The risks Gorenberg identifies (see below) are only some of the risks Israel runs, but which he tends to ignore, not the least, the risks embedded in the suggestions he has to make for resolving the contradictions. “On the verge of being remembered among the false political promises of 20th century ideologies”?! Is this a reference to Nazism and Communism? Historically this is ludicrous – unless Gorenberg sees Israel becoming a totalitarian state sometime soon. Only in terms of the kind of post-colonial anti-Zionism of say, Tony Judt or Phillip Weiss, it does make sense.

I have an Israeli friend, a good liberal who supported Oslo despite the information he was getting about the malevolent intentions of the PA, who admitted to me that after the outbreak of the Second Intifada (in other words, after the Palestinians got out of their Trojan horse and showed their real hand), that the hardest thing for him to realize is that “it’s not in our hands.”

Gorenberg has yet to realize that. For him, everything is in Israel’s hands, and if only they’d do what he told them, then they’d have peace, a liberal democracy, the moral high ground, and the world would once again like and admire them (or at least not stigmatize them as pariahs). As a result, he is a prime candidate for “masochistic omnipotence complex” (MOS) ie, it’s all our fault and if only we could be better [a liberal democracy] then we could fix everything.

As a result, Gorenberg is susceptible to framing the conflict in terms of the “four dimensional Israeli, two- (or one-) dimensional Palestinian“. Since I rarely agree with Phillip Weiss, let me note that he points out the same lack of any real interest in Palestinians on Gorenberg’s part. This was, by the way, my critique of the play NIF staged in NYC which I commented on in Gorenberg’s place: four dimensional Jews ruminating and churning their guilt in a void filled with fantasies of Palestinian peace-makers whom extremist Jews try to assassinate.

What on earth leads Gorenberg to think that this “peaceful way to partition” is possible? When he says “stop the occupation” he presumably means retreat to the Green line (the ’49 armistice lines). When the Palestinian leadership – “secular” and religious – says occupation, they mean the shore line. Does Gorenberg think that ending the settlement enterprise and the occupation will lead to a peaceful partition, rather than to a resumption of war with Israel in a weaker position? Has he considered that possibility?

You’d think from this statement that Israel hadn’t tried. That Oslo was not an effort to exchange land for peace that turned out to be an exchange of land for war? That the failure of Oslo was… Israel’s fault? I think Gorenberg would respond, “Yes,” and point to the settlements as evidence of Israel’s lack of good faith. I’d say that’s more Masochistic Omnipotence Syndrome, and that the West Bank settlements are not even near the heart of the Palestinian leadership’s hostility to Israel.

While there are places where Judaism may well have too much influence on public and political life in Israel, in the grand scheme of what constitutes a theocracy and what constitutes the division of church and state, I’d say Israel is heavily to the latter side. One of the characteristics of MOS is an extreme sensitivity to one’s own side’s every flaw, and a corresponding indifference to much worse failures on the other side. The likelihood of a Palestinian state dominated by Muslim laws and concerns is much greater than any danger of theocracy in Israel. Does that factor in to calculations about how to reach a peaceful settlement by creating such a state? Or are Palestinian flaws not of any concern?

For the moment, I’ll  just note that, in the Middle East, the only ethnicity that has shown itself capable of maintaining a real working democracy, with exceptional freedom of speech even for “citizen”-enemies of the state, is the Jews. Like Judt, Gorenberg is operating at the post-colonial, post-national, end of the historical process, ignoring that in the neighborhood where it must survive, Israel is the cutting edge of liberal democratic developments, surrounded by pre-modern, prime divider societies.

For the sake of argument, let’s accept that every criticism here as real. How does that make Israel different from every other imperfect liberal democracy in the world? Indeed, there are plenty of Arabs in Israel who, for all the discrimination against them, understand that they’re in a far more democratic place with far more rights than they would be in any Arab state including a Palestinian one. For all the talk of Arab pride and desire to be self-determining, over 40% of Arabs in the “occupied territory” of East Jerusalem would rather remain in Israel, even at the cost of moving to avoid being on the “wrong side” of a division of the city. And there’s certainly no rush of Israeli Arabs to emigrate to the rest of the Arab world to live among their “brethren.”

Further, the reader wouldn’t know from his description that Israeli Muslims regularly vote into office representatives like Asmi Bishara, who, by the definition of any “liberal democracy” are traitors, that parties like Adala have every intention of making impossible the kind of Jew-friendly polity Gorenberg grants “makes sense.”

Interesting. I would have taken the argument against two states in a different direction. How can you create another state between the river and the sea when that state shows every sign of being a failed terror state, not dedicated to the welfare of its citizens, but dedicated to keeping the refugees in camps, to ethnically cleansing any Jews from their country, to instituting sharia, and to getting “the rest” of Palestine back, namely Haifa and Tel Aviv.

If this means what I think it does, it’s addressed to the “one-staters,” like Phillip Weiss, who insist that they support a single bi-national secular democratic state, and who reject his analysis. Gorenberg’s respectful criticism of such an either woefully misinformed or outright dishonest a goal is way too subtle. There is no possibility right now of a joint Jewish-Muslim democratic state in which Jews are not the overwhelming majority. There is no reliable evidence that the Muslims are capable of establishing a democratic state that defends the rights of its minorities (as well as its gender majority of women), a fortiori, the Palestinians for whom genuinely “moderate” parties are a tiny fraction (an endangered species) of the political scene.

Wow. Somehow, I think that would be the least of the problems that would arise. The next three paragraphs strike me as a bizarre exploration of why an obviously disastrous idea would fail. Talk about smashing in open doors.

It would be much worse. Lebanon, for all its dysfunctions, still works (more or less).

Agreed.

That’s not the argument of the “right” and its supporters overseas supporters. The argument – and I don’t consider it a right-wing argument, but a sane, even liberal argument – is that making sacrifices in the current Palestinian political climate will not bring peace but more and more vicious war (e.g., the Oslo War of 20oo). If Gorenberg doesn’t even understand this as an argument (even if he disagrees), if his idea of his “right-wing” opposition is so simplistic, then it’s a sign of how little he really understands everyone, including his own people.

More MOS. Israel doesn’t have a border because its neighbors refuse to recognize it. The idea that by withdrawing to a border (which one? ’49-67?) that Palestinians won’t recognize, and being a good liberal democracy will “end the ethnic conflict” is an astounding fantasy.

He sounds a lot like the Obama administration at the beginning. Peace with the Palestinians is a means to… getting the Arab world to support us in confronting Iran, to making the world a peaceful place… etc., fantasies that had Clinton and Obama announcing a solution in a year[!]. As the administration has discovered, much to its unhappiness, “peace with the Palestinians” is right now not possible, and taking Gorenberg’s advice will only make things much worse.

There are two further points here worth making.

1) Who is responsible for Israel’s Pariah Status?

Although he doesn’t discuss it in this article, lying behind much of Gorenberg’s concern is international opinion – the pariah status he warned against in his opening remarks, and which plays a still larger part in his book. The “liberal democracy” that Gorenberg prizes is not really a flesh and blood democracy (they’re all fallible), but the perfectionist demands of progressives – Jews and non-Jews alike – which, intentionally or not, spell suicide for the only functioning democracy in the Middle East and catastrophe not only for the Jews but for the rest of the democratic world. This moral perfectionism that makes serious but relatively small Jewish blemishes unbearable to Jewish progressives and “humanitarians” with Human Rights Complex should not confuse outsiders.

In fact Israel’s “pariah status” is not her fault. Sure Israel has problems, and sure she has made mistakes, both formally and on the field of conflict. But this is nothing in comparison with the revolting behavior of her enemies, who represent a kind of religious and gender apartheid in both principle and practice that should – were there any serious moral consideration at work among progressives – make them the object of universal disdain.

Gorneberg would unconsciously agree by retorting to any effort to lessen Israel’s culpability by pointing to her enemies by insisting that he does not want to be judged by the same standards as Israel. And as an Israeli citizen whose children have served in the army, he has the right to his moral exclusiveness. But outsiders, the people making Israel a pariah, have no business using Gorenberg’s aggressively masochistic notion of the chosen people as their guide to understanding the Arab-Israeli conflict.

As many observers have noted, “Anti-Semitism” is not a Jewish problem, it’s a gentile problem.” I agree (although there are Jews like Gilad Atzmon, who internalize that problem). The same can and should be said for Anti-Zionism. If Israel is a pariah state among European intellectuals and other “progressive-minded” folk, like the academics who have colonized too much of Middle Eastern studies and other fields with their post-colonial paradigm, it’s because of a moral disorientation that will, if unchecked, be the downfall of the West. Rather than rush to appease such moral lunacy – which it cannot because the moral demands have nothing to do with real morality – Israel needs to endure an impossible contradiction long enough for the West to come to its senses.

It’s not that the problem of Israeli-Palestinian conflict is insoluble. If the Palestinians really wanted a civil, two-state solution, they’d have had it long ago. It’s that the real moves have to come from the Palestinians, and they won’t do anything until the pressure is on them. Pushing Israel only makes the Palestinians more demanding (as Obama has learned to his chagrin), and in the current climate the Western approach (the European Commission, the Obama Administration) is asking Israel to commit suicide. This is, of course, a painful situation for Israel. I agree with those who feel that keeping Palestinians in a headlock is morally corrupting. But if it’s the only alternative to giving Nazi-wannabees more power, then its the price of survival.

2) The Urgent Task: 

Gorenberg, like most of the “Israel has to do something for peace” crowd favor the “the current situation cannot hold. In a sense, he’s one of those people crying “fire” in a crowded theater about the demographic threat, the threat of irretrievably “losing” Israeli democracy, the threat of pariah status from the rest of the world. And in so doing, he wants to panic Israelis into “doing [what he believes is] the right thing.” But these fires are not forces of nature (not even the demographic), but social phenomena. When people flee a fire in panic they are not feeding the flames; when Israel does as Gorenberg subscribes, they feed the fires of Palestinian irredentism. The idea that if Israel doesn’t leave the West Bank soon – the next five years? – it will have to be an apartheid state, is a product of movements like the BDS which mobilize this moral lunacy.

Rather than shouting “fire” at the Israelis, Gorenberg would do well to shout “folly” at the very people he allows to bully him into self-destructive concessions. But his own moral perfectionism closes off that route. He can’t allow himself to know what’s going on in Palestinian political culture because it would make it impossible for him to propose his “solutions.”

I actually think the present “impossible” status quo – Israel keeps Gaza under blockade to prevent weapons from getting in, keeps the Palestinians from having free run of the West Bank – is not only possible, but the only realistic choice… until the West comes to its senses, and the Arab world grows up and ceases to be driven by its desire to avenge its lost honor. And as unlikely as that outcome may seem, it is the only one that can assure a peaceful global community in this troubled 21st century.

Alas. Reality is a hard mistress.