Amid the unrelenting assault by the Palestinian Arabs to destroy the state of Israel, there are Jews throughout the world and American politicians who inexplicably still believe in the “peace process” and a quixotic two-state solution.
Are they unaware of the Palestinian Arabs’ refusal to accept the right of Jews to have a state of their own in their ancestral homeland? Are they oblivious to the Hamas Covenant of August 1988 and the Palestinian National Charter of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) that calls for the destruction of Israel as a religious duty?
How can they genuinely believe in a peaceful resolution of the conflict when Palestinian Media Watch (PMW) recently reported that Palestinian Authority daily Al-Hayat Al-Jadida commemorated the anniversary of the first Intifada or “the Stone Intifada” (1987-1993), by calling it “the glorious Intifada,” and stressed the need for martyrdom so that the Palestinian Arabs can be “saved.” During the first intifada, stones, car bombs, stabbings and shootings resulted in approximately 200 Israelis being murdered.” (https://palwatch.org/page/17026).
PMW also documented how PA TV exploits children to advocate the ideal of dying as martyrs for “Palestine,” whose borders are established by “the blood of the Palestinian Martyrs.” At the entrance to PA school in Bethlehem, the PA placed a sign in memory of the “Martyrs” of the PA terror campaign (the second Intifada, 2000-2005) during which more than 1,100 Israelis were murdered, many in suicide bombings.
To help us understand why the true intentions of the Palestinian Arabs toward Israel produces a high level of cognitive dissonance among certain liberals and progressives, we turn to Sol Stern, a former editor, and staff writer (1966-1972) for the now-defunct Ramparts magazine, the flagship publication of the New Left, for some insight.
In his article “Israel Without Apology,” Stern explained that “right-thinking people had to assume a certain degree of rationality on all sides” of the dispute. If you offered someone a better alternative, there had to be a positive response. With enough amity, all disagreements could be overcome. Hadn’t the United States and the Soviet Union reached détente Didn’t Richard Nixon go to China? “Weren’t the Arabs rational human beings?”
“This orthodoxy,” that anything described as a “peace process” is inherently superior to war, prevailed in Europe, the U.S. and in Israel. “Despite all of the failed peace overtures of the past, wasn’t it worth trying yet one more time?” they asked. “To think otherwise, to believe that there might be something inherently violent and unreasonable in Arab Muslim political culture was—well, racist.”
Stern credits the neoconservatives for exposing “what we wanted to avoid admitting—that this conflict is not about disputed territories. It is about Israel’s right to survive as a democratic Jewish state.”
Rather than engage in such blasphemous thinking, Israeli intellectuals learned it was simpler to disparage their own culture and rewrite their country’s history. When they concluded that the Arabs had legitimate grievances, they decided “it was time to try again to split the difference.”
In the 1980s and 1990s two different Israeli administrations offered “land for peace” to Syria. Both proposals were rebuffed. Under terms of the 1993 Oslo Accords, the Israeli government permitted terrorist organizations to return to Judea, Samaria and Gaza and gave tens of thousands of weapons to Yasser Arafat’s security services, before signing a peace treaty or an irrefutable security agreement with the Palestinian Arabs. Their failure to rescind the Palestine National Covenant’s demand for Israel’s demise and replacement by a Palestinian state was either ignored or minimized.
“No nation in the world has taken so many mortal risks for a putative peace with its most implacable enemies,” Stern observed. Even after the Oslo Accords were shattered when the Arabs began blowing up civilians in pizza shops and on buses, Ehud Barak offered another proposal at Camp David. Instead of accepting this offer, Arafat unleashed “yet another savage wave of extermination against Israel’s civilian population” with the weapons Israel had provided him.
Arab attempts to bring their case to the attention of the world are not arbitrary. Suicide bombings are a cleverly planned strategy that has produced considerable advantages. After the first series of attacks against Israeli supermarkets, cafés, malls and buses, the Arab cause was championed in European government offices and on American campuses. Israeli victims receive little sympathy, historian Tony Judt claimed, because they are not seen as victims of terror, but rather as “collateral damage of their own government’s mistaken policies.”
None of the concessions or offers to exchange land for peace have placated Israel’s adversaries. Appeasement has only increased hatred of Israel and the Jews. Yet there is no end to the compromises Israel is expected to make to advance the “peace process.” The reason for this, Stern believes, is that there are allegedly articulate and progressive critics who cannot bring themselves to acknowledge a fundamental truth—that there are political movements that “are so pathological in their hatreds” that the problems they profess to care about can only be resolved when they themselves are eliminated.
Dr. Grobman is the senior resident scholar at the John C. Danforth Society and a member of the Council of Scholars for peace in the Middle East.
