The Boston Globe
"WHAT
HAPPENED," asks Michael Oren, "to Israel's reputation?"
The Israeli
ambassador to the United States, a noted historian, combat veteran, and
bestselling author, raised that question in a Wall
Street Journal essay last
week. Writing on the 64th anniversary
of Israeli independence, Oren began by quoting from Life magazine's salute to
the Jewish state on its 25th birthday
in 1973-- a 92-page special issue that honored the "astonishing
achievement" of modern Israel, an island of enlightened democratic courage
flourishing against all odds amid a sea of Arab hostility and violence. From
"a tiny, parched, scarcely defensible toe-hold," Life declared, the
people of Israel had forged "a new society … in which pride and confidence
have replaced the despair engendered by age-long suffering and
persecution."
Needless to
say, media descriptions of Israel today are rarely so admiring. When the
spotlight turns to Israel now, it is typically harsh and unflattering. Though
Israeli society remains robustly democratic and free, though its dictatorial
and jihadist enemies still yearn to see it
wiped out, international opinion treats the Jewish state as a pariah.
Israel is accused of lurid war crimes and smeared as an "apartheid"
regime; it is routinely portrayed by UN panels and campus activists as an
occupying Goliath brutally oppressing a Palestinian David.
"Why has
Israel's image deteriorated?" Oren asks. "Why have anti-Israel libels
once consigned to hate groups become media mainstays?" Especially now,
after nearly two decades in which Israel has gone to such extraordinary lengths
to end its conflict with the Palestinians.
The concessions
Israel has made in pursuit of peace are unprecedented in diplomatic history.
Oren mentions some of them: Recognizing the PLO as a diplomatic partner,
creating an armed Palestinian Authority, twice offering the Palestinians a
sovereign state, agreeing to share control of Jerusalem,removing
every Jewish community in Gaza, and repeatedly inviting Palestinian leaders
to negotiate
without preconditions.
Given all this,
Israel's ambassador wonders, why is Israel so bitterly demonized? His answer --
that Israel's enemies have undertaken a "systematic delegitimization of
the Jewish state" -- merely begs the question. With everything Israel has done to
prove its goodwill, with the deep sacrifices it has offered in its quest for
peace, why should a campaign to blacken Israel's image be achieving such
success? Why is Israel's reputation so much worse today than it was before
Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat shook
hands on the White House lawn 19
years ago?
The real answer
is that Israel's global standing has been debased not despite the "peace
process," but because of it.
For 19 years
Israel has clung to a policy of appeasement that has made it seem weak and irresolute
-- a policy that successive Israeli governments have justified by denigrating
Jewish rights to the land, while playing up the Palestinian narrative. Ehud
Barak infamously said in 1998 that if he had been a Palestinian, he might have
joined a terrorist group, and that "there is legitimacy for a
Palestinian to fight." Were an American presidential hopeful to suggest
that under other circumstances he could see himself becoming an al-Qaeda
terrorist, his White House ambitions would instantly implode. But Barak's
remarks didn't prevent him from becoming prime minister.
With
its embrace of the peace process, "Israel stopped defending its own claim
to the West Bank and Gaza and instead increasingly endorsed the Palestinian
claim," Israeli
journalist Evelyn Gordon has written. "And with no competing narrative
to challenge it any longer, the view of Israel as a thief, with all its
attendant consequences, has gained unprecedented traction."
Britain's
Neville Chamberlain abandoned his appeasement
strategy once it became clear
that Adolf Hitler had no intention of making peace. But Israel has gone on
making concession after concession to those who seek its destruction,
clinging against all logic to the fantasy of a "two-state solution."
Once, it was agreed by Israeli governments left and right that a Palestinian
state would be intolerable; that there could be no negotiating with the PLO;
that diluting Jewish sovereignty over Jerusalem would be unthinkable.
Yet in its
desperate quest for peace, Israel backed away from each of those red lines.
With each retreat, it lost respect. And all the while it reinforced a false and
terrible message: Peace would be possible if only Israel were willing to give
up more. The absence of peace, therefore, must be Israel's fault.
The 19-year
disaster of the peace process -- that is what happened to Israel's
reputation. How can the Jewish state get its good name back? Step 1 is to jettison
the policy that has caused it such harm.
(Jeff Jacoby
is a columnist for The Boston Globe. His website is www.JeffJacoby.com).
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