Truth Be Told, Belief in Palestinian Openness to Two-State Solution Amounts to Insanity - by Prof. Efraim Karsh

Rather than look at the historical record of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and draw the self-evident conclusions, Uri Avnery retreats into a counterfactual fantasyland.

Prof. Efraim Karsh..
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 654..
23 November '17..
Link: https://besacenter.org/perspectives-papers/belief-palestinian-openness-two-state-solution-insanity/

I never thought I would concur with anything written by veteran Israeli “peace” activist Uri Avnery, but I find myself in full agreement with his recent prognosis that “sheer stupidity plays a major role in the history of nations” and that the longstanding rejection of the two-state solution has been nothing short of grand idiocy.

But it is here that our consensus ends. For rather than look at the historical record of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict and draw the self-evident conclusions, Avnery retreats into the counterfactual fantasyland in which he has been living for decades. “When I pointed this out [i.e., the two-state solution], right after the 1948 war,” he writes, “I was more or less alone. Now this is a worldwide consensus, everywhere except in Israel.”

Ignoring the vainglorious (mis)appropriation of the two-state solution by the then 25-year-old Avnery, this assertion is not only unfounded but the inverse of the truth. Far from being averse to the idea, the Zionist leadership accepted the two-state solution as early as 1937 when it was first raised by a British commission of inquiry headed by Lord Peel.

And while this acceptance was somewhat half-hearted given that the proposed Jewish state occupied a mere 15% of the mandate territory west of the Jordan river, it was the Zionist leadership that 10 years later spearheaded the international campaign for the two-state solution that culminated in the UN partition resolution of November 1947.

Likewise, since the onset of the Oslo process in September 1993, five successive Israeli prime ministers – Shimon Peres, Ehud Barak, Ariel Sharon, Ehud Olmert, and Benjamin Netanyahu – have openly and unequivocally endorsed the two-state solution. Paradoxically, it was Yitzhak Rabin, posthumously glorified as a tireless “soldier of peace,” who envisaged a Palestinian “entity short of a state that will independently run the lives of the Palestinians under its control,” while Netanyahu, whom Avnery berates for rejecting the two-state solution, has repeatedly proclaimed his support for the idea, including in a high-profile 2011 address to both houses of the US Congress.

By contrast, the Palestinian Arab leadership, as well the neighboring Arab states, have consistently rejected the two-state solution from the start. The July 1937 Peel Committee report led to the intensification of mass violence, begun the previous year and curtailed for the duration of the commission’s deliberations, while the November 1947 partition resolution triggered an immediate outburst of Palestinian-Arab violence, followed six months later by an all-Arab attempt to destroy the newly proclaimed State of Israel.

On Fish and House Guests

Medusa
CiF Watch
21 September '10

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) claims to be impartial in its attitude towards Israel but it has not been slow to condemn Israel for alleged human rights abuses while singularly failing to mention continued breaches of the human rights of the Palestinians in Gaza by their own government, Hamas (see also here , here and here).

The ICRC has been tasked, so far without any success, with trying to communicate with Gilad Shalit, the young Israeli kidnapped over four years ago in a cross-border raid by Hamas, held incommunicado and in solitary confinement in contravention of the Geneva Conventions, and without access to medical aid. He was only 19 years of age when he was captured and was last heard from a year ago. Most recently Hamas published an animated video on YouTube, after threats to kill Gilad Shalit unless the Israeli government meets its demands, at the end of which the viewer is led to believe that Gilad has been executed. This is yet more evidence, if any were needed after the murders of four Israeli civilians in the West Bank, of Hamas’ utter depravity and total disregard for human decency.

The first sentence of the ICRC’s mission statement states unequivocally:

“The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is an impartial, neutral and independent organization whose exclusively humanitarian mission is to protect the lives and dignity of victims of armed conflict and other situations of violence and to provide them with assistance.”

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Another Tack: Uri's beloved Ada'le

Sarah Honig
JPost
29 October 09

Most of us Israelis were literally dumbstruck by the imbecilities which our latest Nobel laureate, Ada Yonath, spouted. No sooner had she made us proud, Yonath proceeded to slap us hard across our collective face. We're still smarting from the supposed smart one's slurs, which is perhaps why it's better to pretend that she never advised we forthwith liberate all convicted terrorists - regardless of Gilad Schalit's ongoing captivity and certainly regardless of whatever atrocity they committed and were duly tried and convicted for.

"It's unclear to me why we're holding these Palestinians - the ones we call 'terrorists' - instead of releasing everybody from the outset, without any link to a deal for Schalit," Yonath opined in an Army Radio interview. Her incisive scientific logic continued: "It's in our power to change the present situation. When one is incarcerated for years, friends and family around him grow angry. That's how we create terrorists.... If no terrorists sat in our prisons, nobody would abduct Israelis to effect their release. By holding terrorists, we give the other side an appetite to launch kidnapping operations. Once we no longer imprison terrorists, they'd have no reason to kidnap."

If taken seriously, the implications of the above babble are staggering. It's akin to suggesting that the surefire crime stopper is to empty all prisons, halt all law enforcement activities, desist from arresting, prosecuting, sentencing and punishing miscreants - no matter how heinous their felonies. A free-for-all will safeguard our freedoms.

FOR A state like ours - the only one worldwide overtly threatened with genocide - the implications are altogether scary. They plainly mandate we stop defending ourselves.

If, as Yonath contends, hopelessness is the mother of conflict, then it might well be asked why well-off British-born youths of Pakistani extraction chose to detonate themselves at a beachfront Tel Aviv club. Were they so hopeless in the Labor-led UK that they decided to take it out on us?

If, according to Yonath, violence is triggered by sending murderers to prison, how is it that Arab massacres began many decades before we gained sovereignty and attendant authority to apprehend anyone?

How did Jews nettle Palestinian idol Haj Amin al-Husseini to induce him to join Hitler in Nazi Berlin and became an active accomplice in the "final solution?"

Does Yonath believe the masterminds of the Park Hotel, Sbarro Pizzeria, Maxim Restaurant and many more suicide bombings deserve no reckoning? Would she let off scot-free executioners, like those who shot (at point-blank, one-by-one) expectant mother Tali Hatuel and her four tiny daughters (as well as the fetus she carried to nearly full-term)?

If even legal action is illegitimate, how do we safeguard ourselves? By surrendering?

The so-called political right and center fear vocalizing their indignation, lest they thereby amplify Yonath's delegitimation of Israeli self-preservation. The embarrassment caused by so honored an Israeli echoing enemy rhetoric is too bitter a pill. Even our ever-voluble left-of-center crowd seems embarrassed. There's no exultant crowing, no "we told you so."

Yonath isn't even on the fringes of our consensus. Unbeknownst to most Israelis, who hadn't heard of her until the Nobel committee lifted her from anonymity, she is one of Uri Avnery's loyal sidekicks, a true disciple, even a quasi-protégée.

Read what he himself wrote: "Our table celebrated with Ada Yonath. This 'table' just had its 50th anniversary. It started by accident in California, the café established at the time by Abie Nathan, who later became famous as the Peace Pilot. Afterward, we met for many years at the legendary artists' café Cassit." Then "the table wandered to several other places and became known as the 'Cassit exiles' table." The "House of Lords," one newspaper nicknamed it.

"The habitués of the table come from different walks of life. There is a former director of the Israel Broadcasting Authority, several senior journalists, a linguist and Bible expert, a film producer, a professor of medicine, a psychiatrist, a town planner, an industrialist, a translator of literature, a radio program producer. And a scientist." The latter is Yonath.

AVNERY CONTENDS that "the table is not political. But all its habitués tend, as it so happens, to lean toward the Left. For years, Ada Yonath has been our candidate for the Nobel Prize. I recount all this not only in order to boast about the fact that Ada 'belongs to us.'"

In radio interviews, Avnery was downright fatherly and called Yonath "our Ada'le." He couldn't stop boasting that she indeed "belongs to us." In this context it's instructive to note that Avnery asserted in a recent op-ed that Schalit wasn't kidnapped, that he's a POW, that Israeli government propaganda claims otherwise to foil a swap, that it's wrong to classify "Palestinian candidates for release" as "terrorists with blood on their hands, criminals beyond the law, lowly murderers." Doesn't Ada'le sound like her mentor?

Said mentor, it needs be stressed, had long ago crossed the lines - physically, intellectually, spiritually and emotionally. He identifies with the enemy and subscribes to its perspective. Nevertheless, Avnery parades as the preeminent freethinking Israeli and is the darling of Israel-bashers for doing their dirty work. He's incidentally the single most popular Israeli in his native Germany.
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