The show goes on. As I write, a radio newscaster is repeating an item about the evacuation of an illegal settlement outpost in the West Bank: At Nahalat Yosef, near Nablus, the army demolished two makeshift mobile homes and removed a third, thereby erasing the outpost. Settler leaders promised to rebuild it. Judging from past experience, the promise will be kept.
The show started after Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington. Police razed several shacks comprising Maoz Esther, northeast of Ramallah. It was a grand demonstration that Netanyahu was acting against the 100-plus illegal outposts — small settlements established since the mid-1990s without government approval but with well-documented help from government agencies. Settlement activists immediately began rebuilding Maoz Esther. Like Nahalat Yosef and several other outposts removed with fanfare in recent days, Maoz Esther is among the least substantial of the outposts. Larger outposts haven’t been touched.
The outpost campaign is pure theater. The intended audience is Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and George Mitchell. President Obama has made it utterly clear that he expects Netanyahu to fulfill Israel’s obligations under the 2003 road map for peace and the 2001 Mitchell Report: Remove outposts, stop all construction in other settlements. Netanyahu would like to convince Obama that he’s making a good-faith effort to evacuate the outposts and that the president should therefore let him continue building new homes in other settlements. This kind of con might work on a legacy student with a C average named George. To Netanyahu’s dismay, Barack Obama isn’t George.
Let’s be clear: Obama is asking Netanyahu to do the right thing for Israel’s future. The aim of settlement is to entangle Israel in the West Bank. The argument against permanent Israeli rule of that territory was laid out by the most clear-sighted of Israeli officials by the summer of 1967, and has remained true ever since: Ruling the West Bank without granting the Palestinians citizenship is the antithesis of democracy. Keeping the West Bank and giving them citizenship means making Israel into a binational state. Every new home in Tekoa or Ariel makes withdrawal more difficult. By insisting on a settlement freeze, Obama is acting like a guy standing in the door of his apartment, telling his drunken roommate that he really, really shouldn’t drive. That is, he’s a good friend getting a response that alternates between belligerence and pleading.
Why won’t Netanyahu agree to a freeze? First, because he is an unreconstructed ideologue of the right. He regards the West Bank as Israel’s patrimony, and has never recognized that denying political rights to the Palestinian population undermines Israeli democracy. His proposals for the future are the discredited colonial ideas of the past: Palestinians will concede dreams of independence in return for marginal economic progress.
Besides that, settlers and their supporters fill key roles in government bureaucracies that deal with settlement. Ministries continue to plan and subsidize settlement. The Civil Administration in the West Bank ignores violations of planning law. To stop settlement activity means overcoming this bureaucratic momentum. Yitzhak Rabin did that when he imposed a freeze on settlement in parts of the West Bank. So far, Netanyahu hasn’t shown he has Rabin’s commanding presence.
Acceding to Obama would also provoke rebellion among Netanyahu’s right-wing coalition partners, and invite confrontation with the settlers themselves. This week, radical settler activists renewed their “price tag” strategy: In response to removal of outposts, they blocked a road in the Nablus area, threw stones at Palestinian cars and clashed with soldiers. The idea is to show the government that the price of restricting settlement is setting the West Bank aflame. Never mind the consequences for the army, Israel or the settlers themselves. Netanyahu hoped that removing minor outposts would be a price tag of a different sort — the small cost of assuaging Washington while continuing to build settlements.
Fortunately, Obama is standing firm. Netanyahu, after all, has other options. Ideological rigidity is a choice, not a law of nature. The prime minister could reexamine the real costs of the settlement enterprise to Israel’s democracy, its international standing and its prospects for peace. He could build an entirely different coalition, dumping the parties of the right and sharing power with Tzipi Livni’s centrist Kadima party. Let’s remember: Livni won more votes than Netanyahu in the last election. As Livni has made clear, the price for partnership is endorsing a two-state solution. If Netanyahu can’t stomach these choices, he’s likely to find evacuating even a few outposts will crack his coalition and force him to face the voters again.
Given that possibility, a critical element is missing from Obama’s diplomacy. He, too, has an audience that he needs to address: the Israeli public. By insisting on a settlement freeze, he should tell Israelis, America is showing its commitment to Israel. The president must not leave the Israeli public stage to Netanyahu’s outpost farce.
Gershom Gorenberg is the author of “The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977” (Times Books, 2006). He is a senior correspondent for The American Prospect and blogs at SouthJerusalem.com.
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You wrote: "Every new home in Tekoa or Ariel makes withdrawal more difficult." That's trivially true, but really, how great is the marginal increase in difficulty from adding a new home? The currently fashionable cliche is that we're approaching a point of no return - note that we're always "approaching" it, no one ever says we've passed it - beyond which it will be politically impossible to withdraw from the West Bank. Presumably it would be politically possible to evacuate 300,000 settlers but impossible to evacuate 350,000, or whatever the numbers are. Yes, Judea and Samaria have lots of settlers, many of whom are ideologically committed to staying there. But that was also the situation five years ago, ten years ago, fifteen years ago (at the start of Oslo) and before.
I'm not saying that evacuating the West Bank will be as easy as evacuating Gaza, but it won't be qualitatively more difficult either. There will be violent resistance (I guess at Tekoa) and a few settlers will probably be killed and we'll be subjected to banal and kitschy lamentations in the media, but public support for the forced evacuation will stay strong and there will be nothing even approaching civil war. This is all assuming, per impossibile, that the Palestinians agree to a true land-for-peace deal.
I guess I'm making the same point that David Frum made in his argument with you. People are easy to move, as long as the government has public support. I would add: even if some of them resist violently. I don't like the post-1967 settlement project any more than you do, and I wish it had never happened. I'd evacuate most of the settlements of Judea and Samaria unilaterally if it were up to me. But the settlements are not now an insurmountable obstacle to true peace and they won't be in the foreseeable future.
The "ARABS" are not militarily the same people as those defeated over 40 years ago in the Six Days War. 1973 was only a hint of things getting better militarily for them and 2006 was a clear warninig sign. In the meantime, the "Israeliness" of a very large chunk of Israel is rotting away as ideology, religion and symbols otherwise revered and sacred are expoited sacriligiously. A recent internal poll showed that 78% of settlers would gladly be bought out and 30% of Israelis said that if Iran gets a nuclear bomb they will leave Israel. Worst still, American patience with Israel is running out as goyim are being polarized by the thuggish Zionist propaganda in the US and abroad mixes with shmaltz. The tragedy is that a lot of educated superfluous people are unemployed and would do anything to make some money. That includes propaganda without any concern for how it polarizes people. Hidden in the minds of many, even in Sharon's mind (he admitted this privately), is the view that "civilized" Arabs would be negotiated with and land for peace will always be Israel's greatest bargaining chip, even if at the expense of "rabid" settlers.
In the meantime, historic events that are sacred to our society, in that they inhibit any tendency to slip back into hateful scapegoatng and racism, are being degrated by the Holocaust Industry, exploited for reasons other than true fear of evil. The sight of the horendous state of Nazism's Jewish victims in photographs is the last barrier, a wall that, we all hope, is too high for the promoters of hate to scail. But that insurmountable wall is shortened and crumbled by those who use it as an easy shock tool and a way of censoring the freedom of speech of others. Western society is going through very trying times, the victim of its own material greed. This is not the first time, and last time the West had proven far more inhumane than at any other in that it engaged in industrial extermination of people, both by the Nazis and the Soviets. I fear the clear visual horror in the record of history that is the Holocaust will be thrown out of focus as it is used to blind us to the massacre of Palestinians via high-tech weapons made in USA. Most Jews are Diaspora Jews and Israel is a fetus of a state living from an American $ placenta therefore holding no attraction to the mass majority-- a nice place to visit but not to live there. Therefore, anyone who would crimp the life-giving umbelical chord between the US and Israel is indeed evil; but far more evil is he who would fan the fires of anti-Semitism in order to force Diaspora Jews into fearful flight to Israel. Through its decades of existance (eg. Yallon Affair) Israel's secret services have engaged in acts that are outrageous in that they are truly anti-Semitic for the anti-Semitism they engender. It is therefore not possible to confidently put out of mind these services' acts to deliberately endanger, stampede and coral Diaspora Jews like cattle into "Greater Israel" so they can be drained of their hard earned assets. The only alternative is to hold for a) a two states solution, b) Israel's integration into the Mideast, c) full support of Israel in its doing what it does best: modernizing its Arab relatives so they no longer subsist on banana republic economies from only one crop, oil. Israel is a power because of its people, not because of its control of Diaspora Jews. These make for good Diaspora citizens of their nations of birth and their value to their homelands makes the case for the value of alliance with Israel. It is not for Israeli officials with both alterior motives and multiple passports (just in case) to put the Israeli sabras with no other homeland at risk for some illusory "Greater Biblical (sic) Israel." "Settlements" is a greed that has rendered Israel anemic in young people as its highly educated leave for good jobs in the West. The settlers are like a tear in the placenta-- reckless and criminal endangerment of the Israeli state and the state of assimilation of Diaspora Jews-- not to speak of the gangsterism and fraud by which the land is seized from Palestinians who otherwise would be quite collaborative with their Jewish cousins.
The only RACIST societies out there are the Arab Muslim ones.
If a Jew can't build a playground for his kids or an extension room for his family, then a Muslim in Israel - and that includes Judea-Samaria should be denied access to a Mosque. Let them go to Jordan or Syria to practice the religion of hate.
Turn-around is fair play, don't you think, Mr. Obama?
Finally This,
Any so-called Jew, JINO who stands with Obama on this one, and applauds his "standing firm" that Jews cannot live on their own land is as equally an anti-Semite as the worst kind of Jew-hater out there.
And funnily enough, the Democratic Party is full of them these days. From EVERYONE in the Obama administration, to the Abercrombies, Bairds, DeFazios, McCollums, McKinneys, Morans, Obeys in Congress,and following after them, like the animal keepers who pick up the elephant turds after a parade, are the Ackermans, Bermans, Nadlers, Waxmans, Wexlers, Schumers, Boxers and Feinstein.
I stand by my words. If you support someone who spews out "Neo-Con" (which as Mark Levin stated, is the Left Anti-Semites name for Jews), if you demand Jews in their homeland cannot build rooms or playgrounds; if you stay silent when Hamas kidnaps and rockets - this after territory was GIVEN BACK; and if you support a Little Child who couldn't even say "excuse me" but ACTUALLY APPLAUDED A Jeremiah Wright for 20 years, won't do a thing about North Korea, but boy, those childrens rooms are a threat to peace (even Ehud Barak, no Hawk, nor Settlement maven thinks he's nuts), then you are no better than the Teodorus, Wrights, and other Jew-haters of the world.
Israel must not abandon what God has given them, the Land of Israel. To give up any land is to start the process of demands for all the land, to include first half of Jerusalem and later all of Jerusalem.
Netanyahu has called upon Obama to dismantle the settlements of California, Arizona, and New Mexico.Until Obama takes this reasonable first step, Israel is obliged to do nothing. .
I hope it is true that Netanyahu is committed to build on our land and continue Jewish life in the heart of the Jewish homeland. I alos hope that Obam is a one term president. We have had enough of his lies and distortions of history; from his statement that there are 7 million muslims in the US, to his fabricated quote on Churchill and torture (that Churchill, the one who approved bombing Dresden) and his lies about Israel, which never agreed to the Road Map or a settlement freeze, except in Obama's distorted history.
I commend Mr. Gorenberg on an excellent, nuanced article. I wish I could say the same about the comments posted in this thread, as I have seen roughly equal amounts of idiocy posted from both the extreme right and extreme left alike. First of all, DE Teodoru, while he may have started his post off decent enough, then ruins his message by polluting it with such viciously loaded terminology as "thuggish Zionist propaganda," "Holocaust industry," and "massacre of Palestinians." This sort of talk sure doesn't do much to advance Palestinians' cause.
If DE Teodoru's nasty remarks were meant to bait some extreme rightists into making some equally idiotic statements of their own, he sadly succeeded. First, Alan's mean-spirited bandying about of the epithets "so-called Jew" and "JINO" carried the exact same foul stench I've smelled from white supremacists' labeling of Caucasian supporters of the civil rights movement as "race traitors" and "n*ggerlovers." Worse still is Seth Grossman's Limbaugh-esque wish for President Obama's failure. Honestly, Mr. Grossman, don't you think the reckless irresponsibility displayed by your beloved Republicans regarding the American economy, the collapse of our infrastructure, and the thoroughly unnecessary Iraq war which has wreaked massive damage to America's prestige and respect throughout the rest of the civilized world had anything at all to do with Obama's rise to power? "Obama's distorted history"? Please.
I should hope that the idiocy and vicious tit-for-tat rhetoric displayed by the likes of such ideologues as DE Teodoru, Alan, and Seth Grossman don't manage to drown out the much more reasonable and well-thought-out arguments put forth by people like Mr. Gorenberg. At times, I am tempted to paraphrase a line from an article I read in Rolling Stone magazine some time ago: Maybe the Middle East is like the sun; stare at it too long and you'll leave yourself permanently damaged.
An opinion worth reading: "Bogus 'Zionist' Israel-bashers"
http://israelinsider.ning.com/forum/topics/isi-leibler-bogus-zionist
My my, isn't it hilarious how after I expose radical, egomaniacal ideologues like Teodoru and Alan for the kind of people they really are, yet another one of these nutcases -- in this case the idiot named "Frank" -- pops up on this thread and proceeds to further prove my point.
how much oil,gas does israel have what maritime chokepoint does it control.answer none.the muslims are out breeding the jews time to cut our losses and end the aid.no point pouring good money down a hole.giving money to israel is like investing in confederate bonds.
Steven, I'm sure you know what I mean by "thuggish Zionist propaganda." But because it has Zionist in it, by your view, apparently it can't be properly declared as "thuggish." I urge you to research this issue for yourself and you will indeed recognize "thuggish" propaganda in this very thread, as distinct from, let us say, hasbara. As for "Holocaust Industry," I mean a very specific exploitative sacrilegious use and expropriation-- distinguisheable from the Holocaust-- of an historical catastrophe that belongs to all of us because it is, in my view, not unique, and represents the best example of how ANY SOCIETY AT ANY TIME can get carried away and-- not hatefully but matter-of-factly (that's what makes it so horrible)-- kill not only fellow humans but fellow countrymen. Most people shrugged their shoulders though knowing what lay ahead for the family of their doctor, teacher, lawyer or family aqauintance-- that's the ultimate horror and we saw it again in the Balkans as elsewhere. However when one said that THE CHRISTIANS made the Holocaust because they were jealous that the Jews are God's Chosen People-- as did Abe Foxman of ADL-- I recognize an industrial exploitation, industrially doing to a hallowed event something very different from the scholars trying to understand such willing human bestiality, instead not only money from fear and hate and vengence, but also from particularizing an event of genocide as unique. My family was victim of Stalin's class Holocaust and many of my Jewish mentors were victoms of a double Holocaust, Hitler's and Stalin's. To a man and woman they decried the Holocaust Industry as exploitation that obscure truth and invariably polutes certainty. I remind you that it came to be used as "ink" to justify Israeli actions, utterly unbecoming. THAT alone is outrageous, especially given how little the Zionists did to oppose the death of Jews in WW II. My main point is that I fear greatly that Diaspora Jews who are totally assimilated-- what Mr. Foxman claims he was "fighting" against-- think Israel a nice place to visit but wouldn't want to move there. And, furthermore, there is a reverse aliyah of Israelis who had enough of life there, not only because of Palestinans, so are moving to the West. With such a "DEMOGRAPHIC CRISIS" I fear some in the Zionist movement would willfully manufacture anti-Semitism to force Jews in fear to flee to Israel. As Sharon said in 2002, any Jew who does not move to Israel by 2020, "will lose his Jewish soul." So, these are not abstract issues. For to my mind, while I have more than proven my affection for Israel and all the Sabras I had come to know there, I do not think that such cynical manufacture of fear and crisis, no matter what the issue for Israel, is acceptable. It is not a small issue to me. Yet, I especially appreciate Netanyahu's economic first step and I am confident that so will most Palestinians if it is implimented. Afterall, misery is the main reason for the srife. I only hope that greedy self-interested people do not push Israel off a cliff. Remember that in recent polls MOST settlers are willing to be bought out and also that most settlements are empty. These are the real issues and to obfuscate them with displeasure of my LEGITIMATE (at least in terms of how I used them) use of certain terms does no one any benifit. This is, either way, a life and death issue for most of us, as I had a chance to experience on 9/11, but particularly for Jews in the Diaspora and Israel. Above all, Sabras are people with no other homeland and I would very much want them to have one that is peaceful, secure and well integrated in the region, even if it has to be only about 105% of what it was in 1966. Please, don't ink the issue with some sort of assumed right that words like Zionism and Holocaust can only be used in a way favorable or useful to Israel, especially when refering to the abuse of these concepts.
I don't get it. Arabs living in the State of Israel who again and again expressed nothing but contempt for the Jewish state - check their representatives in the Knesset speaches - would be defended by many of the writers in this thread, but Jews who believe that Judea (Judea, for God's sake!) is part of the Jewish homeland and are willing to face Arab violence are attacked by their Jewish bretherens in Ammerica as thugs! At a time when anti-Semitism is on the rise again, and even when these Jewish-Americans effetes are threatened right here in America by home-grown and imported Jew-haters, they still don't get it and are willing to do the work of latter-day Eichmanns. These who stand up against the new pioneers, the new defenders of the Jewish presence in their ancestral home are deracinated Jews whose Judaism has been replaced by Obamanism.
"Please, don't ink the issue with some sort of assumed right that words like Zionism and Holocaust can only be used in a way favorable or useful to Israel"
Look Teodoru, I'm afraid we're just going to have to agree to disagree on this. I mean, wouldn't you get pissed over someone saying such things at you as "thuggish Arabist propaganda" or "sand n*ggers" or "ragheads"? Loaded words can be just as deadly as loaded guns, and I feel that such terms as "thuggish Zionist propaganda" and "Holocaust industry" (along with the epithets I mentioned in my last sentence) are intentionally inflammatory phrases that serve little more use than spewing anger and gratuitously pissing people off while doing nothing whatsoever to advance the debate.
Forward's Editorial, "Unnatural Growth", is wrong in principle and in fact.
As usual, the Forward's Editorial, "Unnatural Growth", is an anti-Israel polemic attacking the "natural growth" of Jewish communities in the "West Bank". As far-leftists, the Forward takes Obama's side against Israel's.
Rather than citing the larger Jewish communities closer to Jerusalem in the "West Bank" which are extremely likely to end up part of Israel in any final status peace agreement - which are legally entitled and were long-ago approved to grow, the Forward picks on "Beit-El". (The Forward describes it as an hour's "bus ride" from Jerusalem, but it is actually 11 miles to its North.)
To make its argument against Israel, the Forward falsely claim that Beit-El, "surely would be part of an independent Palestinian state, if one were ever created." Well, as much as the Forward thought that it had found a "straw man" to attack, its claim is simply not true. Beit-El will not "surely" be a part of an arab palestinian state, and may well end up part of the Jewish State of Israel.
According to Avi Dichter, a Knesset member, and while a Minister in Olmert's Kadima government, the settlement blocs that Israel would retain include Ofra-Beit El.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1139395565931&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
Why does the Forward go out of its way to attack the Jewish State of Israel, instead of supporting it against the most anti-Israel American administration in history?
Note this rebuttal published (but buried away) in the Forward: http://www.forward.com/articles/107555/
Frank, I understand your view exactly. You know, it is not easy to cross Europe as a refugee child and see your country denegraded, too often unfairly-- especially in school in France as only the French can. But the issue here is not loaded words that I use to set your shorts on fire but rather HOT facts that will infame people whom you can't fight if they decide to go after you and against whom I can't protect you. Would you risk the current 10 minutes to an American Krystalnacht asured that you can always, in the last minute, run off to Israel. Israel would no more be a homeland for american Jews as "Jewish" Palestine was the for the unwelcomed "Yekes" among their brethren during the Holocaust. Israel is a MIdeast nation, Jewish, Arab or whatever. It is not the tip of America's spear in the Middle East, for Americans are chaffing at a cost of around $10 billions a year for a country of 5 million Jews. In fact, this is contagious to Diaspora Jews. SO rather than take my words as "Hot button," take them as possibly dramatic statements like those of a physicians warning a diabetic rather starly about the prospects of continued happy eating of sweets and fats. Typing to me is like a rectal exam; so I'm not struggling with this in a very Jewish paper just to trow stink bombs at you. Rather, I am submitting myself to pain in order to remind you how excruciating will be the pain when the 10 minutes to an american Krystalnacht clock hits Midnight. By then all that ALL OF US can do is acts of desperation that may make us "righteous gentiles" but would save anywhere as many very decent people-- the pilars of Western culture-- as would warinings before gangrene sets into the peripheral ends. You are dealing with a friend whose starkness is based on gravity not antagonism. Try to match me by dialogue on substance, please...