Lorne Gunter: The Jewish state is not the problem – the Palestinians are

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Israeli women stroll along the beach in Tel Aviv.

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In his new book on Israel’s prospects for survival five, 10 or even 20 years out, Hirsh Goodman of Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies writes that the Jewish state’s best chances for longevity and prosperity lie in making peace with the Palestinians.

In The Anatomy of Israel’s Survival, Goodman argues that “with Israel and the Palestinians at peace, no Arab country will have moral justification for going to war with Israel in the future. Instead of isolation, Israel will enjoy the support of the rational world. With the Israel-Palestinian question out of the way, the Middle East could focus its wealth and energy on development.”

But that was as true 20 years ago — or even 40 — as it is now. It’s an egg-shell thin pillar of truth.

The problem has never been Israel’s willingness to make peace with the Palestinians. What were Oslo (1993) and Camp David (2000) and a dozen other accords, frameworks and side deals if not incontrovertible proof of Israel’s willingness to give up land and whatever else it takes to make peace? The problem is, as it always had been, Palestinians’ willingness to make peace with Israel.

Unless the Palestinians are prepared to renounce their goal of driving the Israelis into the sea, and until they are prepared to honour the peace treaties they sign from time to time, Israel’s best hope of survival for another decade or two is the same vigorous defence of its borders that has brought it through the last six decades. All else is just wishful thinking. In places, Goodman seems to stare back through the telescope from the big end. For instance, he charges Golda Meir’s government with having “all the arrogance of the old colonists” when, after the Six-Day War, it chose to pacify the Palestinians by surrounding them with Israeli settlers on the West Bank and Gaza.

But that probably looked enlightened at the time. Rather than stripping Palestinians of their culture and religion and attempting to assimilate them into the Jewish faith and culture, the Meir government (and many subsequent Israeli administrations) sought to subsume them into the larger, multicultural Israeli society by surrounding them.

Instead of being colonial, this seems like an especially Israeli compromise. It recognizes that national security is the number-one priority of any Israeli cabinet, but seeks to achieve that goal with the least force possible. Israel could have forced the Palestinians off their lands and into refugee camps, as Egypt and Jordan did when they governed Gaza and the West Bank for two decades after Israeli independence. Instead, it tried to quell the residents of the occupied territories with kibbutzim, water wells and orchards. This was politically correct before the term even existed.

In another new book on Israel’s future, The Moral Lives of Israelis: Reinventing the Dream State, Israeli-Canadian David Berlin suggests that Israel must become a secular state if it is to be at long-term peace with its neighbours. It must cease to be “a Jewish state” and instead become a state “in which many Jews live,” a sort of New York at the eastern end of the Mediterranean.

But like Goodman’s Anatomy, this presupposes that what is standing in the way of Middle East peace is Israel’s intransigence, when, of course, the biggest source of danger is the unwillingness of Israel’s neighbours to accept its existence and cease violent efforts to wipe it off the map.

When testing the validity of any Arab-Israel peace proposal, play this simple game: Imagine what would happen if Israel unilaterally ceased its aggression. Now imagine if it were the Palestinians and Israel’s neighbours who beat their swords into ploughshares. In the first case — Israel’s willing submission — the hostilities would continue until Israel was eventually overrun. Under the latter scenario — the cessation of Palestinian and Arab attacks — peace could break out tomorrow.

Israel is not the problem. Palestinian and Arab unwillingness to accept Israel’s existence is. So while Israel should probably sign another peace deal with the Palestinians, and should do something about most West Bank settlements (especially the remote ones), and should cease to be an officially Jewish state, it could do all those things and more and still not find the peace it seeks.

For Israel to survive another two decades or more, either its enemies must change their attitudes or Israel must continue its policy of meeting force with force.