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After 30 Years, Bibi’s Path Is Dead End
Especially against the backdrop of increasingly gratuitous suffering in Gaza — by Palestinians and Israelis — the latest declarations recognizing Palestinian statehood are a rebuke of the failed maximalist strategies of Hamas and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. They may also offer an escape hatch for Israel.
Far from being a strike against Israel, or some improbable “capitulation” to Hamas terror, the latest moves are a recommitment to Mahmoud Abbas’ flawed but peaceful effort to achieve some justice for over four million Palestinians living under Israeli control, and possibly a last chance for Israel to restart the path toward normalcy. A smart statesman would use this as an opportunity to empower and obligate Palestinian leaders toward a sustainable coexistence that leaves Israel more secure and prosperous, and more at peace with itself.
Much of Europe’s underlying empathy for Israel and the Jewish people flows from Europeans’ journey of the past 80 years, absorbing the lessons of the Holocaust as preached by us. It was Hitler’s final act after two millennia of persecutions which ultimately awakened the West to the right for a Jewish state and for rules to safeguard peace, the rule of law, and human dignity. As Netanyahu has devoted most of the past 30 years to degrading and betraying those principles, many Europeans and Americans — including plenty of Jews — have either soured on Israel or at least experienced moral dissonance. Netanyahu’s public opposition to any Palestinian state, and ideas of removing Palestinians from Gaza and replacing them with Israeli condos, haven’t helped.
The horrors of October 7, 2023, rekindled sympathy for Israel among European leaders. As with previous Hamas atrocities, many understood that Israel must conduct some military operations in Gaza. This year, most of these governments — whose own modern identities are now hardwired to oppose anything resembling genocide — decided they’ve had enough of Netanyahu’s collective punishment against Gaza’s civilian population.
This does not make European leaders antisemites. The irony, of a French Fascist like Marine Le Pen denouncing President Emmanuel Macron’s recognition of a Palestinian state, should be a source of amusement. Instead, it’s a reflection that Netanyahu is shifting Israel’s global constituency from the champions of universal freedom and Jewish values to the retrograde forces of autocracy and xenophobia. In denigrating minorities, individual autonomy, rule of law and basic compassion, and by emphasizing violence and white grievances, the platforms of nativist right-wing movements on both sides of the Atlantic are explicitly anti-Enlightenment. To quote Netanyahu’s late predecessor Golda Meir, “With friends like these, who needs enemies?”
What’s been happening in Gaza doesn’t have to be a genocide in order to offend the popular conscience, and taking offense doesn’t mean you’re an antisemite. It was the Enlightenment that sparked the flourishing of modern Jewish concepts including Zionism and the establishment of the State of Israel. Enlightenment principles also helped reconcile and redeem humanity after Hitler’s terrorizing of Europe and his genocide against the Jews. As European leaders and many ordinary citizens apply those same standards to Netanyahu, having combated latter-day crimes against humanity elsewhere, maybe they aren’t the ones who’ve lost sight of Jewish imperatives or lessons of the Holocaust.
Recognizing a Palestinian state, even with undefined population and borders, can open the door for Israel to finalize its own citizenship and borders — also a prerequisite for any Israeli normalization with Saudi Arabia. Let’s not allow the ingrained Jewish sense of trauma and vulnerability to pull us down and keep us from fulfilling our promise as a moral as well as a military force in the world. Perhaps, after three decades of trying it Netanyahu’s way, it’s time to try something else. Or at least, to stop seeing the quest for other people’s freedom as a ploy to destroy us.
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