Preposterous position

Editorial

A political narrative is like a ship; it does not alter course on a dime. A number of recent developments underscore this aphorism.

As U.S. President Barack Obama prepared to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas this week, media and commentators worldwide assured readers and viewers that the talks would likely come to naught, mostly because of Israeli intransigence on settlements.

"The main sticking point is Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank, home to 500,000 Israelis but considered illegal by the international community and one of the main hurdles to any peace deal," reported Agence France-Presse in an article run by the National Post Tuesday.

While it may be true that settlements are a hurdle to a peace deal, they are hardly a hurdle to peace. The construction or expansion of Jewish homes in the West Bank, while perhaps not helpful to the overall objectives of mutually agreed coexistence, can be viewed as "one of the main hurdles to any peace deal" only because the Palestinian side and their overseas allies have clung to this preposterous position like Kate Winslet clung to that board at the finale of Titanic. Unlike the soaring saccharine of Celine Dion though, the soundtrack to the Palestinians' refusal to make peace is not "My Heart Will Go On," but "My Hate Will Go On." The overwhelming hurdle to peace – mentioned barely at all during this scenario – is that the Palestinian leadership has continued, after the 1993 start of the Oslo process, through nine years of intifada right up to this new stage of possible negotiations, to educate their youthful population to expect nothing short of absolute victory over the Zionist usurper and to seek that victory through violent ends.

Such misallocation of blame for the Mideast conflict is at the heart of the conflict itself. If the global community refuses to acknowledge the root causes of the conflict, there is almost no chance of resolving it. Even recent history does nothing to alter the course of public opinion toward the ideological iceberg of the anti-Zionist narrative. Israel has demonstrated in Sinai and Gaza its willingness to abandon settlements, even at enormous human and financial costs, if peace has even a remote potential.

The anti-Israel narrative hit another iceberg last week when it was revealed that the United Church of Canada (UCC), the liberal Christian denomination that recently stepped back from an anti-Israel boycott attempt, helped create a "Jewish" anti-Zionist organization. The UCC, the National Post revealed, funded Independent Jewish Voices (IJV) with a $900 grant. Hardly a Madoff-sized scandal, the involvement of the UCC in fomenting Jewish criticism of Israel nonetheless provoked an irate news release from Canadian Jewish Congress.

More illustrative were the comments of Diane Ralph, a Carleton University social worker (on leave) and the founder of IJV, who is evidently an accomplished conspiracy theorist for whom the 9/11 attacks were not a tragedy so much as a cover for American and Israeli imperialists to unfold their master plan for global domination.

"It is difficult to draw another conclusion than that Bush's associates organized the 9/11 attacks to kick-start popular support for this war," Ralph wrote in her contributed chapter of a conspiracy compendium. "The 'war on terror' is a concept modeled on Israel's assaults on Palestinians to provide a cover for campaigns of territorial conquest."

It may be difficult for Ralph to draw another conclusion because her position is distorted by the most significant narrative flaw undermining true understanding of the conflict and indeed undermining peace in the region more broadly.

"Obviously," Ralph has said, "Israel is the instigating power."

Obviously. Ideas like those of IJV are plausible only in a world that is prepared to accept any lies purveyed by Israel's enemies as truth and anything Israel does as Jewish deceitfulness. A core pillar, if not the main pillar, of the anti-Zionist (anti-Semitic) narrative, is that Israel is the instigator, out to control the region and, ultimately, the world. Despite having repeatedly traded land for the faint prospect of peace, having abandoned the Sinai and Gaza and offered effectively all of the West Bank, somehow Israel remains bent on territorial expansion. Despite every scrap of historical evidence to the contrary – the never-ending peace initiatives, compromises and olive branches offered by Israel and the violent incitement that these peace offerings begat – the perverted "independent" view is that Israel is solely to blame.

That's why – if we're ever to achieve peace – truly independent voices must continue to speak out.

^TOP