Why There Cannot Be Peace Between Israel and the Palestinians

If you are wondering why Israel recently turned to the right once again, read the following.


Missing Peace
by Douglas J. Feith, Foreign Policy, January 21, 2013

Israel votes on Jan. 22, and a remarkable feature of its election campaign has been the way politicians on the left have shunned the peace slogans they passionately promoted in the salad days of the peace process.

"Peace Now!" "Land for peace." "There's no alternative to peace." After Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization chief Yasir Arafat sealed the Oslo Accords in September 1993 with their famous handshake at President Bill Clinton's White House, these were proud exclamations of Israel's "peace camp." But for many Israelis, sad history over the last 20 years has discredited such talk.

These elections are expected to keep Benjamin Netanyahu of the conservative Likud Party as prime minister of a coalition government. Left-of-center parties have been campaigning about economic and cultural issues but avoiding talk of peace. Israel's Haaretz newspaper notes that the chief of the Labor Party "has decided to play down her party's position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict" and that "issues of peace and the territories have been marginalized in the pre-election rhetoric."

Why has the left changed its tune? Israelis in general continue to crave peace, but the state of Palestinian politics leaves them hopeless. According to recent Dahaf Institute and Smith Consulting polls, more than two-thirds of Israelis support the creation of a non-threatening Palestinian state alongside the Jewish state. If extra security provisions are assumed, support rises to 75 percent. But, as Dahaf reports, many Israelis do not believe "that the Palestinians will uphold the conditions of peace and especially those elements dealing with security."

There are grounds for this skepticism. In the Oslo process, Israel gave governmental power to the new Palestinian Authority (PA), including control over the territories in which virtually all the Arabs in the West Bank and Gaza live. Israeli prime ministers from parties on the left and the right then offered previously unthinkable concessions, including the sharing of Jerusalem and land swaps involving pre-1967 Israeli territory. In 2005, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon of Likud withdrew completely and unilaterally from Gaza, forcibly removing more than 8,000 Israeli settlers.

Terrorism against Israelis, however, intensified after the Rabin-Arafat handshake, with PA support. In 2000, Arafat, then the PA president, rejected an extraordinarily forthcoming peace offer from Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak (of the Labor Party) and launched the Second Intifada, which lasted more than four years and cost more than 1,000 Israeli lives. After Israel withdrew from Gaza, Hamas, an Islamist terrorist organization affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, won parliamentary elections there and seized executive power, forcibly expelling PA officials.

In 2006 and again in 2012, Palestinians provoked wars with Israel by firing rockets from Gaza indiscriminately against Israeli civilians. Palestinian schools, whether run by the PA or Hamas, persist in teaching hatred of Israel and Jews and exhorting children to armed resistance. Rather than move toward compromise to end the conflict with Israel, Palestinian leaders have been competing violently with each other in vowing eternal resistance and rejection. Even PA officials, relative moderates compared with Hamas leaders, demand that Israel accept the "return" of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian "refugees," which would amount to Israel's destruction.

It is hardly surprising that Israelis no longer mass at political rallies to shout "Peace Now" and "There's no alternative to peace." Those slogans reflected the belief that the key impediment to peace was Israeli policy. Israel's Labor Party promoted that idea during Likud's ascendancy from 1977 to 1992. Labor politicians argued that the Palestinians were ready for a land-for-peace deal, but that Likud was more interested in controlling the West Bank and Gaza than in making peace. "Peace Now" was a way of saying that Israel could readily achieve lasting peace simply by electing Labor and changing its own policies. By insisting "there's no alternative to peace," Israelis weren't actually suggesting that they would die or commit suicide if the Arab side refused them peace; rather, they were assuming that peace was within Israel's control and rejecting it was inconceivable.

Those slogans helped elect Yitzhak Rabin as prime minister in 1992. He and other Labor strategists wanted to rid Israel of most of the West Bank and Gaza for Israel's own reasons -- to relinquish "the burden of the occupation" -- but they had long thought they could trade the territories for a peace agreement that would end the conflict. After a year of exasperating diplomacy, Rabin discovered that was not possible. He then decided that "divorcing" Israel from the territories was more important than peace.

Accordingly, Rabin accepted the Oslo Accords, which were dressed up as a land-for-peace agreement but really amounted to a unilateral Israeli withdrawal. Arafat understood from day one that his various peace promises were not really obligatory, and that Israeli withdrawal would proceed whether or not he complied. By and large, he did not comply. When critics of the Oslo process complained that Arafat was cheating and remained an enemy, Israeli officials answered that one must make peace with one's enemies, not with one's friends. This question-begging reply, despite its obvious absurdity, was praised as ironic sagacity by the "peace camp."

But a nation cannot sustain a profound denial of reality forever. Peace is not a unilateral choice for Israel. The notion that Israelis can make peace with people committed to killing them is, not to put too fine a point on it, impractical. Hence the widespread despair in Israel about peace on this election day.

The Israeli “left,” by and large, isn’t really left at all. Merely, they are somewhere right of center and that’s because the Israeli left subscribes to the ideology that insists on an ethnocentrically exclusivist state. This ideology necessarily rejects the Palestinians’ Right of Return. It is this rejection of the Palestinians’ right that has led the Israelis to oppress the Palestinian peoples. As long as the Israeli people, both “left” and right, adhere to this repugnant and hypocritical (ethnocentric oppression is the rationalization for the creation of the state of Israel, after all) ideology and policy there will never be peace in Israel/Palestine.

In regard to denial of reality, the reality that the Israelis are denying is that they cannot have their cake and eat it too.

Where has there been a historical precedent for a right of return, after a war?

I am not talking about a civil war, but a war where part of a population, in effect, sided with the invading foreigners.

I am not disagreeing with your view point but rather questioning it. If the Palestinians had the upper hand do you think that the Jews should have any rights to the land that their ancestors occupied?

I know what you are driving at. But keep in mind that the Pals never had a country. The Jews had every right to join other Jews living in the area and work to set up a country. They succeeded in setting up a country, which was recognized, and the Pals chose not to set up one. The Pals, and their Arab allies, instead chose to become a de facto terrorist organization whose goal is to destroy Israel.

Loathe as I am to get involved in this particular issue...I will do so in a VERY LIMITED WAY.

Your suggestion here, Advocate, that the Jews "joined other Jews living in the area; worked to set up a country; and succeeded...

is, to put it kindly, fanciful.

I don't know what it is that you find fanciful about facts, Frank,

That's exactly what was done. The issue, as always, is HOW it was done and HOW it continues to be done.

There were Jews who lived in the area for centuries.

Absolutely. You are totally, 100% correct on that.

And there were Arabs who lived in the area for centuries also.

Fact is, for most of those centuries the Jews and the Arabs got along relatively peacefully. Oh, they fought once in a while...but compared with what goes on now, they got along VERY peacefully. Compared with how Europeans got along with one another during those centuries...they got along VERY, VERY peacefully.

I wonder...what do you think has changed?

I wager that one reason for the change is the growth of fundamentalism in the Arab world. For instance, the Arab schools teach that Jews are pigs and worse.

Do you think that it could be possible that "some" Jews have the wrong mind set as well?

Might be...but the Arabs have always thought ill of the Jews...and the Jews thought ill of the Arabs in return.

C'mon, Advocate. See if you can find anything else that might account for the fact that there is constant hatred and warfare between the factions over there right now.

Lemme give you a hint: For the centuries that we talked about...when they were relatively at peace with one another...there was no State of Israel.

See if you can work it out from that hint.

Lemme give you a hint, Frank. The biggest terrorist nation on the planet stuck its big nose in there.

Maybe you can wrap you mind around a few things.

There was nothing fundamentally wrong with establishing the state of Israel in Palestine. The Arabs had no right of exclusive ownership. Although the Pals hate this, Israelis have the right to defend themselves. So how can I account for the Arabs' irrational hatred of Jews and Israel?

sorry to shove my twopence in but...



so do the palestinians, but that's hard to do without an army, airforce, etc, against one of the worlds top nuclear powers heavily backed (logistically, financially, and morally) by the U.S.

that's why the palestinians resort to stone throwing, and rocket attacks...it's all they have to fight with.

The Palestinians are not engaging in self defense. They are engaging in hostile aggression. Therefore, any right to defend themselves that they might have, does not apply to their conflict with Israel.

No. The reason the Palestinians resort to such actions is because they like to murder civilians.

You mentioned there have been Jews living in that area for centuries.

I agreed with you...and noted that there have been Arabs living there also.

For centuries they have lived there relatively peacefully.

Now they are not living together peacefully.

What is different now?

Try answering the question, Advocate. You know the answer. We all do.

oh sorry i forgot the israelis aren't actively settling on palestinian land, that the palestinian way of life isn't crap because sanctions, beyond what is deemed acceptable by the international community, have been imposed on them by the israelis (concrete for example is forbidden, handy when the israelis are destroying your infrastructure), israeli soldiers indiscriminate targetting of children???? noooooo that doesn't happen at all. or how about the big wall they didn't erect separating palestinian families....wouldnt you resort to hostile agression when you can't protect your own people and territory from equally hostile actions?

open your eyes. israel are no saints in this. i'm not justifying palestinian tactics, just saying that israel are equally as aggressive (more so even) and palestine have no infrastructure to deal with it.