Peter’s perverse principle

I haven’t weighed in on Peter Beinart’s silly essay in the New York Review of Books. Shmuel Rosner though, asked Beinart a few questions. Beinart’s answers show that he’s ignorant of what Israel is. In particular, Beinart, in one of his responses says:

I don’t think they’re irrelevant. You’re obviously right that the failure of the Oslo process moved Israeli politics to the right. (Although it always bugs me when people who clearly opposed Barak’s willingness to give back most of the West Bank turn around and use Arafat’s rejection of that offer as a reason to oppose land for peace, when they were palpably against it in the first place). But Arafat hasn’t been around for a while now (thank goodness). Instead, you have in Abbas, and particularly Fayyad, far better Palestinian leaders in the West Bank. And yet settlement growth continues essentially unabated (even this year, despite the supposed partial “ban”) and this Israeli government is clearly hostile to the notion of a Palestinian state (despite Netanyahu’s mouthing of the words under US pressure, which Tzipi Livni rightly declared a sham). I can understand the disillusionment in Israel after Camp David and Taba, but it seems wildly counterproductive to use that disillusionment as a reason to foreclose the possibility that a new, better, Palestinian leadership might accept the kind of parameters that Arafat rejected.

Maybe Israel moved a little to the right in the last election. But, as I’ve written many times, Israel’s political landscape is significantly to the left of where it was even 15 years ago. The Palestinians despite the territory and legitimacy they’ve been granted still deny the right for Israel to be a Jewish state. And yes, that’s true even of the so-called moderates whom Beinart lauds.

Gil Troy had an excellent response to Beinart:

Increasingly, championing Israel was deemed “conservative.” The timing was particularly ironic, amid Israel’s Gaza withdrawal, then Ehud Olmert’s centrist government offering the Palestinians generous concessions. Clearly, as a modern capitalist consumerist society Israel is not the socialist workers’ paradise David Ben-Gurion imagined. Israel remains vexed – and tarred – by the continuing Palestinian conflict. Israel’s current governing right-wing coalition includes some parties that have taken appalling anti-democratic positions. And Israel occasionally does stupid things, such as banning Noam Chomsky from the West Bank (then rescinding the ban).

Still, this wave of articles paints Israel not as leaning rightward but as abandoning democracy. These shrill attacks ignore the many counter-balancing forces – and Netanyahu’s own centrist shifts. Avigdor Lieberman is an unpopular, straitjacketed foreign minister, often bypassed. Still, he attracts more attention than moderates like the urbane, cosmopolitan Deputy Prime Minister Dan Meridor.

In neo-conning Israel critics overlook Arab illiberalism. Peter Beinart correctly notes that many young Jews resent hearing about Palestinian terrorism, incitement and intransigence. Casting the Arabs as the victims and Israel as the aggressor constitutes one of the greatest con jobs in modern politics.

Beinart confuses liberalism with virtue. Beinart refuses to credit to Israel for any concessions Israel made – often with devastating results. These results were often at odds with what Beinart and his ilk predicted. If in 1990 you had said “Over the next 20 years Israel will withdraw from major Palestinian population areas, including all of Gaza and after all of these withdrawals the Palestinians will still promote terror and deny Jewish statehood and the world will still blame Israel for failing to make peace” the likely response even from someone like Beinart would have been, “If Israel would do all that, terrorism would stop and if it didn’t stop the world would be sympathetic to Israel.”

Instead Beinart decided that no concession is ever enough unless it makes the Palestinians happy giving the irredentists veto power over peace. The irony with Beinart’s view is that it is decidedly illiberal.

UPDATE: Abraham Miller at Pajamas Media:

Beinart is simply Walt and Mearsheimer circumcised. Beinart’s conclusion about the Jewish establishment astonishes those of us who constantly run up against the actual Jewish establishment, whose vision of Zionism is to the left of even his.

Indeed, the real failure of the Jewish establishment has been its embrace of and commitment to something even more extreme than Beinart’s naïve progressive vision.

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.