Jewish
Frontier

It has been a most unusual period since the last issue of Jewish Frontier appeared, and the Israeli incursion — Operation Defensive Shield — that paralyzed world politics since then has done much to reveal the cliched "true colors" of the participants in this drama.

Most damaging is what captured files from the offices of the Palestinian Authority revealed. In short, documents detailed the involvement of nearly the entire Palestinian Authority in attacks against Israeli civilians and military checkpoint personnel. Although this revelation was initially buried under media reports of a supposed massacre in Jenin, enough now know that the real tragedy behind the incursion is the unmasking of a partner who is no partner at all. Even the Arafat alternatives, such as Jibril Rajoub, who had held some form of credibility with the Israeli government and the American intelligence community because of his sometimes vicious crackdowns on Hamas and Islamic Jihad, is under suspicion. This is a bad sign all around since it has made evident to the Israelis, the United States, the European Union, and Arab states that the Palestinian Authority has become a "loose cannon" on the world political stage, constantly undermining American diplomatic efforts, the stability of Arab regimes, and even the European Union's ostensible pro-Palestinian humanitarian efforts.

Of course, revelations of the PAs complicity in attacks on Israel had little effect on changing the view on the street in the Arab world, which is so mired in disinformation that no mountain of evidence can persuade Arab peoples of anything other than what they wish to believe. Palestinian officials have mastered the art of the outrageous claim, from the Israeli fabrication of evidence of PA support for suicide bombings to the massacre that never happened in Jenin. Sadly, the Palestinians have joined the rest of their Middle Eastern brethren, who devised such classics as the Mossad planned the destruction of the World Trade Center; footage intimating Osama bin Ladens knowledge of the attacks were American (or again Israeli) creations; video of Palestinians dancing in the streets after the September 11 attacks was old footage from their celebration of Iraqi attacks on Israel during the Gulf War; and my personal favorite: recent suicide bombings have been the work of Israeli rightists seeking to sabotage diplomatic efforts. It hardly seems worth the time combating these laughable assertions in the Western press were the political left not so desperate to believe anything that can justify a cause that continuously embarrasses them and the Arab press looking for ever greater heaps of dirt to throw on Israel for lack of anything useful to say about their own pathetic regimes.

Most interesting is the way Operation I Defensive Shield has played out in the world of Arab internal politics and foreign affairs. The very extremism that Arab governments have fomented among their peoples and even export to one another has come back to haunt them. Arab peoples have for years seen their plight reflected in that of the Palestinians, which their own oppressive governments have always succored by letting them express their anger towards the "Zionist entity" on the streets of Amman, Riyadh, and Cairo. It made for the perfect distraction from the real woes of their present regimes. But now this tool of manipulation has come to haunt the AJab world, forcing moderation upon it. Despite the Saudi plan, it is becoming apparent that Arab states would probably be willing to accept any terms for peace in the region, if but the two parties would actually engage in such a process. Alas, with Sharon and Arafat at the helms, neither of whom they control, it appears that they are out of luck, and so have resorted to their last tactic, pressuring the United States to bear down on Israel. Unfortunately, they have run into another wall that they had not anticipated: George Bush and the Republicans.

George Bush's support of Israel has been both invigorating and worrisome. Certainly the Jewish community has been surprised by the loyalty of the Bush administration, and it suggests not mere politics but a question of personality, too. Bush cannot stand Arafat. His inclination to lie, particularly about the Karine A episode, and his purposeful jeopardization of White House plans to remove Saddam Hussein have become slaps in the face of the most powerful world leader. One senses that Bush has taken this personally — and perhaps rightly so. But there are more wrinkles than this. One such is that the Bush administration has expressed a significantly stronger commitment to democratic regimes, including the imposition of them by force, if necessary, than prior administrations. Notwithstanding the rotting influence of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, no one can argue the fact that the country is still the only true democracy in the region and responds as a democracy to opportunities and crises; the same cannot be said of its neighbors and even of the the so-called "democratically elected" Yassir Arafat (who is still commonly referred to in Palestinian circles as "chairman," which reveals a great deal about the Palestinian Authority's utter lack of commitment to true democracy). Even calls for reform of the PA are viewed with increasing skepticism by all — including the Palestinians.

Moreover there is a cultural disconnect that has placed Bush in Sharon's corner rather than Arafat's. As one Wall Street Journal guest editorialist had put it, the key disjunction between Americans and Palestinians is quite simple: they don't share the same set of values for how one enacts political change. The path of the gun and the explosive belt, no matter how right the cause, has won few, if any, American hearts, whether we're talking about the Palestinians, the IRA, the Tamil Tigers, or Abu Sayyaf.

Bush's detestation of Arafat and American disgust with Palestinian tactics are not the only factors either. Politics has its role, too, and Republicans, as a result of the crisis, have uncovered opportunities to advance their causes. Anyone who knows the world of political lobbying recognizes that political action committees give to both sides. In this case, the Republicans have found in siding with Israel an opportunity to capture money that AIPAC often gives to Democrats. Moreover, they've nosed out another in moving Jewish voters and political money towards the support of increased domestic oil drilling. Intimations of Arab threats to withhold or curtail oil supplies may well give that courtship some momentum — enough such that even the most liberal Jew must give pause and ask him or herself what is more important: the preservation of the Jewish state or a rare bird species in Alaska? With Bush's unabashed support of Israel, a new friendship — and loss of a Democratic constituency — could be in the making.

Alas, no opportunity comes without a threat. The latest to-do over Cuba is illustrative. Former President Jimmy Carter's plea for easing trade and travel restrictions to Cuba has underlined how beholden Republican and Democratic administrations have been and remain to the Cuban-American community and, more importantly, Florida's electoral votes. The heightening of Florida's importance in the last presidential election has placed enormous power in the hands of a new one-issue swing vote: the state's elderly Jewish population. Certainly the butterfly-ballot debacle of 2000 has the Bush administration thinking about its political vulnerability in Florida, especially among this class of voters whom that catastrophe disproportionately affected. What better way to respond than showing an unswerving loyalty to Israel?

And then there are the Europeans. Their reactions to recent events have been among the most revealing and perhaps the most disheartening. The spate of anti-Israel rallies that swept European capitals, the vicious acts of anti-Semitism that reared their ugly heads in France and Belgium, and the threat of European boycotts against Israel do more than raise old specters. They reveal the paralyzed politics of a Western Europe that has not shed the extremism of right and left that has characterized the behavior of its citizens for so many centuries. Indeed, Europe's growing population of disaffected Arab voters unveils how beholden these nations have become to this new swing constituency — particularly France, where that population has grown by leaps and bounds. In short, despite the many noises European leaders have made regarding the newfound openness of their immigration policies, they will say just about anything to gain the vote of the very people whom their nations systematically discriminate against. This crass manipulation of political sentiment not only bespeaks the bankruptcy of European politics but of the Left in particular, underscoring how willfully Europe has ignored its own silent majorities. No surprise that the rightist Le Pen beat out the socialist Jospin in recent French elections, creating one of the more interesting ironic twists in European left politics and for the Arab constituency it is trying to woo. Having viciously attacked the only democracy in the Mideast, the very Arab Europeans that demonstrated so vehemently alongside the Paul Boves of this world found themselves thrown into the same pit as the Jews by the fascistic Le Pen, who would like nothing more than to see Jews and Arabs alike ejected from a more Christian France.

Finally, one comes to Israel itself. Sharon has always purported that, as a hawk, only he can make the peace that Israel needs to guarantee its security and future prosperity. However, he has shown himself to be something of an old ideologue, trying to recreate a situation in the 1980s that is no longer the reality of the twenty-first century. Support for Defensive Shield has been vigorous in Israel, and not surprising in light of the revelations concerning the Palestinian Authority. But even the lowest nitwit recognizes that continued expansion of settlements in the West Bank is a recipe for disaster on nearly every front possible: it jeopardizes the lives of Israeli settlers and soldiers; frustrates any progress for peace with the Palestinians, regardless of leadership; compounds the worsening threat of Islamic insurgency in Arab nations that have sought to moderate; provides additional leverage for Palestinian extremists; drains the military of its effectiveness; costs money better spent elsewhere (anywhere, in fact); and so on ad nauseum. Sharon, however, appears to have found a friend in Bush only inasmuch as Bush has found few real real friends in the Arab world, between Arafat's duplicity; Saudi Arabia's continued export of Islamic extremism; Egypt's utter economic and political inefficiency; the terroristic behavior and support of such by Syria, Iraq, Iran, Yemen, and the United Arab Emirates; the encouragement of hatred for the United States by AI-Jazeera and for Israel among the panoply of government-controlled Arab newspapers; and so forth. Indeed, at this point in time, the argument among the Jewish left that Sharon must be reined in, particularly on the issue of settlements, has almost nothing to do with worrying about the withdrawal of American aid or pandering to Arab cries of outrage and everything to do with the deleterious effect of such a policy on Israel's soul as a nation and integrity as a democracy.

This leads us in the end to the position of the Jewish left, which has been paralyzed the last year and looks to be so for the next few. With respect to the far left, notwithstanding the well-intended excoriations of the Meretz crowd, there is little patience in Israel (and even less among generally rightward-leaning American Jewish community) for criticism of Israeli government policy in light of the duplicity, nay-saying, corruption, propagandizing, and terroristic behavior (or support of such behavior) among Palestinians and other Arab nations. The hope that the Palestinian leadership could distinguish itself from other Arab national entities — in light of the initially secular, pluralistic, and highly educated population within the West Bank — by acting that much more enlightened has been dashed, corrupted by Arafat's traditional tactics, the very same that nearly destroyed Jordan in the early 1970s and did wreck the fragile balance of pre-Syria-controlled Lebanon in the late 1970s. For the center left, the picture has been more troubling. Palestinian attacks have given Labor the cover to participate in the ruling coalition, while permitting it — within reasonable limits — to position itself as a restraining influence on its more bellicose Likud partner. This restraining hand is dubious at best and some have argued —tain red lines must be drawn for continued Labor participation in the government. The more extreme of the two that Mallow has identified is the vicious suggestion of forcibly transferring Arab populations. The second — namely increasing the number of settlements — is the more complex of the two for the simple reason that Labor itself oversaw significant increases in the number of settlements and has shown little willingness to break away on this issue.

Amos Elon, in a May 23, 2002 New York Review of Books article, clarifies that matter, illustrating Lhow beholden democracies can become to bad policies because of swing votes. In the case of Israel, that swing vote comprises those who even if they don't support settlements, at least oppose their dismantling. This inevitably raises the issue of whether Labor has the strength of spirit to break from the government on this matter, risk possible election loss, and assume the role of a vocal opposition. Present signs indicate that it neither has that strength nor, without a significant change in the behavior of the Palestinian leadership, has even good reason to leave the government. In the end, this suggests a troubling scenario. Palestinian advocacy of violence — official or unofficial — has essentially deprived the Israeli left of the political strength to stand in the way of further settlements. Of course, Palestinians may well argue — and rightly so — that a Labor government never did much in the first place to curtail settlements, raising the even scarier specter that the Israeli left has not even the strength of spirit to counteract its own worst instincts should it be given the opportunity to lead again on this matter.

Today the talk is of unilateral separation and democratization of the Palestinian Authority. These two move along separate tracks raising another set of questions concerning intentions. Might not unilateral separation provide Arafat with an excuse not to democratize since such a separation puts an end to the need for a more democratic PA to negotiate with? How does a security fence along the Green Line address the presence of settlements and the vast tracts of unoccupied land around them that Israeli forces continue to hand over to settlement dwellers? Is it not more likely that the fence Sharon ultimately wishes to build will surround Palestinian cities rather than the West Bank itself, thus creating islets of trapped Palestinians whose movements are continuously subject to Israeli permission? Unilateral separation — fence and all — only makes sense with the removal or abandonment of settlements and their inhabitants. Democratization of PA only makes sense if the ultimate goal is to further negotiations for a bilateral arrangement. Much has been revealed since Operation Defensive Shield. But much remains unanswered, and so it appears that not all true colors have come to light.

Bennett Lovett-Graff is managing editor of Jewish Frontier.