A Response to Bradley Burston's Critique

Bradley Burston is offended by my characterization of Israel's inability to let go of the occupied territories as a pathology, a characterization he says can only be made by someone who hates Israelis.

Perhaps to soften the blow, Burston also wrote (rather bizarrely, I thought) in his column of November 3, 2009 that "No one, not even the Palestinians, hates Israelis the way Israelis do." However, in the version of his article that appeared the following day, the sentence was omitted.

The pathology I described is invoked most frequently by Israelis themselves. The term for it in Israel is a "galut [diaspora] mentality," the tendency of diaspora Jewry to see itself as friendless, isolated, and always at the edge of a looming pogrom.

No one has described this pathology better than -- guess who? -- Bradley Burston, in an earlier column (October 20, 2009) in which he criticized an "Israeli approach which borrows from the very worst of our aging instincts. It says: We're moral, our enemies are out to exterminate us along with our state, that's all you need to know. No modifications necessary. Stay the course. Concede nothing. Ease no siege. Give no ground. Ever."

If that is not a perfect description of a pathological mindset, it will do until a better one comes along.

Yitzhak Rabin, whose assassination by a Jewish right-wing extremist is being remembered this week in Israel, did not take much of a different view of this mindset. On the occasion of his inauguration as prime minister in 1992, Rabin told Israelis in his Knesset inauguration address that Israelis are militarily powerful, and neither friendless nor at risk. He urged that they stop thinking and acting like victims.

In my op-ed, I compared Rabin's self-confident, proud and open-to- the- world attitude to that of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who hammers away at the message that the whole world is against Israel and that Israelis are at risk of another Holocaust -- a fear he invoked repeatedly during his address in September at the United Nations General Assembly in order to discredit Judge Richard Goldstone's Gaza fact-finding report.

Burston writes that I consider Israelis "venal, deceitful, the source of the conflict and the obstruction to its solution."

I challenge Burston to cite a single instance of my having touched on the subject of the "venality" of Israel's leaders (i.e. that they can be bought with money) in any of the hundreds of columns I have written over the past forty years, although it is a subject that Israeli columnists have had a field day with. I have avoided it entirely, because my concern has been the damage that Israel's occupation policies and its denial of the human rights and national rights of the Palestinian people are doing to Israel's ability to survive as a Jewish and democratic state.

It is not true, as Burston claims, that I said Israelis lie when they tell pollsters they favor peace. I said that when the peace they favor is for all practical purposes defined as requiring Palestinians to accept the status quo, that is not a choice of peace over territory.

Yes, I have repeatedly written about the deceitfulness of proclamations by Israeli governments about their commitment to a two-state solution. The relentless pursuit by these governments of the settlement enterprise can only be understood as a commitment to prevent such an outcome. For years, successive Israeli governments have solemnly promised, again and again, to remove all "illegal" outposts and settlements (which, even if they had done it, would hardly have made a dent in the settlement enterprise). They have staged the dismantlement of one or two outposts for show, and these were immediately reoccupied.

Prime Minister Ariel Sharon claimed that he removed the settlements in Gaza as a prelude to further withdrawals from the West Bank and a peace agreement with the Palestinians. But the man who negotiated the deal for President Bush's letter of April 2004 to Sharon on the subject of settlements, Dov Weisglass, told Ari Shavit of Haaretz that Sharon's real purpose was to "effectively remove this whole package that is called the Palestinian state from our agenda indefinitely."

To impress President Bush, Sharon made a big show of appointing Talia Sasson to investigate alleged rogue ministerial involvement in the financing and promotion of illegal settlements, knowing that this illegal activity was ordered and orchestrated by himself. As acknowledged publicly by various of his ministers, instructions for this illegal activity came directly from the Prime Minister's office.

And it was none other than Bradley Burston who courageously reported in one of his columns that Brigadier-General Shmuel Zakai, a former commander of the IDF's Gaza division, accused Israel's government of having failed "to take advantage of the calm [during a six-month truce agreed to by Hamas and Israel] to improve, rather than markedly worsen, the economic plight of the Palestinians of the Strip..." Zakai added, "When you create tahdiyeh and the economic pressure on the Strip continues, it is obvious that Hamas will try to reach an improved tahdiyeh, and that their way to achieve this is resumed Qassam fire . . . You cannot just land blows, leave the Palestinians in Gaza in the economic distress they're in, and expect that Hamas will just sit around and do nothing."

That is not quite the story told by Israel's government, or by Israel's media, of why the IDF had to scorch Gaza, is it?

I do not for a moment believe that Palestinians are faultless, and have repeatedly said so in my writings. But there is little that Palestinians could do - even if they were faultless - to compel overwhelmingly powerful and politically well-connected Israeli governments to accede to a viable and sovereign Palestinian state, as called for by the Road Map, with territorial changes made only by mutual consent. However, if Israeli policy had truly aimed at a two-state solution, it could and would have happened long ago. Nothing would have more encouraged Palestinian efforts to overcome their many shortcomings, or to oppose their rejectionist groups, than a credible Israeli commitment to such a state.

To blame Palestinians, rather than their occupiers, for their responsibility for remaining under a forty-year, oppressive military occupation when Netanyahu's government refuses to consider anything resembling a viable or sovereign Palestinian state, insists on retaining far more Palestinian land than was demanded by previous Israeli governments, rejects the idea of equal land exchanges, and has taken Jerusalem entirely off the table, is to add insult to injury.

If and when Palestinians achieve a state, which they deserve no less than do the Jewish people, it will be time enough to hold them accountable for their shortcomings. Until then, blaming Palestinians for their misery is nothing more than a pretext for the continuation of a colonialist enterprise that every other democracy in the world has relegated to a shameful past.

 

Comments

[Macready]

Great article . . thank you so very much for posting . . . israel loves to play the victime game . . I think they are addicted to it . . .unfortunately the US government buys it to its every lasting shame . . .

israel must be held accountable for its actions . . . and no amount of crying victim can change the facts on the ground or the findings of the Goldstone Report

[shotei]

Great debate, but I'm still with Burston.
To call the Israeli occupation colonial is to show the utmost ignorance about the complexities of the reality in the Middle East.

[max08]

The Israeli “occupation” is not only colonial, by its very definition, but apartheid.

[shotei]

Besides different roads, which stir from a strictly security concern, there is no segregation in Palestine. Palestinians control themselves, they run their cities and there is no "Arabs only" bathroom or any atrocity of the sort anywhere in Palestine.

[winningticket]

Good article. For anyone to blame Palestinians for their suffering is nothing short of bullying.

[chapluqa]

Thank you, thank you, thank you. This is exactly the conclusion I came to after living in Israel for 7 years (2001-2007) and seeing the so-called "peace process" go down in flames.... I wish I could send this article to my Israeli friends and family, but I think they would just accuse me of hating their country, and it's not even their fault, it's just that the victim mentality has penetrated so deeply that the cognitive dissonance when confronted with the truth is too much to bear and so the messenger gets punished..

[doughnut70]

I don't know where Yitzak Rabin saying that Israel was not at risk, but I do know that the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said that not only is Israel's survival in the future in question, but that they would be hard pressed to defeat a united Arab military opposition.

As for the sacrifices the israeli's have made for peace, it should be pointed out that the original Balfour declaration (which is the legal basis for the State of Israel) promised the Jewish State all of the land of Palestine which is about three times the territory they currently occupy. They gave up claims on most of that territory in return for promises of peace in 1948. Since that time they gave up land they occupied including the Suez Canal and the Sinai Desert again in the hopes of peace. So far, that effort hasn't been recirprocated by anyone on the other side.

Most of the Palestinians moved in after England promised a Jewish State and Jews from Europe with money started investing in the land that was promised to them and jobs were created and since hundreds of thousands of Jews had their land taken by Arab Governments, the logical first step for peace should be an Arab Country offering part of the land needed for a Palestinian homeland. If they are not willing to share the burden, why should the most vulnerable country in the region have to.

[S1m0n]

Israeli politicians might not be 'venal', but all five PMs since Shimon Peres have been either charged or seriously investigated for corruption.

[lbsaltzman]

A great post that I fully agree with. I have long felt that Israel plays the victim and has created a paranoid worldview that prevents them from grasping any chance they have ever had to live in peace with their neighbors.

[Fireslayer]

That should start a healthy debate. In other words, I loved the post.