SOMETHING strange is happening to us Zionists in the 60th year of the state of Israel: we are repudiating our astonishing success. If in the 1880s (the start of Zionist settlement in what is now Israel) or in 1948 (the War of Independence) or even in 1967 (the Six-Day War) somebody had said that one day virtually the entire world, including all the Arab nations, would accept the existence of the State of Israel in 78 percent of the land of Israel, he would have been regarded as either idiotically optimistic or clinically insane. That, however, is where we are today. We have won, but we are refusing to accept the result.
It is as if the captain of a team winning the World Cup, a triumphant Olympic sprinter or a victor of Wimbledon were to say: “No, no. There has been a mistake. I didn’t win, I lost. My victory is an illusion.”
While it is true that the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, talks about wiping Israel off the map, and he might be developing the technical means to do so, he has also said that he will agree to whatever agreement the Palestinians accept. The Lebanese Islamic group Hezbollah is utterly hostile, but it is now focused on events in its own country.
The Palestinian Hamas, which rules Gaza, refuses to recognize Israel, but even that movement seeks a long-term truce, which is tantamount to de facto recognition.
Far more significantly, Fatah, the official Palestinian leadership, is negotiating peace with Israel. The member states of the Arab League, headed by Saudi Arabia, are on record as recognizing Israel within its pre-1967 borders. The world’s only superpower, the United States, is solid in its support of Israel under any conceivable president.
The other four permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, the European Union and the overwhelming majority of the members of the United Nations all recognize pre-1967 Israel.
Wake up, fellow Israelis, it’s over, we’ve won! What is more we’ve won a lot: more than 8,000 square miles out of the 10,400 square miles of the British Mandate for Palestine. And most Palestinians have accepted this territorially lopsided resolution of the 100-year-old dispute.
Problems remain, of course. We Israelis have made a shambles of our Zionist enterprise by establishing settlements in the Palestinian territories we have occupied since 1967. Either we must disentangle ourselves from the Palestinians, or else create a structure for sharing the land with them. Many of the flagship Jewish settlements are so deep in Palestinian territory that no matter how the borders were to be redrawn, the settlements would be left inside Palestine.
And the current talk of swapping “settlement blocs” in the West Bank for equivalent amounts of land in Israel near the border is unrealistic. For any “two-state solution” to work, we would need to conduct a complete withdrawal from the West Bank. Even so, the success of the Zionist enterprise would be astounding.
If we cannot summon the determination it would take for a complete pullback, might the world, led by the United States, try to force us to withdraw? It might, but it probably won’t, so we are most likely looking at some sort of single state, bi-national state or confederation. What matters is that we are acting from a position of strength, and we ought to be investing our energy and creativity in working out a long-term solution with the Palestinians that will be acceptable to both of us.
What we should not be doing is what we are doing now: besieging and blacking out Gaza, killing and arresting dozens of Palestinians in the occupied territories every month, and constructing walls and fences between us and our neighbors.
The most recent suicide bombing in southern Israel has predictably prompted calls for a new barrier along our 145-mile Egyptian border. This is unreasonable. Walls, as recent events have shown, can be breached. Palestinian terrorism against civilians has decreased over the past years, even though the barrier separating Israel and the West Bank has many large gaps. It is illogical to suppose that this incomplete wall is the factor that has reduced terrorism.
The proposal to build an additional fence along the Egyptian border represents all that is wrong with our current policies. To cower behind a wall is to demonstrate again our loser mentality at a time when we have, in fact, won. The political settlement that the world is begging us to reach is the only way to ultimately stop the violence between us and the Palestinians.
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