Sharon's Critique of the Authoritarian Likud Party
Ariel Sharon's resignation from the Likud Party is a more forceful critique of that party than any I have offered.
Likudniks are notoriously unable to deal with being criticized, so my simple and accurate characterization of the party as having colonialist and fascistic tendencies has driven its acolytes on this side of the Atlantic into a piranha-like frenzy. Being cultists of a sort, they play all sorts of dishonest political games, such as equating criticism of their party with racism (?), or equating their party with Israel itself and then saying that I called Israel a fascist state because I had so characterized the Likud. (I did not, of course, but then the surrogate American Likud has millions of dollars with which to smear me and an easy in with the major media, whereas I just have this little web site; so their megaphone is rather louder than mine.)
It would be rather as though American Latinos should take vehement exception to any criticism of Argentina's colonels and their authoritarian and murderous state in the 1980s. No one ever complains about people "maligning" Argentina, but the Likudniks have an obsession that their party be completely above criticism (or as they would call it, "slander.")
So how delicious it is that Sharon has left the Likud because it is too fascistic even for him! The party's highly authoritarian politburo was an albatross around Sharon's neck. Its strident insistence on continuing to steal Palestinian land and never trading land for peace would have accelerated the engorgement of the West Bank by Israel and the consequent transformation of Israel into a binational state. You can't annex the West Bank without getting a couple of million Palestinians into the bargain. The very hard line Likudniks would deal with that prospect by just ethnically cleansing the Palestinians, but Sharon is enough a man of the world to know that the US (and especially Condi), the European Union, and the Muslim world would never put up with that Milosevic-like war crime.
If Israelis really care about their future, they will swing behind the new Labor leader, Amir Peretz. In fact, a new coalition of those seeking a negotiated settlement with security hawks like Sharon could allow Labor and Sharon's new party to marginalize the "Greater Israel" (i.e. expansionist, colonizing and fascistic) tendency in Israeli politics, which is mainly sited in the Likud.
The lack of a strong Palestinian leader, and Sharon's refusal to deal with the Palestinian leadership that now exists, make it unlikely that there will be real progress on Arab-Israeli peace any time soon. You can't declare peace unilaterally, the way you can war. But if the Likud can be gotten out of office, at least the ruling party in Israel won't be actively attempting to destroy any peace process.
posted by Juan Cole @ 11/22/2005 12:14:00 AM
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11 Comments:
No need for the world to refuse to put up with that " Milosevic-like war crime (ethnic cleansing) " which anyway did not succeed.
The World did not only put up but aided and abeited ethnic cleansing in Palestine in 1948 and 1967...
Great peice, though I wonder how much Peretz would really change things. As this story in Haaretz points out, one of Peretz's first acts was to support Housing Minister Herzog in allowing 350 new houses to be built in the colony of Ma'aleh Adumim. Given this, and when even the supposedly leftist Haaretz refers to the settlement as a "neighborhood," I still see little hope for a real peace movement in Israel.
Prof. Cole is hardly alone in being smeared by the poltroons and scoundrels who make up the American Likudniks. Their slanders are equal for the left and the right, as David Frum (who isn't even American) evidenced in his "Unpatriotic Conservatives" smear in National Review last year. Perhaps the most curious element of such slanders against legitimate criticism is that the debate over Likud, "Greater Israel", etc. is much freer in Israel than here. It is also curious that our debate is so stilted when the strong majority of American Jews are not ideological allies of either Likud or their American adherents. Just goes to show how money can magnify a shrill voice until it drowns out all others, I suppose.
Likud = Republican
Both are "unable to deal with being criticized."
The solution for peace in Israel always struck me as simple. It doesn't even require the Palestinians to agree with it at all.
Israel simply has to draw a line (any line) and declare the stuff on one side of the line to be Israel, and the stuff on the other side of the line to be not-Israel (the line could not look like a Texas congressional district-no gerrymandering-so no settlements deep within not-Israel). Everybody in Israel becomes an Israeli citizen, with full voting rights, etc. Israel then completely and totally withdrawls from not-Israel, and then builds a big honking wall on the line. The Palestinians would then have to fend for themselves. This would be fair to both sides, IMHO.
Doesn't matter where the line is (possession in 9/10s of the law, and currently Israel possesses it all). However, it clearly can not include all of the Palestinian Territorites, because then there would be more Muslims in Israel than Jews. It would probably include of Jerusalem.
With the withdrawal from Gaza and the building of the wall, I believe Sharon is going about this very plan and has been for some time.
However, his former party wants to have thier cake and eat it too. They want to control not-Israel without the pesky problem of giving those Muslims who live within it voting rights (who would therefore take over the country peacefully via the ballot box). This, as has become obvious, is not a stable situation in the long term. It's actually quite similiar to Great Britain and the American colonies pre-revolution, except there is no ocean between the colonies and the motherland.
It is not just the Likud party that has hindered peace in the Middle East, but the leadership of both the Republican and Democratic parties. It is senseless to criticize Bush for his Mideast policy because anyone who cares about justice or knows the least bit about the situation will dismiss Bush.
But Clinton, and nearly every other Democrat, deserves a huge amount of blame. It was under Clinton and the so-called "peace process" that the Israeli settlers doubled in size, making a two-state solution impossible. Then, Clinton forced Arafat to the bargaining table under the promise that Arafat would not be blamed if a real solution did not result. Of course, no real solution did result, because as Israeli historian Arvi Shlaim points out, there are two different version of what peace looks like: the Israeli one, in which Palestine is a reduced state with limited sovereignity, and the Palestinian one, in which Palestinians would be a real country in every sense of the word. So who did Clinton blame for the failed peace? Arafat, of course.
Yet nearly every Democrate labors under the false pretense that Clinton furthered peace.
There is even one other group I would critricize for the lack of peace in the Middle East, and that is leftists groups like the one I belong to. These groups wouldn't blink in a second when it came time to take action against Apartheid South Africa, or publish an article critical of human rights abuses in Guatemala. But these same groups are so afraid of offending Jewish membership, that you can hardly publish an article describing what I write in this very post. Or, they allow Lidudintes to defend their position in a peace publication, in which every stupid myth is allowed to be printed without rebuttals.
If leftists had taken a stand against Israeli propaganda, they might have at least sent a message to the pro-Likud fanatics that their ideas are not consonant with peace. Instead, they are allowed to promote their ideas free of any real criticism and therefore never really think critically about them.
Paul
Being cultists of a sort, [Likudniks] play all sorts of dishonest political games, such as equating criticism of their party with racism (?)
"?" indeed. Opposition to Likud party policy translates to 'anti-Semitism' for the non-Jews, and 'self-hatred' or 'wrong-thinking (insane? ignorant?) lefty' for Jews. If that's not a fundamentally racist tenet then I don't know what is.
Perhaps Sharon cares more about preserving Israel than killing Palestinians et al vis a vis this dumb back-and-forth murder contest. We shall see.
I wouldn't put much faith in Peretz or in Sharon changing his spots, there has never been that much difference between Labor and Likud on the Palestinian question. To study this read, Ilan Pappe's "A History of Modern Palestine" or Chomsky's "Fatal Triangle". They are just playing "good cop, bad cop" as a sop for US public opinion. Moshe Dayan was a voice for Labor when he invited the Palestinians to "live like dogs or leave." What has ever really changed? They are simply playing for time, anything to avoid UN Resolution-242.
Often one image is more informative than a lengthy essay or even a book. This is especially true with neocons and Israeli politics. In this area, everything needs heavy decoding! This cartoon by Steve Bell gives a perfect explanation what neocons understand by "centrism".
The solution for peace in Israel always struck me as simple. It doesn't even require the Palestinians to agree with it at all.
Geotpf,
I think you have just summed up Israel’s long-time attitude towards peace with the Palestinians. And I think you’ve inadvertantly identified why there is no peace. The belief that you can unilaterally declare an end to an asymmetric conflict is a fallacy: a tempting fallacy if you happen to be the side with overwhelming military might, but still a fallacy. The Palestinians are weak in that they cannot militarily force Israel to end the occupation, and cannot diplomatically force the implementation of international law, but the one power they have is the power to say no to Israel’s attempts to impose a one-sided solution. Until Israel can accept a compromise solution to which a Palestinian government can also say “yes, we too can accept this as the end of our claims and the end of our conflict with you” - and like it or not this will involve a shared Jerusalem and generally respecting the 1967 borders - then there simply will be no end to the conflict.
Israel’s attitude has always been that it can create peace vis-à-vis the Palestinians without ever having to deal with them – by denying that they exist, by forcing them to leave, by believing that military might can force those that remain to accept an imposed solution, by thinking that cultivating agreement with the US obviates the need to cultivate an agreement with the Palestinians. That hasn’t created peace in 50 years, and it simply can’t. If you’re at war with the Palestinians, then it’s the Palestinians you need to make a peace agreement with: not with the Americans, and not with your own internal Israeli opposition.
Cheers
- Diane
Diane-
The key element here is the wall. Assuming that it would be difficult to recruit many suicide bomers who live in Israel and are Israeli citizens (fair assumption in my mind), it would then be impossible for them to cross over from not-Israel (they would get stopped at the border/wall). No suicide bombings = peace. Sure, the Palestinians would be pissed off. But what could they do?
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