A peace plan contest

Editorial

What’s your peace plan? The National Post recently undertook a provocative series, inviting readers to offer resolutions to the conflict between Israel and its neighbors.

In a somewhat reassuring development, Canadians – well, Post readers, anyway – recognized the core barrier to Middle East peace: the refusal of the Arab and Muslim leadership to accept the existence of a Jewish state.

However, the process was illustrative not only for the wisdom offered by writers who are unequivocally Zionist. More interesting, perhaps, was the narrative presented to represent the other side.

Jeet Heer, a York University doctoral student and writer, offered up a piece in the Post’s April 29 issue, titled “The Jewish state and its enablers.”

“Who are the enablers?” asked Heer. “Some are Jews in the Diaspora who feel, either out of tribal loyalty or guilt at their comfort, that Israel deserves unconditional support. Others are Christian millennialists who view the Middle East as a playground for their own apocalyptic fantasies. Still others are regular conservatives nostalgic for the imperialist days of yore when Western nations could impose their will on the unruly masses of the Third World.

“When we talk about the barriers to peace in the Middle East, we have to realize that there are more than two parties involved,” Heer continued. “Aside from the Israelis and the Palestinians, there are also the vicarious warriors who sit in comfort in North America and encourage a reckless policy of intransigence. Peace requires not just a change in course for the people in the region, but a confrontation with the enablers who make diplomacy virtually impossible.”

What is notable about Heer’s piece and thousands like it over the past decade, is that he condemns precisely that of which he and fellow ideologues are themselves guilty. When condemning enablers, Heer is not speaking of the thousands of Canadians who have flocked to the streets marching in support of Palestinian “freedom,” a movement that blindly supports the right of Palestinians to live under totalitarian dictatorship. He sees Zionists in North America as the force keeping peace at bay in the Middle East. In his interpretation, Israel feels free to do what it will to the Palestinians because there is “a strong contingent of Western public opinion that will defend them no matter what they do,” supplying Israel with fonds of “unconditional support.”

This rhetoric is the basis of the entire anti-Israel narrative. Any defence of Israel is “unconditional” and, by extension, irrational. When the opposition position is that Israel has no right to exist, anything short of calls for eradication can be seen as unconditional, uncritical support. The irony in this case, as in so many, is that the accusations made against Zionists are precisely the sins of which the accusers are guilty. (See past JI issues for analyses of how Israeli “sins” often are projections of the sins of the accusers, an ancient habit of scapegoating, morphed from projection onto Jews into projection onto the Jewish state.) As well, North American Zionists, contrary to the narrative reiterated by Heer, are far more critical of Israel than so-called “pro-Palestinian” activists are of the terrorists, theocrats and Islamofascists with whom they have made common cause. It is, of course, “imperialist” to suggest that Palestinians have a right to live freely, without religious or political repression, so there is no obligation to criticize the status of developing world peoples or their governments.

This blindness to historical reality reflects the mainstream anti-Israel view, which sees Israel and Palestine in the black-and-white, good-and-evil motif most of us grew out of with the Sunday funnies.

“The so-called ‘peace process’ of the 1990s,” Heer wrote, “failed because the Clinton administration allowed Israel to continue building settlements, undermining any faith the Palestinians had in the honesty of either the United States or Israel.”

In this fictionalization, the peace process did not end because the Palestinian leadership kicked over the negotiating table for the familiar, warm blanket of violence and terror. It was the Israelis and the Americans who could not be trusted, so violence, we can infer, was the only option.

The enablers who assist in prolonging Palestinian violence and statelessness can be represented by Heer and his lot, who reserve all their criticism for the only democratic, pluralist country in its region with basic human freedoms, while refusing to see the real cause of the ongoing conflict: a “strong contingent of Western public opinion” that will defend those who seek the destruction of Israel “no matter what they do.”

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