What scares Israel more than anything else? Not, I wager, the rockets flying over the fence from Gaza or even, at least on a quotidian basis, the Iranian shadow. No, what happens if the Palestinians say Yes? Granted, the Palestinian leaderships – not without their own battles – have persistently demonstrated a fatal lack of imagination. Jerusalem or Bust and it’s always been Bust.
But if the Palestinians could bring themselves to acknowledge the Jewish state, Israel would find itself in a corner, hemmed in by the Palestinians’ engagement, international pressure and its own sense of what kind of country it should be. But freezing the conflict – which is essentially what is happening now – hardly benefits Israel either.
Jeffrey Goldberg has a chillingly clear and frighteningly plausible column for Bloomberg View that should make even Bibi Netanyahu’s deluded fanclub on Capitol Hill wonder where the Israeli Prime Minister is leading his people. Imagining himself as a Palestinian leader, Goldberg says he would have a simple objective:
To hopelessly, ineradicably, entangle the two peoples wedged between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
Then I would wait as the Israeli population on the West Bank grew, and grew some more. I would wait until 2017, 50 years after the Six Day War, which ended with Israel in control of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. I would go before the UN and say the following:
“We, the Palestinians, no longer seek a homeland of our own. We recognize the permanence of Israeli occupation, the dominion of the Israeli military and the power of the Israeli economy. So we would like to join them. In the 50 years since the beginning of the ’temporary’ occupation, we have seen hundreds of thousands of Israelis build communities near our own communities. We admire what they have built, and the system of laws that governs their lives. Unlike them, many of us live under Israeli military law but have no say in choosing the Israelis who rule us. So we no longer want statehood. We simply want the vote.”
And this, of course, would bring about the end of Israel.
Either the Jews of Israel would grant the Palestinians the vote, at which point their country would lose its Jewish majority and its identity as a refuge for the Jewish people, or it would deny them the vote, and become an apartheid state. The latter option is untenable, of course: Many Jewish Israelis would be repulsed by this thought; other nations that already consider Israel a pariah would now have just cause; and Israel would lose its last remaining friend, the U.S., because no American — including and especially young American Jews — would identify with a country reminiscent of pre-Mandela South Africa.
Quite. A Palesitnian state isn’t just a matter of morals or justice, it’s a vital part of Israel’s own long-term security. That security may not be comfortable or assured by such a neighbour but the alternatives are much bleaker for Israel. Netanyahu appears to project strength for the time being but that appearance masks a deeper, longer-term structural weakness in the Israeli position that is in turn predicated upon Palestinian foolishness. So what happens if the Palestinians cease being foolish? If they recognise the Jewish state then Israel will have to respond; if they reject the two-state solution then Israel finds itself in a position that, in the longer-term, will become untenable.If Netanyahu had been thinking strategically, he might have realized this when he went before Congress.
Comments