A misguided fixation

The Jewish Left has yet to internalize that the real obstacle to peace is the Palestinian belief that they alone have an inherent right to the land in dispute.

By ROBERT HORENSTEIN
The Left has emotionally disengaged from the land known by its biblical names of Judea and Samaria (photo credit: REUTERS)
The Left has emotionally disengaged from the land known by its biblical names of Judea and Samaria
(photo credit: REUTERS)
JUNE 2017 will mark the 50th anniversary of the 1967 Six Day War and, though it’s months away, the American pro-Israel establishment is already preparing for trouble.
While many Jewish communities will be commemorating Israel’s astonishing victory against the combined military forces of Egypt, Jordan and Syria, the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement will be marking “50 years of Israeli occupation,” exploiting the anniversary to further its campaign to demonize the Jewish state.
To make matters worse, the delegitimizers will be abetted by well-meaning left-wing Jewish groups that outwardly oppose BDS but view Israeli settlement expansion as the root cause of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Writing in Haaretz earlier this year, for example, Amna Farooqi, the Muslim president of J Street U (the campus arm of the liberal Jewish lobbying group), criticized the Jewish establishment for “staying silent as the occupation approaches its 50th anniversary” while claiming to support “social justice for all.”
A new organization, the Center for Jewish Nonviolence, has announced plans to hold a civil rights-style anti-occupation demonstration in the West Bank next June, coinciding with the week of the anniversary. This is the same group that, in July, held a widely covered protest in Hebron featuring leading liberal American Jewish commentator Peter Beinart, who supports a boycott of products made in the settlements.
Many on the Right consider J Street and like-minded groups to be “anti-Israel.” Yet, I’ve come to believe that the Left’s advocacy emanates from a deep conviction that Zionism is about having a Jewish democratic state and that to retain both its Jewish and democratic nature, Israel must end the settlement enterprise and relinquish the West Bank, where 2.5 million Palestinians live.
For anyone supporting a two-state solution, this is hardly a radical position. After all, without significant Israeli territorial concessions, no peace agreement with the Palestinians would ever be attainable.
One, therefore, can make a cogent political, as well as moral, argument against continued Israeli rule in the West Bank.
Why, then, do I think the Left’s approach of fixating on the occupation is misguided? It’s not just that groups on the Left downplay Israel’s security concerns and the serious risks that a West Bank withdrawal would entail (read: Gaza disengagement). Nor is it simply that the Left’s incessant drumbeat denouncing the settlements as “illegitimate” provides fodder to the BDS movement, for whom the “occupation” dates not to 1967 but to Israel’s founding in 1948.
What troubles me most is that the Left has emotionally disengaged from the land known by its biblical names of Judea and Samaria and has renounced the Jewish claim to any portion of it, even as the other side shouts, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” Given this perspective, how can we ever expect the Palestinians to climb down from their maximalist positions? In this vein, the 50th anniversary of the Six Day War mustn’t become the exclusive province of those who have abandoned the narrative that upholds Jerusalem as the eternal capital of the Jewish people and Judea and Samaria as the land in which Jewish history and the Jewish religion are inextricably rooted.
So, while the Left is busy marking 50 years of occupation, the pro-Israel establishment should hold events commemorating Jerusalem’s reunification, recalling that during the previous two decades the Jordanians had destroyed the Jewish quarter of the Old City and denied Jews access to the Western Wall. As a counterpoint to the inevitable anti-occupation protests by dovish Jewish groups, we should remind the world that some “settlements,” such as Neve Ya’acov and Gush Etzion, existed before Israel became a state ‒ on land purchased by Jews ‒ and were reestablished thanks to Israel’s victory in 1967.
None of this is to suggest that Israel will be able to avoid making painful territorial concessions as part of a future peace deal. Yet, therein lies the point: painful. To use a physical analogy, an Israeli withdrawal from most of Judea and Samaria would be like having a limb amputated. It may be that the limb must be sacrificed to save the rest of the body (the Jewish democratic state of Israel), but it will represent a profound and traumatic loss for the Jewish people.
The Palestinians believe they alone have an inherent right to the land in dispute. This conviction, more than Israel’s occupation, is the main obstacle to peace. Only if each side understands that the other has a legitimate claim will each be willing to compromise.
The mistake of the Jewish Left is that they’ve yet to internalize this fundamental reality.
Robert Horenstein is Community Relations Director of the Jewish Federation of Greater Portland, Oregon