In his weekly Canadian Jewish News media analysis column “According to Reports,†Paul Michaels, CIC Director of Communications, reviews a comprehesive Globe and Mail essay by noted analyst Yossi Klein Halevi:
Yossi Klein Halevi, a contributing editor to The New Republic magazine and a senior fellow at the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem, is a respected Israeli political analyst, known for providing a passionately moderate viewpoint.
In “Fearful, divided and outraged,” a feature-length essay in the March 14 Globe and Mail, Klein Halevi, surveying the prevailing mood, described his country as “fearful for its survival, ready to do whatever is necessary for its basic security, and outraged at much of the world’s judgment against its attempts to defend itself.
Klein Halevi wrote: “For decades, Israeli governments of both left and right maintained a strategic doctrine aimed at thwarting the emergence of terror enclaves on its borders as an existential threat. But with the creation of a Hezbollah mini-state in southern Lebanon and a Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip, that doctrine has collapsed. Not since May, 1967, when Arab armies massed on Israel’s borders and Arab leaders boasted about the imminent destruction of the Jewish state, have Israelis been so anxious about the very survival of the country.”
Klein Halevi emphasized the psychological impact of the thousands of missiles that have fallen on Israeli towns and cities in the north under Hezbollah fire in 2006, and under Hamas since 2005 in the south.
He also reminded readers of the disillusionment of Israelis who’ve seen peace efforts fail: “Israel offered a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital in 2000 and received in return five years of suicide bombings, the worst wave of terror in the country’s history.”
The result? “Increasingly, Israelis sense that there are no solutions to the country’s security crisis. Peace efforts have failed…But military solutions are also elusive.”
Still, Klein Halevi noted that “[i]n principle, most Israelis support a two-state solution – 70 per cent, according to a recent poll.” But the lesson of the Gaza withdrawal has been too sobering. Israelis are not prepared to risk exposing their heartland to missiles in return for withdrawing unilaterally from the West Bank.
Klein Halevi drew attention to the core of the impasse: “For Israelis, the real obstacle to an agreement is the continuing refusal of the Palestinian leadership, and much of the Arab leadership generally, to accept the legitimacy of a Jewish state in any borders. Not even moderate Palestinian leaders such as [Palestinian Authority President] Mahmoud Abbas have told their people that the Jews are here to stay, that this land must be shared by two peoples. Instead, the Palestinian media – of Fatah as well as Hamas – continues to tell its people that the Jews are thieves and usurpers, and that eventually the entirety of the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River will belong to them.”
Klein Halevi made no attempt to sugarcoat this bleak assessment. If anything, he warned that the current Egyptian effort to forge a Hamas-Fatah unity government might only result in the radicalization of Fatah.
No wonder many Mideast analysts caution that, in the near future, the most we can expect is conflict management, rather than conflict resolution.
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Worth noting: In “Labels only obscure Mideast realities” (Toronto Star, March 10) Martin Regg Cohn pointed out some obvious hypocrisy emanating from campus groups targeting Israel.
“Amidst the sound and fury of Israeli Apartheid Week – denouncing Israel’s attacks on Gaza while downplaying the rockets fired by Hamas militants – there was relative silence on campuses about last week’s historic developments in Sudan, where the genocide in Darfur is in its sixth year.
“Hamas, however, was anything but silent. Moussa Abu Marzouk, the second-in-command of Hamas, made a point of flying to Khartoum so he could stand by Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir in his hour of need. Al-Bashir had just been indicted by the International Criminal Court for war crimes in Darfur, where more than 300,000 people have been slain and 2.7 million others displaced.”
This hypocrisy was also exposed, in more detail, in the CJN‘s March 19 editorial, “The silent conscience of the anti-Israel activist.” As the editorial made abundantly clear, the silence about Sudan’s crimes encompassed the entire Arab world, including the Arab League which “has never once condemned or expressed disapproval of the al-Bashir government.”
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