A Conflict of Delusions

In recent days Netanyahu pledged his future government to peace negotiations with the Palestinian Authority. This came after the American President made a statement implying that peace would be harder to achieve under the new government, a rare and unhelpful bias considering conventionally American presidents refrain from involving themselves in Israeli party politics. However worryingly Netanyahu’s statement suggests his government will perpetuate the delusions that have for the past decades assisted in preventing a resolution of the conflict.

In many respects the Arab/Israeli conflict is being maintained by powerful delusions on both sides.
Firstly on the Palestinian side exists the deeply held delusion that the whole land can be turned into an arab State and that Israel can be completely wiped out by violent struggle.
On the Israeli side exists the delusion that the Palestinians will give up there’s.

For the last couple of decades Israel’s policy towards its security problem has been founded upon the premise that the Palestinians are prepared to trade terror for territory and are serious about sharing the land with the Jews. Yet the consistent failure of the PLO (considered the moderates) to amend its charter, which calls for the destruction of Israel through violence, should have been enough to demonstrate that this belief is fundamentally not the case.

Not only has Palestinian rhetoric rarely been concerned with peace through compromise but their actions have spoken much louder than occasional insincere words. No where is this better illustrated than with the conflict’s two major peace agreements; the Oslo accords of the early 1990s and the Camp David talks of 2000. Following the Oslo agreements not only did the Palestinian Authority completely neglect its commitments, but as Israel complied with its side of the deal and increasingly surrendered control over the major Palestinian population centres so these areas were transformed into enclaves of militancy, radicalism and terror training.
In 2000 the Israeli government offered the Palestinians more than they could have ever previously hoped for; an independent state in Gaza and the West Bank with Jerusalem as its capital, but not only did Arafat reject this offer and fail to make an alternative offer, but the Palestinians perceived the offer as a display of Israeli weakness and lack of resolve and launched the 2nd Intafada, the bloodiest episode in Israel’s history, during which nearly 1000 of its citizens were killed in terrorist attacks.
And if that example wasn’t recent enough for most people’s short memories then they should recall 2005 when the Israeli government withdrew completely from the Gaza region (demanding nothing in return) as part of a progression towards surrendering territory to make way for a Palestinian state. The people of Gaza of course repaid this move with the election of the intensely anti-Semitic, anti-democratic islamist movement Hamas, which claimed the Israeli withdrawal as a personal victory. Just like Hizbullah had done in 2006 Hamas didn’t reciprocate Israeli concessions with peaceful gestures but rather began to rain thousands of missiles down on Israel’s civilians.

Even where moderate Palestinian leaders have outwardly talked the talk of peace for diplomatic reasons, in doing so they have failed to be representative of the Palestinian population at large. When groups like the PLO have shown signs of considering moderation, this has only been followed by the creation and rapid growth of hardline splinter groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad, who are rapidly coming to dominate the Palestinian political scene.

Western and Israeli politicians fixated around two state solutions and land for peace deals are increasingly choosing to ignore the cultural reality among Palestinians, which has been becoming ever more dominated by militant Islam and ever more intensely anti-Semitic. Even a very brief survey of Palestinian media, religion and education will indicate that culturally the actual Palestinian people seem as far away from notions of coexistence as they have ever been. Yet as the Israeli population increases its willingness for compromise and eagerness for peace so the Israeli political atmosphere further convinces itself that the other side is equally in the right mental framework for peace. This ability to see the world as you want it to be rather than the way it actually is could prove fatally dangerous in the current climate. Yet with no easy military option and aggressive international pressure to buy into the two state solution so the Israeli political scene has forced itself to ignore the reality around it and further entrench itself in delusion.

The Real Tragedy in the Middle East

Many who visit Israel’s disputed territories come away with a strong sense of tragedy and injustice on behalf of the Palestinians. Seeing the extensive military instillations that Israel has there they feel that Israel’s ‘occupation’ weighs heavy on the ‘native’ population forced to live under it. They see the daily inconvenience of the security checks at road blocks and argue that Israel is imposing unbearable living conditions on these people. But if that’s the only tragedy they see then they really haven’t looked very far at all.

Isn’t it also a tragedy that Jews who wish to exercise their right to live in their historic homeland are forced to live in small compounds, travel on separate roads in bullet proof buses that they have to go through airport style security before even being able to board. And isn’t also a tragedy that all Israeli’s have to send their children to risk their lives trying to protect the Jewish communities living in this fiercely hostile area. The security fence that has to carve up the land is also a tragedy, what nation would ever choose such an extreme option if it really had any other choice.

No where is the tragedy more evident than in Hebron, Judaism’s second holiest site and up until the late 1920’s home to a large thriving and century old Jewish community, before many were massacred and forced to flee in the Arab uprisings of 1929. Now a tiny section of the old city is walled off and heavily guarded for Jews to live in, the ancient synagogue there that was later turned into a mosque is still only partially accessible to Jews, with several of the tombs of important biblical figures on the Muslim side where Jews and Christians can not enter. In Bethlehem and Nabulus things are even worse, here no Jewish community is able to reside, the tombs of Rachel and Joseph are virtually inaccessible, the later having been partially destroyed by the local population.

The tragedy here is the Palestinian inability to allow Jews the right to reside in their historic and spiritual homeland in the same peace and security that Arabs living on the Israeli side enjoy. If they could stop themselves from attacking and murdering Jews at every given opportunity then this military infrastructure that protects the Jewish residents in the disputed territories could be lifted and both Jews and Palestinians would be able to live their lives in far greater freedom. Instead under the current situation Jews like those in Hebron are essentially imprisoned in tiny ghettos, and Palestinians are subject to countless security measures.
Worse still is the fact that it is currently the wisdom of the international community that the only solution to this intolerable situation is not the end of Palestinian aggression against the Jewish communities in their midst, but rather they insist upon the ethnic cleansing of entirety of the Jewish population living in the most religiously significant part of their historic homeland.

There is undoubtedly a tragedy in this part of the world, but the question is one of who is perpetuating it.