Drafting diplomatic alternatives for the Right
Evelyn Gordon reports on former ambassador to the United Nations Dore Gold's latest venture.JCPA chief Dore Gold, a former Israeli ambassador to the UN, explained to reporters that Israel’s biggest international-relations problem is its inability to articulate what it actually wants. Any Palestinian Authority official can recite his goals: a Palestinian state, the 1967 borders, East Jerusalem. But “if someone asks an Israeli politician they say, ‘It’s complicated’ or ‘We want peace,’ or ‘a secure peace.’ The Palestinians have clear targets and we have only indistinct goals.”Read it all. And wish Dore luck because unfortunately, it really is necessary (although, as you all know by now, I don't believe there is a solution).
What Gold didn’t mention, but is equally true, is that the same problem plagues Israel’s internal discourse. Virtually the only Israeli who ever articulated a clear diplomatic vision is the left-wing Yossi Beilin. And this remains the left’s best argument against the center-right. Whenever someone points out the Beilinite vision’s dangers, leftist politicians retort: “So what’s your solution?” And since center-right politicians have no real answer, they wind up adopting Beilinesque solutions once in office.
Granted, a “solution” shouldn’t be necessary. In real life, not all problems have instant solutions, and Israeli politicians should be capable of saying so — just as successive American presidents acknowledged that there was no instant solution to the Soviet problem, so the free world simply had to hold the line against Communist expansion until a solution became possible. This has the great advantage of being true: until the Arabs accept Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, no diplomatic solution will be possible.
But Israeli politicians have never succeeded in making this argument. Thus Gold and his colleagues, who represent a broad center-right spectrum, are wise to seek to craft an alternative vision.
The council’s second vital goal is to restore security, and especially Israel’s need for defensible borders, to the center of the diplomatic discourse. At a JPCA symposium on Israel’s security needs earlier this year, Maj. Gen. (res.) Uzi Dayan, a council member, noted that contrary to accepted dogma, high-trajectory weapons make defensible borders more important, not less.
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 5:59 PM
2 Comments:
Until Antisemitism is somehow washed from the genetic compassion of the human condition, there can never be a solution.
Face it... history proves how Jews have become the solution/final and otherwise not because of us but because there is no humanity!!
Still after everything we have been through even the brilliant esteemed Dore Gold refuses to address the real issues.
We keep searching for answers. We as Jews are like dogs continually chasing our tails. We do it without thinking AND even when we know WHAT PLAGUES US lies within humankind, we still search. Oh yes, the expectation of ourselves is that we always rise above even when no matter how far we rise, it is still not good enough.
So we continue feeding the rabid dogs (even when they bite us back over and over again) thinking, "they will soon love us." We'll show them! When will we learn they will never love us? But then most sadly, this is the consequences of our genetic makeup.
Alas, this is why we always find ourselves directly between the old proverbial rock and a hard place.
Israel has three goals: to be a Jewish State, to have a united Jerusalem as its capital and to have secure and defensible borders. I don't read where those goals require a two-state solution. This should be the platform of Israel's Right. As long as it continues to pretend it has no choice but to go along with the disastrous "peace process", Israel will continue losing sight of the things it needs to have remain an independent, viable and secure country. I can say it openly and with clarity. Why can't Israel's leaders?
What could go wrong indeed
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