APRIL 24, 2014
LONDON — Hearing an Indian official talk the other day about Delhi’s booming arms trade and ever-closer relationship with Israel, I had a thought that also struck me while listening to Israeli businessmen in Beijing. The idea may be summed up in three words: It is sustainable.
“Pivot to Asia” is a term that might be applied to Israel. Its trade with China has boomed, reaching more than $8 billion in 2013 from a pittance when diplomatic relations were established in 1992 (the same year as with India). Europe huffs and puffs about the West Bank settlements; Asia does business. India has already bought sea-to-sea missiles, radar for a missile-intercept system and communications equipment from Israel.
Tel Aviv, one of the world’s most attractive cities, has a boom-time purr about it. For all the talk of its isolation — and all the efforts of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (B.D.S.) movement — Israel has an economy as creative as it is successful. Yes, it is sustainable.
Behind its barriers and wall, backed by military might, certain of more or less unswerving American support, technologically innovative and democratically stable, Israel has the power to prolong indefinitely its occupation of the West Bank and its dominion over several million Palestinians. The Jewish state has grown steadily stronger in relation to the Palestinians since 1948. There is no reason to believe this trend will ever be reversed. Holding onto all the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River, while continuing to prosper, is feasible. This, after all, is what Israel has already done for almost a half-century.
It is time to retire the unsustainability nostrum. Facile and inaccurate, it distracts from the inconvenient truth of Israel’s sustainable success.
Throughout this year the Obama administration has pushed the unsustainability argument to make its case for peace. “Today’s status quo, absolutely to a certainty, I promise you 100 percent, cannot be maintained,” Secretary of State John Kerry said in February. “It is not sustainable. It is illusionary. There’s a momentary prosperity, there’s a momentary peace.”
More recently, President Obama told Jeffrey Goldberg of Bloomberg View that his question to Benjamin Netanyahu was: “If not now, when? And if not you, Mr. Prime Minister, then who?”
Obama also said of Israel: “There comes a point where you can’t manage this anymore, and then you start having to make very difficult choices. Do you resign yourself to what amounts to a permanent occupation of the West Bank?”
But that “point” of unmanageability is a vanishing one. Permanent occupation is what several ministers in Netanyahu’s coalition government advocate. Backed by the evidence, they are certain it can be managed. They are right.
Of course, manageability does not equal desirability. There is no consent of the governed in the West Bank. Dominion over another people is morally corrosive; Jews, of all people, know that. The nationalist-religious credo that the West Bank was land promised to Abraham’s descendants has intensified over the past half-century. Settlers see their work as the culmination of the Zionist idea of settlement. The opposite is true. Israel has undermined its Zionist founders’ commitment to a democratic state governed by laws. The occupation undercuts Israel’s own Founding Charter of 1948, which promised a state based on “complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.”
These, too, are uncomfortable facts. But the evidence is that Israelis, in their majority, prefer to live with them than believe in a sustainable peace with Palestinians. Trust your neighbor? Been there, tried that. Which brings us to the agreement (yet another) reached this week between Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, and Hamas, the militant Islamist group, to form a unity government and hold elections within six months.
Netanyahu leapt on it to inter the already half-buried peace talks: “Does he want peace with Hamas, or peace with Israel? You can have one but not the other.” But Israelis are smarter than that. They know that any peace with only one Palestinian faction would not amount to peace at all; that without elections, eight years after the last vote, Abbas has no real legitimacy; and that bringing a weakened Hamas under Egyptian suasion into a unity government (if that happens) would increase pressure on Hamas to meet international demands that it recognize Israel’s right to exist, renounce violence and accept previous signed agreements.
Moving toward a two-state peace — the best outcome for both nations — cannot be based either on the myth that Israel’s current situation is unsustainable or on the myth that the Palestinian Authority, as currently constituted, represents the Palestinian national movement. It can only emerge when a majority on both sides believes, based on the facts, that painful compromise in the name of a better future is preferable to manageable conflict fed by the wounds of the past.
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