That’s not my headline, it’s Noam Sheizaf’s. It’s from his great blog Promised Land. Up until recently Sheizaf worked for the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv. Here he recounts a typical debate he gets into with fellow Israelis, and says it’s getting tiresome:
I try to speak about Gaza, and say, the illegal use of phosphorus bombs against civilians.
“How do you know the IDF did that?” the answer comes. “Don’t say you believe that self-hating Jew, Goldstone?”
– Well, there are pictures of the bombs exploding, there are people with phosphorus-like burns, and I know that every combat unit in the IDF carries standard phosphorus ammunition, because I’ve been there and I even used it in training.
– You don’t get it, do you? The Palestinians want to destroy us all. What we did in Gaza was self-defense, like everyone else would have done. We didn’t want to kill those children. We did what’s necessary. It was justified.
And that’s basically it. You can’t ask about war crimes, you can’t discuss the phosphorus. Everything becomes irrelevant.
So I forget about the Goldstone report, just like the Israeli media did, and I try to write about Obama’s effort to re-ignite the peace process, or about the fact that from an Israeli perspective, there is no real alternative to the two-state solution. I ask, for example, why Israel can’t stop building settlements, even for a limited time.
– Because settlements are not the issue. They are not the obstacle for peace. We can evacuate them whenever we want.
– If it’s no big deal, what’s preventing us from stopping, even as a favor to Obama?
– The whole demand is a trick to divert us, and the rest of the world, from the real issue: that the Palestinians want to destroy us. Therefore, building settlements is justified.
– I fail to see the connection. The Hamas is indeed a problem, but surly, Abu-Mazen… I mean, look at his efforts to keep the West Bank quiet…
– If everything is quiet, what’s the rush to hand back land?
– Because if we don’t, we will have another Intifada.
– And in this case, we will give them nothing! We don’t deal with terrorists!
– So, when do we get the point where we do give them something?
– It’s simple: When they don’t want to destroy us anymore.
– And how do we know that?
– We can’t. Look at what happened in Gaza. We withdrew and what did we get in return? The Hamas with its rockets. Imagine us withdrawing from the West Bank, and five years later we get the Hamas there as well, 15 minutes from Tel Aviv! You can never trust the Palestinians. All they want is to destroy us.
And so it goes on and on. The Israelis found the perfect argument. It’s the reason and the outcome of everything. It’s the way to understand the past, behave in the present and foresee the future. It’s the full circle, the ying and the yang, and there is no way to break it, since Israelis seem to know what’s in the Palestinians’ hearts. And this is something you can’t debate.
The only possible solution is to surrender. “OK,” I say. “I’ll go along with your logic. We can’t leave the West Bank, and we can’t deport 2 million Palestinians by force…”
– No way! This is a democracy!
– Yeh, I know… and the one-state solution is out of the question…
– Out of the question! We will have an Arab majority! This will be the end of everything!
– So what do you basically suggest we do?
(Silence, followed by a long speech)
All I’ll add is that this conversation doesn’t only take place in Israel.
