By Barry Rubin
Recently I appeared on a panel. I gave what I thought was a devastating and detailed analysis on why there wouldn’t be an Israel-Palestinian peace: the PA wasn’t ready Fatah was led by radicals; the Palestinian people hadn’t been prepared for peace (and had been prepared to see any compromise as treason); Hamas might take over or would use any PA compromises to attack and defeat its rival; there were too many problems with what would happen after a two-state solution was implemented.
Afterward, another participant was asked what he thought of my presentation. He said that, of course, peace wouldn’t be easy but it was really important to make peace, that time was against Israel, and that we should keep trying. Five things struck me about the response.
First, he made no attempt to refute a single point I made. In other words, the we-must-make-peace-right-away types never tell you about these problems. Why? Because they cannot answer this analysis since it is accurate. If they honestly presented these things to an audience, the audience would be convinced that there isn’t going to be any peace.
I call this “lying for peace.” Yasir Arafat once said something like this: “If I’m willing to die for Palestine I’m certainly willing to lie for Palestine.” Thus, instead of being an analyst one who twists the facts to “help the cause of peace” becomes an activist, deliberately withholding information because it undermines what one wants to happen. In addition, of course, this becomes an “analysis” based on wishful thinking.
But lying doesn’t bring peace, just like distorting any situation achieves a goal that is otherwise unachievable. Lying about the economy doesn’t help solve the problems of the economy. Lying about health care isn’t going to improve health care. Pretending that Communism (or Islamism today) was not so bad neither ended the conflict with that ideology nor spread the cause of freedom.
Israelis aren’t going to take risks and make concessions on the basis of lies. They prefer peace but don’t start out by saying that peace—meaning a piece of paper–is the only goal and nothing else matters. The goal is national survival, the country’s flourishing, and individual benefit.
Second, the person in question withheld in the later remarks what he had said before: that the two sides were very close and that PA leader Mahmoud Abbas was eager for peace. In essence, these statements were—according to the later position—lies told in order to help the cause of peace, supposedly. Either you have to admit that the PA does not want a compromise peace with Israel or prove that the PA leadership really wants peace and is eager to obtain it. You can’t have it both ways.
Third, there’s nothing more ridiculous than the notion that Israel must make peace before the situation gets worse. It’s like saying that the British and French should make concessions to Hitler because he’s about to go to war. If we know Egypt is turning radical, Lebanon has a Hizballah-dominated government, that Hamas is getting stronger, and that the current U.S. government cannot be trusted those are all arguments against Israel making concessions at this time!
Fourth, he had said that Mahmoud Abbas, the PA leader, really wants peace. Near the end of his career, he seeks to leave a legacy of having created a Palestine state for his people. That’s what they used to say about Arafat. Precisely. And it wasn’t true then either.
But if peace is desperately needed then Israel must be forced to bring about peace “for its own good” and whether it wants to accept the terms or not. In other words, ignorant people who aren’t telling the truth want to press Israel into a situation that suits neither its interests nor the will of its people.
And if peace is desperately needed and the PA really wants peace, then Israel must be at fault for the lack of peace. Therefore Israel must be pressured and possibly punished.
A very cogent analysis. (btw, another one in the media — that’s Friedman’s pal, Zacharia. The latter is now condemning the U.S. Constitution on the grounds that it’s “old”, and he doesn’t like having a Senate giving 2 Senate seats to each State (apparently he’s too stupid or too Islamist to understand that provision). Next, this treacherous sob will be oohing and ahing and mewling about the Arab “spring” and how much Islamist dictatorships surpass America! CNN should needs to fire this imbecile.
As Ben says
It seems that some people have a hard time understanding what was so problematic about Obama’s speech. This is especially the case of Jews committed to the Democratic Party (or, more precisely, committed to a particular self-image) at all costs. In order to explain the point succinctly, it is necessary to say explicitly something that Israeli politicians generally talk their way around.
There will be no peace with the Palestinians and the Arab world. They want us dead. We engage in sham “negotiations” with them only because of the high diplomatic, economic and political price of not doing so.
In order to maintain the appearance of negotiating, we need to state positions on the central issues. There are two tactics with regard to this. One is to offer concessions that are limited enough — either territorially or functionally — to do little harm in the event that they ever need to actually be paid. This is a fool’s game because the amount we can profitably concede in the face of continuing hostility is so limited as to not even constitute the appearance of negotiating. The second tactic is to condition any concessions on corresponding Arab concessions that they are unlikely to ever pay. At the moment, requiring cessation of claims on the part of the Arabs is a sufficiently high bar, though not without risk.
What Obama did in his speech (and what Europeans have been doing for years) was to counter both tactics simultaneously. First, he demands concessions (the 1949 armistice lines as the default in the absence of agreement on swaps and no Israeli military positions in the conceded territory) that are indefensible in the absence of genuine stable peace. Second, he demands these concessions prior to cessation of claims by the Arabs (refugees and Jerusalem to be negotiated after borders).
There is a point at which the price of participating in these sham negotiations becomes higher than the price of not participating in them.
Here is the fact Arab states attacked Israel in order to destroy the just born Jewish state. This was coupled with cleansing out all the Jewish communities out of Arab states and Persia. Then the Arab refugees they created and refused to absorb they renamed “The Palestinian nation.” Israel absorbed all the Jews of Arab lands with no help from the UN. The Arab refugees AKA The Palestinians alone among refugees got their own UN support, UNWRA as a weapon against Israel and we all pay for this atrocity. As far as we know Arabs do not want Jews alive because “A Jew is hiding behind that rock.” Expecting that alone among all Arabs “The Palestinians” will make peace with Israel is stupid. Granted Egypt and Jordan have a very cold peace that amount to no war yet. The truth is that even if they sign a peace agreement it will be as described by Arafat in a mosque in South Africa the Oslo agreements: Just like Mohammed’s agreement with the Jews of Arabia he slaughtered after his conquest of all of Arabia. The reality is simple: Israel must be ready to defend itself with no notice because this is the plan of the Arab world no matter how much Israel wants peace.
Lying for peace has been the signature hallmark of both Arab taquiya mouthpieces as well as their leftist compatriots.
Furthermore, a devastating (moral) indictment can be made against Israel’s resident peace processors, those in political leadership and others in high profile positions, be they media, academia or cultural elitists.
While one set of challenges are presented fighting peace fantasists from afar, it is an order of greater magnitude to fight those from within who surely should know better.
Dragging us into the abyss via their delusions of peace is NO longer tolerable-if it ever was.Eighteen years after the onslaught of Oslo, the streets are full of maimed Jewish bodies and our graveyards are filled with thousands more.They are the victims of hallucinatory leftists, symbolic of President Peres’s hallucinations, what he unfathomably coined, ‘sacrifices for peace’.
Israelis/Jews are now in the unbearable position of fending off a lightness attributed to another Jewish genocide.
I’m with JS. How dare Zacharia doubt our Constitution. He must be a muslim.
He certainly appears to look convincing while he’s lying. CNN should fire this
fake.
As you know Dr. Rubin, Israel is really divided socially and economically into two Jewish societies, the Coastal Plain, that is, Ashdod, Tel Aviv, Netanyaha, Haifa, and their suburbs and the Galil, the Golan, the South, and the Jerusalem Central areas.
The Coastal Plain Israeli Jews are business and recreation oriented and largle passive or even moderately Left wing regarding the Palestinians, the Palestinian Israeli peace process, and largely uninformed regarding the real difficulties in making peace. They are the ones who argue for peace at any price and have only the most superficial Yediot Achronot and Haaretz notions of the peace process.
The Israelis of the other regions are more warlike and attached to the Land of Israel and are far more aware of the dangers of irredentist Palestinian nationalism and the fact that it includes the most vicious forms of anti Semitism up to and including the destruction of Israel and the genocide of the Jewish People.
This difference is reflected in every election and public opinion poll.
But to move on, the most amazing aspect of Palestinian nationalism is the fact that for decades the Palestinians have refused to sign a full peace accord with Israel even though they could and would tear it up any time they felt like. Arafat went in this direction up to a point when he signed off on the Oslo Accords and then proceeded to launch a terrorist war to achieve militarily what he failed to achieve at Oslo. Everyone, even the Palestinians, assumes that any peace treaty between Israel and the Palestinians would almost certainly be violated sooner rather than later by the Palestinians and thus would not be worth the paper it would be written on.
But with a peace treaty the Palestinians would get huge international support, financing and all the other perks which would certainly more than make up for any embarrassment or betrayal that signing the treaty would include.
And they could tear it up whenever they wanted.
I can only assume that their eliminationist anti Israel ideology and genocidal nationalism has become so much a part of the Palestinian psyche that it even trumps their own best interests.
I disagree with your typology of the Coastal Plain and the periphery. The majority of Israelis live in the Coastal Plain and it includes cities such as Holon, Bat Yam, Rishon Le’Tzion, Ashdod (which you mentioned) and others that are not bastions of leftwing delusion. The people in the rest of the country are not more “warlike”. They are like the people in Holon, Bat Yam, Rishon, Ashdod and Haifa. Even in Tel Aviv there’s a difference between north and south Tel Aviv, the former being a leftist stronhold, the latter not.
The majority of Israelis are centrists who want a good life, peace, security, prosperity, health, joy for themselves and their families, and are ready to make sacrifices to have the normalcy enjoyed in Western countries that are not surrounded with enemies bent on their destrution and/or genocide. Polls have shown repeatedly that a majority of Israelis would support a two-states solution if they were convinced it’ll lead to REAL peace. Polls have also shown that with time less and less Israelis are convinced it’ll lead to peace or that the Arabs are genuinely ready to make peace. Today most Israelis don’t believe it and for good reason.
Like in the West, those more inclined to believe it against all evidence to the contrary are the elites – the intellectuals, media, artists, the wealthy – not all of them, of course, but a greater percentage than in the general population. These are the people most afflicted with left-wing indoctrination. Like in Western universities, here too people are thought that their own country is evil and their enemies are good, and are their victims, and that criticizing or judging any culture but your own is racist. Indeed they mostly live in the richest cities in the Coastal Plain, but they certainly don’t represent the entire Coastal Plain.
Barry,
Your Lying for pPeace phrase would be a most useful reply to the “peace processs” advocates.
You have the most intelligent readership and commentors. Adina Kutnicki is right on, as usual.Frank, Albert Reingewirtz, and Ken Besig are new to me, but their comments are insightful.
What can one do versus Thomas Friedman who is constantly wrong, if not, wrong-headed, yet has a large readership, and much influence?
People like Friedman will only lose their readership when it becomes so abundantly clear they’re wrong that their comrades in the media won’t be able to hide the truth anymore.
Meanwhile, what we can do to help is:
- Email and post links to Barry Rubin and other sane analysts and journalists to as many people and in as many websites as possible, without spamming, of course. Just offer links to relevant articles when this or that issue comes up in a discussion. Do it a lot.
- Mention Rubin by name, e.g. “Barry Rubin thinks x, y, z”, so you’d get the name around. That of course applies not only to Rubin, but to all your favorite writers.
- Do it in comments to articles by Thomas Friedman to rebuttal his arguments
- Do it in websites that have a large readership, whether on the right or the left. Take adavantage of the large readership of people like Thomas Friedman by going to their articles or websites and commenting there with relevnat links (including the name of the author).
- Write to MSM outlets and ask them why they never interview astute analysts such as [a short list of name]. Don’t write anything extreme, but something like: “I’m a long-time subscriber of CNN/MSNBC/NY Times/Wa Po, but as of lately I’m getting a bit bored with its somewhat libral slant and lack of exciting debates. I like to hear both sides of an arguments, even if I don’t agree, and lately I found myself having to switch to Fox News to hear the other side. I don’t really like Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reiley and the rest of the hot-headed, god-crazed and gun-crazed dummies there, and as your viewer/reader I think I will have a more intellectualy enriching experience if you’d invite some of the smarter, more educated and level-headed analysts and thinkers who are obviously too smart to be invited on Fox, such as [short list of names]“.
I will second artcohn’s observation. It is tragic that Prof. Rubin is hardly known and less appreciated than genuine frauds like Friedman and Zarkaria. Perhaps it is that so many want easy simple explanations with a possibility of a happy ending rather than a recognition that war is the answer.
There are those who lie for peace and those who lie to destroy Israel. The first group is supposedly more benign, but ends up doing almost as much damage as the second group.
I agree Thomas Friedman belongs to the lying-for-peace movement and not to the lying-to-destroy-Israel movement. He even came here to save us from ourselves by giving us a “piece of his mind” on Israeli TV. He really felt that he knew 100% what’s the reality and what we should do and that we’re being very silly expecting the other side to recognize our right to exist as a condition for any peace agreement (and I thought it’s kinda basic demand). He’s a witty stupid man who thinks he’s very smart, a lethal combination (see the guy in the White House for a prime example).
“The goal is national survival, the country’s flourishing, and individual benefit.”
But that’s not the goal the left has in mind. They want -what they perceive as- justice at any price and they are happy to pay with it with the lives of 6 million Jews.
A more serious variant of the “lying for peace school” meme comes in the form of an Open Letter from former high-ranking American officials to President Obama blaming Israel for the impasse in the peace talks and advocating Israel be forced to make peace for its own good, regardless of whether that is in Israel’s interests and even if its against the will of its people. Published June 23 in the “New York Review Of Books,” it consists of six points:
1)The United States will oppose any effort to challenge or undermine the legitimacy of the State of Israel within internationally recognized borders – here the authors of the open letter take it as a given the pre-1967 borders are real borders even though they have never had such a status.
2)The United States will work for the establishment of a sovereign and viable Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders, subject only to agreed, minor and equal land swaps to take into account areas adjoining the former Green Line heavily populated by Israelis . . .” – Israel is not only asked to make a huge concession but also to give up obtaining territory that would into account changes after the Six Day War and which would give it a stronger defensive
position.
3)Any solution to the refugee problem cannot flood Israel with Arabs and destroy its character as a Jewish state, so that “proposals for unlimited entry of Palestinian refugees into the State of Israel will be opposed by the United States” – but the formulation is phrased so that Israel MUST admit a “limited” number of Arab refugees – the term “limited” open presumably to US as opposed to Israeli interpretation.
4)As part of a peace agreement, “the United States will support the presence of a U.S.-led multinational force to oversee security provisions and border crossings – given imperial overstretch and the ineffectiveness of multinational forces elsewhere, notably Lebanon, it would in effect place Israel’s security in the hands of foreign governments for whom the security and survival of Israel are not paramount.
5) Jerusalem will be divided between Israel and Palestine and “each side” will control its own holy places – which means Jews and Christians will be denied access to their holy places and east Jerusalem would be ethnically cleansed of its Jewish population.
6)The United States will encourage the reconciliation of Fatah and Hamas on terms compatible with these principles and UNSC Resolutions 242 and 338 – Hamas is not asked to accept the Quartet principles and 252 and 338. It is only encouraged to join the PA in a Palestinian unity government on those terms which are not even mandatory!
In short, Israel is presented with an ultimatum to surrender strategically vital ground and half its capital, to agree to a return of a number of Arabs to Israel to be determined by the US government and to negotiate a pre-arranged surrender to a Fatah-Hamas government that is not even bound by previous commitments! This is nothing short of chutzpah. No Israeli government is going to accept it even under enormous pressure. And a “peace process” that relies on one-sided pressure on Israel to make peace through dangerous unilateral concessions against its own interests and the will of its people is a form of lying for peace. No good can come of this Open Letter.
Nice site you have here ill be sure to bookmark so i can enjoy.
Please allow me to comment something about your post. It is a much well written and I simply love it.=)