Preventing ‘Palestine’: Part II The humanitarian paradigm
By MARTIN SHERMAN,
The Jerusalem Post -September 6, 2012
Into the Fray: Formula for an alternative to two-state-solution
requires policy that depoliticizes the context and ‘atomizes’ the
implementation.
If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for
myself, who am I? If not now, when? Hillel the Elder, Ethics of the
Fathers, 1:14
In Part 1 of this three-part series I set out the essential
preconditions for implementation of a viable alternative to a
“two-state-solution” (TSS) approach consistent with the long-term
survival of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.
To reiterate...
I emphasized that, given how ingrained the TSS-approach has become in
the culture of the discourse on the Arab-Israeli conflict, generating
any conceptual space for the consideration of alternative,
Zionist-compliant proposals requires a dramatic restructuring of
Israel’s diplomatic apparatus.
However, judging from some of the talk-backs received, the centrality
of Israeli diplomacy particularly public diplomacy was not fully
appreciated.
So to reiterate this point, allow me to quote one of the country’s
foremost experts on the role of public diplomacy, Prof. Eytan Gilboa,
who, in an article aptly titled “Public Diplomacy: The Missing
Component in Israel’s Foreign Policy,” warned: “The lack of an
adequate PD program has significantly affected Israel’s strategic
outlook and freedom of action... Any further neglect of PD would not
only restrict Israel’s strategic options, it would be detrimental to
its ability to survive in an increasingly intolerant and hostile
world...”
Gilboa is right. In the absence of a well-financed and well-formulated
public diplomacy offensive, Israel will find not only that its
strategic options are restricted, but that its very survival is
threatened. Among the survival- threatening strategic restrictions
that Israel will be subjected to, is the inability to break out of the
stranglehold the TSS has on its perceived range of actionable
alternatives.
Instrument of what policy?
Furthermore, in Part I, I underscored that diplomacy must be an
instrument of policy designed to achieve national goals, rather than
diplomatic pressures being a determinate of policy that dictates those
goals.
So to what goals should such reconstituted and reinvigorated
diplomatic machinery be directed in order to facilitate the
repudiation and replacement of the TSS? To answer this question in an
operationally useful manner, it is first necessary to identify the
fuel that drives the TSS-compliant perspectives.
In this regard, there is little room for ambiguity. Clearly,
sustaining the TSS mythology is what is commonly known as the
“Palestinian narrative” the notion that the Palestinian Arabs are a
distinct people that comprise a coherent and cohesive national entity,
with a clear vision of a “homeland,” in which they aspire to exercise
national sovereignty.
If this claim can be disproven in a manner that is not only
substantively persuasive, but that can be pertinently packaged
politically, the foundations upon which the edifice of the TSS is
erected will no longer be tenable.
Conversely, as long as the perceived legitimacy of the Palestinian
narrative persists or more accurately, is allowed to persist it
will continue to fuel the myths and the misperceptions that perpetuate
the TSS.
TSS-opponents must be forced to acknowledge the bitter truth. If the
contention that the Palestinian Arabs are indeed a distinct people
that comprise a coherent, cohesive national entity with a clear vision
of a homeland in which they aspire to exercise national sovereignty
cannot be repudiated, then there is little ground moral or practical
for opposing the TSS.
Deconstructing the narrative
Accordingly, the overriding aim of an adequately endowed and
appropriately energized Israeli diplomatic drive, on which all
subsequent endeavor is predicated and to which all subsequent effort
is harnessed, must be the deconstruction of the Palestinian narrative.
This assault on the pervasive but unmerited legitimacy of the
narrative must be directed both at its factual veracity and it moral
validity i.e. both at the empirical elements on which it is founded
and the objectives it is being used to promote.
Delegitimizing the Palestinian narrative will be a daunting task, but
the difficulty should not be overstated. We should take heart from the
accomplishments of the TSS-advocates themselves. Imagine how hopeless
the situation of any pro-TSS Palestinian activist must have seemed in
the late 1960s and early 1970s in the wake of Israel’s dramatic Six
Day War victory.
Faced with the perception of invincible Israeli military might on the
one hand, and resolute US rejection on the other, any realistic pundit
could well have been excused for considering the TSS dead in the
water.
Will and wherewithal
By way of illustration, the 1980 Republican platform that brought
Ronald Reagan to the White House stated: “We believe the establishment
of a Palestinian state on the West Bank would be destabilizing and
harmful to the peace process.” Moreover, in Israel, up until the late
1980s, successive opinion polls found that 80 percent or more of the
electorate opposed any significant territorial withdrawal in
Judea/Samaria.
Yet despite the bleak prospects, TSS-advocates did not despair. With
commendable resolve and resourcefulness they managed, against all
odds, to convert the status of their highly improbable political
paradigm from marginal to mainstream eventually even monopolistic.
For almost a quarter of a century, it has dominated and dictated the
discourse as the preferred mode of ending the Mideast conflict.
This, then, is the example that must be emulated in reverse. The
opponents of the TSS need to marshal the will and the wherewithal to
achieve what the proponents of TSS did: dislodge a dominant paradigm
and replace it with their own.
Without wishing to understate the difficulties entailed in this, in
some important aspects this reverse endeavor is or could be
easier.
For those seeking to debunk the Palestinian narrative, and hence the
fundamental rationale of the TSS, have an important ally on their side
the truth. After all, to strip the wafer-thin veneer of legitimacy
off this narrative, all one needs is to echo what the Palestinians
themselves do and say.
A contrived people
The Palestinian Arabs are a contrived people and their professed
national identity is bogus not because Newt Gingrich designated them
as “invented,” or because some right-wing religious radical dismisses
their claim on the basis of a divine dictate, allocating all of
“Greater Israel” to the Jews. They are a contrived people and their
professed national identity is bogus because they and their Arab
patrons openly admit it.
As I have documented in detail in previous columns, the Palestinians
characterize themselves not as a distinct people, but as part of the
Arab nation, indistinguishable from other components of it. They
openly confess that their national identity is neither authentic nor
permanent, but merely a temporary contrivance to help the Arabs
eliminate Israel. No less a figure than the spokesman of the Arab
League revealed that pan-Arab policy is to refuse Palestinians wishing
to acquire citizenship of Arab countries in which they have been
resident for decades, so as to artificially preserve their identity
lest there be no “reason for them to return to Palestine.”
Even more tellingly, the Palestinians have no clear vision of a
“homeland” in which they aspire to exercise their national
sovereignty. They have put forward wildly divergent even mutually
exclusive delineations of what comprises that “homeland.”
Significantly, until 1968, they not only explicitly eschewed any
sovereign claims to the “West Bank,” but conceded that it was part of
a another sovereign country, the Hashemite Kingdom, which up until
1988 claimed the territory for itself.
Clearly then, the Palestinians do not genuinely see themselves as a
distinct people with an authentic national identity, striving to
exercise sovereign rule in a defined territory. Rather their claim to
nationhood is a thinly disguised device to thwart the exercise of
Jewish national sovereignty and to undermine the Jewish nation-state.
Conveying this message assertively and articulately must be the
primary mission of the nation’s diplomatic offensive and the vital
precondition for the foundation of a viable TSS-alternative.
Depoliticizing the context
Deconstructing the Palestinian narrative and debunking the
authenticity of Palestinian national claims are crucially important
stages in terms of practical policy formulation. They comprise an
indispensable step toward devising a comprehensive policy paradigm to
replace the TSS that furnishes a valid rationale for ceasing to relate
to the Palestinian Arabs as a cohesive political entity.
This “depoliticizing” of the context of the problem has huge
consequences on two complementary levels.
On the one hand, it directs energies away from searching for solutions
that require agreement with one, or more, Arab polity(ies). Since the
express purpose of the contrived Palestinian national identity is to
undermine the foundations of the Jewish state, the pursuit of such a
genuine, sustainable accord with some Arab political entity is so
implausible as to be irrelevant as an element of policy, as the
experience of the past 100 years demonstrates.
On the other hand, it directs energies toward solutions that address
the Palestinian Arabs, not as a coherent national collective, but
rather as an amalgam of unfortunate individuals that has been
continually mislead and misinformed by cruel, corrupt cliques whose
overriding objectives were anything but the communal well-being of
those whose fate they strove to control.
Atomizing the implementation
But depoliticizing the context of the predicament of the Palestinian
Arabs will not, in itself, dissipate that predicament, or render the
need to do so any less pressing.
What it will do, however, is open the door to solutions that
circumvent the ruling cliques and directly engage the households,
family heads and breadwinners in the wider Palestinian Arab public,
without the agreement of any intervening Arab organization which might
and probably will have a vested interest in preventing a peaceable
resolution of the predicament.
Indeed, recognizing the futility of seeking a political solution
underscores the need for a humanitarian one.
Accordingly, these notions of depoliticizing the conceptual context
and “atomizing” the implementation of practical measures lead
inexorably to a policy prescription based on the eminently liberal (as
opposed to “illiberal” rather than “conservative”) doctrinal
principles of: (a) eliminating ethnic discrimination toward the
Palestinian Arabs first as refugees and second as residents in the
Arab world, and (b) providing individual Palestinian-Arabs the freedom
of choice to determine their future and that of their families.
‘Hillelian’ humanitarian rationale
These doctrinal elements translate into a comprehensive tripartite
proposal, based on a humanitarian “Hillelian” rationale, set out in
the introductory excerpt, of sober recognition of the need to look
after one’s own interest without descending into callous disregard for
the fate of the “other.”
The three components should be seen as a mutually interactive,
integrative whole:
• Dissolution or radical restructuring of UNRWA to bring the treatment
of Palestinian refugees into line with that of all other refugees on
the face of the globe.
• Resolute insistence on the cessation of ethnic discrimination
against Palestinian Arabs in the Arab world and of the prohibition on
their acquiring citizenship of the countries in which they have
resided for decades.
• Generous relocation loans provided directly to individual
Palestinian Arab breadwinners and family heads, resident in
Judea/Samaria (and eventually Gaza) to allow them to build better
futures for themselves and their dependents, in other countries of
their choice.
Why these three components do, indeed, comprise an effective,
interactive and integrative TSS-alternative mechanism that complies
with the Hillelian prescription of preserving self-interest while
displaying sensitivity to the fate of other actors indeed, even
antagonists will have to wait until next week.
For despite the allure of discussing the nitty-gritty, I believe that
elucidating how proposed practical measures are moored to their
intellectual foundations is essential for comprehending the proposal
itself and for convincing others to accept it.
Readers’ reservations
A persuasive enunciation of a comprehensive formula for the
replacement of a dominant paradigm to a conflict that has proved
intractable for over a century cannot be adequately conveyed in pithy
sound bites. Out of the box proposals inevitably provoke a maelstrom
of queries and critiques.
Indeed, previous columns have induced much animated responses not
all in the most courteous of terms.
Clearly the presentation hitherto has left much as yet unexplained.
This should not be interpreted as an attempt at evading thorny
questions.
In the final piece in this series I will deal with the major points
that have remained unaddressed and questions/ reservations/criticisms
that readers have raised in past weeks including topics such as:
• control of the decision variables;
• accusations of racism;
• fear of fratricide;
• allegations of ethnic cleansing;
• diplomatic and economic feasibility;
• identity of prospective host countries; and
• evidence of acceptability in Israeli and Palestinian societies.
Until then, allow me to leave you with this thought: If there is
nothing reprehensible in advocating funding the voluntary relocation
of Jews from Judea/Samaria to facilitate the establishment of what, in
all probability, would be a failed micro-state and a haven for radical
extremists on the fringes of Europe, what possible objection could
there be for funding the voluntary relocation of Arabs from
Judea/Samaria to prevent the establishment of such a forbidding
entity?
www.martinsherman.net
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=284173
requires policy that depoliticizes the context and ‘atomizes’ the
implementation.
If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for
myself, who am I? If not now, when? Hillel the Elder, Ethics of the
Fathers, 1:14
In Part 1 of this three-part series I set out the essential
preconditions for implementation of a viable alternative to a
“two-state-solution” (TSS) approach consistent with the long-term
survival of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people.
To reiterate...
I emphasized that, given how ingrained the TSS-approach has become in
the culture of the discourse on the Arab-Israeli conflict, generating
any conceptual space for the consideration of alternative,
Zionist-compliant proposals requires a dramatic restructuring of
Israel’s diplomatic apparatus.
However, judging from some of the talk-backs received, the centrality
of Israeli diplomacy particularly public diplomacy was not fully
appreciated.
So to reiterate this point, allow me to quote one of the country’s
foremost experts on the role of public diplomacy, Prof. Eytan Gilboa,
who, in an article aptly titled “Public Diplomacy: The Missing
Component in Israel’s Foreign Policy,” warned: “The lack of an
adequate PD program has significantly affected Israel’s strategic
outlook and freedom of action... Any further neglect of PD would not
only restrict Israel’s strategic options, it would be detrimental to
its ability to survive in an increasingly intolerant and hostile
world...”
Gilboa is right. In the absence of a well-financed and well-formulated
public diplomacy offensive, Israel will find not only that its
strategic options are restricted, but that its very survival is
threatened. Among the survival- threatening strategic restrictions
that Israel will be subjected to, is the inability to break out of the
stranglehold the TSS has on its perceived range of actionable
alternatives.
Instrument of what policy?
Furthermore, in Part I, I underscored that diplomacy must be an
instrument of policy designed to achieve national goals, rather than
diplomatic pressures being a determinate of policy that dictates those
goals.
So to what goals should such reconstituted and reinvigorated
diplomatic machinery be directed in order to facilitate the
repudiation and replacement of the TSS? To answer this question in an
operationally useful manner, it is first necessary to identify the
fuel that drives the TSS-compliant perspectives.
In this regard, there is little room for ambiguity. Clearly,
sustaining the TSS mythology is what is commonly known as the
“Palestinian narrative” the notion that the Palestinian Arabs are a
distinct people that comprise a coherent and cohesive national entity,
with a clear vision of a “homeland,” in which they aspire to exercise
national sovereignty.
If this claim can be disproven in a manner that is not only
substantively persuasive, but that can be pertinently packaged
politically, the foundations upon which the edifice of the TSS is
erected will no longer be tenable.
Conversely, as long as the perceived legitimacy of the Palestinian
narrative persists or more accurately, is allowed to persist it
will continue to fuel the myths and the misperceptions that perpetuate
the TSS.
TSS-opponents must be forced to acknowledge the bitter truth. If the
contention that the Palestinian Arabs are indeed a distinct people
that comprise a coherent, cohesive national entity with a clear vision
of a homeland in which they aspire to exercise national sovereignty
cannot be repudiated, then there is little ground moral or practical
for opposing the TSS.
Deconstructing the narrative
Accordingly, the overriding aim of an adequately endowed and
appropriately energized Israeli diplomatic drive, on which all
subsequent endeavor is predicated and to which all subsequent effort
is harnessed, must be the deconstruction of the Palestinian narrative.
This assault on the pervasive but unmerited legitimacy of the
narrative must be directed both at its factual veracity and it moral
validity i.e. both at the empirical elements on which it is founded
and the objectives it is being used to promote.
Delegitimizing the Palestinian narrative will be a daunting task, but
the difficulty should not be overstated. We should take heart from the
accomplishments of the TSS-advocates themselves. Imagine how hopeless
the situation of any pro-TSS Palestinian activist must have seemed in
the late 1960s and early 1970s in the wake of Israel’s dramatic Six
Day War victory.
Faced with the perception of invincible Israeli military might on the
one hand, and resolute US rejection on the other, any realistic pundit
could well have been excused for considering the TSS dead in the
water.
Will and wherewithal
By way of illustration, the 1980 Republican platform that brought
Ronald Reagan to the White House stated: “We believe the establishment
of a Palestinian state on the West Bank would be destabilizing and
harmful to the peace process.” Moreover, in Israel, up until the late
1980s, successive opinion polls found that 80 percent or more of the
electorate opposed any significant territorial withdrawal in
Judea/Samaria.
Yet despite the bleak prospects, TSS-advocates did not despair. With
commendable resolve and resourcefulness they managed, against all
odds, to convert the status of their highly improbable political
paradigm from marginal to mainstream eventually even monopolistic.
For almost a quarter of a century, it has dominated and dictated the
discourse as the preferred mode of ending the Mideast conflict.
This, then, is the example that must be emulated in reverse. The
opponents of the TSS need to marshal the will and the wherewithal to
achieve what the proponents of TSS did: dislodge a dominant paradigm
and replace it with their own.
Without wishing to understate the difficulties entailed in this, in
some important aspects this reverse endeavor is or could be
easier.
For those seeking to debunk the Palestinian narrative, and hence the
fundamental rationale of the TSS, have an important ally on their side
the truth. After all, to strip the wafer-thin veneer of legitimacy
off this narrative, all one needs is to echo what the Palestinians
themselves do and say.
A contrived people
The Palestinian Arabs are a contrived people and their professed
national identity is bogus not because Newt Gingrich designated them
as “invented,” or because some right-wing religious radical dismisses
their claim on the basis of a divine dictate, allocating all of
“Greater Israel” to the Jews. They are a contrived people and their
professed national identity is bogus because they and their Arab
patrons openly admit it.
As I have documented in detail in previous columns, the Palestinians
characterize themselves not as a distinct people, but as part of the
Arab nation, indistinguishable from other components of it. They
openly confess that their national identity is neither authentic nor
permanent, but merely a temporary contrivance to help the Arabs
eliminate Israel. No less a figure than the spokesman of the Arab
League revealed that pan-Arab policy is to refuse Palestinians wishing
to acquire citizenship of Arab countries in which they have been
resident for decades, so as to artificially preserve their identity
lest there be no “reason for them to return to Palestine.”
Even more tellingly, the Palestinians have no clear vision of a
“homeland” in which they aspire to exercise their national
sovereignty. They have put forward wildly divergent even mutually
exclusive delineations of what comprises that “homeland.”
Significantly, until 1968, they not only explicitly eschewed any
sovereign claims to the “West Bank,” but conceded that it was part of
a another sovereign country, the Hashemite Kingdom, which up until
1988 claimed the territory for itself.
Clearly then, the Palestinians do not genuinely see themselves as a
distinct people with an authentic national identity, striving to
exercise sovereign rule in a defined territory. Rather their claim to
nationhood is a thinly disguised device to thwart the exercise of
Jewish national sovereignty and to undermine the Jewish nation-state.
Conveying this message assertively and articulately must be the
primary mission of the nation’s diplomatic offensive and the vital
precondition for the foundation of a viable TSS-alternative.
Depoliticizing the context
Deconstructing the Palestinian narrative and debunking the
authenticity of Palestinian national claims are crucially important
stages in terms of practical policy formulation. They comprise an
indispensable step toward devising a comprehensive policy paradigm to
replace the TSS that furnishes a valid rationale for ceasing to relate
to the Palestinian Arabs as a cohesive political entity.
This “depoliticizing” of the context of the problem has huge
consequences on two complementary levels.
On the one hand, it directs energies away from searching for solutions
that require agreement with one, or more, Arab polity(ies). Since the
express purpose of the contrived Palestinian national identity is to
undermine the foundations of the Jewish state, the pursuit of such a
genuine, sustainable accord with some Arab political entity is so
implausible as to be irrelevant as an element of policy, as the
experience of the past 100 years demonstrates.
On the other hand, it directs energies toward solutions that address
the Palestinian Arabs, not as a coherent national collective, but
rather as an amalgam of unfortunate individuals that has been
continually mislead and misinformed by cruel, corrupt cliques whose
overriding objectives were anything but the communal well-being of
those whose fate they strove to control.
Atomizing the implementation
But depoliticizing the context of the predicament of the Palestinian
Arabs will not, in itself, dissipate that predicament, or render the
need to do so any less pressing.
What it will do, however, is open the door to solutions that
circumvent the ruling cliques and directly engage the households,
family heads and breadwinners in the wider Palestinian Arab public,
without the agreement of any intervening Arab organization which might
and probably will have a vested interest in preventing a peaceable
resolution of the predicament.
Indeed, recognizing the futility of seeking a political solution
underscores the need for a humanitarian one.
Accordingly, these notions of depoliticizing the conceptual context
and “atomizing” the implementation of practical measures lead
inexorably to a policy prescription based on the eminently liberal (as
opposed to “illiberal” rather than “conservative”) doctrinal
principles of: (a) eliminating ethnic discrimination toward the
Palestinian Arabs first as refugees and second as residents in the
Arab world, and (b) providing individual Palestinian-Arabs the freedom
of choice to determine their future and that of their families.
‘Hillelian’ humanitarian rationale
These doctrinal elements translate into a comprehensive tripartite
proposal, based on a humanitarian “Hillelian” rationale, set out in
the introductory excerpt, of sober recognition of the need to look
after one’s own interest without descending into callous disregard for
the fate of the “other.”
The three components should be seen as a mutually interactive,
integrative whole:
• Dissolution or radical restructuring of UNRWA to bring the treatment
of Palestinian refugees into line with that of all other refugees on
the face of the globe.
• Resolute insistence on the cessation of ethnic discrimination
against Palestinian Arabs in the Arab world and of the prohibition on
their acquiring citizenship of the countries in which they have
resided for decades.
• Generous relocation loans provided directly to individual
Palestinian Arab breadwinners and family heads, resident in
Judea/Samaria (and eventually Gaza) to allow them to build better
futures for themselves and their dependents, in other countries of
their choice.
Why these three components do, indeed, comprise an effective,
interactive and integrative TSS-alternative mechanism that complies
with the Hillelian prescription of preserving self-interest while
displaying sensitivity to the fate of other actors indeed, even
antagonists will have to wait until next week.
For despite the allure of discussing the nitty-gritty, I believe that
elucidating how proposed practical measures are moored to their
intellectual foundations is essential for comprehending the proposal
itself and for convincing others to accept it.
Readers’ reservations
A persuasive enunciation of a comprehensive formula for the
replacement of a dominant paradigm to a conflict that has proved
intractable for over a century cannot be adequately conveyed in pithy
sound bites. Out of the box proposals inevitably provoke a maelstrom
of queries and critiques.
Indeed, previous columns have induced much animated responses not
all in the most courteous of terms.
Clearly the presentation hitherto has left much as yet unexplained.
This should not be interpreted as an attempt at evading thorny
questions.
In the final piece in this series I will deal with the major points
that have remained unaddressed and questions/ reservations/criticisms
that readers have raised in past weeks including topics such as:
• control of the decision variables;
• accusations of racism;
• fear of fratricide;
• allegations of ethnic cleansing;
• diplomatic and economic feasibility;
• identity of prospective host countries; and
• evidence of acceptability in Israeli and Palestinian societies.
Until then, allow me to leave you with this thought: If there is
nothing reprehensible in advocating funding the voluntary relocation
of Jews from Judea/Samaria to facilitate the establishment of what, in
all probability, would be a failed micro-state and a haven for radical
extremists on the fringes of Europe, what possible objection could
there be for funding the voluntary relocation of Arabs from
Judea/Samaria to prevent the establishment of such a forbidding
entity?
www.martinsherman.net
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=284173
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