Marty Peretz is embracing Netanyahu, saying he wants peace without "illusions." Oh, and George Mitchell is "silly." So spake the lobby.
How interesting that TNR contributor Michael Walzer, who to his great credit has called for heavy pressure on Israel now to defeat the settler movement, is now closer to…
John Mearsheimer, guestblogging for Steve Walt at Foreign Policy, who says that he's with Ehud Olmert. If Obama doesn't buck the lobby now, Mearsheimer says, the two state solution is cooked and Israel
is looking at a Hobson's choice of apartheid state or ethnic cleansing:
The Obama administration will surely try to push Netanyahu to change his thinking about a two-state solution and work to give the Palestinians a real state of their own. The Israel lobby, however, will adamantly defend Israel's right to do whatever it wants in the Occupied Territories and make it impossible for the president to put significant pressure on Israel. Netanyahu, like all Israeli leaders, understands this basic fact of life. He knows that he will just have to say a few nice words about the "peace process" and blame the whole thing on the Palestinians, who he believes are a bunch of terrorists anyway, and he will be pretty much free to do whatever he wants in Gaza and the West Bank.
It seems clear to me and to many smart people I know that this story does not have a happy ending. Indeed, it looks like a disastrous ending. Greater Israel cannot be a democratic state, because there will soon be — if there aren't already — more Palestinians between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea than there are Israeli Jews. So, if you give each person one vote, Israel becomes Palestine. That is not going to happen anytime soon, if ever, which leaves two possible outcomes: apartheid and expelling the Palestinians — and there are more than 5 million of them — from Greater Israel. Talk about repulsive options. It is worth remembering that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has said that if there is no two-state solution, Israel will end up in a South Africa-like situation and that will mean the end of the Jewish state. In effect, he is saying that Israel is turning itself into an apartheid state.
My bottom line is that Israel, with the backing of the lobby, is pursuing a remarkably foolish — Ehud Olmert would say suicidal — policy towards the Palestinians.
I would appreciate it greatly if Israel's American backers would explain what I am missing here.
I can't bet against Mearsheimer; he has been ahead of the curve again and again
on important ideas– the Iraq war, the return of realism, the
role of the Israel lobby, the rightward shift in the Israeli polity,
and reverse aliyah (all the Israelis living here). Foreign Policy really ought to give him a permanent platform.
