Following the 1990s Oslo Accords peace process, Israel experienced “disappointment, and then boom….The Second Intifada was unbelievable….Things were blowing up all over the place, all over the place, on a daily basis.” So stated the Israeli-American academic Galia Golan at a September 27 Foundation for Middle East Peace (FMEP) panel in Washington, DC, that, intentionally or not, demonstrated how irrelevant Israel’s political Left has become.
At the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Golan addressed a small audience of 16 on “Israeli Politics and the Prospects for Peace,” as Carnegie fellows Michelle Dunne and Aaron David Miller moderated. While noting that “we have known each other for a very long time,” he introduced Golan as a co-founder of Israel’s leftist Peace Now group and an activist in the small, similarly leftist Israeli Meretz party. Golan’s simpatico audience included FMEP President Lara Friedman and several FMEP staff, as well as Debra Shushan from Peace Now’s American affiliate. The Quakers’ anti-Israel Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL), as well as American Friends of Combatants for Peace, an American affiliate (with which Golan is associated) of an Israeli leftist organization, also sent staff members.
Miller in his introduction praised Golan as a “very astute observer of the Israeli-Palestinian” conflict, whose “commitment on that issue is really quite remarkable,” and lauded Golan for “your clarity, your honesty, and your integrity.” Yet his remarks during the event noted that center-right governments have governed Israel for 31 of the last 42 years, an indication of the marginal status of leftists such as her among Israel’s electorate. In particular, Israel’s Labor Party, “responsible for the creation of the state during its formative years, has essentially disappeared. It’s extraordinary.”
Golan herself conceded that the “Israeli public, I have always believed, is pretty much in the center, but it is center-right.” There is especially “this belief in Israel, we have to have a security person at the top,” as manifested by Israel’s current political divide between Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his political opponent Benny Gantz. Netanyahu, a veteran of the Israeli Special Forces, leads Israel’s conservative Likud party, while Gantz, a former Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) chief of staff, created this year along with other former IDF chiefs of staff the Blue and White coalition.
Israel’s recent inconclusive September 17 parliamentary elections, held precisely after April 9 elections had failed to enable Netanyahu to form a new government, provided the backdrop for Golan’s comments. She decried that nothing consequential separated Netanyahu’s Likud and Gantz’s Blue and White; rather, the election “was only on one thing and one thing only, and that was the corruption issue,” as Netanyahu faced various dubious corruption charges. While Netanyahu’s main “motivating factor” in the election was supposedly “to stay out of jail,” voters seeking change focused on “getting rid of Netanyahu,” who recently became Israel’s longest-serving prime minister.
For Golan, in this “absolutely no issues” election, the “peace issue was totally forgotten.” Like Netanyahu, Gantz insisted upon Israeli control of the Jordan River valley and a united Jerusalem, while other Blue and White leaders adamantly rejected a Palestinian state. Meanwhile, Blue and White leaders “presented themselves in this campaign as more aggressive” than Netanyahu concerning Israeli military action against Gaza’s Hamas terrorist masters.
Amidst such a “lesser of two evils” choice, Golan saw Blue and White’s only relevance in stymieing a “very slippery slope” of “one thing after another that was endangering civil society, endangering the press, the media.” “Certainly, if I were Palestinian I would be frightened by” Israel’s 2018 nation-state law, she hyperbolically stated about legislation that merely affirmed Israel’s Jewish and democratic character. She also accused, questionably, former Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked of having “packed the courts.”
Despite what Golan herself described as an emerging Israeli consensus rejecting traditional two-state solutions to the Arab-Israeli conflict, she remained adamant that “there is no solution to the conflict except the two-state solution.” “Anything short of two states is going to be rejected by the Palestinians,” she added. In particular, to “have Israel control all the entries and exits to the West Bank and expect to call that peace” is a “non-starter,” just like Israeli demands to control a united Jerusalem.
Notwithstanding a long history of the Palestinian leadership’s duplicity concerning Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, Golan fantasized that the two-state solution remained a reasonable negotiating option. “The Palestinians, the Palestinian leadership, Fatah, they want an agreement,” and “in 1988 accepted the two-state solution,” she contended, in a denial of Fatah leaders’ actual sentiments. She also naively contended that the Middle East’s current geopolitical order meant that Israel did not need control over the Jordan River valley as a vital defense line against hostile states. This shortsightedness additionally ignored dangers of any jihadist group replicating Hamas’ takeover in Gaza among Judea and Samaria’s hardly demilitarized Arabs, an area even more sensitive for Israel’s security.
Golan’s cavalier treatment of Israel’s strategic depth reflected her Pollyannaish outlook on the jihadist threats facing Israel. Even among many of her Hebrew University students, the “average Israeli fears the Arab citizen of Israel,” she wondered, as if Israeli Arab terrorism were not a real concern, one that has been expressed by average Israelis personally to this author in Jerusalem. Her plea that Israel’s “Arab citizen has no power” ignores the Palestinian Authority’s (PA) “pay for slay” financing of terrorist attacks on Israelis, an unsurprising oversight given Meretz’s Knesset record. Along with Israel’s Joint List Arab party coalition, Meretz was the only party to vote against an Israeli law sanctioning the PA for such payments.
Israeli threat perceptions appear to Golan to be the result of fearmongering following the Second Intifada of the early 2000s. The Israeli “government has done a great deal of manipulation to strengthen that belief, that there is only Hamas on the other side,” while Netanyahu supposedly exploits an Iranian threat; “if it hadn’t existed, he would have created it.” The intifada’s “violence fortified this view amongst Israelis that there is no partner, but the Palestinians rightly believe exactly the same thing,” she stated, as if Arab-Israeli violence merely involved mutual misunderstandings.
Golan’s apologies for all things Arab extended to her assessment of Israel’s Arab political leadership, whose participation in an Israeli government Meretz has supported, contrary to Gantz and Netanyahu. Aside from Balad’s “extreme nationalists,” who want a binational state, the “perfectly legitimate” Arab parties in the Joint List “have very little difference from Meretz,” which now wants to become a “genuinely Jewish-Arab party.” By contrast, other observers have documented that the “Joint List, sadly, remains a vehemently anti-Zionist party whose members have often expressed their support for convicted terrorists.”
Israeli Arab support is increasingly essential for a Meretz struggling outside of Israel’s Jewish mainstream that currently only has four members in the 120-seat Knesset. The 2019 elections reflected Golan’s statement that Israel’s “peace camp collapsed” after the Second Intifada. Meretz’s electoral coalition, the Democratic Camp, left unmentioned in its platform the traditional formula of “Two States for Two Peoples,” and instead cited mere general political settlement commitments.
Meanwhile, Golan hinted why some question whether Meretz is still a Zionist party. She seemingly condemned demographic discussions about maintaining Israel’s Jewish character, for “we in Meretz don’t use the demographic argument at all, because it’s basically racist.” Correspondingly, one former Meretz supporter has noted:
Meretz’s demise seems intricately connected with its decision, not uncommon among leftist movements worldwide these days, to see nationalism as necessarily evil and reject the nation-state for an imagined cosmic brotherhood.
Given Meretz’s rebuff by Israeli voters, Golan noted that she “used to have hope for the international community” and “American pressure” to achieve what Israeli elections could not. She praised as “extremely important” the fact that President Barack Obama’s administration abstained during the passage of United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 2334, a destructive diplomatic move. This makes a “distinction between the territory of the state of Israel and our right to exist and the territory that is occupied,” she said. Yet UNSCR 2334 condemned historic and legal Jewish claims to territories such as Jerusalem’s Western Wall, despite American and Jewish outrage.
Golan noted how she has previously applied territorial distinction to the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) economic warfare campaign against Israel. She supports targeted BDS against Jewish communities in the “occupied” disputed territories, just as Meretz was an isolated sponsor of a Knesset bill to single out Israeli products made in Judea and Samaria with labels. Yet she believes that BDS in general will only enable Israeli governments to rally for solidarity.
Although elite Washington, DC, think tanks continue to cherish Israeli leftists such as Golan, critical analysis makes evident why they remain a fringe phenomenon in Israel. They insist upon leftist ideals of peaceful cooperation and multicultural harmony in the face of a Palestinian population that has mostly responded with dangerous Islamic fanaticism and a failed, corrupt, and dictatorial nation-state movement. However hallowed, the Carnegie Endowment cannot hide these hard Middle Eastern realities that have been bitterly experienced by Israelis for decades.
Marilyn Griffin says
Well, I have learned that there seems to be no group exempt from leftist members seemingly intent on remaking the world— ever religion, every culture, every nation, every global organization, etc, seems to have their own share of radical leftists, progressives, no borders, globalists, whatever they are called. I was flabbergasted when I discovered that Jews were part of organizations intent on bringing muslims into the USA, a people who have clearly declared their hatred of Jews and plans to annihilate all Jews, but it is true. Look at the actions of the Catholic Pope. It is beyond belief at the people so willing to give up everything they once held dear and valuable for a truly insane ideology.
carpediadem says
There are far more Christians, organised Christians groups and clerics intent on bringing Muslims the USA; they do it for money, for charity, for whatever goofy ideas of peace they have, and they do it in spite of the massacres of Christians by Muslims in the MidEast.
Yet I only read screeds against Jews who support immigration, even though the millions given to the Catholic Church to resettle “immigrant” Muslims would probably buy a small country.
Is this an exercise to not criticise one’s own? Because Christians supporting “immigration” are ostentatiosly NOT speaking out or even mentioning the mass homicide of Christians in the MidEast – a strange forgetfulness on their part, while wondering why Jews act againt their own interests, even though Christians are acting their own interests on a far vaster scale.
Or is criticising Jews for everything just so much more fun?
Infidel says
I am glad that Israelis have gained the sense to totally reject Labour and Meretz and go to a new type of alternative – Blue & White. I’d like to see that replicated in other countries, particularly in the West, where Leftist parties should be replaced by either centrist or neo-right parties (like AfD)
Angemon says
Since “Palestine” is not a nation, there’s no such thing as an “Israeli-Palestinian conflict”. Miller certainly isn’t an “astute observer”, and however astute or observant Golan may be, she clearly doesn’t see the obvious if she believes in a “two state solution”…
janwoG says
Peace is impossible with the religion of peace.
gravenimage says
Spot on.
Tuvia Fogel says
To be a pacifist in the first years of the country’s history was a forgivable mistake, after all not everyone has the foresight of a Jabotinsky. But to still be a pacifist today means to ignore a century of violent Arab rejectionism while blaming most of it on the Jews. To do that, you have to either have the IQ of a cactus plant or else be in bad faith.
gravenimage says
Following the 1990s Oslo Accords peace process, Israel experienced “disappointment, and then boom….The Second Intifada was unbelievable….Things were blowing up all over the place, all over the place, on a daily basis.”
………………….
I’d been skeptical for awhile, but it was after Oslo that I realized that the “Palestinians” had absolutely no interest in peace.