Jack Ross writes in answer to two questions in this earlier post: "Why did Olmert play FW DeKlerk after the fact, a role De Klerk played while in office?" Ross:
never quite got there in my view, and if he's a bit more radicalized by
the circumstances under which he left office, which I think he was,
that's irrelevant. I guess if Livni will be De Klerk, as I've always
felt, and Sharon was Botha, that Olmert was a sort of transition figure
which there wasn't in the South African case.
As for the larger observations, I absolutely agree with Antony Loewenstein that peace would put Israel
out of business. I do agree with you on the other hand about the
consensus emerging in Washington and with the present Israeli
leadership – the problem is that, frankly, they don't have a
Palestinian partner.
The Israelis totally discredited Abbas
with his own people, the only conceivable alternative they could come
up with to dealing directly with Hamas is to release Barghouti from
prison and try to make him into Mandela. But I would presume that
Barghouti would make demands that anything like a two-state solution
would be on terms the Israelis could not accept. The most he can
really give them is a decent interval, and I imagine that even in the
South African case as late as 1990-91 De Klerk was still hoping,
perhaps on knowingly long odds, for something like a two-state solution.
I also want to comment on what Loewenstein said about Israeli society being far more invested in the occupation than South Africa
in apartheid. This may very well be the case, but I think the vastly
more important thing is that American Jewry is far more invested than the Israelis.
And from my present research, I believe this
was true as far back as the pre-statehood years. The line which Elmer
Berger and his colleagues took after 1948 went roughly like "we lost
the battle against Jewish nationalism in Palestine, but the far more
important battle is against Jewish nationalism in America". In my view
this was always the far more hopeless cause.
