Roger Cohen, toward the end of this outstanding op-ed, tries to find some solace if Netanyahu falls from power over corruption charges, but he is fairly clear that Mohammad Abbas has become a "kapo" to the Israeli government occupation and eventual annexation of the West Bank.
Some kind hearted souls may ask themselves, Why allow the computer specialist and apparently nice guy to leave the West Bank? Don't the Israelis want people like that to talk with?
Um, no. Most Jews in the U.S., nay, most Americans of any religious philosophy or none at all--and I am talking to you, Bill Maher--do not know the following:
In the fall of 1967, Moshe Dayan, reacting perhaps to the Khartoum pronouncement from Arab leaders--the infamous "NO" to negotiations, to recognizing Israel's existence, and no peace with Israel--stated during a meeting of other leaders in his political party:
We don't have a solution, and you will continue living like dogs, and whoever wants will go, and will see how this procedure will work out. For now, it works out. Let's say the truth. We want peace. If there is no peace, we will maintain military rule and we will have four to five military compounds on the mountains, and they will sit ten years under the Israeli military regime.
This quote is from a Hebrew-only book, Mehiro shel Ihud (Revivim, 1985), by former Labor Party official, Yossi Beilin, p. 42, but the quote was based upon transcripts that are available to scholars and those who can translate or read Hebrew. The quote is stated at the Wikiquotes entry for Moshe Dayan, here.
It is important to remember that Dayan was, in internal Israeli circles, a relative dove, though he continued to show public hawkish tendencies in the period up through the early 1970s before he lost most of his power, as a player, in the wake of the October 1973 War, sometimes called the "Yom Kippur War."* It is also important to remember that, generally, when Israeli leaders became doves, they lost or were losing the power they had, or, when uttering public statements supporting specific peace proposals, had already lost power. This was true for David Ben-Gurion, Abba Eban, Nahum Goldmann, Ezer Weizman, Yehosaphat Harkabi, Ehud Ohlmert, Tzipi Livni, and a host of others. Worse, when people like Shimon Peres, who was largely a dove, had power, they tended to exercise it in a hawkish manner, even when it was obviously counterproductive. Worst, Yitzhak Rabin, who presided over the policy of breaking Palestinians' arms and legs during the first Intifada in 1987, did try to reach peace and move toward a two-state solution in 1993, and ended up the victim of a far-right rabbinic student assassin's bullets two years later.
The Allon plan regarding settlements was formulated in the late fall of 1967, and it is the plan that has largely been followed in terms of building settlements as "facts on the ground." The plan was largely formulated by a relative Israeli leader dove, Yigal Allon, but the plan outlasted Allon and became part of a consistent hardening policy toward Palestinians. It is an error for Americans to look for differences in policies from Labor to Likud and back again when it comes to this issue of the Palestinians and settlement building, as the policies are consistent and harden over each succeeding decade. We know, too, that the number of settlers in the West Bank increased by over fifty percent and the Israeli government strategically built roads and took over water sources (see this portion of a book by Mark Levine on the subject), which is part of why Arafat did not accept the last ditch "offer" from two lame duck leaders, Bill Clinton and Ehud Barak, in January 2001.** Then, of course, there were the walls, and the further acceleration of settlement building in this still new century. And now there is this pronouncement from the Netanyahu government's own attorney general about seizing Palestinian lands in the West Bank.
This is why I continue to compare what the Israelis are doing to "Manifest Destiny" in U.S. history. It does not matter how John Quincy Adams wrestled with his conscience during his ill-fated presidency, and in Congress, on issues concerning Native Americans. He was, in that sense, like, for example, Abba Eban, who, when he became a confirmed dove, became a disdained figure in a majority of Israeli Jewish households right up until Eban's death. Most historians of 19th Century American policy toward Native Americans recognize that President James Polk was not an aberration in the decades and maybe century long policy of taking land from Native Americans, and either moving Native Americans, pushing Native Americans, or killing Native Americans along the way. That systemic policy speaks analogously to the policies successive Israeli government continue to pursue in the West Bank.
I know, I know. Had the power relations favored the Palestinian leaders, they would have simply ordered all the Jews to be killed, and many of the "peaceful" Palestinians would have gleefully joined in. For as we know in Europe in the Second World War, there were plenty of Poles, Latvians, Lithuanians, etc. who gleefully killed Jews to a point where at least one German S.S. diarist found it chilling. Ben Hecht's great book, A Guide for the Bedeviled, speaks wonderfully and ironically about the joys some people have over the millennia for Jew-killing. But, let's not lose ourselves: What has happened over the past fifty years in Israel and the occupied territories is what is happening in our timeline, and, in our timeline, we can see there have been plenty of instances when peace talks could have been started--not, for example, in 2008, when Ehud Ohlmert was on the way out the door from scandal, and he tried to jump start negotiations with offers that the Knesset would never have accepted--and yet, nothing but building more and more settlements. Abba Eban's famous quip that "Palestinians" never failed to miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity applies at least, if not more, to "Israelis."
As I have said on FB, I am not ready to join the Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). I am, however, saying I am ready to say, as an American, I now have no more interest in supporting U.S. government aid to Israel (which is mostly transfers from one side of the U.S. Defense (War) Department to the other), and Israel does not need any economic aid from the U.S. at this point in its own history. I am disengaging from Israel as the majority of its nominally Jewish citizens do not speak for me, do not speak to my personal values, and are simply people living in a foreign country. If people were to ask me what the solution there is, I still say it is a two state solution. But it is clear that the majority of Israeli Jews do not agree with me, and I have deep sadness for Amos Oz, David Grossman, A.B. Yehoshua, Bradley Burston, Gideon Levy, Uri Avnery, Avi Shavit, and the various Jewish activists and lawyers who fight for fair treatment of Palestinians, among others.
*Dayan, for example, had tried, unsuccessfully, to push Golda Meir to accept the U.N. peace proposal from U.N. (Swedish) diplomat Gunnar Jarring in 1971, after Egyptian President (after Nasser) Anwar Sadat accepted it. The Jarring proposal was actually more favorable to Israel than the peace agreement which Jimmy Carter brokered in 1978 at Camp David (the so-called "Camp David Accords") with Sadat and Israel's then new prime minister, Menachem Begin.
** See Robert Malley's perceptive insider's discussion of those failed negotiations from April 2001 in the New York Review of Books. Arafat, the target of many Israeli assassination attempts, also likely had the fear that he would be murdered by "one of his own," as was Rabin. I find it frustrating how American Zionists, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, use the failed January 2001 peace talks as if that was the only possible way out, and then use that to avoid pushing Israel to the bargaining table at most points thereafter.
