Coming Not To Praise Sheldon, But To Bury Him

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's eulogy for Sheldon Adelson doesn't mince words: It's titled "I hate everything Sheldon Adelson loved about Israel". A taste:

Adelson loved Israel and contributed much to a variety of Israeli organizations. And yet, which Israel did he love? Adelson loved an Israel that expels Palestinians from areas under our control. He stated this explicitly on a number of occasions.

Adelson loved an Israel that ignores its Arab citizens and refuses to recognize their equal rights. Adelson believed in a right-wing, nationalistic and fundamentalist Israel, though he himself was not a religious person. He also thought that if Israel had nuclear capability, it should use this power against Iran.

Adelson contributed to public discourse in Israel by fueling hatred toward elements that did not identify with the extreme Right, and that were unwilling to bear the dominance of settlers and their supporters.

[...] 

Sheldon loved an Israel that most of the residents living here don’t even want. He preached a racism that is inimical to us. He supported discrimination against Arabs, which we are definitely not prepared to go along with. He hated leftists, and did his utmost to make Israeli society fractious. He encouraged internal disputes and rivalries among ourselves, even though he himself didn’t live here.

Everything he loved, I hate.

Everything I love about Israel has nothing to do with Adelson.

May he rest in peace.

Woof. But hardly undeserved. (H/T) 

 

Olmert Blames American Right-Wing for Blocking Peace Deal

I just feel compelled to point this out: Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert says that it was right-wing American dollars that prevented his peace plan from going through back in 2008. He didn't name names, but we know the sorts of folks who is referring to. They like to call themselves pro-Israel. They're anything but. And as far as Olmert is concerned, that Israel didn't get a peace deal signed with the Palestinians is directly on their heads.

As If We Didn't Know Already

John J. Mearsheimer, guest-blogging at Stephen Walt's place (good to see the old gang back together), has a post up which demonstrates quite clearly that he really doesn't understand the dynamics of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. It's not that his predictive analysis is wrong -- he is quite right that if Israel pursues a "Greater Israel" policy unchecked, it will mean the eventual demise of the state. But beyond that, he ... how to put this gently? He doesn't know what he's talking about.

First, neither Ehud Barak nor Avigdor Lieberman "are committed to creating a Greater Israel." Barak proved his two-state bona fides at Camp David and Taba, and his Labor Party has been the primary mover in making the two-state solution official Israeli policy for nearly two decades. We can debate whether Barak should have brought Labor into government absent a commitment by Netanyahu to a two-state solution (one he wouldn't get), but there is no reason to believe that Barak will affirmatively use his position to try and create a "Greater Israel" that he has spent his entire political career trying to undermine.

Lieberman may be a racist, fascist thug, but Mearsheimer clearly doesn't know anything about his specific and peculiar brand of politics. Lieberman is most certainly not an advocate of "transferring" Palestinian Israelis (Israeli Arabs) out of the country -- a term which has a very specific meaning (essentially, expelling them). Lieberman wishes to redraw the borders of Israel so that predominantly Israeli Arab villages are incorporated into a new Palestinian state (and, in exchange, primarily Jewish settlement blocs are kept by Israel). This policy is inherently impossible to achieve without creating a Palestinian state. It is true that Lieberman doesn't see the creation of Palestine to be the immediate item on the agenda, but that's not because he's pursuing a "transfer" policy domestically.

Finally, Mearsheimer also doesn't understand the politics of the American pro-Israel community. He asks why "Israel's Jewish backers" think "Greater Israel is good for the Jews." Well, there's a simple answer to that: We don't. The settlements and the idea of Greater Israel are not particularly popular amongst American Jews. And even many (not all) of the more conservative Jewish organizations are not affirmatively in favor of Greater Israel or pro-settlement. They just either don't see the settlements as that big a deal, or think of them as a distraction from the "real" issue of Palestinian terrorism and Israel's security.

What American Jews tend to battle over is the degree to which settlements should be a primary item on the agenda. There are many Jews who will say that the settlements are a bad thing, but we have to deal with the problem of terrorism first. I think that's short-sighted -- I think the settlements are a major issue that has to be dealt with now, because they are continually aggravating the conflict, don't make Israel safer, represent an injustice to the Palestinians, and constitute a ticking time bomb on Israel's ability to maintain itself as Jewish and democratic. But that's the axis where the debate is.

I think the resistance many Jews have to putting the settlements front and center is the degree to which this conflict has been moralized into a game of "who is the worse evildoer." In the discursive climate we have, where there is nothing stupid, only something evil, saying the settlements need to be one of the primary items on the agenda table is read as saying that they are equally morally wrongful to, say, a Palestinian rocket attack on Sderot. Whether they are or not, though, is immaterial to Mearsheimer's completely correct observation that they still are a "remarkably foolish" policy. But until we can talk about Israel that way -- until not everything about the conflict is collapsed into this moral gamesmanship -- I think this debate will still be live.

But that's neither here nor there. At least in my lifetime, it hasn't been Greater Israel versus two-state solution. On that question, Greater Israel is in the definitive minority. The big debate is whether the degrees to which we should direct our energies towards pressuring Israel over the settlements versus pressuring Palestinians on terrorism and extremism. It's a debate I'm committed to winning, because like Mearsheimer and former PM Olmert I think the path Israel is going down with the settlements is suicidal. But Mearsheimer doesn't help his case when he fundamentally misunderstands the mindsets of the relevant players.

The Anti-Settler Turn

An old friend of mine remarked to me a few weeks ago that he thought my opinions on Israel had changed dramatically since we first met. I was skeptical: I always (well, at least since we met) supported a two-state solution. I always was a strong advocate that liberals and leftists pay more attention to the rampant anti-Semitism latent in Palestinian terrorism (and the global reaction to it). Insofar as I have changed, it's more a matter of focus: noting and calling out the human rights abuses committed by Israel and Israelis, while still not letting that excuse Palestinian acts of terror.

But one area in which I think I may have changed pretty substantially has been my views on the settlers. I wouldn't say I used to be "pro-settler", per se, but I didn't think of them as a huge deal. People living in houses in the desert were not "obstacles to peace". I wasn't committed to letting them stay -- but it rang uncomfortable to me that "peace" was taken to mean a Judenrein Palestinian state.

In recent times though, I've begun to revise my opinion. And I think the events surrounding the evacuation of settlers in Hebron have crystallized this instinct, not just for me, but for many other pro-Israel commentators. In their actions, the settlers have revealed themselves to be not just "obstacles to peace", but murderous, terrorist thugs. Their response to the Hebron evacuation was to launch what was called by both Ha'aretz and Israel's own Justice Minister a "pogrom". Marty Peretz says "shame on us". Eamonn McDonaugh of the Z-Word blog calls the settlers "religiofascists" who need to be "crushed" by the Israeli government.

Israeli commentators warn that the settlers, left unchecked, could lead to "civil war". Other writers continue to urge that we take the settler threat seriously as something that can single-handedly derail the peace process. Steve Clemons suggests officially labeling extremist terrorist factions working to propagate violence as "terror organizations", allowing their assets to be frozen.

The point being, we seem to be seeing (inside and outside of Israel) a broad-based backlash against the crypto-fascist settler movement whose primary political agenda at this point is to sabotage the peace process. The trick, now, is to get that outrage translated into some action. The Israeli government, slowly and belatedly, seems to be waking up to the threat that radical right-wing settlers pose to the state's liberal democratic character. And pro-Israel groups in the US are starting to recognize that the settlers are an insult to the very idea of Israel that they want to protect. Together, they can get something done. But it will take guts, and it will take courage.

Count me in.

UPDATE: Current (but outgoing) Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert joins the chorus:

"We are the children of a people whose historic ethos is built on the memory of pogroms," Olmert said. "The sight of Jews firing at innocent Palestinians has no other name than pogrom. Even when Jews do this, it is a pogrom.

"As a Jew, I am ashamed that Jews could do such a thing."

He was addressing the riots last week in which Jewish settlers -- angry over the forced evacuation of a contested house in Hebron -- attacked Palestinians, setting fire to their houses.

In a statement released by his office, Olmert told the Cabinet that he chose the term "pogrom" -- a Yiddish word meaning an organized massacre, usually referring to such attacks against Jews -- "after much thought."

"I formulate these words with the greatest care that I can," the prime minister said.

The CNN article's headline says Olmert called the events "tantamount" to a pogrom. I didn't see the caveat.