Blame Israel First
KROSSEL, MARTIN
Blame Israel First Amos Elon Misperceives the World Around Him By Martin Krossel For roughly the first 30 years of Israel's existence, there was general agreement in the country about how to deal...
...Such slogans first surfaced in Israel in 1982, in the huge Labor-party and Peace Now rally held in Tel Aviv's Kings of Israel Square [now Yitzhak Rabin Square] to protest the massacre of Palestinians by Lebanese Christians...
...By pretending that this third group does not exist, the Left in Israel has tried to stigmatize and undermine everyone who has doubts about Oslo and the Arabs' willingness to make peace...
...Elon backed the decision of Rabin's minister of education to cancel such trips...
...Elon argues that the government should have been more determined to prevent the establishment of these settlements...
...One by one the enemies have fallen away...
...The opposition's rhetoric was, in the main, well within the bounds of legitimate discourse...
...As Elon and his fellows see it, since 1993 every Israeli has either supported the Oslo accords—every jot and tittle, every implementation and violation—or stood against peace...
...He extends this criticism even to Abba Eban—well loved in the West as a dove—for referring to the pre-1967 lines around Israel as "the Auschwitz borders...
...Elon is willing to overlook the existence of these enemies, and is even ready to champion their cause...
...It is doubtful that the intifada would have lasted so long had world opinion not fully aligned with the rioters...
...Rabin's widow, Leah, enjoyed a successful book tour recently...
...If the international community had resolutely signaled that political legitimacy could not be gained by hurling lethal objects at soldiers trying to maintain order, the violence might have died down within weeks...
...While some of the anti-Rabin rhetoric was indeed excessive, and dangerously so, Elon conveniently overlooks the Left's history of equally inflammatory statements...
...Elon believed the West Bank Arabs who told him that they expected few political gains out of their uprising...
...Elon has long been concerned about the danger that this segment of Israeli society poses to both the state's democracy and reconciliation with the Arabs, and some of this concern is justified...
...Most of the collected essays were published in American magazines to begin with, notably the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books...
...Elon has just come out with a collection of essays on the Arab-Israeli conflict, 21 in all, written during the 28 years from the Six-Day War to the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin...
...Elon spreads the blame for the murder to nearly everyone who opposed the Oslo accords, especially those in the parliamentary opposition...
...During the riots that followed the opening of a Jerusalem tunnel last fall, this is exactly what happened...
...If there is ever to be peace, he says, Israel will not only have to surrender the territories, but abandon the settlements— which should be unthinkable for a Jewish government...
...Blame Israel First Amos Elon Misperceives the World Around Him By Martin Krossel For roughly the first 30 years of Israel's existence, there was general agreement in the country about how to deal with hostile Arab neighbors...
...Virtually all Israelis believed that the wars they were fighting were forced on them by Arab aggressiveness...
...The volume will probably score a hit in America, not because it contains anything insightful—it does not—but because Elon is the kind of Israeli favored by the American media, as well as by most American Jews...
...This "peace movement" included several prominent writers, among them Amos Oz, A.B...
...There, signs proclaiming, 'Begin is a Murderer' and 'Sharon is a Murderer' were held high by many demonstrators...
...Moreover, much of this criticism was valid...
...In his essay on the murder of Rabin, he addresses the loaded question of who was responsible for the crime...
...Ideally, according to Elon, the Israelis would have been "generous victors" and returned the territories soon after they captured them...
...These Israelis are skeptical about surrendering territory because they are not yet convinced that the Arab states have committed themselves to peace with their country...
...Sometime in the late 1970s, this conventional view was challenged by a number of Israeli intellectuals...
...But they still have their enemies, too...
...It would have been foolish for any Israeli government to think that it could return those territories without inviting further unprovoked attacks...
...Take, as a starting point, the use and abuse of the Holocaust in Israeli polemics...
...For them, the central issue was not the Arabs' refusal to live in peace, but Israel's reluctance to surrender territories occupied in 1967's Six-Day War...
...He contends that "no Israeli government had ever been as deliberately and systematically delegit-imized by its opposition as Rabin's...
...Elon's writings on the intifada are excellent examples of the Israeli intellectual at work...
...Elon assumes that the Israeli population is divided neatly into two groups: pragmatists, who are willing to trade land for peace, and fervent nationalists, who eschew peace in order to hold on to territories divinely set aside for Jewish habitation and control...
...I can vouch that no one asked for their removal . . . Elon is unable to make the case that politicians' words whipped up a murderous climate...
...ing on campus...
...There is this difference, though: In Elon's writings, it is the Israelis who are the Nazis...
...These essays demonstrate, again and again, how reluctant Elon is to hold Arabs accountable for their own actions...
...He writes, "Upon their return from Poland, some of the young participants in these tours told the press that . . . they had become 'better Zionists...
...When Benjamin Netanyahu charged in the Knesset that Oslo would establish "an army of Arab terrorists," he was referring to a Palestinian "police force" of 30,000 that, in any confrontation, would side with their own and turn their weapons on Israelis...
...If her experience is any indication, Elon will be on the talk shows and lecturMartin Krossel is a freelance writer who con centrates on international affairs...
...As time went on, an exchange of land for peace became more difficult, Elon says, because Israel allowed the territories to be settled by Jews...
...Baruch Goldstein earned infamy in his massacre of almost 30 Arab civilians in a Hebron mosque three years ago...
...In a similar vein, he quotes his cohort Yehoshua about the failure of Israelis to rise in mass protest against their army's efforts to put down the Palestinian intifada: Yehoshua said that, at last, he could understand how Germans, following World War II, could claim not to have seen or heard of the death camps...
...Right after the Six-Day War, the government made a half-hearted attempt to prevent the creation of new Jewish settlements...
...He declares that the assassin, Yigal Amir, is not to be regarded as a Lee Harvey Oswald, acting on his own initiative...
...But there is a third major group within Israeli society, probably the majority...
...The Left, however, is no more hesitant than the Right to invoke the Holocaust when it serves political purposes—as exemplified by Elon himself...
...Yehoshua, and Amos Elon...
...This is the sort of double standard that permeates all of Elon's analyses...
...An Israel reduced to its pre-1967 frontiers had proven an inviting target for Arab aggression...
...An epidemic of Stockholm Syndrome has broken out among these intellectuals, so completely do they identify with the Arab cause...
...But Elon's suspicion that Amir received prior rabbinical sanction for Rabin's murder is without foundation...
...Certainly the Jews still have their demons, their religious fanatics on the right...
...In his last chapter, Elon writes, "In an essay on the rise of Meir Kahane, Leon Wieseltier wrote that the Jews must attend to their demons as well as they attend to their enemies...
...Israel captured the territories in defending itself against such aggression...
...In his view, the settlers are all fanatics and zealots with a racist view of the Arabs and no desire for peace...
...If Israel is portrayed as the heavy, who better to fortify such an image than an articulate, urbane Israeli...
...He quotes favorably an Israeli officer who told a newspaper in the late 1980s, "When I read about [Kurt] Waldheim in the papers, I worry about how the future will interpret what I am doing in the territories today...
...Only the demons remain...
...In Elon's one-sided view, Israelis are responsible for violence committed by Israelis, and they are also responsible for violence committed by Arabs...
...they had become convinced that Israel must become every square centimeter of Eretz Israel [Greater Israel...
...But these Arabs knew that world opinion regarded them as victims and the Israelis as their oppressors...
...But Elon produces no evidence that either the population in the territories or the neighboring Arab states would have accepted a "land-for-peace" deal in the '60s and '70s...
...Which makes him about as dangerous to Israel as the gun-toting zealots...
...They figured that, in time, pressure on Israel would mount and cause the government to make risky concessions, as at Oslo...
...Elon instead casts a very wide net...
...Many fewer lives, both Israeli and Arab, would have been lost or ruined...
...After the assassination, Hillel Halkin, a wellknown Israeli writer once active in the peace movement, wrote, [An] example of right-wing incitement, said to have provoked the assassination, were the placards and shouts of 'Rabin is a murderer' . . . These were reprehensible—but the copyright on them belonged to the Left...
...Then, they could have had peace...
...Elon argues in "The Politics of Memory" that the Holocaust has been exploited by right-leaning politicians as a justification for their inability to make peace with the Palestinians (the Arabs are like the Nazis, Yasser Arafat is like Hitler...
...Perhaps this is because there is no such evidence...
...Elon's book is significant because it shows that the Israeli Left has become radicalized and extreme...
...Elon not only condones the violence: He outright embraces it...
...Amir, he notes, grew up in an ultra-Orthodox home, attended Orthodox schools, and so on...
...Elon further objects to Israeli students' being sent on the "March of the Living," a study tour of former Nazi death camps...
...The Arab states launched these wars because they hated the Jews and wanted to destroy Israel—that was that...
...territorial compromise was impossible...
...Elon's arguments—like those of the movement for which he speaks—are fraught with deception and hypocrisy...
...While there are scattered mentions of Palestinians' missing opportunities for peace, Elon clearly believes that, since 1967, Israel has had it within its power to determine war or peace...
Vol. 2 • June 1997 • No. 37
