Negotiating with Hamas, but for the wrong reason?

Whether to advance a peace agreement leading to a Palestinian state or to consolidate the status quo, an Israeli government will probably be talking to Hamas before too long.

Twenty years ago, Israeli law prohibited any Israeli citizen from contact with the Palestine Liberation. As Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir put it, talking to the PLO would lead to the unacceptable establishment of a Palestinian state. And center-left politicians, including Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres agreed. So when Rabin became the PM and Peres his Foreign Minister, they pursued indirect contacts with the PLO precisely because they had realized that a separate Palestinian state was indispensable to Israel's long-term stability.

Today, the idea of "a PLO state bordering Israel" sounds pretty bad, but it remains the official preference of the Government of Israel... even if the actions of Israel's current leadership seem to be making that outcome progressively less likely. When President Ronald Reagan authorized the U.S. Government to talk directly with the PLO 24 years ago, the PLO was still on the State Department's list of Foreign Terror Organizations -- as is Hamas today.

But it was still the Cold War, PLO leader Yasir Arafat had met the specific conditions the United States had pledged to Israel, and Vice-President George H.W. Bush had already won the election to succeed the departing Reagan. There was little Israel or American Jewish organizations could do beyond calling for strict controls. Within five years, partly thanks to Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait and serious strong-arming by then-Secretary of State James A. Baker III, the Bush administration helped set the stage for the 1993 Oslo Accords.

Today, the memory of Hamas terror is constantly refreshed by new attacks on Israeli civilians, and Hamas leaders speak regularly of destroying Israel. The PLO once acted the same way, and that bitter legacy will never be erased. And yet, the Oslo Accords were signed between Israel and the PLO, and PLO leader Mahmoud Abbas is generally seen as the best chance for a moderate Palestinian leader willing to make a final deal with Israel.

Israel shouldn't risk for peace? So say so

Those who don't want peace will never have a shortage of statistics and anecdotes to cite in support of their rejectionism. Israel's most vocal antagonists appear politically primitive, often tribal in their allegiances, fractious, racist, absolutist, and wantonly violent. Those who reject meaningful negotiations against such a backdrop feel justified in not taking the risk. But every choice carries a risk, and continuing along the same path day after day -- and settlement after settlement, unpleasant necessity after... is equally a choice, and with real risks. Own it.

My Republican friends like to talk about being responsible for one's choices, so OK. If the "facts on the ground" are so challenging and dispiriting -- and if one is unwilling to recognize even minor blame on Israel's side -- then opponents of the peace process should be clear about their position: There should be no negotiations. Israel's current government has not been clear, at least not in English and not to Washington. The good news for the wide spectrum of Israelis who have come back around to opposing or fearing any negotiations with the Palestinians, is that many months ago U.S. President Obama gave up on any serious effort to bring Israeli and Palestinian leaders back to the table.

Palestinian statehood - no brains required

I blogged a few months ago about how Israeli-Palestinian negotiations might still forestall a unilateral declaration of statehood by the Palestinians, along with the likelihood that only a U.S. veto would stop the United Nations from formally recognizing such a state. Now, barely five months before the UN General Assembly convenes for its annual high-level kick-off, such a U.S. veto seems unavoidable. Those seeking to gain from a reinforced sense that Israel stands alone against the world will feel very vindicated, if a little disappointed that their White House bogeyman came through for the Jewish State in a pinch.

President Obama will be facing a tight re-election campaign, if only because the American people are increasingly divided along partisan lines, which suits the career politicians. It's no longer astonishing that, as recently as last August, one-quarter of all Americans didn't even believe Barack Obama was born in the United States. So backing Israel against premature Palestinian statehood is a no-brainer. 

Unfortunately, lack of brain function is what defines all Israeli-Palestinian dealings these days. We have shifted completely into the realm of political reflex.

Almost a Manifesto

Just because something is inevitable doesn’t mean it will come to pass, and just because something is unthinkable is no guarantee it won’t happen. 

Israeli-Palestinian peace seems to be a no-brainer, especially 17 years after Oslo. And yet, most Israelis are convinced that Oslo “failed”. What failed was the U.S. Congress, among others, to support the process politically and financially when the two adversaries were ready to move forward. Rabin knew that Israelis and Palestinians couldn't live together, so he sought to separate as quickly as possible under some diplomatic cover of night. The window of opportunity was wasted once Rabin was assassinated, demonstrating that at certain points in history it really can’t be bigger than one or a handful of individuals.

Reflecting on the 47th anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination (which happened a bit before I was born), Cold War brinkmanship could so easily have led to full-scale nuclear war, if not for a few cool heads. Even for those of us old enough to remember just the 1970s and 1980s, the blanket of nuclear terror and the despair of Soviet-bloc police states are inconceivable in hindsight. One must travel to North Korea to grasp what I experienced as a young boy during one long summer in Ceaucescu’s Romania. 

The idea that things can get out of hand and that leaders and followers can lose touch with reality seems preposterous, and yet this happens with frightening regularity right here in the United States -- fear, paranoia, suspicion, hatred, willing suspension of disbelief. In ever-widening circles, the subversion of basic liberties and freedom masquerades as a triumph of American values. The Cold War may have ended, but history continues and our intellectual and spiritual struggle for genuine democracy and enlightenment is a daily challenge, even when we choose (yes, it is a choice) to ignore it.

Even as the cult of self-enrichment and self-absorption metastasizes throughout our political culture, many Americans stubbornly and proudly maintain the ethic of self-sacrifice and common good which JFK tapped, celebrated, and sanctified. For those of us, the purpose of government is to make America and the world a better place, because we have a purpose that must go beyond ourselves. At no other time in nearly a century has this assumption been so tested and demeaned. And yet, at no other time has it been as meaningful or critical.

President Kennedy famously said: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”

We have been to the moon, but we should still avoid the easy answers and the convenient black-and-white analysis, or the obvious path of polarization. We do these things, “not because they are easy, but because they are hard...” Otherwise, we humans are wasting some valuable space back here on Earth.

All Jews share responsibility for Rabin's death (originally published Nov. 10, 1995)

I helped kill Yitzhak Rabin.

Not only Yigal Amir or the movements that helped motivate him played a role. Not only the rabbis who called on Israeli soldiers to disobey orders, and not just those who ruled it a halachic imperative to kill Rabin.

Not only the Likud opposition, which neglected to renounce its support for extremist anti-peace activists. Not only the Israeli expatriates who physically attacked Israeli officials overseas, nor the American activists who applauded such violence. Not only the leading rabbis who carried the flag of American Jewry to Jerusalem and proclaimed that Rabin was violating God's laws -- and not the nominal leaders who failed to restrain them.

No. We all share responsibility.

Read full op-ed at JWeekly.