Peter Beinart is a long-time friend of the Dish and author of the critically needed book, The Crisis of Zionism. From one of my many defenses of the book against its knee-jerk critics:
The notion that Beinart ignores the standard and fair criticisms of past Palestinian leaders is simply wrong, as any reader will see. Yes, he presses the case that the Israelis and their American patrons have recently led the Jewish state into a dead end – but his book is an argument, not a history. He lacerates one side – persuasively, I might add – but doesn’t excuse the other. … The real shift in US policy toward Israel has been the embrace of the settlements by the Christianist base of the GOP over the last decade and their continuing power. The real development is the fusion of Jewish and Christian fundamentalism around the cause of Greater Israel. Which means to say that a democratic Israel is living on borrowed time. And Peter’s book will one day be seen as one lone protest, a marker that not everyone acquiesced in Israel’s degeneration, not everyone put blinders on. Just most.
Above Beinart argues the only way to save Zionism is to have a Palestinian state alongside a Jewish state. Read his latest writing at Open Zion, where he today responded to Jeffrey Goldberg on the settlements’ role in freezing the peace process:
To suggest, therefore, as Jeff does, that what “froze” the peace process was Obama’s emphasis on settlements is wrong. What “froze” the peace process was Netanyahu’s lack of interest in creating a viable Palestinian state, and Obama’s unwillingness to truly confront him on it.
But even more baffling than Jeff’s claim that it was Obama who froze the peace process is his claim that the settlements “are a derivative issue” because “if the Israelis and Palestinians settle their borders, the settlement issue will also be solved.” Is Jeff really unaware that the settlements are a big part of the reason the two sides haven’t been able to agree on borders? Obviously, settlements aren’t the only reason that past talks have failed, but every time the Israelis and Palestinians have negotiated seriously, a major stumbling block has been Israel’s demand to maintain large settlements like Ariel, which Palestinians believe imperil the contiguity of their future state. It is precisely because of Israel’s decades of settlement building that in his final offer at Camp David in July 2000, Ehud Barak demanded that Israel annex nine percent of the West Bank (while giving the Palestinians one-ninth as much land within the green line in return). In the wake of Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, Barak feared that if he did not incorporate eighty percent of the settlers into Israel, he risked civil war. But to do so, he needed to annex Ariel, which stretches thirteen miles into the West Bank, and which even Barak’s own former negotiator, Shlomo Ben Ami, has conceded makes the “contiguity of a Palestinian state something that is very, very difficult to imagine.”
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