RUTHFULLY YOURS

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu rightly canceled a meeting with visiting German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel after Gabriel met with Breaking the Silence, an organization that accuses the Israeli government of war crimes. As the Times of Israel explained:

Few organizations are more despised on the Israeli right — and by many who are not on the right — than Breaking the Silence, which publishes anonymous testimonies documenting alleged human rights abuses by Israeli soldiers.

That’s the equivalent of meeting Wikileaks — denounced by CIA Director Mike Pompeo as a “hostile intelligence service” — right before a scheduled meeting with the U.S. president. Or the equivalent of a senior American official meeting with German ultra-rightists before a scheduled meeting with Chancellor Merkel. Visiting diplomats simply do not raise the profile and credibility of fringe groups that question the legitimacy of their host government.

Gabriel’s action was obnoxious in the extreme, and Israel’s prime minister had no choice but to snub him. More egregious than Gabriel’s sin of commission, though, was his sin of omission: Germany could explain the reality of their circumstances to the Palestinians more credibly than any other country, by reference to its own sad history.

As polls taken between 2011 and 2015 showed, between a third and half of Germans view Israel as the moral equivalent of Nazi Germany.

That is of minor consequence in the great scheme of things. The Germans will never forgive us for Auschwitz, as an Israeli psychiatrist quipped, and the memory of Nazi crimes is made easier to bear by believing that the Jews are just as bad. (I run into Germans who believe this from time to time, and tell them that the so-called Palestinians they see on television are actors — we exterminated all the real Palestinians, just like the Nazis).

Sigmar Gabriel should have explained to the Palestinians that they are beaten, and what it means to be beaten.

The conflict continues because the Arab side — after losing the 1947 War of Independence, the 1956 Sinai War, the 1967 Six Day War, the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and two pointless Intifadas — refuses to accept that it is beaten. That is a common occurrence in history. Most casualties in war occur well after hope of victory has vanished; that, as I wrote in a study for Asia Times last year, explains why many wars continue until there aren’t enough men left to fight.

As long as the Palestinians think they can make all their defeats come un-true (rather like the Duke brothers in Changing Places demanding that the commodity exchange “turn the machines back on”), they will continue fighting pointlessly. The estimable Daniel Pipes, president of the Middle East Forum, argues:

Palestinians will have to pass through the bitter crucible of defeat, with all its deprivation, destruction, and despair as they repudiate the filthy legacy of Amin al-Husseini and acknowledge their century-long error. But there is no shortcut.

Dr. Pipes probably is right. But there might have been a shortcut — if Germany told the truth to the Palestinians rather than enabling their radicals. Germany could have told the Palestinians (in the style of the late Sam Kinison):

Look, numbskulls. You lost. You’re beaten. Get over it. You can’t kick the Jews out. You got beaten the last six times you tried and you’ll get beaten the next six times.

We Germans got beaten in World War I but we refused to believe it — Hitler said we were betrayed, not vanquished. So we fought the Second World War. We were beaten by the middle of 1944 but we refused to believe it, so we took millions of military and civilian casualties until Russian tanks rolled into Berlin. We lost nearly 30% of our military age men. A million civilians died. Two-fifths of our people lost their homes. We starved and froze. And then we believed that we were defeated. Then we were able to get on with our lives.

Now we’re the leading economy in Europe.

Admit you are defeated. You admit defeat by giving something up — in this case, the small portion of Judea and Samaria with the highest concentration of Israeli settlers. Unless you give up land, you haven’t admitted that you’ve lost, and your people won’t accept that you’ve lost. The settlements are not an obstacle to peace. The settlements are a precondition for peace. There won’t be peace until you accept that some of them are permanent.

Don’t be like us. Don’t keep fighting until your life is in ruins. Until you come to your senses, we’re not going to give you any more aid. We’d only be feeding your delusions. We’re showing you tough love in your own best interests. Embrace defeat, and look to the future.