Neocons know that realism is ascendant. The answer? Say they’re realists. Paul Wolfowitz has gone around praising realism lately, I hear, on National Public Radio. Now the Washington Post provides a platform to Elliott Abrams (a neoconservative parochialist who believes in Jewish social separation from non-Jews and who pushed the disastrous Iraq war) to respond to Jimmy Carter’s superb piece on the dissolution of the two-state solution and preach the real world to Palestinians. Abrams:
While Carter warns that a Palestinian "civil rights struggle" is in the offing, he says nothing about Palestinian violence in the real world…
Most inaccurate of all, and most bizarre, is Carter’s claim that "a total freeze of settlement expansion is the key" to a peace agreement. Not a halt to terrorism, not the building of Palestinian institutions, not the rule of law in the West Bank, not the end of Hamas rule in Gaza — no, the sole "key" is Israeli settlements. Such a conclusion fits with Carter’s general approach, in which there are no real Palestinians, just victims of Israel. The century of struggle between moderate and radical Palestinians, and the victories of terrorists from Haj Amin al-Husseini to Yasser Arafat, are forgotten; the Hamas coup in Gaza is unmentioned; indeed the words "Hamas" and "terrorism" do not appear in Carter’s column. Instead of appealing for support for the serious and practical work of institution-building that the Palestinian Authority has begun, Carter fantasizes about a "nonviolent civil rights struggle" that bears no relationship to the terrorist violence that has plagued Palestinian society, and killed Israelis, for decades. Carter’s portrait demonizes Israelis and, not coincidentally, it infantilizes Palestinians, who are accorded no real responsibility for their fate or future.
Let us consider Abrams’s definition of the real world, and how skewed it is. Just imagine– in the real world– if India had such influence in the United States that it had foiled the Partition plan of 1947, and there was no Pakistan, as a state, just a bunch of people who thought of themselves as Muslim Pakistanis, but did not have international recognition or the right of self-determination, because the U.N. had frustrated the aim, and the U.S. had put up endless obstacles. Well in the real world, the Pakistanis would be violent — heck, they are violent, and so are the Indians– and the Indians would be continually arguing that the Pakistani violence was worse than their own righteous violence and disqualified the Pakistanis from having a state. And meantime India would be gobbling Kashmir, and the Swat valley too, out of some Sanskrit credo. Would that be fair, after 61 years? When Tajikistan has a state of Muslims, and so does Kosovo, also born in violence? We live in a world of nation-states, for now, and the denial of such status to Palestinians, because they are too degraded, among all the world’s peoples– it’s racism.
