Barry Rubin Exposes the Truth about the "Peace Process"

Mike L.

{Cross-posted at Israel Thrives.}

If you want to cut through the yammering mierda around the Arab-Israel conflict one of the best scholars and analysts to consider is professor Barry Rubin.  In a recent piece at his blog, Rubin Reports, entitled "It's Time to Tell the Truth About the 'Peace Process'" he writes:

Has it become time that the absurd paradigm governing the Israel-Palestinian and Arab-Israeli conflict as well as the “peace process” be abandoned or challenged?

After all, this narrative has become increasingly ridiculous. Here is what is close to being the official version:

The Palestinians desperately want an independent state and are ready to compromise to obtain that goal. They will then live peacefully alongside Israel in a two-state solution. Unfortunately, this is blocked either by: a) misunderstanding on both sides or b) in the recent words of the Huntington Post, “the hard-line opponents who dominate Israel's ruling coalition.” Israel is behaving foolishly, too, not seeing that, as former President Bill Clinton recently said, Israel needs peace in order to survive. One aspect—perhaps a leading one—why Israel desperately needs peace is because of Arab demographic growth. The main barrier to peace are the Jewish settlements.
This interpretation has nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with reality. People on both sides know this, even if they rarely say so publicly. For the Palestinian side, the pretense of peacemaking—which every Palestinian leader knows—obtains money, diplomatic support, popular sympathy, and pressure on Israel. Here's the dirty trick involved. If anyone raises... issues about whether a "peace process" can really bring peace, concerns about how it would be implemented, and documented experience about Palestinian behavior in the past, the response is that Israel doesn't want peace. The actual arguments and evidence about these problems is censored out of the Western mass media and distorted in terms of political stances.

Rubin is correct.  One of the main things that it is necessary for us to understand concerning the long Arab war against the Jews in the Middle East is that it is cognitive war, in a certain kind of way.  Whatever else it is, it is a propaganda war in which our Arab opponents seek to influence western understanding.  They seek to present a progressive "narrative" of Arab-Muslim persecution within the Land of Israel at the hands of Israel and the Jews.

Let's go through some of this:

The Palestinians desperately want an independent state and are ready to compromise to obtain that goal. 

This is what many, or even most, on the western left, particularly in Europe, believe.  They honestly believe that the local Arabs are largely innocent and that when they strike out against the Jewish minority in that part of the world it is due to righteous indignation against Jewish wrong-doing.  From an historical perspective this is entirely nonsense.  The "Palestinian narrative" as it has been adopted by the west wipes out fourteen centuries of Jewish persecution under the boot of Arab-Muslim imperialism.  They are robbing us of our history.

They will then live peacefully alongside Israel in a two-state solution. 

The fact of the matter is that the vast Arab-Muslim majority in the Middle East - which outnumbers Jews by a factor of 60 or 70 to one -  has never accepted the existence of Israel as a Jewish State and its governments have vowed the destruction of the Jewish homeland from even before UN Resolution 181 in November of 1947.

Israel is behaving foolishly, too, not seeing that, as former President Bill Clinton recently said, Israel needs peace in order to survive.

One of the most insidious notions often peddled on the western left is that the Jews of the Middle East do not want peace.  We read this kind of thing all the time in western left journals like the Huffington Post or the UK Guardian.  The Jews of the Middle East are a people continually hounded, harassed, and murdered - thus keeping our numbers artificially low - for fourteen hundred years.  Israel is a bunker because the only way that the Jews can survive in that hate-filled environment is with a bunker.  Yet these smug, safe westerners throughout Europe and in the United States honestly believe that the Jews of Israel do not want peace and thus do not deserve peace. This is, essentially, what they are saying.

One aspect—perhaps a leading one—why Israel desperately needs peace is because of Arab demographic growth. The main barrier to peace are the Jewish settlements.

To blame the refusal of the local Arabs to even negotiate a peaceful settlement of the issues on the fact that Jews build housing for themselves in Judea and Samaria is racist on its face.  For something around four thousand years Jews have lived in Judea. The very first thing that we must understand is that this small bit of the planet is, in fact, Jewish land.  It is not just as much Jewish land as France is French land, but far more so.  Four thousand years we have lived in those hills.  Four thousand years we suffered armies marching through and throwing us into the sea and off of Jewish land.

The main barrier to peace is not Jewish towns in Judea and Samaria.  They aren't "settlements," they are homes, townships, and communities.  I understand, of course, that I am critiquing Rubin's interpretation of how the western world, particularly the western left, views the conflict, but he happens to be correct.

The characterization by Rubin, in italics above, is an exceedingly accurate view of how the western left views the conflict.

They honestly believe that the tiny Jewish minority in the Middle East - which is doing nothing more than trying to protect itself from the relentless anti-Jewish violence characteristic of the Muslim world - is guilty of the persecution of the Arab majority population.

And that, my friends, is the Big Lie.