A Case of the Mondays: The Spectrum of Views on the Arab-Israeli Conflict

A lot of the problems in the debates over the Israel-Palestinian conflict stem from a truncated political gamut. The real gamut ranges from more anti-Israeli than Islamic Jihad to more anti-Arab than the settlers in the West Bank. That allows people who favor one side strongly to present their views as moderate and the views of people who want peace on both sides as extreme.

A debate about strategy is inherently one-sided. Debates about Democratic party strategy are intra-Democratic, so the gamut in them runs from very liberal to centrist, rather than from liberal to conservative. Debates about war are the same: international forums like the UN don't matter much, and intranational ones are similar to partisan ones. Debates about strategy in American foreign policy in the US are always about how to make the US more powerful; Americans aren't any likelier to be anti-American than Chinese are likely to be anti-Chinese.

Although the debate about Israel and Palestine is ostensibly one of morality—the quintessential question is, “Which side is acting more morally?”—in fact it's a very strategic one. Serious left-wing Israelis talk mostly about the good peace will do for Israel; the suffering of the Palestinians is only a side issue. Any Palestinian who will talk about the need for nonviolence because terrorism is inherently wrong will be laughed at.

Obviously, there could be a separate political debate divorced from strategy, just as there are political debates between liberals and conservatives. But there are several disanalogies here that in fact favor the intranational debate. First, as I already mentioned, international forums aren't meaningful enough to be decisive. In the UN it could be possible to strike a balance, but the UN's authority on any issue, especially the Arab-Israeli conflict, is murky at best.

Second, in those countries that do matter, either there is no public debate, or political prejudices go exclusively one way. In the US, the political elite is strongly pro-Israeli. It's not because there are no pro-Palestinians in American politics—for example, almost every isolationist in the US harbors some sympathies for the Palestinians—but they are far less influential than the neo-liberals and neo-conservatives. European countries have a more balanced mix of pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian views, but the people holding them tend to self-segregate into their own newspapers, academic circles, political parties, and so on, and the issue isn't important enough to the public to force an open debate. In the Arab world, pro-Israeli views are typically censored, except when the country in question hates the Palestinians more than the Israelis and has nothing to gain from claiming to support the Palestinian cause.

Roughly, on the pro-Palestinian side, the gamut runs from Fatah, to the party-less Palestinian center, to Hamas, possibly with Islamic Jihad on the fringe. On the pro-Israeli side, it runs from Peace Now to Labor/Kadima to Likud/Israel Beitenu, with the settlers on the fringe. Israeli groups left of Peace Now, like the refuseniks, tend to be mostly in accord with Fatah, while Palestinian groups left of Fatah tend to be very much like Peace Now.

On that gamut, I suspect most people who don't have a nationalist stake in either side will be somewhere between Fatah and Peace Now. That's the view everyone pays lip service to, at least: negotiations between Israel and Palestine should resume, the Palestinians deserve self-determination, the occupation should end, Israel has the right to defend itself from terrorism, and Palestine should crack down on armed groups other than what will become the state. The exact details differ, but that's what most people at least pretend to support.

On both sides, the situation has gotten to the same point the African-American civil rights movement did in the early 1960s. Nobody claims to be for terrorism or for continuing the occupation, except a few people in the minority on both sides. But nobody will do anything about either; the Palestinian center has no political party to turn to, leaving only Hamas and Fatah to clash with each other, and the Israeli center is both too spineless to try to end the occupation and too politically weak lately to succeed even if it tried.

Naturally, people on both sides will object to including each other in the entire gamut. To Israelis, including a party that calls for the destruction of Israel is repugnant. Likewise, to Palestinians it's unacceptable to consider seriously people like Avigdor Lieberman, who has called for bombing civilian targets in Palestine and believes Arab-Israelis are traitors, or settlers who believe it's their God-given right to stay in the West Bank and to oppress the Palestinian inhabitants of the area.

From a more idealistic centrist point of view, those views can be safely excluded, just as such extremes as fascism and communism are excluded from political considerations nowadays. However, from a realist point of view, democrats never excluded fascism and communism while they were politically alive. It so happens that large numbers of people are taking seriously ideologies that call for massacres or even wholesale exterminations. People rarely take other views seriously because they want to; usually they do because they have to without appearing irrelevant. In the current political climate of the debate over the Arab-Israeli conflict, anyone who doesn't consider the reality of views ranging from those of Islamic Jihad to those of the most militant settlers is engaging in some form of preaching to the choir.

Comments

[aguy109]

Thanks for a perceptive post, Alon to say it's a great improvement on some of your previous posts would be patronizing, so I won't say it!
The key problem that you raise here is maybe best defined by the Russian word that is very popular in Israel: ‘balagan’, meaning ‘chaos’. This is prevalent on both sides of the conflict.
Israel’s terrible electoral system, based on strict proportional representation, ensures an abundance of narrow-interest, sectarian political parties and a succession of perpetually unstable weak governments. Almost any small/ medium sized opinion group, like the ones mentioned I this post, can throw its spanner in the works. Moreover, in a thoroughly undemocratic manner, the career of each politician (whether he/she gets a seat in the Knesset parliament or not) is not determined by the voter, but by his/her position on his party’s list, and this position is determined by highly dubious ballots amongst often fictitious ‘party members’, by deals made in smoke-filled rooms at party conventions, or by outright nepotism and bribery. In this chaotic state of affairs, the most talented people stay out of politics, budgets are cut along racial , religious or ethnic lines, well moneyed groups make a killing, and the conflict with Palestinians is often relegated to the side lines. It is extremely hard for any Government to push through radical measures. Often military actions are the only kind of policy that a Government can carry out without being stalled by some flaky religious faction. Israel needs to move to a two-party system, like in Britain or the US, with direct elections This would mean that Jews and Arabs, in mixed constituencies, would be represented by the same Knesset member, and this would create an opportunity to face up to and deal with inequality issues.

On the Palestinian side, society has always been divided in a neo feudal manner. Yassir Arafat founded the PLO-Fatah in 1964 as an umbrella movement, not as a single coherent body. He cleverly allowed the different factions, some supported by Syria, others by Iraq etc. to carry on terror actions independently. Divide and Rule, as Louis XIV said. The terms of the Oslo accords were only binding on those who felt like it, and who were they? Palestinian philosophy is a fluid conception of “continuing struggle” with suicide bombing and shelling of civilians sitting happily alongside talk of ‘negotiations’ and ‘Hudna’ and what not. Of course, this willing surrender to chaos is disastrous for the economy and wellbeing of the people, and goes hand in hand with massive corruption.

Today, with the Mecca ‘agreement’ between Hamas and Fatah, this fluid chaos will simply continue. Abu Mazen , the nominal president with a 30,000 strong ‘police force’ at his command, is not prepared to take the initiative of forging a true government and implement a policy, and the Palestinians will remain a disparate group of clans and factions, and not a true people.

[fred lapides]

When Hamas and Fatah met un der the spo nsorship of Saujdi Arabia and hammered out a deal for cooeration, the Saudis could have at that point said: Make peace with Israel, get them to the table, work out a state for the Palestinians. They did not. What they did do is simply say:work together and continue to call for the destruction of Israel. We will fund you for this.

Israel, like any other nation, will not give back land taken in war without getting a peace agreement in advance.

There are extremes on both sides, as post notes, but renoucning Hmas goal of extermination might convince both sides that thre canbe but a political and not a militarhy solution. Hamas began to feel the heat but the Saudis stepped in and effectively bailed them out to continue their policy o n non-cooperation .

[JonJ]

I'm no Middle East expert for sure, but it seems to me that the Israel-Palestinian conflict could be settled, just as other seemly intractable ones have been, such as the IRA-British conflict. But the only two ways I can imagine this happening would be: 1) Some outside power occupies the whole territory and forces the two sides to stop dead in their tracks and work out a modus vivendi, and prevents all outside countries from intervening. 2) One or both of the Israeli and/or Palestinian publics gets so sick and tired of the situation that they take very strong civil disobedience action -- putting their bodies in the way of the fighters -- to stop the fighting. Obviously, neither of these events is going to happen in the foreseeable future, so unfortunately the conflict will rage on and on. This famous "peace process" is nothing but a sham.

[Omri Ceren]

A more or less reasonable post, Alon. I wonder, though, if there isn't a little bit of slippage there at the end. You write "It so happens that large numbers of people are taking seriously ideologies that call for massacres or even wholesale exterminations". But it seems like there's large and then there's large. While Lieberman has some supporters, they're nowhere near a plurality. Meanwhile, Hamas was elected on an explicitly genocidal platform. And even if it was for social reasons, that certainly doesn't explain the gains made by independent radicals in local Palestinian elections or by Islamic Jihad in the general election.

Or to put it another way: I'm concerned for two reasons by your comparison between PIJ and the settlers. First, the settlers don't conduct campaigns of mass civilian murder - at worst, there are isolated incidents. Second, when those incidents do occur they're condemned by the entire spectrum of the Israeli public. Even Lieberman won't publicly countenance settler vigilantism - and that makes a difference when we're talking about the political spectrum of what's acceptable to say or do out loud.

Meanwhile, as you state, to condemn terrorism as such is not even on the radar of Palestinian public discourse. And that, too, is a that makes a difference.