… got some interesting reactions on Crooked Timber. Its is set out over the fold. I’m confident readers who take a little time to think about it will realise it’s far superior to existing policy, and to any alternative proposed so far.
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John Quiggin 
Policy seems to be missing.
I’ve taken a little time (roughly 35 years) to ponder the problem of the Middle East and indeed find your conclusion unavoidable:
Oh I get it. Non interventionism is the Ron Paul platform. Hard to disagree.
p.s. I should have mentioned it is also the policy position of the other libertarian presidential candidate Gary Johnson.
Not going to fly. Where’s the mass killing?
The spectacle of that snarling bully Netanyahu congratulating his puppet Obama, on following orders, was pretty nauseating. I recommend Googling the Chicago Jewish News of October 24, 2008, and the article ‘Obama and the Jews’, to see just exactly who Obama is and who recruited and employed him and furthered his political ambitions with lavish injections of funds. Then you will understand precisely why he is such a cravenly one-sided bully-boy for Israel, lecturing the imprisoned, tormented, humiliated, and tortured Palestinians on just how best to crawl on your belly to your superiors. After twenty years of Israeli intransigence, double-crossing, murder and contempt, even an old collaborator (why do you think he is even alive after Israel murdered virtually all his former colleagues up to and including Arafat?) like Abbas has had enough. The Western MSM has, as ever, been putrid, responding to orders from the Zionists like Pavlovian dogs. Fran Kelly on the ABC this morning asserted that Palestine’s bid had little support, Howardite groupthink for the belief that the 120 or more non-Western countries don’t count as real people, don’t qualify as the ‘international community’, which means in this case, as all others, those countries whose politics are controlled by Zionist money power.
‘The Fundament’ has a lovely piece from Greg Sheridan this morning, in my opinion even more hysterical and vicious than normal. I suppose his Zionist buddies value histrionic outbursts, and theatrical displays of absolute fealty to the holy cause. Still, it may be a good sign of Zionist nervousness. If things go as they have in recent years, with Israel careering further and further to the fascist and racist Right, with fundamentalist Jews and settler groups increasingly dominating politics and the military, and Western Zionists exerting ever more demanding control over politics and the media through their money power, then Israel will destroy itself, from inner corruption and one aggression too many, but not before wrecking the region and perhaps, much of the world. After all the ‘Samson Option’ is still on the table. A proper, decent, accommodation with the Palestinians, which has been offered by these victims of Zionist racism since 1988, would ensure peace for Israel and its neighbours, and the hope of eventual regional co-operation and amity. But, as any intelligent and honest observer can see, Israel has never been prepared to compromise with its victims, who many in Israeli society and its elites regard as nothing but insects in human form.
The Israel Question is a “wicked problem”, a “super wicked problem” or “social mess”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_problem
Just looking at some basic facts, Israel’s position is untenable without massive external support. Israel’s GDP was about $213 billion in US$ in 2010 according to the IMF. To put this into perspective, Greece’s 2010 GDP was about $305 billion. Israel’s population is about 7.75 million people and Greece’s population is about 10.78 million people. Despite these numbers, Israel maintains an airforce as large as Germany’s and significantly larger than those of the UK or France. Israel has 1,680 main battle tanks which is more than twice as large as Germany’s force. (Strangely enough, Greece is listed as having 1,268 main battle tanks, however I shudder to think what vintage they might be and how many would actually be operational.) In addition, Israel is thought to have 200 to 400 thermonuclear warheads capable of being delivered by ballistic missile, fighter-bomber, or submarine, in some cases to targets anywhere in the world.
Thus, while Israel’s position is “untenable without massive external support” (financial and military) it is also untenable now for key allies like the US to deny Israel this support. If Israel is existentially threatened it will unleash all its nuclear weapons and not just in the M.E. area. Isreal has threatened to use the “Sampson option” in extremis. This means provoking a world wide total nuclear war if Israel’s existence is threatened.
Israel’s position is far from ‘untenable’. All it needs to do is cease acting like a cancer in the region, accept a proper Palestinian state on the Green Line territories, and cease subverting its neighbours. This means controlling the ‘Eretz Yisrael’ ‘from the Nile to the Euphrates’ tendency. After that it would also be helpful, for Israel’s own moral hygiene, to rein in the sex trade, human organ trafficking, blood diamonds, financial shennanigans and drug trade (particularly in ecstasy and cocaine)that are such features of Israel’s burgeoning black economy. Israel has a great advantage in high tech, so doesn’t really need the seedy stuff. The peaceful regional co-operation with its neighbours, unconditionally on offer at least since 2002, would secure Israel’s position, but the ruling elites in Israel and in Zionism plainly have other, far grander, ambitions.
Yes, it does seem that the territorial expansionists, who are insistent upon colonising the West Bank, have a stranglehold over Israel’s policymaking which prevents meaningful peace negotiations.
To be honest Tim, an Eretz Yisrael, ‘from the Nile to the Euphrates’ and cleansed of non-Jews was Zionist policy from the days of Herzl and Ben-Gurion.
By that logic the wind farm industry is also untenable.
Israel gets a lot of foreign aid from the USA. However so do the enemies of Israel. If the US stops funding Israel (which it should) then one would expect that it should also stop funding the enemies of Israel. At which point Israel can readily defend itself.
Israel has ‘enemies’, but principally it has victims, as it is by far the strongest power in the region, the most belligerent, most racist and most inclined to homicidal violence. Just why that is so was explained by the ‘Yesha Council of Rabbis and Torah Sages’, an orthodox group aligned to the settler Judaic Taliban, in 2006, as Israel leveled Lebanon. These worthies declared that, under Judaic Law, killing civilians in time of conflict was not just permissible, but constituted a religiously sanctified good deed, or ‘mitzvah’. International humanitarian law that states differently, was contemptuously dismissed as ‘Christian morality’. This was during the onslaught on Lebanon when all Lebanese ethnic and sectarian groups were attacked, plainly in a vain attempt to re-ignite civil war, and when schools, hospitals, mosques, power-stations, oil refineries, airports, fleeing civilians, ambulances, bridges and warehouses were all targeted, and the Beirut suburb of Dahiya was leveled because Hezbollah leaders lived there. Israel later boasted of a new ‘Dahiya Doctrine’ of unlimited destruction of civilian spaces, a variant on Dayan’s infamous ‘mad dog’ doctrine. Israel followed up, in a fit of outraged presumption of racial superiority, when beaten on the ground, again, by Hezbollah’s second-string fighters, by spraying southern Lebanon with hundreds of thousands of cluster bomblets.
I think the interesting question is how any state can survive with proportional representation when there are two distinct peoples living it. I suppose I have to point out that even if Israel adopted a two state solution self-identifying Jews will eventually become a minority in their own county, and the reality is that the place is so small and interwoven or divided that only one state makes sense.
One solution would be to have a constitution that recognises primary ethnic allegiances (say, more than 30% of the population) and then has a set of rules that prevent a single ethnic group imposing their will on the remaining ethnic groups. This could simply be a requirement (like the super majority in the US Senate) that a law is void unless proportionality is maintained above a certain threshold. That is if, a vote by an ethnic block, after that block achieved a certain number, would have to attract a proportional number from other ethnic blocks to be effective.
There would also have to be rules on identification, but that is fairly simple on a ‘both sides have to agree that a member identifies with that group’ or their vote doesn’t count in proportional votes.
This could apply to Israel, several countries in Eastern Europe with large ethnic Russian populations, and much closer to home, to West Papua where the possibility of an autonomous region may well see native population outnumbered by recent immigrants from Java.
Likelihood of the Israelis and Palestinians sitting down over a nice cup of tea and sorting it out: buckley’s. Obama should get a life.
I think Tim Minchin’s solution is better, but it has to be sung:
You don’t eat pork
We don’t eat pork
It seems its been that way forever.
So if you don’t eat pork
And we don’t eat pork
Why not not eat pork together?
I can’t actually find your policy proposal John, either above or at Crooked Timber
The Israeli policy is quite clear, and was wonderfully illustrated by Netanyahu’s proposal for a Palestinian state. He proposed a state based on the current collection of Bantustans wherein the Palestinians are imprisoned. It would have no external borders, with the Jordan Valley occupied by Israel. It would be allowed no army, Jewish ‘security’ being paramount, but Palestinian security being a non-category, not worthy of mention, let alone contemptuous dismissal. The ‘Jewish state’ of Israel would have a veto over this Palestinian entity’s foreign relations. Israel would retain control of the airspace and cyberspace, and would have the right of ‘hot pursuit’ if it felt the need for some therapeutic death-squad killing of ‘terrorwists’.
All in all a ‘state’ as electronic zoo, in which the ‘two-legged animals’ would remain imprisoned until they decided to ‘go elsewhere’ as the Zionists have always planned. At some future point ‘transfer’ ie another mass cleansing as in 1947-8, might be necessary, possibly depending on when the fundamentalist, neo-fascist settler tendency takes over.
The link to ‘over the fold’ is missing but we won’t let that stop us commenting on it!
Actually the US having no Middle East policy would probably be a marked improvement over what’s passed for a US led ‘peace’ process.
Err, Fran and Ken, that’s exactly John’s point. It’s like that book they used to sell called “The Wisdom of Ronald Reagan” which consisted of empty pages.
Damn, a joke loses impact if you have to explain it.
I’d like to know where you’re getting that from–either part of it.
‘From the Nile to the Euphrates’? Where does that come from? I don’t think that’s accurate.
As for the other, in Herzl’s fictional depiction of the Jewish state he imagined, Arabs are explicitly a part of it and the politicians who want to change that are the villains of the story.