Soccer Dad

Klein's Whine

One of the best commenators on the Middle East lately has been Yossi Klein Halevi. That doesn't mean I always agree with him. Unlike most of his former comrades at the Jerusalem Report, he understands the Left's greatest failing was to whitewash who Arafat was.
In his recent essay "Absurdity redux" laments that Israel's center may not hold:

To a great extent, the fate of the center has become bound with the fate of Ariel Sharon - the unlikely embodiment of our post-ideological politics. Sharon's government is not in imminent danger of falling; but the absurd compromise devised by his cabinet, endorsing "disengagement" from Gaza without referring to uprooting its settlements, only delays the inevitable confrontation within the coalition and the Likud. And the strong opposition, both within the Labor Party and the Likud, to a national unity government could deprive Sharon of the mechanism necessary to implement unilateral withdrawal.

As the political center appears to falter, the Right and Left are tempted by the void to imagine their own resurrected importance. Once again, the ideologues are claiming to represent the mainstream. "The people are with Gush Katif," proclaim pro-settler stickers in a slogan borrowed from the Golan settlers - as if Gaza, with its one and a half million Palestinians, and the Golan, with its 18,000 Druse, were interchangeable.

For its part, the Left has again begun to refer to itself as "the majority" - as if the real Israeli majority has forgiven it for the Oslo process, which turned our homefront into a battlefield and created the worst security crisis since 1948.

Rightly he has gone after Ha'aretz for its baldfaced attempt to ressurect Yasser Arafat:

And then, to remind us how detached the Left has become from its historic role of sane Zionist leadership, came last week's attempt by Haaretz, the newspaper of the left-wing elite, to rehabilitate Arafat as a credible peace partner. According to Haaretz, it's not at all clear that Arafat's long-term goal is the destruction of Israel. Why, he even told Haaretz that he accepts Israel as a Jewish state.

"Definitely," reassured the Ra'is.

Earlier though, he turned his wrath on Uri Elitzur; formerly head of the Prime Minister's bureau under Netanyahu:

The result of the renewed self-confidence of our ideologues is a relapse into political absurdity. The true believers are trying to return us to the mid-1990s, that time without shame or restraint, when rightists denounced Yitzhak Rabin as a traitor and called on soldiers to refuse orders to dismantle settlements, while leftists embraced Arafat as a peace partner and dismissed terror attacks and their victims as the inevitable price for peace.

Last week, veteran settler leader Uri Elitzur resurrected the 1990s by calling on soldiers to refuse orders to evacuate settlements, adding that settlers have the right to violently resist, short of taking up firearms. Yet having legitimized violence, how will Elitzur ensure that hotheads don't turn their weapons against soldiers?

No, Elitzur cannot offer guarantees against hotheads; but neither can he be said to encouraging. As opposed to the blank check the Left has given Arafat; Elitzur says that there are limits.
Despite what the left says, there was no "vast right wing conspiracy" kill PM Rabin. It was the work of no more than the handful of "hotheads." And it is pretty clear that Yigal Amir was goaded, if not aided, by Avishai Raviv, a Shabak agent to carry out his dastardly deed.
(He even tries to tie the residents of the Golan - mostly Laborites and ex-Laborites - with the Right. It just was not the case.)
Look, I understand Klein's frustration but I think that the problems in Israel are a lot less the fault of the Right than of the Left. The Right was correct about Arafat and the Right currently is correct about the dangers of withdrawing from Azza. (As evidenced by the latest terrorist outrage in Sderot.)
The demagoguery that Klein refers to is largely the overblown interpretation of the Left than it is of the Right itself. I suspect that most of Israel's nationalist camp would acquiesce to territorial compromise; most of Israel's left cannot break its attachment with Yasser Arafat.
Crossposted on Israpundit and Soccer Dad.

Posted by SoccerDad at June 28, 2004 3:55 AM