"How Israel Lost" by Richard Ben Cramer

Other settler societies "solved" the problem of the indigenous population by annihilating the natives (e.g., North America, Australia, New Zealand) or intermarrying with them (South and Central America), while others completely collapsed (Algeria, Zambia and, perhaps, South Africa). Israel's problem is so intractable because none of these or other options, including repartition of the territory or binationalism, are either acceptable to it or viable.

The final question that must be addressed is the right of return of the Palestinian refugees. There is no doubt that, as Cramer suggests, Israel should recognize its moral responsibility at least for not accepting the refugees back home after the 1948 war. The Geneva draft, supposedly accepted even by Arafat (perhaps too late), presumes that most of the refugees should return to the Palestinian state and rehabilitate there, after having been compensated for their lost properties. A very limited number would be allowed to return into Israel. This may not be as difficult for Palestinians to accept as it may appear: Khalil Shikaki, a controversial pollster, found that only 10 percent of Palestinian refugees were in fact even interested in exercising their right of return (as Cramer notes, for his trouble he had his office smashed up by thugs associated with Arafat's corrupt political machine). Nonetheless, even if all the trends outlined above take off, the solution to this complex situation may not be quite as simple as Cramer suggests.

Since 1967, Israel has regarded the occupied territory of the whole of Palestine and the Syrian Golan Heights as an open frontier for Jewish settlement and colonization. Both the rights of the indigenous inhabitants and international law were blatantly ignored. This was a gradual and incremental, two-dimensional and mutually complementary process. One dimension was the establishment of irreversible and accomplished facts on the ground, like settlements and the transfer of Jewish residents to them; at the same time, Israel prevented the development of local Palestinian institutions, infrastructures and leadership. (Those institutions and authorities that were created during the short period of the implementation of the Oslo Accords were a major deviation from the general trend, and were destroyed after Rabin's assassination.) It must be mentioned that even the Oslo Accords were hardly welcomed by the majority of the Jewish population, and that Rabin's government was based on a parliamentary minority.

The second dimension was the psychological-cognitive one. The fact of occupation and rule over a territory and its population was absorbed into the Israeli consciousness and became part of its identity. Today most Israelis have grown up under the present reality or immigrated into it (more than 1 million from the former Soviet lands, Ethiopia and even from the U.S.) and cannot imagine life within the narrow pre-1967 war borders. Moreover, "peace" is an abstract and incomprehensible notion, while land is a tangible asset. If Israeli casualties caused by wars and Palestinian terror, or resistance movements (depending on one's values), were regarded in the past as a painful national calamity, they were slowly routinized and perceived as an inevitable cost of Israel's existence. In the past, governments that failed to prevent war or protect the personal safety of their citizens were voted out. Today, casualties only empower governments -- a situation that reflects a high level of national cohesion on this issue. It's true, as pointed out above, that many Israelis say they are prepared to give back land for peace, but their words remain untested.

Cramer's impressionistic book, with all its charming naiveté, lack of historical depth and some imprecision and exaggeration, is a very important work, both for American Jews and non-Jews. It is my hope that it will create a more open and critical debate regarding American policy and relations toward Israel (and perhaps even towards the entire Middle East), replacing the current orthodoxy of reflexive, blind defense of any wrongdoing by the Jewish state merely because it is Jewish.

Cramer is completely correct in his intuition that Israel is behaving today like a suicidal nation. Unlike Europe, the United States has not yet come to reject Israel's behavior as unacceptable. Nonetheless, such a time will surely come, probably as a part of an increasing general awareness that the American responses to 9/11, including George W. Bush's blank-check acquiescence in all of Sharon's schemes, were evil, wrong and counterproductive. When the time comes that Americans realize, in the words of Cramer, that "we, the Americans, don't want to be like them," and Israel is forced to stand alone and choose its course, we will witness Israel's finest or worst historical moment.

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