I keep track of the burgeoning crisis experienced by some liberal Zionists. The Rabin assassination anniversary has caused them to despair that the two-state-solution is dead; the Netanyahu government’s obduracy and slickness has caused them to despair of Israeli leadership. Here are a few signs of this crisis.
First, Lara Friedman of Peace Now has an article on Huffington Post calling for a new “Peacemaking Paradigm” and saying the only thing that can save Israel is the U.S. getting out of the peace business; because we are too much on Israel’s side.
She begins by stating that the Netanayhu government has “an unmistakable drive to implement a one-state outcome.” And that the violence we’re seeing is merely a taste of what’s to come: “increasing carnage, transformation of a territorial conflict into a religious war, and growing international pressure on and isolation of Israel.”
President Obama may well choose to walk away or play it safe, she says: but both paths will
“cement Obama’s legacy as the president who oversaw the death of the two-state solution and the descent of Israel into pariah status.”
Friedman then says that the U.S. in incapable of being a peacemaker in this situation, because of the Israel lobby (though she doesn’t say that out loud): “Thanks to Netanyahu’s tireless and extremely successful efforts to deplete the Obama Administration’s energies, discredit its policies, and deprive it of leverage.” (Netanyahu could never have done this without wide support in the U.S., which is another reason Peace Now should quit the rightwing Jewish Conference of Presidents, which undermined Obama.)
Friedman’s recommendation? Obama must end “the American monopoly over Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts.”
How would this look? To start, the United States should become a genuine partner to other members of the United Nations Security Council, cooperating to formulate and pass – rather than block and veto – resolutions laying down consensus red lines in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The United States should support the establishment of an international support group or similar body to lead efforts to revive peace talks, and should empower the existing Middle East Quartet to propose concrete consequences for actions that undermine the viability of the two-state outcome. [European boycott of settlement goods; Arab states engage, etc.]…
By charting this new course, Obama can leave to the next president an Israel-Palestine peace paradigm that is different from the discredited, failed one in which the United States is mired today.
Next, this joint statement by five liberal Zionist organizations including J Street and Peace Now on the 20th anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin’s murder doesn’t have much to say, and it grants greater value to Jewish lives than Palestinian ones, but it includes some frankly desperate words about Israel’s “quagmire”: “If [extremist] voices triumph, we face another 20 years of loss, violence and quagmire.”
Then there’s novelist David Grossman’s piece in the Guardian titled, “We have been given a frightful glimpse into Netanyahu’s mind” that anguishes over Netanyahu’s Mufti/Hitler comments and cites a recent image showing Netanyahu using binoculars with the lens caps on. Grossman portrays the Israeli public as easily manipulated by a fearful leader. I say the analysis is irresponsible, but the desperation is palpable:
Israel is a country of refugees from a terrible disaster, a country battered by trauma. The trauma of Jewish history, the trauma of the Holocaust, and the traumas of frequent war. To a certain extent most of us are helpless in the face of the prime minister’s sophisticated manipulations. For many of us, too, it is hard to rationally discern the true dangers of today from echoes of the past that roar still in our ears. We give ourselves easily to those fears, at times even eagerly. This is not a surprise: they are etched into our collective and individual DNA, and naturally they leap to the surface with the first shadow of threat and danger. With the blink of an eye, those echoes of the past drown out the threats of the present, and we find ourselves “there” – even if the facts of our lives point towards a reality that is far more complex…
But the internal apparatus of Netanyahu’s mind and consciousness – bared before all with his statement about the mufti and Hitler – tells us, in the most simple and frightful way, that the policies of the state of Israel, its character and its future, are being forged and determined, to the utmost extent, within the narrow and hermetic confines of the man and his covered and sealed field glasses.T hat is where we are trapped; that is where our future is being determined; and that is where we are being led, eyes wide shut.
Another leading author is also desperate. The Associated Press reports that Amos Oz is undertaking a very limited boycott:
Author Amos Oz, one of Israel’s most celebrated writers, says he will no longer attend events hosted by Israeli embassies abroad, as a protest against what he says are extremist Israeli policies.
Oz said in comments published Friday in the Maariv newspaper that “in the wake of the growing extremism in the present government’s policy in various areas, I informed my hosts that I prefer not to be invited to events held in my honor at Israeli embassies overseas.”
Lately I’ve been reading Oz’s 2010 book How to Cure a Fanatic. It seems a bit smug and entitled (“even when this conflict is history, there will still be bitter disagreement about who was the victim and who the tormentor.” Really?). He doesn’t feel that way now, evidently.
That’s nice that Lara Friedman said this, but APN still supports the massive military aid package to Israel. It’s quite true that Washington has zero credibility as a broker of peace, but without cutting off the military aid and the blank-check diplomatic cover, the U.S. is still providing more incentives for the Israeli state to continue ethnic cleansing and occupation than for any workable peace deal. I don’t see how APN gets away with the P in its name if the group is for for ongoing military subsidies to a country engaged in ethnic cleansing–that’s supporting a war process, not a peace process.
I agree that it is nice that she said this, but it’s not exactly new. Maybe from her it’s new. But this has been a common observation for years, albeit not so common, perhaps, in the mainstream U.S. media. I believe that Mr. Obama himself publicly mused about ending our veto recently, but it isn’t clear to me why he did so. Nothing came of it. Perhaps he was feeling particularly put upon by Mr. Netanyahu that day, or strangely embarrassed by having to wipe the Zionist spittle from his brow, and wanted to suggest that he had options.
IMO the Rubicon has long since been crossed with regards to the two state solution. “Liberal” Zionists in the US and in Israel itself are doing no more than timorously flagging up the fact that theend of the 2SS is a possibility. They like Obama and the US (albeit the latter in a more embarassing way ) are simply ducking the fact that the 2SS is dead,deceased,departed this mortal coil,in short it is now an ex solution.
The only way forward for the victims of extreme Zionism and by victims I mean also those moral and conscionable Jews both in Israel and in the Diaspora who feel deep shame over what their co-religionists are doing, as well as the Palestinians, is an enhanced BDS movement led by Europeans.
By enhanced I mean on top of the commercial,economic,sporting and cultural boycotts a greater focus on little discussed aspects of what Norman Finkelstein described as “a lunatic state ” – eg keep pointing out and reminding people that this lunatic state has hundreds of nuclear warheads and that a significant number of these apparently are aimed at their “trading partners ” and diplomatic allies in Europe / NATO countries etc.
BOYCOTT APARTHEID ISRAEL
Fox News had Dennis Ross on as their guru re Obama throwing in the towel on the peace process while he remains in office. Ross agreed it’s impossible to have peace process now with violence taking place “in the region.” No mention of occupation or settlements. Nor of using US aid leverage to force a plan it could suggest for peace chats. Ross spent most of the time saying US needs to really hold Iran to the fire on living up to its part of Iran Deal.
These are like the voices of the distraught parent unwilling to believe their beloved child is a serial killer, despite overwhelming evidence, including a confession. They are the voices of the distraught spouse unwilling to believe their beloved spouse of decades has a secret life as a vicious gangster.
David Grossman gives a sympathetic account of the emotionally manipulated enabler, whose mind is swirling in a confused maelstrom of fears, fictions, and reality. I encourage him to continue on the path of facts.
In that vein, he might drop the fiction that “Israel is a country of refugees from a terrible disaster”. Most of the refugees went elsewhere. Militant extremists from Eastern Europe, eager to carry guns in re-establishing ancient Israel, provided the boots on the ground for the takeover of Palestine. Here’s a recent article on the military-industrial complex’s role in Israel’s crimes.
https://mondoweiss.mystagingwebsite.com/2015/10/because-global-supplier