Outdated thinking
When I tell you that there is a lot of leftist thinking in Israel's foreign service corps that needs to be replaced, this is the sort of thing I have in mind (although the speaker is no longer part of the foreign ministry bureaucracy, he was for many years). “One thing we owe you is a peace process,” said Pinkas.Read the whole thing. The biggest problems with the 'two-state solution' are that the 'Palestinians' won't accept a Jewish state, and that they will not acknowledge that giving them a 'Palestinian state' is the end of the conflict. So all we would do by removing our heart to create a 'Palestinian state' is to bring on the 1967 war again under even less favorable circumstances than those under which that war was fought.
It is the absence of a peace process that has contributed to Israel’s isolation in the world today, said Pinkas. Israel is fast reaching a point in which realities that were suppressed, ignored or dismissed since 1967 have to be acknowledged and decisions made, he added.
“We’ve been living in the Six Day War for too long,” he said.
“We’re living in a situation of protracted temporariness. We know we can’t stay in the West Bank.”
Israel already knows that the contours of any future agreement will follow the parameters set by former US president Bill Clinton during his last days in office, said Pinkas, who issued dire warnings about further delays.
“We’re reaching a point where the impasse is such that it serves only the Palestinians. The two-state formula is becoming untenable, nonviable and non-sustainable.”
He suggested that unless the peace process gets under way immediately the Palestinians will opt for one binational state in which they will demand the right to vote. If Israel were to incorporate the Palestinians and allow them to vote, this would imperil Israel’s identity as a Jewish state, and in Pinkas’s view, would pose a much greater threat than a nuclear Iran.
No one is taking Israel seriously any more, said Pinkas. No one is listening to the Israeli narrative.
“The world sees Israel as the last colonialists and occupiers of Palestine,” he said.
For many years Israel was able to deflect pressures by arguing that the Palestinians could not be trusted and that the Arab world does not recognize Israel and is out to get Israel, observed Pinkas.
In this respect Israel was always able to rely on the US due to the sound, solid, very real and unparalleled relationship that it had developed with America, “but we’ve become too arrogant about it. We’ve come to take it for granted.”
And that's without even getting into the fact that the 'Palestinians' have never conceded anything on any of the four 'core issues' (Jerusalem, 'settlements,' 'refugees' and borders), and that the 'demographic time bomb' that so worries Pinkas is a hoax.
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 6:05 PM
3 Comments:
Alon Pinkas' views is pretty much minority thinking in Israel today. Even Barry Rubin - who used to be on the Left and who still backs a Palestinian state under the "right conditions" - concedes those conditions are not going to emerge any time soon. Most Israeli Jews realize shrinking Israel further is not going to win Israel the Arabs' acceptance or the world's affection. Pinkas' views may have made sense in 1993, when most Israelis were willing to give Oslo a try. That experiment failed disastrously and almost no one in Israel wants to revisit it. We're not going to see peace happen in our lifetime.
If the binational solution is the Rwanda Solution (pace Plaut), then the two-state solution is the Sudeten Agreement. Even without mentioning the "right of return" ruse, Israel would be pressured to give up its Jewish exclusivity for the sake of the Arabs within the pre-1967 borders. The same outcome as the binational solution.
The article says:
"If Israel were to incorporate the Palestinians and allow them to vote, this would imperil Israel's identity as a Jewish state, and in Pinkas's view, would pose a much greater threat than a nuclear Iran."
Correct, but is Pinkas unaware that this exact reasoning is anathema to the Left-shaped "world opinion" which he so wishes to court with gifts of Jewish land? On any Daily Kos Israel-related diary, just try to voice the smallest reservation about the idea that Israel should be a multicultural ("of all its citizens") state. You'll be branded a racist before you could say "political correctness."
Israel's PR war under the current circumstances is a losing proposition. We lose even if we win. We're trying to win the game of showing how Israel guarantees equal rights for Jew and non-Jew alike, but if we finally got the treasonous Marxist Left (sorry for the triple redundancy) to agree with us, we'd be firmly down the trashcan of history.
How do I know? Again, Europe. Britain, for instance, is a multicultural state, as are the Scandinavian countries. Life is now a living hell for the natives in those states; the surviving WW2 heroes of Britain now say winning the war simply wasn't worth it, for a country they can no longer recognize as what they had fought for. And all this is without the visceral, genocidal frenzy that is our local reality.
Israel's PR needs to change into something winnable. That something is the idea of the right of every nation to a nation-exclusivist state within well-defined indigenous borders. The idea that the state is to protect the nation by providing a safe, exclusive haven for it, just as a computer operating system protects each process by assigning an exclusive memory space for it. The Leftist standards cannot and are not to be courted--they must be replaced by a new, sane, rational, logical way of thinking.
The Left rejects the idea of the nation state in favor of a universal ouikumene - the idea advanced by the ancient Greeks that adoption of Greek culture, philosophy and religion would make all men brothers. This was the fusionist idea current in the Hellenistic World created by Alexander and his successors in the Ptolemaic and Seleucid dynasties that succeeded him.
The only people on earth who rejected it then were the Jews. And the Jews today are no more likely to give up Judaism and their attachment to national independence than their ancestors were. That is precisely why the post-modern Left finds Israel anathema, since on top of anti-Semitism, the Jews reject the notion the nation state has outlived its usefulness and they still believe in the ideology of Zionism in our post-ideological age.
The above factors then guarantee Israel won't find ready acceptance among Western elites any time soon but neither will it disappear in our own lifetime.
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