It is inevitable that European awareness that the two-state solution is a pleasant delusion is going to come to the U.S. And Colonel Pat Lang has done Americans a favor by importing this piece from David Habakkuk in London, called “A Poisoned Chalice” that says essentially that Israel is finished, the Israel lobby has fixed this course for the country, and western Jews will come to accept the outcome. While Habakkuk acknowledges that Arab violence against Israel played a role in sending the country into its bunker, he is coldly realistic about a number of factors now at work: the dead reliance on the Israel lobby to sustain the project, the rejection by Israel of a deal that might have preserved the state, the unsustainability of dual loyalty in the Diaspora (I have not excerpted this part), and the rapidly-changing discourse about the country in Europe and even the U.S., which Israel seeks to tarnish as “delegitimization” when in fact it is just awareness. Habbakuk is on to something I have noticed myself: that when push comes to shove, American Jews will walk away from the Zionist project, they will choose their liberal values over maintaining dual loyalty. (h/t Brian Dana Akers) Some excerpts:
Alliance with neoconservatives has in fact been a poisoned chalice for Israel. The last thing that country needs is friends like Michael Gove, who encourage Israelis to believe that attitudes to them have nothing whatsoever to do with actions of theirs which others may find objectionable, and are purely to do with their virtues. The belief that one represents a state of achieved perfection, and that any hostility on the part of others can only be understood either in terms of their moral turpitude or one’s failure adequately to explain one’s virtues, is dangerous enough for the United States and Britain, who have the benefit of relatively secure geographic locations. The Israelis, who do not, simply cannot afford to duck out of the endeavour – which is commonly liable to be less than entirely pleasurable – of confronting how one is actually seen by others, in order to understand how they have responded to what one has done in the past, and calculate how they might respond to what one might do in the future….
In relation to declining support in the West, Israel and its external supporters commonly talk about delegitimation, as though this decline reflected the malign efforts of people implacably hostile to the very idea of a Jewish state. But in relation to my own country, Britain, this is delusional. The decline of support for Israel simply does not reflect cunning propaganda from Palestinian advocates – whose efforts, taken in themselves, resonate among rather limited sections of the population. It is the actions and words of successive Israeli governments and their supporters in this country and in the United States which have shifted sympathy away from the country.
One element in this remarkably successful effort at shooting oneself in the foot is a failure on the part of the Israeli government to grasp the premises on which on which support for the country has commonly been based – and in particular, the crucial role of the assumption that a two-state solution was feasible. As long as I can remember, it has been taken for granted among most people here concerned with these issues that there existed a division of Palestine such that, with patient encouragement from outside, sooner or later it would come to seem preferable to the leaderships on both sides to any other option available to them. And crucially, it was also assumed that the difficulties they could be expected to face in taking their peoples along with them, in the face of the obvious ability of ‘rejectionists’ on both sides to stand in the way of and disrupt any likely agreement, could be overcome.
If there was to be such a division, it has been clear ever since 1967 that it involved the Palestinians acknowledging that 78% of historical Palestine contained within the the borders prior to the Six Day War was irrevocably lost, in return for Israeli withdrawal from the remaining 22% — with minor border adjustments. The successful defiance by Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu of the timid attempts by the Obama Administration to persuade it to observe some minimal restraints on the ongoing process of settlement of the West Bank – a pyrrhic victory if there ever was one — have in the minds of many on both sides of the Atlantic finally put paid to belief such a division is ever going to happen.
Coming together with the revelations in the ‘Palestine Papers’ in January about the extraordinary lengths to which Palestinian leaders were prepared to go to accommodate Netanyahu’s predecessors, the conclusion is increasingly being drawn that there is no Israeli ‘partner for peace’….
The most remarkable transformation, however, has been at the Daily Telegraph – which in the days of Lord Conrad Black used to be a central neoconservative stronghold, and where the neoconservative presence remained extremely strong even after his departure. It has certainly very far from vanished, but last September Peter Oborne, who back in 2009 took a leaf out of John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt’s book and co-authored a notable pamphlet on Britain’s own Israeli lobby, moved to the paper as chief political commentator.
What provoked the pamphlet was a speech given by the Tory leader David Cameron to an organisation called the Conservative Friends of Israel not long after the attack on Gaza, in which Cameron went out of his way to praise Israel because it ‘strives to protect innocent life’. When Oborne remarked to some Tory MPs that it was difficult to reconcile this with the ‘numerous reports of human rights abuses in Gaza’, he recalls, they ‘looked at me as if I was distressingly naive, drawing my attention to the very large number of Tory donors in the audience.’ However, the problem the British Israeli lobby is finding increasingly difficult to handle is that the actions of successive Israeli governments are producing revulsion and disillusion – and also disgust at the pusillanimity of our own political leaders,and their willingness to cave in to the combination of financial inducements and emotional blackmail deployed by Israel’s sympathisers….
It is clear that emerging splits among American Jews are a crucial element in how the policy of the United States towards the Middle East will evolve in coming years. The same holds true in Britain. And it is here that one of the most important effects of Netanyahu’s defiance of Obama is liable to be felt. As in the United States, most British Jews have believed in the two-state solution. There is certainly a wide spectrum of attitudes among those who have placed their hopes in the possibility of a settlement with the Palestinians. But I think it is fair to say that a bedrock element is an identification with the fate of fellow Jews which memories of the Holocaust make if traumatic to abandon without a sense of guilt and betrayal. In a world where hopes of settlement with the Palestinians have disappeared, however, the tension between identification with Israel and the liberal values shared by very many Jews in Britain as in the United States is going to become unmanageable.
