Here is an excellent opinion piece on Israel written by Sir Max Hastings, a prominent British journalist, and editor of, if memory serves me correctly, of the Telegraph. He is a Financial Times Contributing Editor.
Ed CorriganA storm of international criticism has this week fallen upon Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister. Yet, rather than expend ink on the moral shortcomings of Israeli expansionism on the West Bank, it seems more useful to address the only issue of interest to Mr Netanyahu’s constituency: can he get away with it?
Some Israeli nationalists note that history is replete with nations that have adjusted borders to their own advantage after winning wars. The Soviets did so on a grand scale in 1945, displacing millions of unwanted people from eastern Europe. Who today remembers that the Russian city of Kaliningrad was East Prussian Konigsberg? Who has any serious appetite for recovering the eastern lands Stalin took from the Poles?
Israel’s pre-1967 frontiers reflect only the 1948 ceasefire lines. Likud supporters say: since the Arab world refuses to recognise any legitimate existence whatever for Israel, where lies the advantage in restricting its overcrowded population within arbitrary old limits?
The phrase “Middle East peace process” is constantly misused. If such a thing existed before Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated, it has not done so since. Israel has pursued an uninterrupted programme of settlement expansion in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, where there are now 177,000 Jewish settlers.
The government labours tirelessly to create facts on the ground. The security wall dividing Israel from the Palestinians has curbed the terrorist threat. Mr Netanyahu – at heart what he has always been, a believer in a greater Israel embracing much of the West Bank – makes a cold calculation about US behaviour. He perceives President Barack Obama as an enemy, but judges that Congress and the American people want no breach.
The Palestinians, and indeed the Arabs at large, have few American friends outside the oil and arms businesses. The terrorist attacks of September 11 were a disaster for them. Most Americans are viscerally fearful of the Muslim world. They accept Israel, their enemy’s enemy, as their friend. It enjoys powerful, even fanatical, support from evangelical Christians.
In Israel, the popular mood is remarkably complacent. The economy, with a pre-2009 growth rate of about 5 per cent, has shrunk only slightly while those of most western nations languish. Real median income is about $37,000 (€27,800, £24,850), ahead of Singapore, Hong Kong and Ireland. Israelis even cherish hopes that their demographic problems are receding. The local Arab birthrate has fallen while that of Jews has marginally increased.
The Jerusalem Post carried a headline last year: “Let’s leverage the good demographic news”, editorialising below it: “The Jewish demographic tailwind behooves the new government to introduce a demographic road map, which would increase the Jewish majority, while respecting the rights of the Arab minority”. It urged Mr Netanyahu to prioritise further Jewish immigration. It is doubtful whether Mr Obama’s anger will change this mood, unless or until Washington imposes a tangible price.
It is left to Israeli intellectuals and strategists to voice fears for the future. The most obvious is that, if their governments persist with the policies of recent years, they condemn the country to permanent isolation, indeed war. It seems a dangerous gamble, to found a small nation’s polity exclusively upon faith in eternal military superiority. Whatever the demographic blips, a fundamental persists: Arabs in Palestine, denied rights taken for granted in every western democracy, are increasing in number faster than Jews. Israel’s notional population, including West Bank settlers and 26 per cent Israeli Arabs, is 7.5m. But many Jews who claim Israeli citizenship choose not to live in their professed country – the exact proportion is not revealed by Jerusalem, but US intelligence estimates 20 per cent.
Many thoughtful Jews, inside and outside Israel, debate philosophical issues about the entire basis on which the state, and especially such a government as that of Mr Netanyahu, conducts its policies. French historian Esther Benbassa has just published a notable book called Suffering As Identity. She argues that Jews must look to the future rather than the past and cease to define their world view in terms of the Holocaust, ruthlessly politicised since the 1950s.
“How can Israel base an entire national identity on the genocide,” she asks, “and bind its youth to this history of suffering, which turns peace with the country’s neighbours into an increasingly abstract notion?
“Do Israelis have the right to speak in the name of those who died in the genocide? Have [the dead] ever approved of the use that some make of their tragic destiny, bending it to the service of nationalist aspirations at the expense of the Palestinians, who are in no way responsible for the catastrophe that befell the European Jews?”
In the short-term it seems plausible, even likely, that Mr Netanyahu can defy Mr Obama. Israel’s tragedy is that it is an ever more inward-looking society: proud of its prosperity, deaf to foreign opinion, contemptuous of the Arabs. It wilfully ignores the prospect that its Palestinian neighbours can never forge a viable society capable of responsible behaviour on lands chequered with Israeli settlements and strategic roads.
Yet Israel’s claim upon East Jerusalem is rooted in a sense of moral entitlement, which the rest of the world increasingly rejects. Some day Americans will awaken to the heavy strategic price their own nation pays for indulging Israeli excesses. Israel may be successful in securing all of Jerusalem within its own borders. But it runs the historic risk of making itself, by a ghastly irony, a pariah state.
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