Benjamin Netanyahu, Prime Minister:
“I think anyone who is going to establish a Palestinian state and to evacuate territory is giving radical Islam a staging ground against the State of Israel.” (Politico, 3/16/15)
“I think the Israeli people understand now what I always say: that there cannot be a situation, under any agreement, in which we relinquish security control of the territory west of the River Jordan.” (Times of Israel, 7/13/14)
Naftali Bennett, Minister of Education:
“I will do everything in my power to make sure they [Palestinians] never get a state.” (New Yorker, 1/21/13)
“We are not going to give up more land. This approach has failed. Now, if it means that the world will penalize us, that is unfair but so be it.” (Times of Israel, 2/17/15)
“Israel cannot withdraw from more territory and cannot allow for the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank.” (New York Times, 11/6/14)
In a 2010 television debate with Palestinian Israeli Ahmed Tibi: “When [Palestinians] were still climbing trees, we had a Jewish state here… We were here long before you.” (972 Mag, 1/1/13)
Yuval Steinitz, Minister of National Infrastructure, Energy, and Water:
“Israel should stop transferring the taxes it collects for the Palestinian Authority and consider dismantling it if it continues to act against Israel in the international arena. Establishing a Palestinian state in the current conditions will bring war, terrorism and a Hamas and Islamic State takeover of Judea and Samaria.” (Jerusalem Post, 12/18/14)
“The demand for Israel to withdraw to the 1967 lines, without holding on to the Jordan Valley, without defensible borders, without security control, and without the demilitarization of Gaza… is a recipe for collective suicide.” (Jerusalem Post, 9/8/14)
Ayelet Shaked, Minister of Justice:
“We should manage the conflict and not give up on any centimeter of land. Yes, it’s not perfect, but it’s better than any other alternative.” (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 2/3/15)
“Around us in the Middle East there is total chaos. I’m not willing to give up on my land for this chaos.” (The Forward, 5/7/15)
Moshe Ya’alon, Minister of Defense:
“It is time to free ourselves of the concept that everything leads to a framework that is called a state. From my standpoint, they can call it the Palestinian empire. I don’t care. It would basically be autonomy.” (Jerusalem Post, 10/17/14)
“I think we made a mistake with land for peace.” (The Forward, 6/10/14)
Tzipi Hotovely, Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs:
“This land is ours. All of it is ours. We expect as a matter of principle of the international community to recognize Israel’s right to build homes for Jews in their homeland, everywhere.” (The Guardian, UK, 5/22/15)
“We need to demand sovereignty over all of Judea and Samaria, and nothing less than that.” (Times of Israel, 7/16/12)
Miri Regev, Minister of Culture and Sport:
“The expression Palestinian state should not be used.” (al-Arabiya, 6/11/09)
“The towns in the Jordan Valley are a strategic and security asset of the state of Israel that must stay in our hands.” (The Guardian, UK, 12/31/13)
Silvan Shalom, Vice Prime Minister, Minister of the Interior:
“We are all against a Palestinian state, there is no question about it.” (Ha’aretz, 5/18/15)
“Judea and Samaria are the bulletproof vest of Israel.” (Ha’aretz. 5/18/15)
Danny Danon, Minister of Science, Technology and Space:
“Enough with the two-state-solution. Land-for-peace is over. We don’t want a Palestinian State. We need to apply 
Israeli sovereignty over all Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria. It’s been about 20 years since the Oslo Accords. That’s finished and now we’re ready for new ideas…We are a nationalist government and not a government that will establish a Palestinian government on 1967 lines.” (Arutz 7, 10/2/12)
“I understand the importance of political power, so I will use my strength and influence to convince as many people as I can within the (Likud) party and outside the party that a Palestinian state is bad news for Israel.” (The Forward, 7/8/13)
Zeev Elkin, Minister of Jerusalem:
“There is no place for a Palestinian state, not in temporary borders and not in any other configuration.” (Arutz Sheva, 3/25/11)
“Whoever objects to the ‘two state’ solution does not need to present an alternative solution because the basic 
situation is that this territory belongs to us.” (Arutz Sheva, 10/24/13)
“For 20 years, we talked about what to give and why. Now the time has come for an entirely different discourse…This is our land, and it’s our right to apply sovereignty over it. Regardless of the world’s opposition, it’s time to do in Judea and Samaria what we did in [East] Jerusalem and the Golan.” (Times of Israel, 7/16/12)
“I certainly think a Palestinian state is no solution. And if I think a Palestinian state is no solution, that means I do want a Jewish presence here. Which raises the question: What do you do with the Palestinian population? And I don’t think the answer to that question can be found right now.” (Times of Israel, 7/29/13)
Uri Ariel, Minister of Agriculture:
“There will be just one state between the Jordan River and the sea, and that is the State of Israel.” (Middle East Monitor, 5/30/14)
“Anyone here today understands that the vision of two states is unrealistic and will never happen.” (Times of Israel, 8/25/13)
Yisrael Katz, Minister of Intelligence and Atomic Energy:
“I will not agree to a Palestinian state. The only practical solution is an autonomous entity in the A and B areas with an affiliation with Jordan and Israeli security control.” (YNet News, 7/10/13)
“Israel needs to take unilateral steps to apply Israeli sovereignty to all of the settlements in Judea and Samaria.” (Jerusalem Post, 5/6/11)
After Benjamin Netanyahu’s surprising victory in Israel’s national elections in March, he took until the last possible minute to complete the process of forming the government for his fourth term as Israel’s prime minister. For all the time he invested, despite making it just under the wire, Netanyahu ended up with a fragile, ultra-right-wing coalition and more work ahead of him to bring in at least one more party.
The government Netanyahu presented to Israeli President Reuven Rivlin was a bare majority of 61 seats out of the 120-seat Knesset. There are no fig leafs in this coalition, no Tzipi Livni or Ehud Barak for Netanyahu to send to talk fruitlessly with the Palestinians. One might think this would make the coalition more stable, since it consists entirely of the right wing. In this, one would be wrong. Read more at LobeLog.
The shell game is a tried-and-true method of persuading people to give their money to the person running the game. In political terms, it’s also a reliable method of persuading people to buy into the political stance of the man running the game.
Elliott Abrams is a master of the shell game. He provides what seems like a serious and sober analysis, with just enough cherry-picking of facts and omission of detail to convince you of his point of view. That is a big reason why this man, who is responsible for some of the greatest foreign policy fiascos in American history, continues to be considered a legitimate source for foreign policy analysis.
Perhaps it’s not surprising. Despite the enormous catastrophes brought on by the neoconservative school of thought of which Abrams is a part, the philosophy, such as it is, continues to be an influential voice in the foreign policy debate in the United States. This is, however, even more reason to look at an apparent change of course from Abrams with a skeptical eye. Read more at LobeLog
During the height of the Algerian revolution against French rule, Albert Camus, the celebrated writer, philosopher, humanist, and tenacious foe of fascism, was asked why he did not forcefully condemn the atrocities committed by OAS ultras and French military torturers against Algerian Muslims. Camus was a pied noir—born and raised among the European settler community in Algeria. “I love justice,” he answered, “but I love my mother more.”
Camus’s response shocked his admirers on the left, who felt their hero had failed them. Politically their disappointment is understandable, but Camus was making a profoundly important point. There is a difference in kind between attachments to principles, images, doctrines, or large, and necessarily abstract, groups—however passionate—and attachments to particular things or particular people.
If I lose my mother, the pain of that loss is not assuaged by the availability of another woman of her approximate age. My attachment was to a particular woman, not to “motherliness.” On the other hand, the pain of injustice “there and then” can be lessened by justice “here and now” because the abstract attachment to the principle of equity entails a wide set of equivalent attachments spread over time and space.
Camus loved his mother as a peasant loves and is organically attached to the place he inhabits. It is a particular and quintessentially personal attachment. Camus loved justice in the abstract way an ardent nationalist loves his “patria”—the territory of his nation—most of which he has never, and will never see or know in any personal way. Both attachments can be deep. Both can lead to enormous sacrifice, but they are different.
Understanding the Palestinian-Israeli conflict means, among other things, understanding how these two peoples come to their attachments to the same land from very different directions. Consider a peasant’s attachments to places in his world—to the ancestral burial ground, the mountain whose silhouette shadowed all below it, and the stream with familiar tendencies to flood at particular times. Such ties were deep, so deep that separation from “home” or one’s home village, could hardly be experienced as anything less than death. But these ties were not political. They did not register, for most of human history, as relevant to the political order—usually vast and imperial—within which these “places” were organized. These attachments did not inspire those who held them to “imagine” larger political communities than those who also shared, in an immediate way, the same place of habitation. Nor did they produce an honored or iconic “map image” of a territorial space attached to hundreds of thousands or millions of other human beings to whom the bearers of these feelings could feel kindredness.
Attachment to a particular place can do much to satisfy—or make miserable—those who can preserve them or lose them, but they cannot, themselves, be the basis of what Rupert Emerson called a “terminal community”; that is, a group of people too large to be known individually but which nevertheless is considered worthy of the ultimate sacrifice.
Nationalism and national states require a kind of abstract empathy that, it turns out, humans are quite capable of, but that capacity became apparent only relatively recently in human history. Nationalism requires people to shift much of their emotional investment from personal attachments to a place to abstract attachments to a space. Indeed they must learn to experience those abstract attachments as so important that for them they would be willing to sacrifice, as the saying goes, their “lives, their fortune, and their sacred honor.” The process of transforming attachments to place into attachments to space is a long and difficult one. This is what “nation-building” entails.
For masses in both Europe and the Third World, processes of industrialization, urbanization, education, and marketization, as well as immensely destructive and dislocating wars, “socially mobilized” huge populations, throwing them into new, disorienting, and difficult circumstances. But they made those populations available for this new abstract kind of attachment. From the 17th to the 20th century Jews, and in particular European Jews, experienced these processes with a vengeance. They witnessed the utter destruction of a medieval order that had both sheltered and oppressed them for centuries. But regardless of the strength of their attachment to traditional rabbinic authority, Jewish alienation and exclusion in Christian society made them more prepared for this “modern” world of abstract political loyalties than their non-Jewish contemporaries.
As both Marc Chagall and early Zionists pictured the situation, Jews were “luftmenschen,” floating in the world, unattached to gentile institutions or the fundamentally foreign places over which they hovered. The Jewish strategy of constant migration from erstwhile refuge to possible shelter was directly related to this sociological and psychological condition. All this meant Jews did not experience an attachment to specific places as intensely as ordinary folk around them. More than that, their own cultural celebration of a not-actually-known-or-remembered land—the Land of Israel—gave them centuries of practice in the cultivation of an abstract attachment, not to a “place” of irreplaceable individual meaning, but to a “space” of collective, abstract, empathic focus.
Zionism, as a nationalist movement seeking to mobilize a dispersed population and move it to a land inhabited by others, faced more challenges than most. But a typical problem that Zionism did not face was overcoming the highly parochial attachments traditional peasant and village society developed in its laboring masses. The huge task of assimilation into a Jewish “nation” that Israel faced when confronted with hundreds of thousands of Jews from very different countries and classes, and speaking different languages, was not unusual for states seeking to build nations. But Zionism did face one unique problem. It needed to make the new country, so alien for most of its Jewish inhabitants, feel familiar. This meant great emphasis on mapping the terrain of the “Land of Israel,” marking and hiking trails, and exploring as much as possible about its springs, mountains, caves, small rivers, wadis, flora and fauna. It meant changing thousands of place names to invented Hebrew designations as well. All this activity can be understood as a strong effort to establish some sense of “place” to complement the ideological attachment to the “space” of whatever parts of the country could be acquired.
The Arabs in Palestine faced a very different challenge. They sought to rouse their countrymen as members of the “Palestinian nation” to defend, not the villages and locales that were the intimate framework of their lives, but a “space” called Palestine carved out of the Levant by the outcome of battles between European and Ottoman imperialists. This was a more typical assignment for a nationalist movement; one that in Europe and elsewhere took generations if not centuries to accomplish.
When the nakba destroyed the settled life of the 950,000 or so Arabs living in what became Israel in 1948, hundreds of thousands of refugees huddled in forests, fields, and makeshift camps. Whether in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, or Jordan, they did not yearn to return to the “space” of Palestine, but to the “place” of their village, their farm, their fields, and their homes. The keys they treasured were to the doors of their actual houses, not talismans of a space promised and celebrated but unremembered. Unlike Zionist immigrants, these refugees needed no maps of where they lived or how to get there. Indeed one reason why tens of thousands of refugees were able to surreptitiously return and remain in Israel is because they knew the back roads and trails so well. Maps are for unfamiliar spaces, not for homey places.
Although the “two state solution” may well never be achieved, its emergence as a plausible target for a negotiated settlement entailed a difficult struggle among Palestinian nationalists to transform attachment to place to attachment to space. This required considerable finesse, along with a good deal of deception and disingenuousness. On the one hand, Palestinian leaders evoked the heartbreaking stories of refugees expelled from their homes and the homes of their ancestors, and then refused permission to return. On the other hand, those committed to the “Palestinian state” option set about transforming the Palestinian pathos into a nationalist ethos focused on “Palestine” as a space, with indistinct borders encompassing parts but not all of the country. That meant using the phrase “right of return” ambiguously, to mean—perhaps, but only perhaps, and only for a very tiny number–return to places, to specific homes, fields and villages. For most it would mean return from spaces that were not in Palestine to locations in a “space” by that name– a space that would not contain “places” of actual, original, attachment.
This is a difficult political task for any nationalist movement. But it was particularly difficult for the Palestinians, because the spaces involved are so small, and therefore where the distances to specific yearned-for places, so near and yet so inaccessible, are so tantalizingly short. From the Israeli point of view, the continued evocation by Palestinians of the “places” they were forced to abandon signals either their adversary’s inability to be satisfied with a Palestinian “space” as a basis for resolving the conflict; or their dishonesty in pretending to accept partition while actually expecting that to be a stage toward eventual liberation of all the “places” in historical Palestine.
Indeed, we may use this analysis to gain a fine appreciation of one of the most difficult points in the seemingly endless and almost certainly fruitless negotiations that have been going on between Israelis and Palestinians. When Palestinians accepted the “two state solution” they did not explicitly accept it as corresponding to two peoples—Jewish and Palestinian. In their eyes that would have been equivalent to recognizing the right of the Zionist movement to have dispossessed Palestinians from their homes and their country. Instead, a Palestinian Arab state would live, side by side, with an Israeli state, containing an “Israeli people” comprised of both Jewish and Arab citizens. This position has been softened to the extent that Palestinians have offered Jewish settlers in the West Bank the opportunity to remain as law-abiding citizens of Palestine.
Meanwhile, however, Israel has escalated its demand. Originally no Israeli leader asked for or ever expected to receive Palestinian or Arab recognition of Israel’s “right to exist as a Jewish state.” But beginning with Ariel Sharon’s premiership, this became a constantly repeated demand. It is now often identified by top Israeli officials as the single most important requirement before Israel can make its own “painful compromises” for peace. Palestinian leaders and negotiators have objected to the opening that acceptance might give to Israeli policies of persecution or even expulsion of Arab citizens. They have also objected to the injustice and emotional impossibility of Palestinians, as victims, granting approval to their own historical victimization. But another obstacle to Palestinian acceptance of this demand also looms large. To name Israel as a “space” that is “Jewish,” would categorically foreclose the dream of re-establishing Palestinian refugee attachments to places in that space by confining Palestinian political ambitions, now and forever, to the “space” of the pieces of whatever mini-state of Palestine emerges from the agreement.
Because of the different trajectories that brought both national movements into collision, most Israelis can literally not imagine the pain of giving up attachments to places as part of building an attachment to a space. At the same time, most Palestinians can only understand the Israeli demand that such attachments be explicitly abandoned as reflecting the brutality and inhumanity they have come to associate with Jewish power in the space of Palestine.
This is an updated version of “Places vs. Spaces for Palestinians and Jews,” Perspectives, Spring 2014.
Professor Ian Lustick is the Bess W. Heyman Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. He is a past president of the Politics and History Section of the American Political Science Association and of the Association for Israel Studies, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.
The views expressed on the Foundation for Middle East Peace Blog are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of the Foundation.
As a Jew, I would be absolutely appalled to read these sentences: “The Huckabeeans also heard from Muhammed Tamimi, national president of the Arab Organization of America, who explained to the group, according to
Huckabee, that there’s really no such thing as the ‘Jewish People.’ ‘The idea that they have a long history here, dating back hundreds or thousands of years, is not true,’ Huckabee said.”
In fact, what appeared in the front-page article of today’s Washington Post read, “The Huckabeeans also heard from Morton Klein, national president of the Zionist Organization of America, who explained to the group, according to Huckabee, that there’s really no such thing as the ‘Palestinians.’ ‘The idea that they have a long history, dating back hundreds or thousands of years, is not true,’ Huckabee said.”
Aside from mentioning that prospective GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee and his group would not be visiting Ramallah or meeting with any Palestinians, there was no mention of the Palestinians in this piece at all. Can any of us imagine an article in one of America’s most prominent newspapers where such a claim was made about Jews or Israelis without a single quote from a Jewish source in response, or at the very least a challenge to that claim by the author?
Perhaps the author of the article, William Booth, thought the assertion so absurd it needed no rebuttal. But in fact, Huckabee and Klein espoused a view of the Palestinians that a great many Americans hold, and one that even more Americans do not have the knowledge of Palestinian history to judge, and might just accept on faith.
Indeed, such statements are the very definition of “de-legitimization,” a charge Israel and her supporters throw around constantly. It is an offense to Jews when they are told they have no connection to the Land of Israel. It should be no less so for Palestinians to be told they do not exist. Yet somehow, in American discourse, the former is, rightly, treated with disdain while the latter is perfectly acceptable.
Let’s try on another picture. A Muslim cleric, a formerly powerful politician with ambitions of returning to even higher office, leads a tour of his devout followers and fellow travelers to Palestine. He takes them on a tour of the Dome of the Rock, the al-Aqsa Mosque, the Hebron Mosque, and the tombs of a list prophets revered in Islam. They meet no Israeli Jews though they do view the settlement of Har Homa from nearby Bethlehem.
Let’s say this cleric not only denied any Jewish connection to the land, but had another Muslim cleric tell a reporter that “… if you are a friend of Palestine, you are okay. If you’re an enemy, you’re in real trouble. God doesn’t change his mind about this stuff. The Qu’ran is an eternal book.” Would this not send chills down most American and Israeli spines? And wouldn’t this be called incitement to violence?
Well, substitute “Israel” for “Palestine” and the Bible for “the Qu’ran” and those were the words of Rev. Steve Sturgeon, a retired military chaplain and a pastor who was part of Huckabee’s entourage. And let’s not kid ourselves: his words reflect the views of a significant number of Americans. This is not just about Mike Huckabee, a man who is very unlikely to win the race for the White House next year. In part, though, it is about the very significant and influential segment of American society he represents.
Huckabee’s promotion for the Holy Land Tour on his website boasts that pilgrims will get to tour many biblical and historical sites, hear from Huckabee and other famous people about their views and experiences of the Holy Land and Israel’s value to the United States, and will meet with top Israeli officials. Interestingly, and unsurprisingly, there is not a mention anywhere of the Christian Palestinians who actually live in the Holy Land.
It is disturbing enough that these views have influence in the discourse around American policy toward Israel. But perhaps even more disturbing is the Washington Post allowing itself to be turned into a platform for this kind of radicalism.
The byline of the article locates the piece in “Masada, Israel.” The idealized story of Masada permeates the article, and clearly left Huckabee and his crew awestruck. Booth uncritically quotes Huckabee and zealously fills in more details himself about the Sicarii “rebels’” heroic stand at Masada, ending with a Roman siege and the decision by the Sicarii to die rather than live as Roman slaves.
These are the “Jews” these Christians admire, and about whom they beseech God in their prayers to “give us some of their backbone.” In fact, the Sicarii were a band of assassins, named after their long and curved daggers who committed atrocities, often against other Judeans. These included the massacre of 700 women and children in a raid on a Judean village, and, perhaps most tellingly, destroying the food supply in Jerusalem in order to force the people to war rather than the peace they were trying to negotiate with the Romans.
That would seem to describe al-Qaeda a lot more closely than the Huckabeean view of Israelis. But those suicidal assassins who attacked civilians are the “Jews” Huckabee and his crew admire, and why shouldn’t they? The view that was reinforced for them on this trip is one that rejects peace in favor of Israeli domination of another people and offers no sympathy for civilians harmed on a daily basis by the ongoing conflict and occupation.
But the more important question is why the Washington Post delivers their readers the Huckabeean view of Israel, and its concomitant blindness to Palestinians, with no critique and no counter-balance. Supporters of Israel would never tolerate the reverse, and rightly so. For all the activism aimed at protecting Israel’s image in the media, pro-Israel forces never have to contend with something like this on the front page of one of America’s leading dailies. And that tells us a great deal about why Americans have the one-sided view of the conflict that we do.
The idea that the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is dead has been repeated so many times in the
past several years that it has taken on the droning sound of a mantra. Yet at the same time, we continue to hear pleas like the one that Palestinian Ambassador to the United Nations, Riyad Mansour made as the Security Council was about to reject the Palestinian resolution calling for an end to Israel’s occupation: “Those eager to save the two-state solution must act and cannot continue to make excuses for Israel and to permit, and thus be complicit in, its immoral and illegal behavior.”
So which is it? Must we abandon the two-state solution and think of other formulations or do we desperately need to revitalize and resuscitate the process we’ve been working on since 1993? Perhaps there is a better answer: a completely different approach to the two-state solution. (more…)