George W. Bush made his first presidential visit to Israel this month, but no one expected that his presence in Jerusalem and Ramallah would bring about a miracle and accelerate progress toward Israeli-Palestinian peace.
Some Israelis who are hoping that either Bush or Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will use these meetings or subsequent conclaves to “rape” their country — i.e., force it to submit to a U.S. dictate that would mandate more far-reaching concessions than even those already agreed to in the past.
Incredible? Not to David Landau, the editor of Ha’aretz, the newspaper that bills itself as The New York Times of Israel.
Landau’s byline is familiar to readers of U.S. Jewish newspapers due to his years as the Israeli bureau chief of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. He earned a peculiar sort of notoriety recently due to his reportedly asking Rice to “rape” his nation via intervention in the peace process.
According to The New York Jewish Week, this bizarre request took place at an informal gathering of “military, academic and media elites” at the residence of the U.S. ambassador to Israel on Sept. 10.
Though Landau told the Jewish Week that he disputed how his vulgar comments had been interpreted, he confirmed that he used the word “rape,” and that he told Rice that it was his “wet dream” to have the opportunity to make the request in person to an U.S. Secretary of State.
Looking to D.C.
Landau, who made aliyah from Britain, is, by definition, something of an anomaly in Israeli society. He is a religious kipah-wearer whose political views place him on the left, along with most of his newspaper’s readers.
But while his tasteless comments have earned him an avalanche of justified criticism, he rightly claims that he speaks for others.
The alliance with the United States has bred in many Israelis a sense of dependence that is far from healthy. Some on the left and right in Israel have acquired the nasty habit of looking to Washington to win political battles for them that they can’t manage on their own.
Landau and those who share his feelings are frustrated that, even though Israelis have elected a number of governments dedicated to achieving peace via territorial withdrawal, none of them has succeeded.
It does little good to point out that blame for this does not rest with the governments of Yitzhak Rabin, Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert. It comes from the Palestinians’ refusal to take “yes” for an answer.
Landau surely knows the new peace talks initiated at the Annapolis summit a few weeks ago will fail because the Palestinian Authority and its supposedly moderate leaders can’t stop Palestinian terrorism, even if they wanted to.
But rather than face facts, the Israeli left and its supporters cling to the notion that if only Washington was not restrained by Israel’s supporters, it could force a reluctant yet grateful Israel to do what is in its best interests.
This is the same argument we hear from John Walt and Stephen Mearsheimer, the academics who have slandered their way to best-seller status by claiming the “Israel lobby” has manipulated U.S. foreign policy.
Their thesis, shared by some in the Jewish community, is that if only Jews and other Americans who care about Israel would stop trying so hard to support it, hard-headed “realists” could force Jerusalem to pull back to the 1967 borders and magically make peace.
In other words, to follow Landau’s disgusting analogy to its logical conclusion, though Israelis may have been saying “no” to pressure, they really mean “yes.”
I’ll leave it to psychiatrists to delve further into the troubled psyches of those whose political fantasies disturbingly resemble the rationalizations of sexist abusers who can’t have their way.
But it must be understood that most Israelis who agree with Landau don’t hate their country. They just believe that Israel’s presence in the territories is a sin that corrupts the nation and will lead to disaster.
Handing over military control of these territories to Palestinian terror factions such as Hamas — which now reigns in Gaza after Israel’s unilateral withdrawal from there in 2005 — would lead to another, more immediate disaster. But this fact doesn’t alter the views of the Israeli leftists.
Blind belief
Yet this blind belief — in withdrawal and the willingness of the Palestinians to make peace, despite all evidence to the contrary — is similar in a sense to their counterparts on the right.
The rightists believe that the Jewish presence in the territories is a Zionist and religious mitzvah; and that holding on to the land transcends the obvious consequences of trying to incorporate localities whose Arab inhabitants undermine Israel’s demographics.
That either set of true believers is sure they know what’s best, however, does not give them the right to attempt to dictate to their government.
Nor is it appropriate for them to urge U.S. leaders to strong-arm Israel’s democratically elected leaders, as Landau tried to do.
As it happens, Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has been making it clear lately that he may be willing to exceed the previous generous offers of withdrawals and recognition of a Palestinian state.
It is also true that if he does that, his government may collapse because the majority of the Knesset won’t go along.
Yet even if Israel agreed to every conceivable U.S. request, it is even less likely that P.A. President Mahmoud Abbas will risk his life by making compromises on refugees and the recognition of Israel as a Jewish state.
Just as it is inappropriate for right-wing American Jews to attempt to dictate policy to Israel from afar, Israeli left-wingers who long for the United States to solve their problems by force are also wandering into dangerous territory.
Facing the truth about an intractable conflict that can, at best, be managed rather than solved is better than living in a fantasy world.
Jonathan S. Tobin is executive editor of the Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia.
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