October 24th, '03
Golda's Successors

This article by Yossi Klein Halevi first appeared in the Jerusalem Post.

Israel is finally emerging from its annual, weeks-long period of Yom Kippur self-recrimination, prompted not so much by the holiday as by the 1973 war. This year marked that war's 30th anniversary, and atonement has been particularly intense. Once again we reminded ourselves of the sin of arrogance that led to Israeli complacency before the Egyptian and Syrian surprise attack. Once again we relived those terrible moments when Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan ignored warnings of impending war and took refuge in the conceptzia, the prevailing Israeli strategic concept which insisted that Israeli might would deter Arab aggression.

Ironically, though the failures of the Yom Kippur War have been cited most vigorously by the Left, the real heirs to the arrogant blindness of the old Labor hawks are today's Labor doves. They are the ones who cling to a failed conceptzia and dismiss any data that contradict it. Like the old Labor hawks, they too advocate a policy of ein breira, no alternative - except that where Labor hawks once invoked that phrase to insist that Israel's survival depended on wariness and resolve, Labor doves now invoke it to insist that Israel's survival depends on trust in Palestinian goodwill and accommodation to their demands.

Which brings us to the Geneva Initiative.

Reading the 26-page document is a surreal experience. The document fearlessly penetrates the most intractable issues of the Palestinian-Israeli abyss. Jerusalem? Here's a color-coded map of how the city of conflict will be transformed into the city of peace. Refugee return? There's no dilemma that men of goodwill can't resolve. The Temple Mount? Give us a real problem.

The only hitch is that it's a monumental act of self-deception. Which is precisely what makes it such a worthy successor to the pre-Yom Kippur conceptzia that it supposedly negates.

The conceptual sin of the Geneva Israelis - Yossi Beilin, Avraham Burg, Amram Mitzna, Amnon Lipkin-Shahak - is to assume that we can still negotiate a comprehensive peace with this generation of PLO leaders, and that they will abide by their commitments. That sin emerges from the Left's refusal to concede the enormity of the Palestinian betrayal of peace, and to cling instead to the cowardly claim that both sides are responsible for the failure of Oslo. Cowardly, because the notion allows left-wingers to avoid admitting just how wrong they were about the possibility of peace with the PLO. That failure wasn't just a lapse in judgment about Yasser Arafat's character; it was a failure to comprehend the depth of Arab rejectionism of Israel's being.

NOT SURPRISINGLY, the initiative itself contains Oslo-sized loopholes waiting to be abused. The fact that disagreement has already begun over interpretation of the document is the inevitable result of negotiating with Arafat's regime. While Israeli negotiators insisted they had won a Palestinian renunciation of the right of return, Palestinian negotiators were telling their people that they had done no such thing.

Welcome to the conceptzia.

The supposed historic breakthrough of the Geneva Initiative is simply that it doesn't mention the right of return. In other words, the Palestinians have refused once again to renounce their goal of demographically destroying Israel. And so while Israelis are expected to repudiate their right of return to post-1967 borders in the most tangible way, by physically uprooting settlements, Palestinians won't even offer a verbal repudiation of their right of return to pre-1967 Israel.

I'm not among those who view territorial concessions, even on the Temple Mount, as a betrayal of Zionism. Achieving an end to this conflict and normalization of the Jewish fate have always been mainstream Zionist goals.

But to agree to cede all the territories and almost all of Jerusalem's Old City means going beyond even what Israel offered at Taba - and to do so under terrorist pressure. And so Geneva compounds the disaster of Taba, which offered concessions beyond those offered at Camp David after the Palestinians had launched their terrorist war. Palestinians will not be wrong to see in the trajectory of concessions from Camp David to Taba to Geneva a vindication of the terrorist strategy. And that makes the Geneva Initiative a document of surrender.

Along with their adamant insistence on implementing a faulty conceptzia, the Geneva Israelis have revealed a stunning disdain for the niceties of democracy and for the will of the Israeli people, just like the old arrogant leaders of Mapai, forerunner of the Labor Party. In the early years of the state, Mapai leaders routinely referred to the immigrants from Arab countries and to the survivors of the Holocaust as "poor human material," not quite good enough for the socialist experiment that was supposed to unfold here.

When the angry young Sephardi activists who called themselves the Black Panthers demonstrated against Ashkenazi paternalism in the early 1970s, Golda Meir dismissed them as "not nice boys." And when the repressed Sephardi majority finally threw out the Labor Party in 1977, Yitzhak Ben-Aharon, one of the grand old men of Labor, sniffed that the people, not the government, should be replaced.

By circumventing the democratically elected Israeli government and inviting an international campaign to isolate and pressure it, the Geneva Israelis have revealed that same contempt for the democratic will of the Israeli people. Never mind that this will was overwhelmingly expressed in the election of the present government, which has determined that it will not negotiate substantive issues under fire, and that it certainly won't negotiate with representatives of Yasser Arafat. Mapainiks always know best.

But the Geneva Israelis want it both ways. On the one hand, they pretend to be private Israeli citizens devising a theoretical vision of the future together with private Palestinian citizens. On the other hand, they stress that the very value of the Geneva Initiative is that their Palestinian partners are officials in the Palestinian Authority. This means that they've negotiated in place of the Israeli government. And this, in time of war.

Geneva is hardly Yossi Beilin's first exercise in anti-democratic duplicity. He negotiated the Oslo Accords behind Yitzhak Rabin's back, and manipulated him into a peace process with Arafat that the prime minister didn't want. If Ariel Sharon is guilty of deceiving a reluctant Menachem Begin into extending the Lebanon War, then Beilin is the Sharon of the Left.

There's one more compelling parallel between the arrogance of Labor's old hawks and new doves: Neither took responsibility for their extraordinary failures. Golda Meir assumed she could simply resume running the country, 3,000 dead soldiers later, while Yossi Beilin assumes he can resume negotiating with PLO leaders after the mass murder of Israeli civilians. Being a Mapainik means never having to say you're sorry.

The unspoken assumption of the Geneva Israelis is that peace is the ultimate value, and to achieve it one may temporarily tamper with democracy. And that brings us back to Oslo. The 1995 decision to withdraw from the West Bank's cities was passed by the Knesset with a single vote. The Labor government managed to lure an unscrupulous member of the right-wing Tsomet party, who'd been elected by a constituency that opposed Oslo, by offering him a deputy ministership. And so one of the most fateful decisions ever made by the Knesset was engineered through a parliamentary trick.

This time, though, the Israeli majority won't be so easily manipulated. For most Israelis, after all, the conceptzia died 30 years ago.

Yossi Klein Halevi is a contributing editor for The New Republic and an associate fellow of The Shalem Center. He is author of At the Entrance to the Garden of Eden: A Jew's Search for God with Christians and Muslims in the Holy Land.

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