Israel Matzav

Why the empty response to an empty threat

Caroline Glick chastises Prime Minister Netanyahu for calling on the 'Palestinian Authority' to 'make a choice' between peace with Israel and peace with Hamas. Glick argues that the 'Palestinian Authority,' and its leader 'moderate' 'Palestinian' President Mahmoud Abbas Abu Mazen, have made that choice several times over the last ten years.

Glick attributes Netanyahu's weak response to his having bought in to the notion that Israel's international standing is dependent upon its perceived willingness to make concessions in the 'peace process.' Glick argues that every Israeli government since the Oslo accords has bought into that mistaken notion. Based upon reading Yehuda Avner's account of Menachem Begin's July 1977 trip to Washington, I would argue that the notion goes back further than Rabin's Oslo-signing government.

But Glick argues that the threat to Israel's international standing is empty and affects only those Israelis - mainly of the Left - who are affected by things like an academic boycott of our country.

Two factors are at play here. The first is our inability to understand power politics. Our leaders believe that the likes of Sarkozy, Cameron and Merkel are serious when they tell us that Israel needs to prove it is serious about peace in order to enable them to vote against a Palestinian statehood resolution at the UN. But they are not serious. Nothing that Israel does will have any impact on their votes.

When the Europeans forge their policies towards Israel they are moved by one thing only: the US.

Since 1967, the Europeans have consistently been more pro-Palestinian than the US. Now, with the Obama administration demonstrating unprecedented hostility towards Israel, there is no way that the Europeans will suddenly shift to Israel’s side. So when European leaders tell Israelis that we need to convince them we are serious about peace, they aren’t being serious. They are looking for an excuse to be even more hostile. If Israel offers the store to Abbas, then the likes of Cameron, Merkel and Sarkozy will not only recognize “Palestine” at the UN, (because after all, they cannot be expected to be more pro-Israel than the Israeli government that just surrendered), they will recognize Hamas. Because that’s the next step.

It would seem that Israel’s leaders should have gotten wise to this game years ago. And the fact that they haven’t can be blamed on the second factor keeping their sanity in check: the Israeli Left. The only group of Israelis directly impacted by the BDS movement is the Israeli Left. Its members – from university lecturers to anti-Zionist has-been politicians, artists, actors and hack writers – are the only members of Israeli society who have a personal stake in a decision by their leftist counterparts in the US or Europe or Australia or any other pretty vacation/sabbatical spots to boycott Israelis.

And because the movement threatens them, they have taken it upon themselves to scare the rest of us into taking this ridiculous charade seriously. So it was that last week a group of washed-up radicals gathered in Tel Aviv outside the hall where David Ben-Gurion proclaimed Israeli independence, and declared the independence of “Palestine.” They knew their followers in the media would make a big deal of their agitprop and use it as another means of demoralizing the public into believing we can do nothing but embrace our enemies’ cause against our country.

The time has come for the vast majority of Israelis who aren’t interested in the Nobel Prize for Literature or a sabbatical at Berkeley or the University of Trondheim to call a spade a spade. The BDS haters have no leverage. A degree from Bar-Ilan is more valuable than a degree from Oxford. And no matter how much these people hate Israel, they will continue to buy our technologies and contract our researchers, because Cambridge is no longer capable of producing the same quality of scholarship as the Technion.

Read the whole thing. I hope Netanyahu reads it too.

Labels: BDS, Binyamin Netanyahu, Hamas-Fatah reconciliation, Palestinian state RIGHT NOW syndrome, unilateral declaration of statehood

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 1:23 PM