THE END OF THE CHARADE

AT THE START OF THE INTIFADA, WE MADE EXCUSES FOR VIOLENCE. NOW WE DON’T EVEN BOTHER

Give this guy a Nobel Peace Prize!

Does the date September 28, 2000, mean anything to you? It should.

That was the date the Second Intifada began. That was when the Israeli-Palestinian peace process ended. It was also the moment when the global left went off the rails by making a minor compromise on our values of negotiation over violence and began a quarter-century of aligning with the most atrocious Palestinian terrorists, burrowing down antisemitic rabbit holes and generally defiling everything we progressive antiracists claim to venerate. So it’s a date that should live in infamy.

If we are not familiar with the events of that time, we cannot approach an understanding of the headlines we see every day of thousands of people dying in a Hamas-initiated war.

So let’s open the Big Book of Mostly Forgotten Recent History.

The manufacture of a revisionist narrative began almost immediately. When a huge segment of the political spectrum almost unanimously forsakes everything it claims to believe (peace, negotiated resolution to conflict, equality for women and LGBTQ+ people, antiracism), obviously, a pretty intensive propaganda factory is needed to paper over this egregious moral carnage.

No problem! The violence-apologists of the West were ready with justifications just as the participants in the intifada were ready with stockpiles of stones to supply their “spontaneous” uprising.

Rachelle Marshall, writing in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, declared that “The explosion of Palestinian anger … put an end to the charade begun at Oslo seven years ago and labelled the ‘peace process.’

“In 1993,” she continued, “Palestinians, along with millions of people around the world, were led to hope that Israel would withdraw from the West Bank and Gaza within five years and that Palestinians would then be free to establish an independent state.

“Meanwhile both sides would work out details of Israel’s withdrawal and come to an agreement on the status of Jerusalem, the future of Israeli settlements, and the return of Palestinian refugees.

“Because of the lopsided balance of power, negotiations went nowhere and the Palestinians’ hopes were never fulfilled.”

This first draft of history, though massively removed from reality, has nevertheless stood the test of time. Arafat may have walked away from negotiations and started blowing things up, but it was, of course, Israel’s fault.

Marshall’s make-believe was part of a cottage industry of obfuscation, inventing explanations for the inexplicable. The Palestinian rejection of the peace plan was so counterintuitive that observers had to contrive fables and myths to explain it rather than simply acknowledge the core truth that had been out there all along. The Palestinians did not want, as the world had gullibly accepted, a nation in the West Bank and Gaza. All the negotiations over borders and tradeoffs and details were just Arafat playing for time.

The Palestinian movement was never and is not now primarily a movement for national liberation of Palestine. Palestinianism is a movement for the destruction of Israel.

We cannot appreciate the facts of the conflict, understand the actions of the parties or move ahead to any sort of resolution while staunchly denying this troublesome truth.

Arafat could not accept a negotiated peace and neither can his successors, because to accept the “victory” of a Palestinian nation astride, rather than instead of, Israel would be to admit failure. The very thing that Western observers have been conditioned to believe would be the ultimate Palestinian victory — an independent state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip — is seen by Palestinians themselves as total failure. The naïve Western assumption is that the end goal is two states for two peoples, but what Arafat was after was two states for one people — and that once-shrouded goal is now shouted unabashedly by marching millions chanting “From the river to the sea.”

The cognitive incompatibility of the world’s gullibility with the truth of the maximalist Palestinian objective necessarily begat outlandish revisionism that attempted to paint the Oslo process as a fraud, a conspiracy with some ominous thumb on the scale tipped to Israel’s advantage, a massive intrigue to screw Palestinians out of what was rightly theirs. It is a symptom of the character of Western leftists that we almost universally adopted these misrepresentations and it is why we now find ourselves down a road of moral catastrophe from which it will be difficult to reverse.

Ilan Pappé wrote of the peace process: “Israel used it as a means to grab more land, build more colonies, and annex more space. The status quo was the solution … the basic Zionist quest is for control, direct or indirect, over the whole of Palestine.”

Like much of the narrative, this is a direct projection. The peace process ended because the Palestinians demanded all of Palestine — and all of Israel. To paper over this fact, it is necessary to recast Israel’s offer — 97% of the West Bank, all of Gaza, territorial tradeoffs to compensate for the 3% of the West Bank Israel would retain and $300 billion in “symbolic” recompense for the “right of return” of refugees — as a Zionist land grab. It is difficult to conceive of any people but Jews being accused and convicted by global opinion of offering nothing when they offered everything.

“The end result,” Pappé went on, “was that the Palestinians were to receive whatever Israel was willing to give them.” 

The fact that what Israel was willing to give them was everything the world assumed the Palestinians wanted is apparently irrelevant here.

As Marshall writes, at the core of the emerging progressive narrative around Palestine was a “lopsided balance of power,” the premise that the Palestinians were inherently disadvantaged partners at the negotiating table.

So they should have been. The very fact of their statelessness was a result of the Arab world’s successive attempts at annihilation of Israel and Israelis. But after Israeli victories in the Arab-initiated wars of 1948-’49 and 1967, Israel had control of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip and should have rightfully held the upper hand. The defeated rarely get to set the terms of the peace.

Despite this, Israel had agreed to effectively ignore the fact that these exterminationist wars had occurred, to wipe the slate clean and agree to a status quo ante that no nation on earth has ever been so generous to undertake.

The collapse of the Oslo process makes more sense when you read Pappé, Noam Chomsky and other “pro-Palestinian” commentators. They openly seek the destruction of Israel. They believe the Palestinians deserve both Palestine and Israel. They, like many other voices in the Palestinian movement, endorse a one-state “solution” that would dissolve (in the best-case scenario) the Jewish state. So dismissive of the idea of coexistence is Pappé that he refers to the entire process as the “peace orthodoxy.” So one can’t accept the Palestinian narrative without admitting the core destructive aim at its heart. Yet Western progressives, at least the relatively moderate ones, have continued to side with the Palestinian narrative while credulously claiming that we support Israel’s right to exist.

At the end of the peace process, a whole propaganda hoopla was invented to hide the reality that the “Palestinian liberation” movement was a “Israeli destruction” movement all along.

That charade is over. “From the river to the sea” is now the unavoidable cry of the activists.

Which puts leftist progressives who believe in peace, coexistence and negotiation over violence in a bit of a tough spot. As I’ll discuss in the next days, as usual, this has not proven a problem. Because while adherence to peace and a revulsion for violence used to be a core tenet of our ideology, those days are gone. When it comes to Israel (and, as I will also address separately, Jews), everything we claim to believe goes out the window.

Wait for it …