The full Israeli experience

But this group is called the “ideological” hawks because most of them also advocate Israel’s retaining permanent control of the West Bank and Jerusalem for religious-nationalist reasons. So it’s impossible to know where their strategic logic for holding territory stops and their religious-nationalist dreams start — and that muddies their case with the world

This is Friedman’s main fallacy in this article – that the Israeli Right only wants to control Judea and Samaria for religious/nationalist reasons. Primarily, control of Judea and Samaria is important for the exact same reason it was important to control Gaza and South Lebanon – security/strategy. That this reasoning agrees nicely with nationalism is a bonus; that this reasoning is supported by Jewish theology is merely confirmation that this is what should have been done all along.

Indeed, Friedman’s antisemitism is showing here. If, for ideological purity, Israel can only write policy based on strategy, and not on religious reasoning, how can a Jewish state be defendable at all? Why would religious-nationalist dreams of Palestinians or Iranians be acceptable to Friedman, but not Israelis? Why not the one-state solution?

Right-wing Israelis have a slogan – we are all settlers. It’s a response to Western protestations of settlement (E1 etc.) by pointing out that the Arabs consider all of us to be colonialists, and that the Arabs will never be satisfied with the land granted them in negotiations because they consider all of Israel to belong to them. It is a statement of Jewish pride that people like Friedman seem to despise.

solatic on December 10, 2012 at 12:19 AM