There’s
been a strange phenomenon building in the last few weeks that's been
puzzling me. But I’ve just figured it out. Various people—there are
many examples so you can insert your own--have been writing that Israel
is making some big mistake. It is losing support, especially liberal and
American Jewish support, they explain, because of the way it’s been
behaving.
What’s
puzzling about this is that nothing has actually happened to imply that
any great opportunity is being missed that might justify this attitude.
There has been no recent turn toward peace by the Palestinian
Authority; no great new idea promising a breakthrough; no change in
personalities that offers some shocking new opportunity. The regional
picture has been getting worse for reasons having nothing to do with
Israel; Hamas stronger; and the Palestinian Authority equally
intransigent.
Equally,
Israel hasn’t done anything new or startling. The most important thing
that can be said about Jewish settlements is that Israel hasn’t
created any new ones in almost 20 years. True, there has been
construction on existing settlements but that’s been going on since 1993
on a fairly regular basis. If anything, I think it has declined in pace
and mostly in Jerusalem rather than farther out in the West Bank. And,
of course, all the settlements in the Gaza Strip have been dismantled.
One factor that might be mentioned is that the critics are far out of date. They describe the situation as it existed, say, in the 1980s when many Israelis believed that a negotiated deal with the PLO was possible and claimed that rightists were blocking this great opportunity because they were so suspicious of the Palestinians and so fond of settlements. Since then, that proposition was tested and found wanting in the 1993-2000 peace process era. Yet many American Jews and others simply haven't noticed that things didn't turn out the way the doves had hoped. To their credit, many of them (and I might as well say "us" rethought our assumptions).
Yet that was a dozen years ago. The behavior of the Palestinian Authority since then and the rise of revolutionary Islamism, among other factors, have underlined the skepticism engendered by the terrible peace process experience. If you claim the right to determine Israel's fate and put its people's lives at risks you might be expected to go to the trouble of doing a little research and serious thought on these matters.
One factor that might be mentioned is that the critics are far out of date. They describe the situation as it existed, say, in the 1980s when many Israelis believed that a negotiated deal with the PLO was possible and claimed that rightists were blocking this great opportunity because they were so suspicious of the Palestinians and so fond of settlements. Since then, that proposition was tested and found wanting in the 1993-2000 peace process era. Yet many American Jews and others simply haven't noticed that things didn't turn out the way the doves had hoped. To their credit, many of them (and I might as well say "us" rethought our assumptions).
Yet that was a dozen years ago. The behavior of the Palestinian Authority since then and the rise of revolutionary Islamism, among other factors, have underlined the skepticism engendered by the terrible peace process experience. If you claim the right to determine Israel's fate and put its people's lives at risks you might be expected to go to the trouble of doing a little research and serious thought on these matters.
--------------------
So
what is the great urgency here, the dramatic change, the
Palestinian moderation that offers a real chance for peace, or the
Israeli misbehavior that throws away a great opportunity to achieve it?
Other than pure perversity, ideological nastiness, or a panic derived
from mass media antagonism toward Israel or due to the sharp Obama era
turn to the left, the claim that Israel was doing something reckless
which was antagonizing would-be supporters doesn’t make sense.
And then it hit me.
There
has just been still another in a long series of polls about what
Americans think of Israel and the Palestinians. These polls have been
broadly consistent. In 2012, about 71 percent of Americans say they side
with Israel, as high as that number has ever been in all of history!
And that's compared to only twenty percent who say they side with the
Palestinians, a figure that has been stable now for three years. Here are the numbers from Gallup.
But
here’s the point: apparently, Democratic and liberal support for Israel
has gone down. The idea of supporting Israel's control over Jerusalem
was at first left out of the Democratic platform, then booed and opposed
by a majority of the delegates voting (though undemocratically added
anyway by the leadership). Of course, they did the same to mentioning
God so Israel is, as so often historically, in good company.
The
point, however, is that this isn't really about Israel itself;
it's about the liberal Democratic intellectual (or pseudo-intellectual)
upper middle class milieu of people claiming that Israel is wantonly
throwing away support by acting irrationally. After all,
these people have a choice in how to respond to the situation:
Option
1: Israel is at fault for losing the Obama cult crowd and a small but
vocal increasingly left-wing sector of Americans (many of whom aren’t
that thrilled with the United States either) because of something that
it has done. If only Israel would show itself ready to take risks for
peace, elect a prime minister who was ready to recognize a Palestinian
state and give up almost all of the territory captured in 1967, show the
Palestinians that Israelis aren't horrible monsters, let Palestinians
rule the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, help them get billions of dollars
in aid, and let them create the own armed force to stop the real
extremists then peace is possible!
Oh,
wait a minute, that already happened. And there were three such prime
ministers: Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, and Ehud Barak.
Option
2: Given an increasingly left-wing ideology that’s based on faulty
assumptions and neglects the dangerous radicalism
of Islamist forces and other enemies of America, it is the dominant
worldview in the mass media, academia, and ruling circles in America
that is to blame for turning away from Israel.
Understand
this well: Option 1 requires Israel to change; Option 2 requires the
people voicing such complaints about Israel to change.
Well,
these people don’t want to examine their assumptions and change their
views. They’d end up suffering for their support of Israel, they’d be
out of step with the mob; they might have to—shudder!—step away from
what’s popular and “in.” My goodness,
they might even have to question Obama’s brilliance and policies!
No contest.
So
it’s not surprising that Option 1 wins out. And the exact same point
would apply if you substitute the word America for Israel and revised as
required the details.
Hey, do what you have to do to avoid admitting you're wrong and paying some price for telling the truth. But don’t blame us.
Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest book, Israel: An Introduction, has just been published by Yale University Press. Other recent books include The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). The website of the GLORIA Center and of his blog, Rubin Reports. His original articles are published at PJMedia.
Hey, do what you have to do to avoid admitting you're wrong and paying some price for telling the truth. But don’t blame us.
Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest book, Israel: An Introduction, has just been published by Yale University Press. Other recent books include The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). The website of the GLORIA Center and of his blog, Rubin Reports. His original articles are published at PJMedia.
Professor Barry Rubin, Director, Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center http://www.gloria-center.org
The Rubin Report blog http://rubinreports.blogspot.com/
He is a featured columnist at PJM http://pajamasmedia.com/barryrubin/.
Editor, Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal http://www.gloria-center.org
Editor Turkish Studies,http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~db=all~content=t713636933%22
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