And Still More

Ben:

I don't think your attempt to save Gordon's argument from the terms she puts it in works.

Rather than being her "apparent framing" as you put it, the effect of the peace process on Israel's international standing is the very point of her article, so central that Commentary decided to place her own statement of her thesis to this effect on the cover in oversized print. Further, the Editor's Page says that "Evelyn Gordon explores the catastrophic decline in Israel's global standing despite 16 years of taking risks for peace..." The Table of Contents says about the article that " Israel's efforts to resolve its conflict with the Palestinians have... harmed its image".

International or global standing or image are empirical matters and my complaint with Gordon is that she ignores the facts about international standing before and after. She speaks of Israel's standing having fallen to an "unprecedented low" and its standing having "fallen so precipitously...since 1993". But you can't do a before and after comparison without looking at before. You can't long for the good old days of international standing pre peace process without looking at whether the old days were in fact good. Gordon does not do so.

Israel's "narrative" that it and not the Palestinians had the rightful claim to the West Bank and Gaza never played well in terms of Israel's international standing. The international community never accepted Israel's nomenclature of Judea and Samaria in place of the occupied territories, nor did it accept Israel's
annexation of East Jerusalem. The UN Resolutions following the 6 day and Yom Kippur wars called for Israeli withdrawal from territories occupied as a result of the wars. In 1975 the UN General Assembly passed the obnoxious "Zionism is Racism" resolution which remained in effect through Likud led Greater Israel period, and was not revoked until 1991, in the aftermath of the Madrid Peace Conference which opened dialogue on issues such as Palestinian self rule, final status negotiations and the like and is seen by some (like Thomas Friedman) as the beginning of the peace process which continued through Oslo.

Gordon never compares Israel pre peace process-- with, for example, a Zionism is Racism international standing according to the General Assembly-- to Israel post peace process and never explains why she thinks Israel's international standing is worse after than before. So this is why I say that she doesn't begin to make the point she and her Editor and publisher advertise her article as proving.

There may be reasons of Israel's self interest for it not to pursue some of the policies she criticizes. But Gordon wants to argue that the Oslo process was bad PR, judged in terms of whether it worsened Israel's international standing. She doesn't show that at all.

Me:

According to Michael Oren, from the mid seventies on, Israel has been subject to concerted attempts to delegitimize her. In that, she has been portrayed as a racist, colonialist state. These charges in many quarters have become received wisdom. They have become daily conversation in the U.N. and in other international bodies. More recently, Oren says, Israel has been depicted as an apartheid state. Israel is now accused of war crimes and there is talk of international indictments against her political and military leaders. As Oren says,

“...Such calumny was, in past, dismissed as harmless rhetoric. But as the delegitimization of Israel gained prominence, the basis was laid for international measures to isolate Israel and punish it with sanctions similar to those which brought down the South African regime. The academic campaigns to boycott Israeli universities and intellectuals are adumbrations of the type of strictures that could destroy Israel economically and deny it the ability to defend itself against the existential threats posed by terrorism and Iran....”

These comments mesh with the sweep of Gordon’s introductory comments, and if you don't mind, I'll repeat them:

“…Not only is Israel’s standing no better than it was prior to the famous handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat on the White House Lawn in September 1993, it has fallen to an unprecedented low. Efforts to boycott and divest from Israel are gaining strength throughout the West, among groups as diverse as British academics, Canadian labor unions, the Norwegian government’s investment fund, and American churches. Israeli military operations routinely spark huge protests worldwide, often featuring anti-Semitic slogans. References to Israel as an apartheid state have become so commonplace that even a former president of Israel’s closest ally, the United States, had no qualms about using the term in the title of his 2007 book on Israel. European polls repeatedly deem Israel the greatest threat to world peace, greater even than such beacons of tranquility and democracy as Iran and North Korea. Courts in several European countries, including Belgium, Britain, and Spain, have seriously considered indicting Israeli officials for war crimes (though none has actually yet done so). And in October, when the United Nations Human Rights Council overwhelmingly endorsed a report that advocated hauling Israel before the International Criminal Court on war-crimes charges, even many of Jerusalem’s supposed allies refused to vote against the measure. In academic and media circles, it has even become acceptable to question Israel’s very right to exist—something never asked about any other state in the world. None of these developments was imaginable back in the days when Israel refused to talk to the Palestine Liberation Organization, had yet to withdraw from an inch of “Palestinian” land, and had not evacuated a single settlement….”

If you consider the Durban Conference, the pervasive media assault on Israel after the war in Lebanon, and then, a few years later, in Gaza, if you consider the unprecedented prominence anti Israeli sentiment finds in universities round the world, and all the other matters above cited, what is the answer to the "empirical question" of worse now or worse before? At a minimum, it’s not easily answered.

You say, “International or global standing or image are empirical matters and my complaint with Gordon is that she ignores the facts about international standing before and after”. But I persist in thinking that it is too narrow to criticize her essay on the likely unanswerable question of whether it’s worse now than it was before. And that’s because in these matters comparisons are odious: it’s plenty bad enough now. Her underlying point must be that whether or not things are worse now than before (which question ultimately is a distraction)—“Not only is Israel’s standing no better than it was prior to the famous handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat on the White House Lawn in September 1993, it has fallen to an unprecedented low”—the present badness coexists with a seventeen year history of a “deadly” pursuit of peace, the deadliness evident in the data she cites.

Her underlying point is that that coexistence spells out the failure of the policy. How Commentary’s editors choose to highlight her essay and the size of their lede print, I suggest, matter not at all. The driving point of her essay surpasses a debate over “worse now or worse before”.

Here’s Dan Ephron on the mood in Israel these days based on reports on some recent Israeli political science polling: (http://www.newsweek.com/id/228840)

“…By the standard logic of Middle East peacemaking, this should be the perfect time to negotiate a deal. Israelis, after all, have long argued that real talks about land for peace cannot proceed until terrorism stops and some level of security is achieved. But, as so often happens in the Middle East, the standard logic no longer holds. If security was a prerequisite for peacemaking, now it's a goal unto itself. And it's been achieved, Israelis can plausibly argue, through their own hard-nosed measures.

Consider the numbers. Over a six-year period starting in September 2000, about 140 suicide bombers crossed into Israel from the West Bank, killing around 500 Israelis, a huge number for a population of 7 million (though only about one 10th the number of Palestinians killed during the same period). Since mid-2006, the year Israel completed large sections of the new fence around the West Bank (and a wall around parts of Jerusalem), not a single suicide bomber has infiltrated from the area and staged a successful attack. Built in part on Palestinian land, the barrier has generated criticism at home and abroad. But if you set aside the controversy, at least in the short run, the conclusion is clear: the barrier is working.

Gaza has similarly been subdued. In 2008, Palestinians launched around 3,000 rockets at southern Israel, an average of about 250 a month, according to an official tally. (The rockets have caused few casualties but have exacted a psychological and economic toll.) Then, a year ago, Israel waged a controversial war in Gaza. Critics of the campaign have focused, justifiably, on the high number of civilian casualties and the disproportionate use of force. But the results are indisputable: since the war, the number of rocket attacks from Gaza has dropped by 90 percent.

The stability, in turn, has helped Israel's economy. While the global recession plunged other countries into crisis in the past year, nearly all of Israel's indicators have held steady. Tourism, a good gauge of overall welfare, hit a 10-year high in 2008. Astonishingly, the IMF projected recently that Israel's GDP will grow faster in 2010 than that of most other developed countries…"

Gordon herself says the same thing near the end of her essay:

"...Finally, Israel must stop projecting a sense of panic, through both words and deeds, which merely emboldens its enemies. Israel has not only survived for 61 years despite the absence of peace; it has thrived. Its population has increased more than seven-fold; its per capita income has risen nine-fold; it has maintained a strong democracy in a region where democracy is otherwise unknown. And it can continue surviving and thriving without peace for as long as necessary....”

Surely she is saying in contradistinction to, say, the last few years of hapless negotiating by Olmert and Livni, which reflected a defensive Israeli posture consistent with what she calls the “'peace process' culture”, Israel among other things must be clear as to why peace is now at an impasse. She endorses Netanyahu’s approach to these matters by, in part, lauding his speech both at Bar-Illan and to the U.N. General Assembly.

As I say, this ultimately is what her essay is about—a failed policy and the reasons why—and a new way forward.