The Treason of the Hawks

[shaayecanaan]

http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/04/28/the_treason_of_the_hawks

(snip)

And could someone please explain to Netanyahu that a group of devout Muslim clerics aren't likely to fire warheads at a land that contains the third holiest site in Islam? Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has said some remarkably foolish things about the Holocaust and repeatedly questioned Israel's legitimacy (as in his oft-mistranslated statement about Israel "vanishing from the page of time"), but he's never threatened to murder millions of Israelis (and Palestinians) with nuclear weapons. Just last weekend, he even told ABC's George Stephanopolous that if the Palestinians reached an agreement with Israel, then Iran would support it. Moreover, as Roger Cohen has noted, there is no evidence that Ahmadinejad has any particular animus toward Iran's own Jewish community. Despite his many offensive statements, in short, Ahmadinejad is not Adolf Hitler and we are not living in the 1930s.

The real threat to Israel's future is the occupation, and the conflict with the Palestinians that it perpetuates. To see that, all you have to do is look at current demographic trends and poll results and then ponder the consequences for Israel. There are presently about 5.6 million Jews in "Greater Israel," (i.e., the 1967 borders plus the West Bank) and about 5.2 million Arabs (of whom nearly 1.5 million are citizens of Israel). Palestinian birth rates are substantially higher, however, which means they will be a majority of the population in "Greater Israel" in the not-too-distant future. To put it bluntly, it is Palestinian wombs and not Iranian bombs that pose the real threat.

Netanyahu ought to be equally concerned by signs that the Zionist ideal is losing its hold within Israel itself. There are reportedly between 700,000 and one million Israeli citizens now living abroad, and emigration has outpaced immigration since 2007. According to Ian Lustick and John Mueller, only 69 percent of Israeli Jews say they want to remain in the country, and a 2007 poll reported that about one-quarter of Israelis are considering leaving, including almost half of all young people. As Lustick and Mueller note, hyping the threat from Iran may be making this problem worse, especially among the most highly educated (and thus most mobile) Israelis. Israeli society is also becoming more polarized -- which is one reason Netanyahu had such trouble forming a governing coalition -- with the Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox at odds with secular Israelis, to include the more recent immigrants that form the core of Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman's support.

http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/04/28/the_treason_of_the_hawks

[bemildred]

1. I wonder if the allusion to Benda is intentional.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julien_Benda

[henank]

2. Mr. Walt should do some more reading

on the demographic "threat" - which is not such a threat after all if you don't fiddle the numbers in order to pressurise Israel. He might like to take a look at this for example. There are other similar reports out there if you care to just look.

[shaayecanaan]

3. a matter of dispute

http://www.jcpa.org/brief/brief004-19.htm

additionally, the Palestinian statistics referred to do not read exactly as your article claims:-

http://www.arabicnews.com/ansub/Daily/Day/980227/1998022735.html

[Violet_Crumble]

4. Pressurise Israel to do what? Accept a two-state solution? n/t

[Douglas Carpenter]

5. thank you for posting this absolutely excellent scholarly article

I hope everyone reads this article in its entirety:

http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/04/28/the_treason_of_the_hawks

Netanyahu clearly wants to avoid an open rift with the Obama administration, which has forcefully reiterated its commitment to negotiating a two-state solution. To do that, he has to pay lip service to the peace process. But because Netanyahu has long opposed the creation of a viable Palestinian state and instead wants to extend Israel's control of the West Bank, he has to lay out a set of demands that will endlessly delay the process and make it hard for Obama to put meaningful pressure on him.

According to Ha'aretz, Netanyahu will insist that the Palestinians go beyond their prior recognition of Israel's right to exist (as expressed in the 1993 Oslo Accord) and explicitly recognize Israel as a "Jewish state." Furthermore, he wants the United States to agree that a future Palestinian state be barred from possessing its own army and forbidden from making alliances with other countries, while Israel is permitted to monitor its borders, its airspace, and its use of the electromagnetic spectrum, presumably in perpetuity. In the meantime, the expansion of Israeli settlements will surely continue, and in ways that will soon preclude any possibility of a territorially contiguous state on the West Bank. Lastly, Netanyahu wants to link progress toward a two-state solution with an end to Iran's nuclear program. As I've noted before, this condition would allow Tehran -- purposely or inadvertently -- to derail a two-state solution by stonewalling on the nuclear issue. Ironically, this outcome might suit Iran and Netanyahu alike: Israel could keep expanding settlements and the Islamic Republic could continue to play the Palestine card against its Arab rivals.

My question is this: What is Netanyahu thinking? Doesn't he realize that time has nearly run out for the two-state solution, and that failure to achieve it is by far the most serious threat facing Israel? The prime minister and his allies keep harping about an "existential" threat from Iran, but this bogeyman is mostly nonsense. Iran has zero -- repeat, zero -- nuclear weapons today, and even if it were to acquire a few at some point in the future, it could not use them against nuclear-armed Israel without committing national suicide. Let me say that again: national suicide.

http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/04/28/the_treason_of_the_hawks

[shaayecanaan]

6. Its a good website...

I used to read Asia Times online...but this site is better. Its a world apart from the lightweight crap in Time/Newsweek/Economist.