The Unspeakable Truth

David Isaac

“Israel Will Never Have Peace”. That was the startling headline of Bret Stephens’ op-ed Tuesday in the Wall Street Journal. It was startling both for what it said and for where it was said. The Journal has never been discerning on the Arab-Israel conflict, which isn’t to say it has been hostile to Israel, just wobbly and woolly. Like a first-rate race car driver who's always defeated by that one track, the Journal’s editorial staff just can’t seem to handle the Arab-Israel conflict.

Bret Stephens has been one of the strongest supporters on the Journal’s editorial board of the two-state solution. What seems to have turned him around was the sight of Arabs leaping over the border fence into Israel on “Nakba” day. Stephens writes, “[A] grievance that has been nursed for 63 years and that can move people to acts like those witnessed on Sunday is never going to allow a political accommodation with Israel and would never be satisfied by one anyway.”

Good for Stephens. Let’s hope the revelation sticks. One of the curious things about the Arab-Israel conflict is that the truth behind the conflict cannot be said: The simple truth that there is no “peace process”, there never was a “peace process”, and the Arabs want Israel eliminated. It’s a testament to how off-limits this truth is that, until this Tuesday, the Wall Street Journal, for all its conservatism, never published an op-ed saying so. Perhaps Stephens’ piece is the start of something new.

It’s impossible to enact intelligent policy when it’s based on a lie. Of course, Israel contributes to the problem by endorsing the ‘two-state solution’. Israel needs to be the first to say this is a delusion. Only then can we expect things to change.

In “The Hollow Peace” (Dvir Co. Ltd., 1981), Shmuel Katz devotes a section to the reasons that Israel finds it so difficult to state the simple truth about Arab intent. It’s worth quoting at length.

[The spokesmen of the Establishment] refrained from mentioning the fact that the Arab nations meant to prevent the birth of the Jewish State, and that they continued, once the State was born, to hatch plots for its destruction. Israel’s policy ignored this bitter truth and centred mainly on the slogan that Israel wanted peace and that her leaders were prepared to negotiate with any Arab leader. This formula unwittingly distorted the image of the Arab leaders: it endowed them in the eyes of the world, with the quality of reasonableness, as though they were open to discussion. The image of the dispute itself was altered out of all recognition, and made to seem an ordinary border dispute, which could be eliminated by a chat with some Arab leader.

This approach had – and has – yet another psychological basis. At the beginning of World War II, when the Nazi invaders began hounding the Jews in Poland and launched their campaign of murder, the Jewish artist Arthur Szyk denounced the silence of the Western press. Their attitudes towards these horrors, he said, resembled the prevalent attitude toward pornography: everybody knew about it, but it was not talked about in polite society. This is what happened with regard to the Arab purpose of annihilating Israel. Yehoshafat Harkabi, in his profoundly incisive published works on the aims of the Arabs, complains repeatedly and bitterly of the lack of response of the Israeli leadership and the Israeli public in general in the face of the reality of institutionalized abysmal Arab hatred towards Israel. A knowledgeable man in his own field, Harkabi was apparently not aware of the diplomatic reason for this silence. To diplomats of the nations of the world – in Washington or in London, in Paris or in Stockholm – accustomed to “handling” territorial disputes in a commonly accepted format, which they could understand from their experience and education, it was “discomfiting” to have to hear that one party to this dispute, the Arabs, with whom they maintained friendly relations, were simply athirst for the blood of the other side and desired nothing but to liquidate them. As for the Israeli diplomats, it made them uncomfortable to have to tell the foreign diplomats that their routine thinking was worlds away from the realities, and that the solutions they proposed were chimerical. Almost involuntarily one calls to mind well-known events of the ’thirties, when the leaders of the enlightened European countries refused to heed the warnings of foreign observers in Germany, who kept repeating that the Nazis were determined on war, and on mastery in Europe and the whole world.

It is possible of course that sounding alarm bells by Israel would have aroused in the world the primary reaction that this was “Jewish paranoia”. That was perhaps the reason why the architects of Israeli policy flinched from the attempt to instill the shocking truth in the minds of statesmen and in world opinion: they preferred to adapt themselves in the approved manner to bland routine diplomatic formulas.

On May 16, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the Knesset. Listening to his speech, one would be forgiven for thinking that everything was about to change, that Israel was abandoning ‘bland diplomatic formulas’ and had returned to basic truths. It appeared Mr. Netanyahu had broken through the wall of silence when he said: “My friends, the root of this conflict never was a Palestinian state, or lack thereof. The root of the conflict is, and always has been, their refusal to recognize the Jewish state. It is not a conflict over 1967, but over 1948, over the very existence of the State of Israel.”

There it is. The cat’s out of the bag. Truth is back in style. We can now expect a drastic change of policy. The prime minister understands the nature of the conflict and, following things to their logical conclusion, will put a stop to a policy that assumes the Arab-Israel conflict is a territorial dispute.

Not so fast. Yossi Klein Halevi, in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, reaches a different conclusion. He sees Netanyahu’s speech as ending “the ideological debate within mainstream Israeli politics over the so-called two-state solution.” In other words, Mr. Halevi sees this as a rousing finale to a process that began with Mr. Netanyahu’s 2009 Bar-Illan University speech wherein the prime minister accepted the principle of a two-state solution. Mr. Halevi writes, “There is no longer any major Israeli party that rejects a West Bank withdrawal on ideological grounds. Instead, the debate is now focused on where most Israelis want it to be: on how to ensure that a Palestinian state won’t pose an existential threat to their country.”

Mr. Halevi, a frequent guest contributor to the Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages (who possesses a unique gift of making sense throughout the first two-thirds of his op-eds only to draw the exactly wrong conclusion at the end of them), is probably right when it comes to Netanyahu’s message.

In his speech, much like Halevi does in his op-eds, Mr. Netanyahu didn’t conclude from what he had just said – “It is not a conflict over 1967, but over 1948, over the very existence of the State of Israel” – that there is no point in continuing policies based on the lunatic notion of Land for peace. Instead, he simply reiterated his negotiating points: “[T]he Palestinians recognize the State of Israel as the national homeland of the Jewish people … the problem of the Palestinian refugees will be resolved outside of Israel and not within its borders … Jerusalem remain the united and sovereign capital of the State of Israel”. Yada, yada, yada.

We may indeed be entering a new era in the Arab-Israel conflict, one in which Israel’s leaders tell the unvarnished truth, only to dismiss it a moment later.