Peace With Whom, Exactly?

Peace With Whom, Exactly?

Sulzman, a recent reader who attributes positions to me which I don't hold, comments:

What exactly don't you think Obama doesn't get about Israelis? I think he gets Israelis exactly right, which is that they've become complacent about the peace process, and perhaps understandably so, given developments over the last 10 years. But for the U.S. that's a big problem. I thought this article by Tom Friedman today pretty much got it right.

The Friedman column is here, and indeed makes a similar point: that Israelis no longer care about making peace.

In a truly weird development, Fake Ibrahim supplies the answer, though of course his intentions were rather the opposite:

One year after the Israeli invasion of Gaza, people you were acquainted with continue to die at the border. In the past two weeks a foreign worker and three soldiers were killed: compare that to less than 30 Israeli deaths in the whole Qassam years. It looks like Cast Lead was a failure. How many Peretz's are you prepared to sacrifice before you admit that force alone won't bring you security?

Whether the Gaza Operation was successful or not, it's still too early to know. It brought a year of calm, that's beyond argument; what happens now we don't know, but can hope that the calm will return. In either case, the answer to your question, Fake Ibrahim, is that we'll sacrifice as many people as we need to sacrifice, and for as long as it takes even if it be another century or two, but we won't give up. Or to put it more bluntly, we'll make every reasonable effort not to sacrifice anyone, but if needs be, we'll keep at it until the Palestinians decide the conflict is no longer worth the sacrifices it demands of them.

Yet the mystifying part of the story is that uninformed and malicious Fake Ibrahim gets it, while Sulzamn, who was here not long ago, and Friedman, whose profession it ought to be to know better, don't. Fake Ibrahim understands that we can't be enjoying the lack of peace and the losses of life this requires, while Friedman thinks

To put it another way, the collapse of the peace process, combined with the rise of the wall, combined with the rise of the Web, has made peacemaking with Palestinians much less of a necessity for Israel and much more of a hobby. Consciously or unconsciously, a lot more Israelis seem to believe they really can have it all: a Jewish state, a democratic state and a state in all of the Land of Israel, including the West Bank — and peace.

Does the name Ehud Olmert ring a bell? He won an election here in 2006 by promising we'd leave the West Bank even without peace, and then in 2008 (September 2008: that's all of 18 months ago) offered the "moderate" Palestinians not only 100% of the West Bank but even East Jerusalem. The response? There never was one. Abu Mazen never responded, hoping (correctly, as it turned out) that Obama would be elected and he'd wring more concessions from Israel. (Well, he was right about Obama. It remains to see if Obama manages to deliver: I expect not).

Friedman's column - like most of the discourse about all the things the Israelis "must understand", is arrogant, uninformed, unintelligent, and coming from someone with his pay-grade, offensive. Israeli cab drivers and tomato merchants are better informed about the details of this area: and they have to be, since it's their lives, or the lives of their children, which will be lost if the wrong decisions are made - or more accurate, whenever the wrong decisions are made.

Newsflash for the ignoramusi, from the White House down: we understand our situation, and don't much like it. Sadly, all possible alternatives at this stage are worse. Those of you with true power, if there are any of you, might try to help by convincing the Palestinians to make a deal. But if you don't have that power - and you probably don't - then at least stop preachifying. It makes you look unserious.

As a former Lefty and current centrist, it pains me that you've got to go all the way to The Weekly Standard to find thoughtful descriptions of how destructive the Obama policies are, and how dangerous for the people who live here, but there you have it. Here. Then again, perhaps you don't need to go to the Weekly Standard. Simply read the mainstream, PA- ("Moderate")-controlled press. Here, translated into English.

Originally posted by Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations