Why have a forced marriage?
By Ted Belman
Sultan Knish suggests Why Israel is Losing the Military and Media Wars
- The answer is simple enough. Defensive PR, like defensive warfare, never works. And Israeli PR and Israeli warfare has been on the defensive for decades now. If you break down Israel’s message to a single sentence, it’s “We didn’t do any of the things we’re accused of.” That is the kind of message you expect to hear from criminal defendants, and it’s a message that impresses no one. The only thing it does is produce a debate about the validity of the accusations themselves, which is to PR what Stalingrad was to the Russian front.
I go further. Our diplomacy, if it has any chance to overcome the demonization of Israel and win us a better deal, must be rights based.
Rather than resist the demanded freeze with the argument that such settlements must be permitted internal growth, we should have been asserting our right to build because it is our right.
Rather than hide behind the necessity for Palestine to be demilitarized or to recognizing Israel as a Jewish state, we should be claiming our right to Judea and Samaria.
Rather than stand by failed agreements which have been honoured only in the breach, such as Oslo and the Roadmap, we should be discarding them.
Rather than wait passively for the next peace initiative to broadside us, we should have an initiative of our own. We must take matters into our own hands.
In a way, Netanyahu, with his economic plan for the “Palestinians”, is doing just that, but it is the wrong plan. It is premised on the basis that as the Palestinians develop a greater stake in peace, they will be more wont to preserve it. That may or may not be so. Essentially he is investing in a marriage, believing that it will work to our advantage in the long run. By doing so, he forecloses the option of squeezing the Arabs out of Judea and Samaria.
Many accept it as inevitable that we will have to live with them and must make the best of it. Others reject such a marriage, or separation or divorce if that’s what it leads to. They don’t want to get married in the first place.
Why struggle to share a house? Why not get one party to move out.
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