A debate on Israel

A debate over Israel policy, in an exchange of letters at The New Republic.

The last one, by Yossi Klein HaLevi, seems to sum it up:

Dear Jim,

You say that Israel has been caught in amber, even as the rest of the world has changed. Not so: Israel has changed beyond recognition. We're no longer an ideological, pioneering state but a high-tech society that desperately wants to be part of the globalizing world. And Israelis are willing to pay the territorial price for that admission—provided we can be reassured that a Palestinian state wouldn't turn into an even worse nightmare than the one we're caught in now.

In urging Israelis to face reality and accept Palestinian statehood, you're pushing against an open door. That argument was resolved, at least in theory, 20 years ago, during the first intifada, when a majority of Israelis concluded that the occupation would devastate Israel from within and turn us into a pariah from without.

A majority of Israelis agree that ending the occupation is an existential need—to spare us from growing isolation, from the moral attrition of occupation, from the untenable choice between Israel as a Jewish state and a democratic state.

But that's only half the equation. You ignore the other half: that a Palestinian state could turn into an existential threat to Israel. Most Israelis are convinced that, given the current state of the Palestinian national movement, an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank would lead to missile attacks against the Israeli heartland, including greater Tel Aviv and Ben-Gurion Airport. All it takes is a few "primitive rockets" to be launched every day against Israeli neighborhoods—and for the international community to tie our hands when we try to defend ourselves—for normal life in this country to become impossible.

In order to make your case against Israel, you have to ignore the fact that Israel tried—three times in the last decade—to create a Palestinian state. Palestinian leaders rejected the equivalent of one hundred percent of the West Bank and Gaza, because that deal would have required them to restrict refugee return to a Palestinian state. The Palestinian pre-condition for an Israeli withdrawal is that Israel commit suicide. As a veteran Peace Now activist said to me recently: The Palestinians won't let us end the occupation.

We've tried negotiations and got suicide bombings; we tried unilateral withdrawal without negotiations and got rocket attacks. What would you have us do next?

What's so depressing about your position, Jim, is that it offers proof that Arab intransigence is winning, that with enough time, the combination of terrorism and denial of Israel's legitimacy will wear down even friends of Israel like you. And then the Middle East conflict seems to turn into an endless blood feud. Or that stupid journalistic phrase, a cycle of violence. And then what you once knew about the conflict—that at crucial moments Israel has accepted compromise and the Palestinians have rejected it—gets lost in the general weariness.

Yes, Israeli tanks will almost certainly "storm into Gaza" again. But that cartoon you cite omits these crucial words: "Palestinians shell Israeli towns and then Israeli tanks storm into Gaza." But hey, that's just a detail in the endless blood feud. So is the fact that we pulled out of Gaza. And that most of us would pull out of the West Bank if we didn't think it would turn into Gaza.

There's a curious obtuseness running through your position—and in this you are by no means alone among our colleagues in the media. Israel, you write, has a "strange immunity to influences from the outside world." In fact Netanyahu has given in to the Obama administration on two crucial issues. First, he accepted a two-state solution—for the first time placing the Likud within the national consensus in support of a Palestinian state. And he suspended housing starts across the West Bank, including in settlement blocs near the border slated to be part of Israel according to every peace plan. No Israeli leader ever went as far. Yet Netanyahu is treated virtually as a war monger. Why, Israelis wonder, should we give in to the next Obama demand on Jerusalem when we've gotten zero credit for giving in to his other demands—while the Palestinians, who refuse to even show up at the table, are treated with kid gloves?

Finally, you raise the question of Israel as a Jewish state versus a democratic state. For me, erasing either identity would do fatal damage to Israel's soul. An Israel that has cut itself off from Jewish responsibility would not have rescued tens of thousands of Jews in Ethiopia. And that's an Israel I would not want to live in.

Israel is fated to be both a Jewish state that is responsible for Jews around the world and for Jewish history, and a democratic state that makes room in its national identity for its non-Jewish citizens. How to reconcile those two non-negotiable needs is the most important domestic issue facing Israel.

I would hope that Americans would appreciate the complexity of our dilemmas, tell us when we're wrong and back us against the international campaign to deny Israel's legitimacy. That, at least, is what I expect from a friend.

Best,

Yossi