Noah, you’re right. As I wrote, Robert Malley and Hussein Agha have acknowledged that Palestinians are still not much interested in a state in the West Bank, Gaza, and Jerusalem, but rather in Israel’s destruction.
Dennis Ross and other Democrats defended Malley last year as a friend of Israel when the president came under attack for his association with the former Clinton staffer. But that pretension of friendship was far from sincere.
We need to acknowledge that Malley and Agha’s piece in the New York Times is the harbinger of the next phase of anti-Israel incitement from the Left. Over the past two decades, mainstream critics of Israel have focused relentlessly on the notion that Israel must withdraw from territory, cease building Jewish communities in the disputed territories, and uproot those that already exist. That over this same period Israel recognized the PLO, granted it control of most of the territories, offered it statehood repeatedly, and in 2005 withdrew every settlement and soldier from Gaza earned it little credit in the court of international opinion. Though the repeated refusal of the Palestinians to make peace, even on terms that seemed to satisfy their demands for sovereignty, has discredited the Israeli Left, those facts seemed not to have penetrated the consciousness of the West.
The inevitable failure of the next round of peace-processing pushed by President Obama will be blamed on Israel in spite of there being no reason to believe the Palestinians will accept a deal on any terms that leave a Jewish state in place. What Malley and Agha seem to be doing is preparing for the moment Obama needs a scapegoat for his hopeless initiative. It is at that point that we can expect hardcore anti-Zionist opinions such as those exhibited on yesterday’s Times op-ed page to be given more prominence.
As such, this decision by Israel’s foes—and their enablers at the Times—to now focus on the delegitimization of Zionism rather than on traditional carping about Jerusalem’s policies may well foreshadow the not-so-distant future debates on the Middle East.
