Jeffrey Goldberg has an odd piece for Bloomberg that offers a view from the White House of U.S.-Israeli relations. Goldberg reports (or intuits?) what President Obama thinks about Benjamin Netanyahu and affirms Obama’s approach to the U.S.-Israeli relationship. It’s difficult to tell where the reporting ends and the commentary begins in the article, it reads like Goldberg’s message for Israel as told through the President. The two are seamlessly molded into one generalized representative of the American liberal Zionist consensus — Obama Goldberg. The takeaway is that “Israel doesn’t know what its own best interests are” and that the current government’s policies will only deepen Israel’s international isolation:
In the weeks after the UN vote, Obama said privately and repeatedly, “Israel doesn’t know what its own best interests are.” With each new settlement announcement, in Obama’s view, Netanyahu is moving his country down a path toward near-total isolation.
And if Israel, a small state in an inhospitable region, becomes more of a pariah — one that alienates even the affections of the U.S., its last steadfast friend — it won’t survive. Iran poses a short-term threat to Israel’s survival; Israel’s own behavior poses a long-term one.
Does Obama think Israel won’t survive? Or Goldberg? Or both? Either way Obama Goldberg sees apartheid and sanctions in the future:
Obama, since his time in the Senate, has been consistent in his analysis of Israel’s underlying challenge: If it doesn’t disentangle itself from the lives of West Bank Palestinians, the world will one day decide it is behaving as an apartheid state.
Again, I’ve never seen Obama use this language. Goldberg has and is clearly concerned about Israel’s future. He (or Obama) also believes he has a handle on what Israel’s “best interests” are:
But what Obama wants is recognition by Netanyahu that Israel’s settlement policies are foreclosing on the possibility of a two-state solution, and he wants Netanyahu to acknowledge that a two-state solution represents the best chance of preserving the country as a Jewish-majority democracy. Obama wants, in other words, for Netanyahu to act in Israel’s best interests.
This is an American liberal Zionist definition of Israel’s best interests, and appears to be completely out of touch with the desire of Israelis. One of the best aspects of David Remnick’s current article for the New Yorker is that it lays bare the widening gulf between the imaginary Israel conjured by American liberal Zionists and the racist anti-democratic reality ascendant in Israeli politics. Compare Goldberg’s two-state plea to Remnick’s description from the ground:
Leaders of the traditional peace camp hardly conceal their gloom. Hagit Ofran, the director of the Settlement Watch project of the once influential Peace Now movement, told me, “Our fight today is not so much to persuade the Israeli public that we need two states. The biggest challenge is to ward off the despair and the indifference.”
Palestinians who are still in favor of a two-state solution and who have worked with Israelis over the years watch the elections with anxiety. “This is all very bad news for the Palestinians,” Ghassan Khatib, the vice-president of Birzeit University, in Palestine, told me. “If Netanyahu and this new crowd come to power, there will be two casualties—the Palestinian Authority and the two-state solution. The simple practical changes on the ground—the settlement projects, the daily incidents of settler violence against our people—just do not allow for a two-state solution. Also, the radicalization of public opinion in Israel and the radicalization of the leadership reinforce each other. And that, of course, has an influence on public opinion in Palestine. The percentage of people here who support armed struggle is going up for the first time after ten years of decline. The Palestinian majority is still in favor of a two-state solution, but hopes are fading all the time.”
Right-wing politicians listen to all this and smile. They are delighted. They are emboldened. Danny Danon, a Likud leader who recently suggested that, for every rocket launched by Hamas, Israel “delete” one neighborhood in Gaza, said to me, “I tell my colleagues on the left in the Knesset, ‘You are an endangered species. We’ll build a nature reserve for you.’ ”
Given this, Obama Goldberg really expects Netanyahu to “acknowledge that a two-state solution represents the best chance of preserving the country as a Jewish-majority democracy”? Maybe he hasn’t noticed but Netanyahu can’t run away from his Bar Ilan speech fast enough. Goldberg has missed the story — democracy is out of vogue, annexation is in. Remnick has a shocking, and clarifying, quote from settler leader Benny Katzover, “I would say that today Israeli democracy has one central mission, and that is to disappear. Israeli democracy has finished its historical role, and it must be dismantled and bow before Judaism.” In the past Goldberg has dismissed people like Katzover as outliers, but they are closer to the center of Israeli power than ever before. What is Obama Goldberg to do?
Very insightful!
So what are the signs to look for that indicate the cognitive dissonance for libzios is becoming acute?
Goldberg may be a special case, but this seeming inability to separate personas you point out here would appear to me to be one. For Goldberg anyway.
Is what you point out in Goldberg’s case showing up elsewhere in your conversations within the “community?” Small, but nonetheless distinguishable, cracks in the PeP persona?
I don’t know, so just askin’.
Good one, Adam!
Here’s Al Akhbar’s take:
The Katzover quote is from today’s Ha-aretz (Jan 15) and originally from an interview he gave Beit Mashiach (House of the Messiah), a journal of the messianic faction of the Chabad Movement. They want democracy replaced by a “halachic state” based on Jewish law (halacha). That means a Jewish king (ideally the Messiah himself) advised by a restored Sanhedrin (rabbinical council). In fact, a body that claims this status is already in existence, and its supporters seek “as a first step” to insert it into the current state structure as the new supreme court and simultaneously as an upper house of the Knesset.
There are also settlers who propose establishing a halachic state first in the West Bank in the event of an Israeli withdrawal. This sounds infeasible but I suggest the following scenario as a possibility. Suppose Israel officially withdraws under mounting international pressure and the settlers then declare their own even-more-Jewish state in “Judea and Samaria.” Officially this second Zionist state would be quite separate from Israel, and Israel would disavow all responsibility for it. But in reality it would remain closely connected with Israel and receive support from Israel as well as through its own network of backers abroad. Parallels would be the Serbian republic inside Bosnia and Nagorno-Karabakh in relation to Armenia.
As Adam says, these people are no longer marginal, and the further Israeli politics lurches to the right the greater their influence will be. So it might be worth paying some attention to their aims and strategies.
“appears to be completely out of touch with the desire of Israelis”
I am paraphrasing here but democracy means giving Jewish Israelis what they want and giving it to them good and hard .
Does everyone else find the zios as hysterical as I do?….First they demanded we build an Israel–and demanded we let it do whatever it wanted to do and defend it’s every crime—–and Now they want us to save it from itself?
I don’t know how many zios libs I’ve seen moaning for the US to save Israel from the Israelis.
I think O like a lot of us have given up on Israel. It’s like hard core drug addict that no matter how you warn that he is killing himself, keeps right on. I think O has let Israel go. He might keep up the aid and support because of domestic political pressure by the lobby, but otherwise he’s through with Israel. He’s letting it take it’s own course, washed his hands of reasoning with them. And if he’s doing anything about I/P it is under the table with the Europeans…..basically not squawking about whatever pressure they may apply on Israel.