Walter Reich on why Israelis despair of peace

"The Despair of Zion," Walter Reich.  The Wilson Quarterly. Summer 2010.

Walter Reich sheds some light on Israelis' profound doubts about the prospects for peace after the failure of the Oslo process,  the fallout from recent attempts to withdraw from territories, and the rise of Hamas.  "Any effort to bring peace between Israelis and Palestinians," he writes, "must reckon with the fact that bitter experience has taught many Israelis to doubt that their foes want a lasting concord."

He offers a list of ten beliefs and fears contributing to Israelis' despair over the prospects for peace.

Here are two that I think many self-proclaimed "students of The Conflict" are completely blind to, even as they insist that Americans are always "beaten over the head with the Israeli narrative." Somehow, despite this much-hyped control of the media, Israelis' views about the challenges to peace are not at all on their radar. The two concerns below are at least as relevant to questions of "justice" and "peace" in the  Levant as any other purported fact mustered to implicate Jewish wrongdoing: the systematic indoctrination to hatred of Jews and Israelis and delegitimization of the modern state of Israel throughout the Palestinian territories (and beyond), and the growing exploitation of the language and laws of human rights--by those in no position to call out others, who even mock Israelis' own respect for human life--but invoke them in order turn those who respect human rights against the one nation in the Middle East that also respects and systematically protects human rights.

The Palestinians will never accept the existence of Israel, and systematically teach their children that they must never do so, either.

It’s this belief, probably more than any other, that causes Israeli despair.

Israelis have grown accustomed to being pilloried in the most crude and violent terms in Palestinian mosques. And they’ve grown accustomed to media controlled by the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank that regularly undermine the readiness to accept Israel alongside a future Palestinian state—that glorify suicide bombers, quote Muhammad as saying that Jews must be killed, accuse Israelis of poisoning and spreading AIDS among Palestinians, deny that the Holocaust happened, claim that Jews never had a history in the land and that there was never any Temple in Jerusalem, and insist that Jews should leave the area and go back to their “original” homelands—Europe and Ethiopia.

Israelis might feel reassured that peace is possible if it were promoted in the Palestinian Authority’s education system; even if the current Palestinian generation isn’t ready to accept the Jewish state, maybe a future one will. But they know that Palestinian students study maps in their textbooks on which Israel doesn’t exist and watch television programs aimed at young people that identify cities in Israel as being part of Palestine.

Moreover, the other Palestinian territory—Gaza—is governed by a group, Hamas, that is forthright in declaring that it will fight until Israel is gone, and that promotes this ideology in every way it can in its own media and education system. Even if the Palestinian Authority were to foster the ideal of coexistence among its students, what about the students in Gaza?

Palestinians attack Israel from behind civilian human shields, but any response by Israel, however careful, that harms those civilians is condemned, while the tactic itself, which is a crime of war, is ignored.

Israelis have concluded that this new form of warfare has undercut the effectiveness of the military strength on which they long relied. They know they have a powerful army—the Israel Defense Forces, or IDF—that faces, in the cases of the Palestinians and Hezbollah in Lebanon, adversaries that lack tanks or planes. But Israelis have discovered that their military superiority is blunted, even useless, when their adversaries are willing to use the very people whose cause they claim to champion as shields behind which to fire rockets. That’s what happened during Israel’s three-week incursion into Gaza in the winter of 2008–09, which it launched after being bombarded by thousands of rockets. And that’s what happened during the 2006 war with Hezbollah, the Palestinians’ ally on Israel’s northern border, which hid its rockets in schools, mosques, and hospitals, so that Israel couldn’t target the rockets without also destroying those schools, mosques, and hospitals—and killing civilians. Like the United States and other countries fighting in the Middle East, Israel doesn’t know how to fight such a war. And when it tries, it’s accused of war crimes. Israelis worry that the military they built to defend their country can’t do it without bringing upon Israel international condemnation.

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More on exploiting the Palestinian cause at the expense of actual Palestinians

A couple of years ago, a Palestinian refugee camp was encircled and laid siege to by an army of tanks and Armored Personnel Carriers. Attacks initiated by Palestinian militants triggered an overwhelming response from the army that took the life of almost 500 people, including many civilians. International organizations struggled to send aid to the refugee camps, where the inhabitants were left without basic amenities like electricity and running water. During the conflict, six U.N. personnel were killed when their car was bombed.

Government ministers and spokesmen tried to explain to the international community that the Palestinian militants were backed by Syria and global jihadist elements. Al Qaeda condemned the government and the army, declaring that the attack was part of a "crusade" against their Palestinian brothers.

At the time, there was little international outcry. No world leader decried the "prison camps" in Lebanon. No demonstrations took place around the world; no U.N. investigation panels were created and little media attention was attracted. In fact, the plight of the Palestinians in Lebanon garners very little attention internationally.

Today, there are more than 400,000 Palestinians in Lebanon who are deprived of their most basic rights. The Lebanese government has a list of tens of professions that a Palestinian is forbidden from being engaged in, including professions such as medicine, law and engineering. Palestinians are forbidden from owning property and need a special permit to leave their towns. Unlike all other foreign nationals in Lebanon, they are denied access to the health-care system. According to Amnesty international, the Palestinians in Lebanon suffer from "discrimination and marginalization" and are treated like "second class citizens" and "denied their full range of human rights."

Amnesty also states that most Palestinian refugees in Lebanon have little choice but to live in overcrowded and deteriorating camps and informal gatherings that lack basic infrastructure.

In view of the worsening plight of the Palestinians in Lebanon, it is the height of irony that a Lebanese flotilla is organizing to leave the port of Tripoli in the next few days to bring aid to Palestinians in Gaza. According to one of the organizers, the participants are "united by a feeling of stark injustice."

This attitude exposes the dishonesty of the whole flotilla exercise. Whether it is from Turkey, Ireland or Cyprus, those that participate in these flotillas reek of hypocrisy. There are currently 100 armed conflicts and dozens of territorial disputes around the world. There have been millions of people killed and hundreds of millions live in abject poverty without access to basic staples. And yet hundreds of high-minded "humanitarian activists" are spending millions of dollars to reach Gaza and hand money to Hamas that will never reach the innocent civilians of Gaza.

Read the rest: "The Flotilla Farce," Danny Ayalon. Wall Street Journal. July 29, 2010.


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Pejman Yousefzadeh at The New Ledger on the shameless Jew-baiting of Walt and Mearsheimer

Pejman Yousefzadeh, a lawyer blogging at The New Ledger, writes this in response to the predictable outrage of Stephen Walt, Andrew Sullivan, Phillip Weiss over Lee Smith's recent article arguing that their blogs are "Mainstreaming Hate." A former student of both Walt and Mearsheimer when he was at the University of Chicago, Yousefzadeh has nothing but praise for the education he received from them. He has nothing but disgust for what they've become. Below is just a quick glimpse. The whole thing is worth reading.

Walt has become exceedingly irresponsible in his rhetoric since the time that I knew him. His argument–and that of his cohorts–that bloggers are not responsible for what their commenters write is a somewhat appealing one, but at the end of the day, that’s a rather facile response to a serious issue. Writing about Israel, the Arab-Israeli conflict, the status of the Palestinians, and the Middle East as a whole is an enterprise fraught with emotion, anger, outrage, and ancient grievances. Those who engage in these discussions owe it to others to keep their heads level so as not to fan the flames of an already inflammatory subject. They also owe it to others to try to keep the heads of their supporters level. If that means repeatedly denouncing those supporters who take one’s contentions and extend them to despicable levels, then so be it. That means that Zionists have to denounce–repeatedly, if need be–people who think that Baruch Goldstein was a swell guy, and that means that people like Stephen Walt, Philip Weiss, Andrew Sullivan, and Glenn Greenwald have to denounce–repeatedly, if need be–those who latch on to their arguments to openly preach anti-Semitism, and anti-Zionism that is nothing more than thinly-disguised anti-Semitism.

That’s taxing work, to be sure. But those who complain about having to do that work won’t win any sympathy from me, and shouldn’t win any sympathy from anyone else. Want to gain respect and credibility in writing about Israel and the Middle East? Make it clear–crystal clear–that you will have nothing to do with the crazies who use your arguments to propagate their own racist rantings. If you say “oh, it goes without saying that I am not a racist, and don’t believe what the racists say,” and think that this will be enough, well, get ready to find out that it won’t be enough. If all of this is too much work for your fragile, little self, stop blogging about the Middle East.

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How Jewish conspiracies become mainstream

"Mainstreaming Hate," Lee Smith. Tablet Magazine. July 21, 2010.

This is a gutsy piece.  Smith has called a spade a spade, and the spade, which fancies itself a flower, isn't going to like it.

One reason for the surge of public criticism of Israel over the last decade is the increasing interest of American media consumers in the Middle East as U.S. involvement in the region deepened after Sept. 11. The other reason is the triumph of the Internet, which lends itself to anti-Semitic narratives. The genius of the web is its interconnectedness, the facility with which it is capable of making links based on other links, which allows a chain of unbroken and unsubstantiated rumor and innuendo to acquire the stature of fact...

“It hasn’t been secret,” writes Carroll, a commenter on a Lobelog post, that “for a long time that we have a small cabal of US zionist operating in and manipulating the US for their vision of Israel and a group of US Neocons and other assorted special interest who never met a war they didn’t like. … What do we have to do to put an end to them? … Suicide the cabal?” On another post at the same site, a commenter named Rowan Berkeley writes: “It seems to me that it is no exaggeration to say roundly that the USA in its entirety is under Jewish control of one variety or another.” He then makes an entirely accurate observation: “Ten years ago, it would have been a safe assumption that only ‘neo-Nazis’ would say such a thing.”

What is notable about such comments is not that they are original or unusual, but that there are hundreds and thousands of them, each sicker and crazier than the next, appended like a mile-long oil slick to nearly any mainstream news story or opinion piece that mentions Israel. In addition to creating the impression of a wave of popular hatred directed against the Jewish state—an impression belied by polls that show nearly two-thirds of Americans support Israel—the commenters attempt to swamp the news with paranoid anti-Semitic rantings that are entirely detached from even the BBC’s version of reality. On Glenn Greenwald’s Salon blog, there were close to 1,000 comments when the news of the Gaza flotilla incident broke. One commenter took the episode as proof that “The jewish state intends to clean itself of all non-jews. Anything that might slow the starving of the hated ones will be dealt with in the most harsh of terms. This slow-motion genocide/ethnic-cleansing is a horror to witness.” One prominent contributor to Greenwald’s blog, a commenter calling himself Shingo, also appears in the comments section at Stephen Walt’s place, where he manfully exposes Zionist lies: “There is no archeologically and historically evidence that a Jewish state did exist,” he wrote in response to a Walt post.

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Attacks against Jews on the rise in Europe

Ever more reasons to be grateful to live in the U.S...

"Anti-Semitic Alliance: The Shared Extremism of Neo-Nazis and Migrant Youth," Sven Röbel. Der Spiegel. July 14, 2010

It was supposed to be a carefree festival in Sahlkamp on the outskirts of the northern German city of Hanover. Billed as an "International Day" to celebrate social diversity and togetherness, the June celebration included performances by a multicultural children's choir called "Happy Rainbow" and the German-Turkish rap duo 3-K. Music from Afghanistan was also on the program.

But then the mood suddenly shifted.

When Hajo Arnds, the organizer of the neighborhood festival, stepped onto the stage at about 6:45 p.m. to announce the next performance, by the Jewish dance group Chaverim, he was greeted with catcalls. "Jews out!" some of the roughly 30 young people standing in front of the stage began shouting. "Gone with the Jews!"

The voices were those of children -- voices full of hate, shouted in unison and amplified by a toy megaphone. Arnds, the organizer, was shocked. He knew many of the children, most of them from Arab immigrant families in the neighborhood.

A social worker, Arnds tried using the tools of his profession -- words -- to save the situation. But his words were met with stones, thrown at the stage by people taking cover in the crowd.

"Jews reluctantly abandon Swedish city amid growing anti-Semitism," Donald Snyder. The Forward via Haaretz. July 11, 2010.

A continentwide study, conducted by the Institute for Interdisciplinary Research on Conflict and Violence at the University of Bielefeld in Germany, released in December 2009, found that that 45.7% of the Europeans surveyed agree somewhat or strongly with the following statement: “Israel is conducting a war of extermination against the Palestinians.” And 37.4% agreed with this statement: “Considering Israel’s policy, I can understand why people do not like Jews.”

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