Jerusalem — Is Israel up against what England faced in World War II? Is Prime Minister Ariel Sharon an Israeli Winston Churchill? If not, should he be?
These are questions for Jews to think about, now that it seems Churchill has become the new role model for Israelis and their diaspora Jewish supporters.
It probably was inevitable. The pro-Israel view of the conflict with the Palestinians has become so absolutist, so black and white, that only a metaphor in which the Nazis stand in for the Palestinians would do.
And if the Palestinians are the Nazis, then who are the Israelis? The greatest anti-Nazi of them all, the antithesis of the appeasers (who, in this metaphor, stand in for the Israeli and diaspora peace camp) — the conservative icon Churchill.
Churchill didn’t whine about a “political horizon,” our Jewish patriots remind us. Churchill didn’t want to talk to Nazi leader Adolf Hitler (Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat).
Churchill didn’t ask the British to “understand” the Germans’ (the Palestinians’) hardships. He fired them up for war. He promised them nothing but “blood, tears, toil and sweat.” He drove them through agony and sacrifice to their finest hour. In the end, they won the victory because they refused to accept anything less than total German surrender.
Our staunch Jewish defenders ask: Are the Palestinians any different than the Nazis? Do they not want to exterminate us? Do they not cheer and idolize the terrorists who slaughter Jewish women and children?
They are the same enemy the Jews faced in the 1930s and 1940s, say the proudest, strongest Jews, and the only way to fight them is the way Churchill did — by recognizing clearly that they are out to vanquish us, and by going out to vanquish them first.
Plausible endgame
Sounds reasonable. But there is a flaw in this argument, a difference between wartime England and present-day Israel, and between the Nazis and the Palestinians, that makes all the difference.
In World War II, Churchill had a plausible endgame. He told the British: If we fight the Germans hard enough, they will see it doesn’t pay to try to take over the world, and they will give up the idea of being an empire and go back to being a sovereign nation within their own borders.
Churchill left the Germans a decent option to war. He fought to prevent Germany from taking over England, not for England to take over Germany.
He didn’t build British colonies in Germany. He didn’t station British troops there to defend colonies. He didn’t build bypass roads for British settlers to travel on. Before, during and after the war, Churchill left Germany for the Germans.
Which is why the Palestinians aren’t the Nazis, why Israel isn’t wartime England and why Sharon or any other Israeli leader cannot be Churchill.
Since the Six Day War — or, more precisely, since the first West Bank settlement went up in 1968 — Israel’s foremost project has been the permanent takeover of what, in the eyes of the entire world, was meant to be the Palestinians’ state in the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip.
The enterprise was not about Israeli security. If security was Israel’s only concern, it could have stationed soldiers in the territories and left it at that.
But it built Jewish enclaves in a sea of Palestinians where a third generation of settlers are now being born — 220,000 of them, with thousands upon thousands of soldiers to protect them, at a cost of God knows how many billions of dollars.
That’s not a bargaining chip. Israel didn’t build towns of 10,000 and 20,000 residents, with schools and health clinics and shopping centers and all the rest with the intention of one day telling all those people to leave.
That may have been the intention of Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres and Ehud Barak during the days of the Oslo Accord. But they never did it; and while they were waiting, the settlements expanded and the population doubled from 100,000 at the start of the peace process in September 1993 to 200,000 when it ended with the Al-Aqsa intifada in September 2000.
If the Palestinians surrender, they will have no country to go back to — Israel has colonized it. And people who think Sharon would be generous in victory are lying to themselves, because Sharon, more than any other Israeli politician, built those settlements. He is a settler himself, and a provocative one, having purchased a home, now heavily guarded by Israeli soldiers, in the middle of the Muslim Quarter in Jerusalem’s Old City.
To suggest that Sharon, having defeated the Palestinians, would then betray his deepest beliefs and instincts — not to mention inviting civil war — by telling the settlers to pull up roots is absurd.
Israel has no endgame, no plausible goal. We are telling the Palestinians: If you stop fighting, we will be in your face forever. Our settlements will spread throughout the land where you live, and wherever you go our soldiers will be there. We will be on top, and you will be on the bottom.
Why should they stop fighting? Who would settle for a life like that?
Churchill never offered the Germans as rotten a deal as Israel offers the Palestinians. If Israel wants to learn a lesson from Churchill, let it present the Palestinians with a decent option to war — the option of simple independence, of sovereignty within their own borders.
Let Israel finally, after 35 years, take down its colonies and leave Palestine for the Palestinians.
Larry Derfner writes about Israeli society for U.S. Jewish newspapers and the Jerusalem Post.
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