Been busy as hell. So much to blog about, and so little time to do it in.
As Allison rightly points out, if even HaYefeNefesh Haaretz Ari Shavithas second thoughts about the Geneva farce, and even veteran peacenik and author Amos Oz feels like he's been had, Beilin should see that he's in trouble. Amos Oz has a way with metaphor's, but he's outdone on this occasion by Shavit:
The Israelis who devised the Geneva Accord are good people - [...]. But in their attempt to do good, these people have lost their way. They have made a lethal mistake.Does this mean that the right is correct? Not at all. The two-state solution was and remains the only solution. We have to end the occupation, and it is compulsory to partition the land. However, the operation to separate the Israeli
Siamese twin and the Palestinian Siamese twin must be performed with caution and prudence. If this critical operation is performed in an irresponsible manner, if it is performed in the spirit of the Geneva initiative, both twins will bleed to death on the operating table.
Tal G. has more --- and it's pretty clear that anyone who thinks the Pali participants in the Geneva Farce have given up on the "right" of return, is living in a dreamworld. Former PM Ehud Barak calls the initiative 'delusional' and 'And why am I surprised that Jimmy Carter (well-deserved winner of LGF's first-ever "Fiskie" award) thinks Geneva doesn't go far enough? Jay Nordlinger looks at some length at the ties between Carter and Yasser Archbandit. And as if this weren't enough, Best of the Web links to this (Freudian?) blooper by Jimmy Carter:
Finishing the Job--I
Had I been elected to a second term [in 1980], with the prestige and authority and influence and reputation I had in the region, we could have moved to a final solution."
Charles Krauthammer call Geneva "a suicide note" (Washington Post), Jeff Jacoby (Boston Globe) speaks of "a blueprint for war". Sarah Honig quotes former government minister Yuli Tamir as saying last year's elections were "irrelevant" (making me wonder how much of the accusations of "fascism" on the part of the "Left" result from Freudian projection). But I will leave the last word to the politically liberal Yossi Klein Halevy :
The Israeli initiators of the Geneva Accord are guilty of multiple outrages. They've summoned a campaign of international pressure against their own democratic government, hampering its diplomatic maneuverability. They've undermined the legitimacy of the Sharon government while strengthening the legitimacy of Yasser Arafat's. They've lied to the public about the accord's supposed renunciation of the right of return, when in fact the accord reaffirms it. They've negotiated away Israel's most basic assets, not least its right to defend itself, and gotten vague Palestinian promises in return. And, hardly surprising, they allowed the Geneva signing ceremony to be overtaken by a blame-Israel atmosphere without offering any defense in response.But perhaps their greatest damage is domestic. In the past three years, Israeli society has managed two extraordinary achievements. The first is to withstand a planned, systematic terror campaign whose purpose was to break our will and slowly erode our viability. Shortly after the outbreak of the Terror War in September 2000, Ehud Barak warned that, in a contest of wills between two societies, the loser will be the one who blinks first. Now, with Geneva, a part of Israeli society has blinked.
No less serious is Geneva's erosion of Israel's second great achievement: the marginalization of both the ideological Right and Left and the end of the no-win debate between them. The combined effects of the first and second intifadas on Israeli consciousness was to convince the majority that both Greater Israel and Peace Now were delusions. And so, arguably for the first time since the 1967 Six Day War, most Israelis were no longer viewing the territories through an ideological prism of wishful thinking but facing reality, however grimly, on its own terms.
For the past three years, I've argued that the lesson of the failure of our two ideological camps is that Jews need to respect each other's insights and warnings. For though Left and Right had failed to offer us any workable solution, each understood the fatal flaw in the other's position. The Left warned us, immediately after the Six Day War, that the occupation would undermine all that we believed about ourselves and in the end occupy us; while the Right warned us, long before the Oslo process, that appeasing terrorists wouldn't bring peace but only more terrorism. Had we listened to each other, we might have spared ourselves the disastrous mistakes of unlimited settlement and empowerment of the PLO.
Finally, I felt, we were ready to start listening to each other. I believed that the Jewish people had begun to mature, and that the new centrist majority had become the permanent majority.
Evidently, though, my optimism was premature. With the Geneva temptation, the center has begun to fray. Polls show that rather than being rejected with the contempt and outrage it deserves, Geneva has generated confusion. And if all it takes to unsteady the center is a document as shoddy as Geneva's, then the obvious question is how stable this center was to begin with.
Instead of offering hope, as Geneva's initiators insist, the accord has eroded the most precious resources for a people under siege: political sobriety and minimal national unity.
My anger toward the Geneva initiators is personal: I hold them responsible for threatening my country and its ability to defend itself, for threatening the well-being of those I love. And so, despite my insistence over the last three years on the need for Jews to respect and listen to each other, I find myself now being drawn into the bitterness of Jewish discourse.
That frightens me: Because if I feel this way, I know what the crazies on the edge of the Right are thinking.
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