Why do so many American liberals prefer to think ill of Israel and accept libelous accusations such as Time magazine’s infamous August cover story that proclaimed “Why Israelis Don’t Care About Peace”? The answer is that, unlike the majority of Israelis, they’ve decided to ignore the results of nearly two decades of failed peace-processing. A prime example of this foolishness is provided today by the New York Times, where online columnist Robert Wright urges Palestinians to give Israelis who are indifferent to peace a good scare. What would scare them? His answer is a Palestinian peace movement based on civil disobedience that would advocate for votes in a binational state where a presumed Arab majority would soon take over the country.
Wright’s determination to divide Israelis between indifferent moderates and bad settlers whose political strength exercises a veto over peace is absurd. Israeli moderates aren’t indifferent to peace; they just understand that concessions that created the Palestinian Authority and a Hamas state in Gaza brought more terror, not peace. That’s why the Israeli left has more or less disintegrated as a political force. But should the Palestinians ever accept one of Israel’s peace offers, the right would be powerless to stop such a deal from being signed.
As for the Palestinians, there’s a good reason why they’ve never taken the advice of foreign well-wishers and gone Gandhi on the Israelis. The Palestinian national movement has always been based on violence. The credibility of Palestinian political parties stems from their involvement in terror, not nation-building, which is why Hamas has a mass following and pragmatic Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salaam Fayyad is virtually a man without a party. Palestinians don’t have to be persuaded to embrace a “one-state” solution, because they have never supported one that would envision two states for two peoples, since acceptance of a Jewish state is still anathema to Palestinian nationalism.
Indeed, far from Israelis needing to be convinced of the utility of a two-state solution, it is the Palestinians who must be persuaded to do so. They turned such a deal down in 2000, when Yasir Arafat said no to one at Camp David and again at Taba the next year. Current Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas did the same in 2008. But all this is of no interest to authors such as Wright who still prefer to blame the continued standoff on the Israelis.
But the most compelling passage in Wright’s article is when he claims that a nonviolent Palestinian movement would enable American Israel-haters to create successful campaigns to isolate Israel without fear of being called anti-Semites, as was the fate of Harvard students who advocated for disinvestment in 2002.
The determination of Wright and his fellow left-wingers to ignore the same recent history that has caused so many Israeli leftists to abandon their cause is curious. It is hard to avoid wondering whether Wright’s longing for a more presentable Palestinian movement has more to do with his hope that it would make the work of American anti-Zionists easier than any chances that it would actually lead to peace. Perhaps without intending to do so, what Wright has done in this piece is to give us a look at the dark side of left-wing fantasies about the Middle East in which advocacy for an end to the Jewish state will be granted a legitimacy that it has hitherto lacked.
