Israel's iron wall

[Violet_Crumble]

Israel's incoming rightwing government is blind to the country's deteriorating status in the western world

Carlo Strenger
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 11 March 2009

Binyamin Netanyahu will soon present a narrow, right-wing government to the Israeli Knesset. It is worth pondering a commonality between him and this government's second main force, Avigdor Lieberman. Both have a clearly defined world view. At its core is the belief that the Middle Eastern conflict is in essence the expression of a clash of civilisation between the Judeo-Christian west and Islam. Netanyahu has written books about this, and Lieberman has said it time and again. Neither of them sees the solution of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians as something that is of any value if detached from the geopolitical configuration as they see it.

How do they envisage the solution? Netanyahu has argued for years that true peace for Israel will be possible only when the Middle East is composed of liberal democracies. Before that, he believes, Israel will have to continue managing the conflict rather than resolving it. For the time being, he argues for something he calls "economic peace", in which Palestinians should be helped to develop economically without achieving sovereignty.

Lieberman's position is more complex than his image as an extreme right-winger implies: he explicitly endorses the two-state solution, but demands a land swap with the Palestinian Authority that would lead to a substantial proportion of Israel's Arab population becoming part of Palestine. He sees this as a necessity because he considers Israeli Arabs to be a long-term security problem. Lieberman, who is likely to be named foreign minister, wants Israel to become part of NATO to cement its status as part of the west.

Netanyahu and Lieberman are deeply influenced by the views of the founder of the right-wing revisionist stream (the Likud's forerunner), Zeev Jabotinsky. Jabotinsky argued that Arabs will never accept Israel as long as they see a chance to defeat it, and that Israel needs to convince the Arab world that it is there to stay through its military might. He called this the "Iron Wall" conception. The question is at what point Israel comes to the conclusion that the Arab world has indeed accepted Israel's existence.

In fact, all of Israeli politics is influenced by the Iron Wall thesis. It is responsible for the most amazing facet of Israel's policy since 2002. For decades, Israel yearned for acceptance by the Arab world. And yet no Israeli leader has deemed the Arab League peace initiative even worthy of serious consideration. It is as if Jabotinsky's warning that Arabs will never accept Israel is deeply ingrained in the Israeli psyche. As a result, most Israelis don't even know the exact content of the Arab League's proposal, and are surprised when told about it.

Netanyahu and Lieberman's adherence to the Iron Wall paradigm leads them to make one big mistake. Their assumption that Israel is part of the west, no matter what it does, is based on a relatively unsophisticated version of the "clash of civilisations" model. The problem is that Israel's modus operandi in the last years, including the second Lebanon war and the Gaza operation, has made the west, particularly Europe, very uncomfortable with it. Israel is seen by many as having moved beyond the bounds of what is acceptable to the western world.

This myopia about the impact of Israel's action on its place in the world is, unfortunately, not limited to Netanyahu and Lieberman. After all, the outgoing government, headed by Kadima and the Labor party, was responsible for the Gaza operation.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/mar/11/israel-palestine-netanyahu-lieberman

[TomClash]

1. Interesting but

Israel has no incentive to negotiate in good faith. This so-called Iron Wall mentality has served it well. The only problem left for Israel is that it wants to be the victor and the victim at the same time. No one with any integrity buys that perverted view and so it has problems with the West.

Netanyahu in reality rejects a two state solution and Lieberman essentially wants another Operation Danny, a new and improved exodus. But they will mouth platitudes and coax, pressure and cajole the Obama Administration to muddle any "peace process" in much the same way as every prior Israeli Government did. And why not? It works - there are no serious, adverse consequences to such an approach.