as a people, indigenous to the region and endowed with the right to self-government. Criticism of Israeli policies often serves to obscure this fact, and peace continues to elude us. By urging the Palestinians to recognize us as their permanent and legitimate neighbors, Prime Minister Netanyahu is pointing the way out of the current impasse: he is identifying the only path to co-existence.

There are many 'cores' to the conflict, be they territory, security, national self-determination, dignity or oppression, but no one serious "refuses to recognize the Jews as a people". The fact that some Jews are "indigenous to the region" is a matter of irrelevance and as for "the right to self-government," the only way that Jews are going to lose the right to govern Israel is if they absorb a massive demographic shift of Palestinians under an inevitable one state solution.

And therein lies the irrational, paradoxical quality of the debate today. Mr Oren's op-ed reflects a fear that Israel will lose its Jewish character, but the most sure-fire way that that can happen is by not fast-tracking a two state solution by halting settlements and negotiating seriously. Every day the two-state solution grows further out of reach, until the inevitable point when Israel will be the only political entity between the Mediterranean and the River Jordan. On that day, Israel will be faced with a choice: give the Palestinians a right to vote or create a state of true apartheid character. I strongly suggest that, instead of writing hyperbolic op-eds in the New York Times, Mr Oren devote himself to getting his country out of that inevitable mess.

This post was originally published here.