1691. As US Media Awake to a ‘Nightmare’ Israel, NYT Brings Blumenthal in From the Cold

By Phillip Weiss, Mondoweiss, December 10, 2014

Fascist Lehava youth demonstrating in Israel

We’re in the midst of a sea change in the American mainstream’s treatment of the conflict. US media are beginning to reflect the awareness that the two-state solution is over and that violence around Jerusalem and the West Bank is caused by occupation and fostered by rightwing intolerance inside Israeli political culture– the “nightmare” of greater Israel. There are countless examples of the shift. Last night on MSNBC Richard Engel said many people are angry at the US because of torture and drones, but also “because of Israel/Palestine, and Gaza.”  When Israeli finance minister Naftali Bennett was confronted by Khaled Elgindy at the Brookings Institution last Saturday to explain why Palestinians are “the only group of humans in the world that do not have the right to self-determination,” the Beltway audience was evidently on Elgindy’s side. Leon (AIPAC) Wieseltier is gone from the New Republic. The New York Times is publishing Max Blumenthal. And the New Yorker‘s David Remnick is staying in East Jerusalem.

A roundup:

The New York Times published two anti-Zionists in a forum on the Israeli government’s turn to the right. After more than a year of ignoring his book about tyranny and intolerance in Israel, Goliath, The Times gave Max Blumenthal a platform to explain that Israel has always been rightwing.

Over 60 years before [anti-Arab group] Lehava’s segregationist crusades, there was the socialist Zionist “Conquest of Labor” that organized Jews-only work collectives and boycotted businesses that employed Palestinians. Before the settlements, there was the kibbutz movement whose admissions committees denied residency to anyone but Jews. Before the wave of vigilante “price tag” attacks on Palestinians, there was the Nakba that expelled some 750,000 Palestinians in order to establish Israel’s Jewish majority. And as Marzel mentioned, there is the Jewish National Fund, a para-governmental group founded by Theodore Herzl to provide land exclusively to Jews which recently oversaw a program that would have led to mass expulsion of Bedouin called the Prawer Plan.

If a shift is underway in Israeli politics, it is primarily tonal. Israel’s rightists intend to carry on the Zionist project as originally conceived, but without the pretense of democracy. In a way, their honesty is refreshing.

Blumenthal’s non-marginalization is a crushing blow to Zionists. Liel Leibovitz,who wrote a book saying we are the chosen people, labels Blumenthal an anti-Semite and says that the Times should apologize for the publication. Tablet is marginalizing itself with this kind of smear, as well as draining even more meaning from the term, anti-Semitism.

That Times forum also features Diana Buttu bringing news to Americans: Palestinians have always seen Zionism as a colonial movement that forces them off their land; the continuation of these policies will only produce violent reprisals; and the US is supporting Israel against its own interest.

Whoever wins these elections and whatever the composition of the next government, the same situation will prevail for Palestinians.We will continue to live under inequality or under foreign military rule in our homeland. Israel will continue to steal our land, demolish our homes, strip us of our rights and demand our loyalty and subservience to a system and society that seek to oust us.

Israel’s perpetual rightward shift reflects the hubris of America’s spoiled child. Every elected American official pampers and lavishes support for Israel, even as Israel’s actions defy U.S. interests and presidential statements. The world’s unwillingness to halt Israel’s illegal behavior, cements a mindset that illegality is permissible.

It is nonsensical that Palestinians, occupied and stateless, must negotiate their freedom with their occupier and oppressor. It is the role of the international community to make known that it will not tolerate colonialism in the 21st century.

As the New Republic fallout demonstrates, anti-Arab racism is at last becoming problematic in the U.S. mainstream. Six weeks ago the Times ran Rula Jebreal’s op-ed saying that Israel needs a civil rights movement to end a “pervasive institutionalized system of discrimination.” While Foreign Policy readers lately learned of Israel’s Jim Crow conditions from Sayed Kashua in “The Country That Never Wanted Me,” citing facts you used to only hear at Palestinian solidarity events:

 “[N]ot a single Arab town has been established since the State of Israel was founded — in contrast with some 700 Jewish settlements.”

New Yorker editor David Remnick shapes opinion among the elites, and maybe most important in this roundup was his piece last month reporting that Israeli claims to the West Bank have established a “one-state reality” and Israeli political culture is getting scarier by the minute. While few elements of that piece would surprise readers of this site (Naomi Klein talked about the one-state reality long ago), the mood was surprising: Remnick seems to want a trial separation from Zionism, noting pointedly that he was staying in the American Colony hotel in East Jerusalem. He quoted Meron Benvenisti explaining that 1967 was merely a continuation of 1948, and name-checked Ali Abunimah (without interviewing him).

Even better at conveying the “nightmare” was Henry Siegman at Huffpo, “Will Greater Israel Transform Into Greater Palestine?” filled with bleak realist pronouncements about Israel’s future. Israel is losing contact with world opinion and the enlightened are leaving the place (just watch Naftali Bennett’s manic performance at Brookings, dismissing “a little thing called the rest of the world”). Seigman sketches an Algeria-like scenario of decolonization in which political violence plays an important role. Just as political violence played a role in creating Israel.

If the slaughter in the Jerusalem synagogue will make the Palestinian dream of statehood an even more unreachable dream, it will also turn Israel’s illusion of the sustainability of the occupation into a nightmare. For the more hopeless the expectation of Palestinian moderates that non-violent means can bring about the promised and repeatedly denied two-state solution, the more Palestinians will believe that violence is the only way to change Israel’s cost-benefit calculations for its theft of Palestinian territory in the West Bank and in East Jerusalem.

Palestinian violence against non-combatants discredits the Palestinian national cause. But who is to say it may not work for the Palestinians as well as it worked for the Jews in their War of Independence, for it achieved Ben Gurion’s goal of triggering the flight of over 700,000 Palestinians. Palestinian violence may similarly serve to drive many of Israel’s most creative and productive elements to abandon the Jewish state and renew their lives in the Diaspora, a reaction that is already discernible.

Jay Michaelson at the Forward is also bleakly realistic. He confesses that Israeli racism and Sheldon Adelson’s political crudeness have caused him to become “binational-curious.”

Like everyone else in the peace camp, I am dejected by the current state of affairs and pessimistic about the future. I’m exhausted by Israel’s unethical behavior, by renewed (and condoned) Palestinian terrorism and by vulgar, bloviating billionaires dictating policy by checkbook. I am ready to stray from my two-state views, and I am open to all other realistic options.

Unfortunately, there aren’t any.

So Michaelson finds himself shifting. So does Princeton student Maya Wahrman, writing in Haaretz, “Despair is driving me towards BDS.” Wahrman has long condemned boycott of Israel, but if BDS can change Israel’s political climate, she must support BDS.

Some people fear BDS because they think it will be harmful to Israel. I answer that most of Israel’s current policies regarding Palestinians harm Israel because they harm humanity. If we fear anti-Semitism, let us be just, and our strong allies will support us. I suspect that others fear BDS because they are afraid it might actually work. Which makes it all the more promising….

[D]o not immediately disqualify [BDS] because it is harsh on Israel. Nor should you immediately support it without considering the wide-reaching and serious consequences.

I have by no means run the full gamut of important considerations. I do not know if BDS is the answer. But if commercial sanctions effectively pressure the Israeli government and show them that the injustice must end, potentially leading to commitment to a peaceful resolution, then who am I to stand in the way?

All this talk is getting some pushback. I mentioned Liel Leibovitz’s smear on Blumenthal. Even the Times ran Caroline Glick and Jonathan Schanzer in its forum with Blumenthal and Buttu. Even more regrettably, the Atlantic asked Matti Friedman to rehash/expand his argument in Tablet of last August that Israel is a “tiny village” situated on a volcano of Islamic hatred. Friedman says that foreign correspondents hanging out at the American Colony hotel have fashioned/imbibed “the ‘Israel story,’ which is a story of Jewish moral failure”–

Mingling occurs at places like the lovely Oriental courtyard of the American Colony hotel in East Jerusalem, or at parties held at the British Consulate’s rooftop pool. The dominant characteristic of nearly all of these people is their transience. They arrive from somewhere, spend a while living in a peculiar subculture of expatriates, and then move on.

Isn’t that orientalism? Remnick left it at: “a beautiful old hotel in East Jerusalem.”
Wahrman, Remnick, Michaelson, and Siegman all seem to fear the future, how far this could all go, and suggestions that Jews must decolonize. This is the biggest argument for BDS; it respects the human rights of everyone in the country; Those fears are also the greatest argument for democracy I can think of. How many liberal American Zionists would wash their hands of the ideology entirely if they could only be assured that there could be a nonviolent resolution of Israel’s predicament. A lot, I’m sure. (There is one way to marginalize rightwing racists; and that is to grant everyone who is governed by Israel the right to vote for the government of the land. The UK losing Scotland would have swung hard right. The Congress, if Jim Crow were in place, would be absent many progressive urban representatives. Advocates of the two state solution say that the great Palestinian middle and the great Israeli middle just want peace. Well, let them work together, in political combination. Right now Israeli national political candidates have to appeal to religious zealots. Imagine if they had to campaign to Palestinians.)

- See more at: http://mondoweiss.net/2014/12/nightmare-brings-blumenthal#sthash.vaGpJq1f.dpuf

1630. The Zionist Apartheid as a Process and Goal: Israel's Minister of Economy's View

By Naftali Bennet, The New York Times, November 5, 2014

JERUSALEM — Recent events in the Middle East are a reminder of how the old models of peace between Israel and the Palestinians are no longer relevant. The time has come to rethink the two-state solution.

This past summer, Hamas and its allies fired over 4,500 rockets and mortars at Israel, demonstrating once again what happens when we evacuate territory to the so-called 1967 lines and hand it over to our adversaries. Peace is not obtained. Rather, we are met by war and bloodshed.

The rise of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, and other extreme elements in Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, make the risks just as clear. Israel cannot afford to gamble with its security. There are no second chances in the volatile Middle East.

That is why, for its security, Israel cannot withdraw from more territory and cannot allow for the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank. If we were to pull out of the West Bank, the entire country would become a target for terrorists who would be able to set up rocket launchers adjacent to the Old City of Jerusalem and on the hills above the runways of Ben-Gurion International Airport and the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange.

Take the Jordan Valley. The Palestinians demand that Israel withdraw from this narrow piece of land, which borders Jordan. But if we do so in today’s climate, we potentially open the door for the Islamic State and other extremists to flood into the new Palestinian state. We cannot take that risk.

How do I know? Because it happened. Not once, not twice, but three times.

In the mid-1990s, we pulled out of Palestinian cities as part of the Oslo agreement. In 2000, the second intifada erupted and over 1,000 Israelis were killed in attacks carried out by terrorists, many of whom came from the very cities we had evacuated.

When we pulled out of Lebanon in 2000, we saw a significant strengthening of Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militia. During the second Lebanon war six years later, Hezbollah fired more than 4,300 rockets at our cities.

And in 2005, we withdrew from the Gaza Strip and handed it over to the Palestinian Authority. We were told that Gaza would turn into the Singapore of the Middle East and that peace would grow out of the greenhouses the Jewish residents had left behind.

Instead, those greenhouses were used to cover up terrorists’ tunnels dug across the border into Israeli towns and villages. Gaza quickly turned into a fortress of terror.

But this does not mean all hope is lost. There is still much we can do to improve ties with our Arab neighbors, to generate peace and to cultivate economic prosperity for all people who live in this land.

The secret is bottom-up peace. After more than two decades of working on a single solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — the establishment of a Palestinian state — it is time to realize that coexistence and peaceful relations will not be obtained through artificial processes imposed on us from above. Instead, I propose a four-step plan.

First, we would work to upgrade the Palestinian autonomy in the West Bank, in the areas largely under Palestinian control (known as Areas A and B, according to the Oslo Accords). Ideally, this will be done in coordination with the Palestinian Authority.

The Palestinians will have political independence, hold their own elections, select their own leadership, run their own schools, maintain their own social services and issue their own building permits. They should govern themselves and run their day-to-day lives. Israel should not interfere. Much of this already exists, but we can do better.

This Palestinian entity will be short of a state. It will not control its own borders and will not be allowed to have a military.

Gaza already functions like a state, but the Hamas government in control there is bent on Israel’s destruction. As long as Gaza remains on this path, it cannot be a party to any agreement.

The second step will see the massive upgrade of roads and infrastructure, as well as the removal of roadblocks and checkpoints throughout the West Bank. The objective will be to ensure freedom of movement for all residents — Palestinian and Israeli — and to improve their quality of life.

No peace, though, can last without economic viability. So the third step will be to build economic bridges of peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

In my former career as a high-tech entrepreneur, I saw how diverse people from different backgrounds could learn to work together in pursuit of economic prosperity. Already, there are 15 industrial zones in the West Bank where Israelis work alongside about 15,000 Palestinians. These zones pump about $300 million a year into the Palestinian economy. Imagine what another 15 industrial zones could do.

Lastly, I propose applying Israeli law in Area C, which is the part of the West Bank controlled by Israel under the Oslo agreement. The Palestinians who live there would be offered full Israeli citizenship. We can start with the known settlement blocs that everyone agrees will remain part of Israel even under a final status agreement. By applying Israeli law and asserting national sovereignty in those blocs, while upgrading Palestinian autonomy in Areas A and B, we will reduce the scope of territory in dispute, making it easier to reach a long-term agreement in the future.

I am aware that the world will not immediately accept this proposal. It seems to go against everything Israel, the Palestinians and the international community have worked toward over the last 20 years. But I will work to make this plan government policy because there is a new reality in the Middle East, which has brought an end to the viability of the Oslo peace process.

The regional upheaval and disintegration of nation states oblige us to act responsibly. We must work toward realistic goals that are capable of providing real security and economic prosperity.

Naftali Bennett is Israel’s minister of the economy and the leader of the Jewish Home Party.