http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=283307
Into the Fray: The Right must revert to the traditional Zionist perception of “reality” as malleable rather than immutable.
In this two-part sequel to my columns analyzing “What’s wrong with the Right,” I set out the components of a comprehensive approach to what is usually termed the “Palestinian problem.”
This will include not only the measures that should be undertaken to dissipate – rather than resolve – the problem per se, but those that must be undertaken to render them feasible.
To recap briefly
Over the past two weeks, I took the Right to task for its poorly thought through proposals for alternative policy paradigms to the two-state-solution (TSS) proposal, which even if implemented would, in all likelihood, eliminate few of the threats to Israel’s security, and exacerbate many.
I criticized what I saw as the intellectual surrender by the Right in failing to acknowledge, or, at least, failing to clearly articulate acknowledgement of the inevitable conclusion that, to sustain itself as the nation-state of the Jewish people, Israel must address two imperatives:
a. The geographic imperative, which implies it cannot make any significant territorial concessions in Judea and Samaria; and
b. The demographic imperative, which implies it cannot incorporate large segments of the Palestinian Arabs, resident in this area, as enfranchised citizens within its sovereign territory.
This leads to the inescapable deduction that if Israel is to be secured as the permanent Jewish nation-state, the only non-coercive option is the relocation of the Palestinian Arabs, induced primarily by generous economic incentives.
Recognizing realities
Effective policy invariably requires one to acknowledge existing realities. But acknowledging reality does not mean accepting it. Indeed, to successfully change reality, one has first to recognize it.
In this regard, it must be admitted that – mainly due to decades of dereliction of diplomatic duty – Israel has allowed the international discourse on the Mideast conflict in general, and the Palestinian component of it in particular, to gel very disadvantageously for it. It has permitted the TSS-concept to become deeply engrained in the international psyche as the only option available to Israel that will allow it to exist as a Jewish democracy and prevent it from becoming either an undemocratic Jewish ethnocracy – imposing minority Judeo-centric rule on an Arab majority – or a non-Jewish state-of-allits- citizens.
In other words, the currently entrenched (mis)perceptions are that Israel must choose between the risk of becoming geographically unviable, or the certainty of becoming demographically unviable. Intellectual allegiance to this misplaced dichotomy between a TSScompliant Jewish democracy on the one hand, and non-democratic/non-Jewish alternatives on the other, has come to dominate not only the content of the international debate, but the cultural codex of its conduct.
To challenge its validity – no matter what the substantive basis for such dissent – is to risk being marginalized professionally and ostracized socially, at least as far as mainstream institutions are concerned.
It will not be easy to shatter this political reality, which due to a noxious mix of neglect, naïveté and nefariousness has, over more than two decades, hardened into the “received wisdom” on the Judeo-Arabic conflict in the Middle East.
However, within the constraints of the faux framework of artificially imposed dictates that comprises current conventional wisdom, there is no viable policy-paradigm that can sustain Israel, in the long run, as the nation-state of the Jews.
Accordingly, despite the daunting difficulties, prising loose the debilitating stranglehold it has in defining the conceptual space of the discourse is an essential precondition for the promotion – and eventual implementation – of any Zionist-compliant TSS-alternative.
Unless this is grasped – and perceived as both possible and imperative – pursuit of such alternatives is futile.
Radical revision required
To accomplish this objective requires a radical revision of how the nation relates to diplomacy – particularly public diplomacy (a.k.a. hasbara) – as a crucial element in the design of the strategic arsenal required to sustain Jewish sovereignty in the modern era.
