Good summary from Parapundit blog.
Jeffrey Goldberg on the Palestinians And Israeli Settlers
Laura Rozen rightly calls Jeffrey Goldberg's New Yorker piece on Israel "one of the richest and bleakest pieces from Israel I've seen". In a long multi-part set of articles which I encourage you all to read in full Goldberg exposes the depths of the conflict between the Palestinians and Israeli Jews and also the deepening divisions among Jews.
Sharon seems to have recognized—belatedly—Israel’s stark demographic future: the number of Jews and Arabs between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea will be roughly equal by the end of the decade. By 2020, the Israeli demographer Sergio Della Pergola has predicted, Jews will make up less than forty-seven per cent of the population. If a self-sustaining Palestinian state—one that is territorially contiguous within the West Bank—does not emerge, the Jews of Israel will be faced with two choices: a binational state with an Arab majority, which would be the end of the idea of Zionism, or an apartheid state, in which the Arab majority would be ruled by a Jewish minority.
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Sharon is considered to be one of the most effective fighters in Israel’s history (he is certainly thought to be one of the most brutal). He came to power promising to use force in order to end Palestinian violence. But he has not succeeded. What he is proposing now is a two-pronged survival strategy: the building of a security fence separating the Arabs of the West Bank from Israel; and a unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, which will remove more than a million Palestinians from Israel’s direct control.
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Modest though these measures seem to many Israelis (they are seen as comically parsimonious by most Palestinians), to the settlement movement they are a betrayal. The borders of Israel, in the view of Jewish religious nationalists, are drawn by God, and one does not negotiate with God. So the settlers have, golem-like, risen against one of their creators, and pledged to stop any attempt—including Sharon’s provisional attempt—to disentangle Jews and Arabs. The settlers reject the idea of a demographic crisis. They still see themselves as Sharon once saw them—as the avant-garde of Zionism, heirs to the pioneers of the early twentieth century who restored the Jews to Palestine. But, should they somehow prevent the emergence of a viable Palestinian state, they may well be the vanguard of Israel’s demise as a Jewish democracy.
Keep in mind that this is all playing out against the backdrop of heightened anger on the part of Muslims the world over toward the United States and the West as a whole. Al Qaeda operatives are trying to kill large numbers of people in the United States and in European countries or anywhere else they can target their enemies. The Iraq occupation is not going swimmingly. There are Al Qaeda operatives launching attacks on non-Muslim oil workers in Saudi Arabia and the terrorists might start blowing up actual oil pumping facilities there. We live in pretty interesting times that look set to get even more interesting.
Palestinians are cast in the minds of some settlers as descendants of the ancient Amalekite tribe.
Some settler leaders see in the Palestinians the modern-day incarnation of the Amalekites, a mysterious Canaanite tribe that the Bible calls Israel’s eternal enemy. In the Book of Exodus, the Amalekites attacked the Children of Israel on their journey to the land of Israel. For this sin, God damned the Amalekites, commanding the Jews to wage a holy war to exterminate them. This is perhaps the most widely ignored command in the Bible. The rabbis who shaped Judaism could barely bring themselves to endorse the death penalty for murder, much less endorse genocide, and they ruled that the Amalekites no longer existed. But Moshe Feiglin, the Likud activist, told me, “The Arabs engage in typical Amalek behavior. I can’t prove this genetically, but this is the behavior of Amalek.” When I asked Benzi Lieberman, the chairman of the council of settlements—the umbrella group of all settlements in the West Bank and Gaza—if he thought the Amalekites existed today, he said, “The Palestinians are Amalek!” Lieberman went on, “We will destroy them. We won’t kill them all. But we will destroy their ability to think as a nation. We will destroy Palestinian nationalism.”
Hint to Lieberman: The Palestinians are Muslim Arabs. Understand what they are today using all of the literature and social science research at your disposal. It is a lot harder to do that than it is to read some ancient text verses. But it will provide much more useful insight.
The more extremist factions of Jews may respond to forced abandonment of remote settlements by blowing up the Dome of the Rock.
In a speech delivered last December, Avi Dichter, the chief of the Shabak, warned that an Israeli withdrawal from Biblically important lands could heighten the desire of some Jewish extremists to destroy the Dome of the Rock. (The Muslim mosque and shrine that cover the site now are in the way of the imagined Third Temple.) “Jewish terrorism is liable to create a substantial threat, and to turn the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians into a confrontation between thirteen million Jews and one billion Muslims across the world,” Dichter said.
If we live to see the destruction of the Dome of the Rock we will live in extremely interesting times. I personally am not that interested in being able to live through the sort of interesting and ccomplex and deadly conflict that would likely follow. But we may well get the opportunity to see some epic history as it unfolds just as our parents and grandparents did during the 1930s and 1940s.
Israeli soldiers can not enforce occupation rule without killing some children.
In Gaza three years ago, I witnessed Hamas gunmen firing at Israeli jeeps from behind a screen of children throwing rocks. The Israelis, faced with the choice of retreating or returning fire, returned fire. They hit at least two children with rubber-coated steel bullets, injuring them seriously. This shoot-out took place during school hours. Almost five hundred Palestinian children under the age of eighteen have been killed by Israelis since 2000. Not all of them were shot by soldiers who were under fire. Palestinian children, even those throwing stones, are not in themselves threats to armed soldiers in tanks, and many were simply bystanders.
If settlers didn't insist on living in Gaza the Israeli Army would not have to injure and kill Palestinian children as often as they now do. That'd be an improvement at least on that score.
Occupation rule in the face of an on-going insurgency results in dehumanization and moral corruption.
Critics accuse the Army of only sporadically prosecuting human-rights abusers. Dror Etkes, of Peace Now, sees a more intransigent problem. “This is not an issue of a few rotten apples,” he said. “It’s the crate itself that is rotten. The Army is operating deeply in the occupied territories because it has to defend the settlers. This part of the conflict is a war to defend the privileges of the settlers, and there is no way for the Army to do this elegantly. It’s like the French in Algeria. No one has ever succeeded in doing this without dehumanization.”
I think the IDF is being asked to do more than it is reasonable to expect any army to do well. They are supposed to protect themselves and settlers against killers and widespread hostility while also being fair to the occupied population. They are not all selfless geniuses with brilliant gifts at handling people. They are just average soldiers mostly in their late teens and twenties.
This is a religious conflict combined with conflict about competing claims on land.
There remains a moral gulf between the most zealous settlers and the most extreme of the Palestinian Islamists. Small cells of settlers have shown themselves to be capable of committing atrocious acts of violence, but the main institutions of the settlement movement have not endorsed the sort of violence against Arabs that members of many Palestinian factions commit against Jews.
Still, there are similarities. Like the theologians of Hamas, the ideologues of the settlement movement have stripped their religion of all love but self-love; they have placed themselves at the center of God’s drama on earth; and they interpret their holy scriptures to prove that their enemies are supernaturally evil and undeserving of even small mercies. And, like Hamas, which would build for the Palestinians a death-obsessed Islamic theocracy, the settlers, if they have their way, would build an apartheid state ruled by councils of revanchist rabbis.
What, religious people in the 21st century? Science hasn't wiped out all beliefs about the supernatural? Humans still enjoy feeling morally superior to their enemy? Human nature hasn't miraculously changed to eliminate deep-seated conflicts?
As Goldberg reports, settlement construction continues on the West Bank. Where the line should be drawn to separate the Palestinians and Israeli Jews can be debated. But the continued existence of two overlapping and deeply conflicting claims of sovereignty will only increase the bitterness and hatred on both sides. The Palestinians are not ready to accept the continued existence of Israel regardless of whether the remote settlements are abandoned. The vast bulk of setttlers and their supporters are unwilling to accept that non-Jews can have a state on lands which they see as given to Jews by God.
Will Sharon even manage to force the settlers out of Gaza? Will the wall separating the West Bank and Israel be completed? Will that wall take in so many settlements that it will seem like a land grab more than an act of self defense?
Israel's electoral process gives small religious parties an out-sized amount of influence on politics far in excess of the number of people who vote for those parties. Israel could position itself as more clearly the party engaged in self defense if only the majority of Israelis could get enough control of their own government to force an evacuation of the remote settlements along with a border wall path didn't extend too far into the West Bank.
The denial of demographic reality in Israel has parallels in both Western Europe and the United States where immigration and reproductive trends are causing large changes in ethnic make-ups of countries. California is projected by official state demographers to be 54% Hispanic by 2050 and looks set to become more Latin American with all the negative connotations that entails. Europe looks set to become more Islamic and less free. Therefore Israelis have no monopoly on denial of reality when it comes to demographics.
Jeffrey Goldberg consistently writes good stuff. See my previous posts Jeffrey Goldberg on Islamic contempt and anger, Jeffrey Goldberg on Hezbollah, and Jeffrey Goldberg On Terrorism and Intelligence Work
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