Israel and the Need to “Do Something”

The wide front of antagonism—military, diplomatic, and ideological—that faces Israel today is itself proof, if proof were still needed, that the “Oslo” turn undertaken by Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres 22 years ago was a crucial mistake. They made that mistake despite their own many warnings in the 1970s and 1980s against precisely the sorts of dangers that, as if on schedule, ensued after the signing of the September 1993 Oslo accords and the creation of the Palestinian Authority. If great leaders can be maneuvered into such strategic traps once, it can happen again.

Hence the timeliness of Evelyn Gordon’s essay on the collapse of the “peace process” and the steps she outlines there for avoiding similar false temptations in the years ahead. As she points out, the Israeli public at large now frankly acknowledges that under present conditions a two-state solution is not achievable—mainly because of the persistent lack of a credible partner on the Palestinian side. Even on the Israeli left, important voices of opinion have conceded as much, though the lesson they draw from it is the opposite of Gordon’s.

Thus, the novelist A.B Yehoshua proclaimed this past July that, ever since the trauma of Ariel Sharon’s 2005 disengagement from Gaza, followed the next year by Ehud Olmert’s failed effort to demolish the West Bank outpost of Amona, it is no longer possible to uproot settlers in the name of peace. By creating “such hysteria,” Yehoshua said, the settler movement established “a fact on the ground—there will be no more evacuations by force. And this,” he concluded, “is why the state of Israel is marching smartly toward a binational state.” Farther to the left, the Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy, stipulating similarly that the settlers have “won,” now lectures Israelis to reconcile themselves to the only feasible consequence: a single state, with an Arab majority just like the other countries in Israel’s neighborhood.