HOW WILL PEACE COME?

WEEKEND LONG(ISH) READ: Are overseas activists advancing peace and Palestinian self-determination? No. Our actions are having the opposite effect.

Hateful howling ins’t helping.

The Palestinian cause is ostensibly a movement for peace and Palestinian self-determination. If we consider ourselves a part of this movement, everything we do should be measured against this criteria: Are our actions advancing peace and Palestinian self-determination?

Just look at what’s happening in Israel and Palestine. Does that look like peace and Palestinian self-determination to you?

Of course, overseas activists blame Israel for the absence of peace. If you’ve been reading my posts (here, here and here, for example) you should already know my take: It’s not Israel that is to blame. To an extent, it’s not even Palestinian terrorists who bear the most blame. It’s us: Overseas activists who reward and encourage more violence, hatred and intransigence at every turn.

We can debate whether our stated goals and our actual goals are in alignment, but let’s proceed on an assumption of goodwill. Let us accept that we actually do want peace and Palestinian self-determination and that we are not motivated by less noble impulses.

Since September 28, 2000, at the latest, the global left has pursued a course that does not lead to peace and Palestinian self-determination but pushes it further away.

We have adopted and zealously defended a defective narrative in which Israel is all that stands in the way of peace and justice. Until we discard this erroneous plotline, we will continue to thwart peace and Palestinian self-determination.

Laying complete blame for the conflict on Israel is historically wrong (which is something activists have shown we don’t care about) but it is also strategically wrong (which is something we should care about).

It is belied by the fact that Israel has done everything in its power short of self-destruction to advance coexistence. Strategically, unless we recognize the source of the conflict and correct it, we will only perpetuate it.

Only the Palestinians can make peace, because only the Palestinians are making war. This is the core fact of the conflict that we must accept, even though it utterly destabilizes our entire worldview. Our worldview needs destabilizing because it is exactly wrong.

But overseas activists insist on clinging to a false narrative — even if it perpetuates the conflict and thousands of Palestinians die as a result.

By rewarding and encouraging Palestinian extremism, and discouraging any compromise with the “Zionist entity,” Western activists prevent an end to the conflict. By depicting Israel as the embodiment of evil, they make compromise impossible, as a literal deal with the devil. That’s why I don’t use the term “pro-Palestinian” without scoff quotes.

If there was some identifiable reason Israel had to prolong the conflict, some kind of underlying desire to prevent peace and Palestinian statehood from being realized, we wouldn’t have to look hard to find it.

One of the differences between Israeli and Palestinian societies is that Israel is a democracy, with a passionate and unrelenting media feeding a news-obsessed population. There has hardly been an idea expressed in Israel over the past seven decades, on the issue of the conflict or any other, that has not been dissected, analyzed and debated. If there were some ulterior motive in the Israeli body politic resisting the relinquishment of the territories and their troublesome Palestinian inhabitants, it would have been unearthed by now.

Israelis want one thing: security.

Put even more simply: Who but the Jews, among all people, wouldn’t want a little peace?

Yet it is an accepted bias that Israel is solely responsible for the perpetuation of this conflict. We just keep coming back to this false premise as though it were written in stone.

Doing the same thing repeatedly and anticipating a different outcome is the definition of insanity. Our approach to Israel and Palestine is crazy because the problem is, Israel is not the problem.

We need to accept that our entire approach to the conflict is misguided. Israelis seek to live in peace with their neighbors. Palestinians, with very rare exceptions, reject the idea of compromise and coexistence.

We need to accept that Palestinian statelessness is not a byproduct of Zionism, it is a deliberate strategy of the Arab League and Palestinian leaders to perpetuate a humanitarian disaster.

The “resolution” to the Palestinian issue, according to Palestinians and most of the Arab world, is the elimination of Israel, either through war or the demographic flooding intended by the “right of return.”

Compromise and peace are not on the agenda. Western leftists simply refuse to believe this — and as long as we continue this naïve self-deceit, we will never see how our position harms Palestinians, how it punishes Israelis for a crisis they did not create, or how it betrays our claims to be the sort of people we imagine ourselves to be.

We can chant “End the occupation now!” We can demand “Free Palestine.” We can boycott, divest, sanction and hold our breath until we turn blue. But the reason the occupation continues, the reason Palestine is not free, the reason Israelis and Palestinians continue to die, is because people like us around the world made a grievous moral error in the days, months and years after September 28, 2000. We endorsed endless violence instead of negotiated peace.

Do we actually believe that violence will somehow lead to Palestinian statehood?

Palestinian terror can make life for Israelis challenging; it can kill and maim. But it will never lead to Palestinian self-determination.

The only route to that goal is through a negotiated settlement that is unsatisfactory to both sides. Yes, unsatisfactory, because both sides need to accept that they will not get everything they want. For the Israelis, that means accepting security risks and making territorial concessions. For Palestinians, it means acknowledgement that they will live alongside of, not in place of, Israelis.

As Western leftists, our role should be to advance coexistence. We should be pressuring Palestinians to live in peace. Instead, all we do is reward intransigence and discourage coexistence. That’s not helping Palestinians. It’s punishing them. As we see in the news every day, it’s literally killing them. In response, we howl against Israel. Instead, we should look in a mirror.

If we truly want to see an independent Palestine, we have to convince our Palestinian allies that they need to live in peace with Israel.

By refusing to prioritize this sole prerequisite, we make everything else we do worthless.

Coexistence is incontrovertibly the sole route to the peaceful end to this conflict and to what we claim to seek. Our refusal to recognize this and act accordingly raises legitimate questions about our real aim in engaging on this topic.

If we are not advancing the condition of actual Palestinians and instead cheering on a nihilistic, intolerant, violent movement with not a chance of success, what exactly is our motivation here?

If we call ourselves “pro-Palestinian” but everything we do perpetuates their statelessness, decrepitude and death, can we understand why the proverbial Martian might look at our actions and see something inherently deranged?

Similarly, let’s quit waving meaningless United Nations votes in Israel’s face. UN bodies have been taken over by anti-Israel extremists. Their routine votes denouncing Israel are a kabuki that no one should take seriously, especially in light of the myriad exponentially more serious conflicts and abuses ignored by those same agencies and bodies.

The General Assembly condemnations are invoked as legitimate international law by people who perhaps do not understand fundamental human nature. For decades now, the United Nations has exhibited an unhealthy obsession with Israel and Israel alone, virtually ignoring all other human rights and other issues in the world to focus on the one Jewish state.

A fundamental tenet of international relations is that a society that feels threatened will retrench into strength and recoil from compromise.

Western leftists, the UN, the EU and much of the world have made Israel-bashing a full-time occupation. Feeling rightfully threatened and abandoned by the West, Israelis vote for a strongman. Rather than taking responsibility for our own role in this predictable unfolding, we point to the situation we have helped create and invent ever more theatrical hyperbole to condemn Israeli hawkishness.

We need to accept the idea that Zionism has always been and remains a pro-Palestinian movement.

Yes, we can find examples of Israeli and Zionist intolerance, rejectionism and even racism. But most Israelis recognize that they need to coexist. This is simply not the case on the other side. We need to mobilize all of our contacts and influence with our Palestinian allies to change that.

We need to stop arguing over whether Israel has a right to exist. Not only is the Jewish state the only one in the world whose existence progressive people debate the legitimacy of, it is simply bad strategy: Until the world (including our Palestinian friends) accept that Israel has a right to exist, Palestine will never be independent.

Arguing about whether Israel has a right to exist is not only a slap in the face to Jews, it is a guarantee of Palestinian statelessness. Why is this so hard for activists to understand?

Still, when people make the case that Israel has a right to exist, far too many on the left respond with a variation of: At the expense of another people’s right to exist? This needs to stop. It is historically wrong, but it is also strategically wrong. We need to stop seeing Israel and Palestine as a zero-sum conflict. More, we need to acknowledge that Israelis have done exponentially more to end this conflict and hasten peace, coexistence and Palestinian self-determination than Palestinians themselves and their allies have done.

Israelis have tried to coexist. Palestinians refused.

We have a choice. We can reward that refusal and encourage generations more of rejectionism. Or we can encourage coexistence. Until we do the latter, we should always refer to ourselves, as I do, as “pro-Palestinians” in scoff quotes—because we are pro-Palestinian in name but not in action, which is all that matters in the end.

Israelis have demonstrated repeatedly that they are prepared to take steps to end the conflict, peacefully surrendering land that they had every legal and moral right to keep.

In Sinai and in Gaza, Israelis have handed over territory in (obviously) dubious “land-for-peace” deals that resulted in cold peace (Egypt) and hot war (Gaza).

It is amazing that a significant portion of the Israeli body politic still believes in the idealistic potential, however remote, of a negotiated peace with their neighbors. Palestinians have given them almost no reason to expect it. Their movement is founded on a meme of “stolen land,” permanent grievance and inflexible rejection of peace and coexistence.

This is what Western leftists have signed on to.

Of course, this presupposes that Western progressives are genuine in our concern for Palestinians’ welfare. Since we’ve basically adopted the Arab League’s conspiracy to use Palestinians as a battering ram against the Jewish state, this presupposition is probably generous.

But if we want to prove that we truly seek what we claim to seek, we need to behave in ways that advance peace and Palestinian self-determination.

Until we stop what we’ve been doing for two decades and start to put pressure where it belongs — on Palestinians — we will continue to be part of the problem, not part of the solution.