March 3, 2014
The Vision Thing
Why do scenarios for a better Middle East—like Yoav Sorek's—tend to succumb to the utopian temptation?
At the end of his provocative essay, Yoav Sorek laments that Israel’s political leaders have lost the ability to “see beyond [their] own horizon”—or “as far as we [Israelis] think they safely could.” He therefore proposes that “we help them envisage, and debate, the better future that might lie ahead.”
Similar sentiments are heard in Israel today on both the Left and the Right. Hawks and doves alike complain incessantly that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is risk-averse, lacks political vision, and appears content to manage an unsustainable status quo.
Sorek correctly diagnoses one of the main reasons for this general Israeli malaise. Despite decades of “peace processing,” the Palestinian leadership still adamantly refuses to accept the legitimacy of a self-defined Jewish state in the Middle East, while also insisting that not a single Jew will ever be allowed to live in a future Palestinian state. Earlier this month, as if on cue for the purposes of the present discussion in Mosaic, a classic statement of obdurate Palestinian rejectionism appeared in a New York Times op-ed by Ali Jarbawi, a former minister in the Palestinian Authority (PA). To endorse the concept of Israel as a Jewish state, Jarbawi warns, would entail tossing aside the “right of return guaranteed to [the Palestinian] refugees by international law”; therefore, it will not happen.
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