By Ira Sharkansky
JERUSALEM–The Washington Post has published two views, claiming to be contrasting expressions of Israeli and Palestinian despair for peace. http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/guestvoices/2009/11/israeli_despair_for_peace.html
Neither is what the headlines claim. They are not expressions by Israelis or Palestinians, but by Americans or individuals affiliated with American institutions (Simon Wiesenthal Center, and the American Task Force on Palestine). One is written by Jews, and the other by an Arab, perhaps with Palestinian roots.
That does not invalidate them as views worthy of notice, but it stretches reality to call them Israeli and Palestinian.
If this is the best that the Washington Post can do, perhaps its editors will ask me to write an American perspective on the Middle East, health care, Afghanistan, or the quality of American railroads.
One of the two men contributing to the Israeli perspective is a rabbi, and he shows his religious roots by including in his argument a story about Maimonides from the 12th century. The item is interesting, and not entirely irrelevant, but a bit removed from what did not happen at Camp David in 2000, discussions involving Mahmoud Abbas up to 2008, and all those rockets and suicide bombers since 2000.
The fluffiness in both articles may derive from their placement in the newspaper’s section “On Faith.” Some of my best friends are moved by religion. They have something important to say about eternal truths and the human condition, but not necessarily about political ambiguities.
Missing from the article that claims to “look through the eyes of ordinary Israelis” is the element of dispute.
Israel has a well educated, politically savvy population, a great deal of personal experience with the costs and benefits of military action, and a culture that has respected argument since the Biblical prophets and the rabbis who assembled the Talmud from several hundred years of different views about Biblical law. Dispute continues with discussions in the media among people having experience as fighters, diplomats, and commentators, not easily classified as hewing to company lines. Jews from the far right and far left have ample opportunity to express themselves in prominent venues, along with Palestinians and other Arabs or Muslims having their own varieties of perspective.
Israelis are not letting up in their arguments, but the data show that the left is losing. A recent poll predicts Labor getting less than half the Knesset seats it won in the election that occurred in February, and then Labor won the fewest seats ever attained in its long history. http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1127911.html
Why the loss of the left? At least partly it is a response to Palestinian adherence to their fantasies, and American naivite. The lack of Palestinian flexibility is a missing trait that dooms negotiations. Why should Israel give if there is no take?
It is not easy making the point that Obama is trying hard and is not anti-Israel. Polls show his credibility among Israel Jews in single digits.
Among the things missing from the Arab perspective as presented by the Washington Post is the power of Islam. Hamas and like minded movements are prominent, maybe even dominant in the West Bank, and firmly in control of Gaza. If there is one thing that appears more important than anything else in explaining the failure of negotiations, it is the intransigence of Islamic extremists and the refusal of Palestinian politicians to challenge them. American clumsiness is a disturbance, but minor insofar as Palestinian extremism has been prominent since the onset of negotiations in the early 1990s. It may only have been made incrementally more apparent by the flubs of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.
Israeli intransigence appears in the slogans of the Israeli and international left, but assertion does not stand up to withdrawals from the West Bank in 1993, from Gaza in 2005, and the seven year absorption of rocket attacks before the response to Gaza.
Despair truly is apparent among Israelis and Palestinians. However, the Wiesenthal Center, the American Task Force on Palestine, and the Obama White House have not yet done well in fixing the problems.
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Sharkansky is professor emeritus of political science at Hebrew University.
Sharkansky is professor emeritus of political science at Hebrew University.