Why Israel Has to Do Better

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Why Israel Has to Do Better

by Peter Beinart


It has been a week since my essay, “The Failure of the American Jewish Establishment,” was published in the New York Review of Books, and the responses have largely congealed into a single critique. From Leon Wieseltier to Jonathan Chait to Jeffrey Goldberg to Jamie Kirchick to David Frum, the main complaint is that I didn’t spend enough time discussing the nastiness of Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, and extremist Muslims in general.
It’s a little odd when you think about it, because my piece never claimed to offer an overview of the Israeli-Palestinian or Israeli-Iranian conflict. Rather, it was a plea for American Jewish organizations to take sides in Israel’s domestic struggle between democrats and authoritarians, and thus help save liberal Zionism in the United States. Those American Jewish organizations, of course, don’t need to be encouraged to criticize Iran and the Palestinians. It’s virtually all they do. If I had written an essay directed at the U.N. Human Rights Council, which condemns Israel and often ignores human-rights abuses in the Arab world, rather than the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, which does the opposite, would Leon and Jon and Jeff attack me for not spending enough time denouncing Avigdor Lieberman?

The harsh truth is that settlers—including fanatical settlers—are now so entrenched in the Israeli bureaucracy that the process of planning, funding and building settlements occurs irrespective of whether the Palestinians are naughty or nice.

To some degree, it is true that the misdeeds of Israel’s foes have pushed Israelis to the right. That certainly happened after Yasir Arafat’s failure to respond courageously to Ehud Barak’s offer at Camp David in June 2000 and his (much better) one at Taba in January 2001. But that was almost a decade ago. Arafat has been dead since 2004; the second intifada fizzled the same year. The West Bank now features Palestinian leaders who are far more sincere about non-violence, and about the kind of two-state solution that Arafat did not grasp. And yet Israel has not responded with any meaningful halt in settlement growth. (Sadly, that remains true even today, since Israel began a huge amount of construction just before Netanyahu’s partial “freeze,” with the result that, as Israel’s Transportation Minister recently declared, “The construction momentum in Judea and Samaria is the same as when it was at its peak.”) So in the West Bank, at least, it’s hard to see how Arafat’s failures justify Israel’s continued encroachment onto Palestinian land—an encroachment that makes it ever harder to create a Palestinian state without provoking an Israeli civil war. The harsh truth is that settlers—including fanatical settlers—are now so entrenched in the Israeli bureaucracy that the process of planning, funding and building settlements occurs irrespective of whether the Palestinians are naughty or nice. As Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar write in their indispensable book, Lords of the Land, settlement growth is built into the daily functioning of the Israeli state. It takes place “as though it were an involuntary, unconsidered movement of a body that has lost its mind.




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http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-05-23/why-israel-has-to-do-better/?cid=hp:beastoriginalsL5