There’s a fixed belief in progressive
circles that if only Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, were
to be removed from office, there would be at least a sporting chance of
peace in the Middle East.
On Monday night, in an appearance on an NBC
show, U.S. President Joe Biden said that Israel must make peace with
the Palestinians to survive. He warned that Israel’s “incredibly
conservative government,” which includes the ultra-nationalist National
Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and others, was “going to lose support
from around the world. And that is not in Israel’s interest.”
American officials repeat, like a steady
drumbeat, that the reason the Israelis are so resistant to the
imposition of a Palestinian state and insistent on mounting an attack
against the last bastion of Hamas in Rafah, contrary to American
instructions, is that Netanyahu is in hock to “right-wing extremists.”
Some believe that the Biden administration
is working to replace Netanyahu with a more pliable alternative, such
as war cabinet member Benny Gantz. Isn’t such interference in another
sovereign state by seeking to lever out its democratically elected prime
minister the kind of thing that the left routinely denounces as U.S.
“imperialism”?
It’s apparently fine, however, for the
Biden administration to do this to Israel because Netanyahu is, after
all, leading a “right-wing extremist” government, which seems to mean he
has no basis to be in power at all.
Of course, Biden is trying to appease the
virulently anti-Israel wing of the Democratic Party, which is causing
him a major election-year headache.
More fundamentally still, his
administration won’t permit Israel to derail U.S. strategy for the
region. Astonishingly, this involves empowering Iran, and ludicrously
asserts that the solution to the Iranian war being waged against Israel
and the West by using Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis as proxy
terrorist armies is to impose a Palestinian state.
Biden wants Netanyahu gone because the
Israeli prime minister is refusing to bend to American pressure and is
standing in the way of the administration’s treacherous policy goals.
The “right-wing” meme is a potent weapon
because it damns everything at which it is directed. To be “right-wing”
in the circles that control Western culture is to be utterly beyond the
pale. Everything bad is “right-wing,” and everything “right-wing” is
bad.
In Britain, even newspapers that are
relatively well disposed towards Israel frame the conduct of the war as
disproportionately belligerent because, well, Netanyahu runs an
“extremist ultra-right” government.
n Israel, the left-wing press pounds out
daily the message that absolutely everything Netanyahu is doing in this
war is bad because it’s designed to save his skin and keep himself in
power.
Since both the “settlers” and the
“right-wing” are demonized as evil by so-called progressives, any
opposition to a Palestinian state is also demonized as evil.
All this ignores a number of facts. Since
the genocidal pogrom of Oct. 7—and with Hamas threatening to mount such
atrocities over and over again until Israel is destroyed—Israelis are
united as never before in opposition to a Palestinian state. They are
also overwhelmingly committed to continuing with the war until Hamas no
longer has the capacity to mount such attacks ever again.
This has absolutely nothing to do with the
“settlers,” Ben-Gvir or Netanyahu’s desire to save his own skin. It is
due to the fact that the vast majority of Israelis understand that they
are fighting for their lives.
People may detest Netanyahu, but they
don’t detest his conduct of the war. They may hold him ultimately to
blame for the systemic mistakes behind the catastrophic failure to
anticipate the Oct. 7 attack. They may think that he should no longer be
in office. They may believe that he is unprincipled, devious,
hypocritical, narcissistic, power-crazed, corrupt and with a dangerous
messiah complex, as he is painted by his enemies.
Yet none of that means that they think the
war should be waged in any other way. None of their dismay at Netanyahu
as prime minister means they believe that anyone else would or should
prosecute this war any differently.
They understand that making peace depends
not on Israel, as Biden insists, but on its Palestinian Arab aggressors.
They understand that if Biden gets his way and Hamas survives as a
military force, there will be more Oct. 7-style atrocities. They
understand that the Palestinian state Biden is threatening to impose
upon Israel will deliver Oct. 7-style atrocities on steroids.
And so the more Biden applies the
thumbscrews to Israel, the more he will actually increase Israeli
support for Netanyahu, who will be applauded for standing up to such an
unconscionable betrayal and defending Israeli lives.
Some people dismiss the realities of
Israeli opinion about the war and the “two-state solution” because all
they can see is the apparently demonic figure of Netanyahu. Such people
are obsessed with him. Many Israeli journalists see nothing but this
hate-figure looming in front of them. He fills the entire visual space
between the hater and the political horizon.
But it’s perfectly possible to dislike
Netanyahu and want to see him gone from office, and yet support his
determination to destroy Hamas or oppose the imposition of a Palestinian
state, on the grounds that there is no alternative strategy that would
protect Israelis against further genocidal attack.
So why are so many unable to distinguish between the man and the measures?
For a start, it’s so much easier to blame a
man who can be removed from office rather than face up to a terrifying
reality that’s far harder to address, such as the Palestinian Arabs’
implacable and brainwashed hatred of the Jews.
For exactly the same reason, it’s so much
easier to believe that a Palestinian state would end that enmity, rather
than face up to the actual evidence of a century of murderous
Palestinian rejectionism that continues without end.
There’s also another reason, a clue to which was provided by certain reactions to the Oct. 7 pogrom both in Israel and abroad.
Among many “progressives,” the atrocities
produced a profound sense of disorientation. This was because the
Palestinians—people whose cause they had promoted as the acme of
conscience and enlightenment—turned out to be barbaric savages.
Even worse, people the progressives had
opposed and stigmatized as the “far-right” because they had regarded the
Palestinians as murderous foes turned out to have been correct all
along.
Worse yet again, some people on their own
side actually turned on them for supporting Israel against Hamas. This
was a terrible and destabilizing shock. That’s because the left is
governed by a herd mentality. Their views have to conform to the opinion
of similarly “enlightened” people. Anyone who isn’t part of the
progressive herd is “right-wing” and wrong about everything.
Moreover, since progressives believe that
they embody virtue itself, right-wingers aren’t just wrong but evil. Yet
the Oct. 7 massacre revealed that the people supported by the
progressives were evil.
This put progressives in a terrible bind.
They couldn’t accept anything that revealed their own narrative to be so
morally bankrupt.
So they exaggerated the plight of Gaza
civilians in the war, for which they blamed Israel not Hamas. In
response to the tsunami of antisemitism consuming the West as a result
of the Palestinian cause they themselves promoted, they focused instead
on the evils of “Islamophobia.” And they redoubled the attack on
Netanyahu as their scapegoat.
As a result, both the Biden administration
and others who demonize “the right” are supporting the insupportable.
If they have their way, more Israelis will be murdered, raped, beheaded
and taken hostage; there will be more Islamist intimidation, subversion
and violence in Britain and America; and the West will find itself in a
terrible war for its survival not against “right-wing” bogeymen, but
against truly sinister enemies whom Western folly has so
catastrophically empowered.
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