Jerusalem Post, 27th August 2004

The Inevitability Myth

by Bret Stephens
__________________

It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine. – R.E.M.

So it turns out Israel stands on the verge of self-destruction. And by "verge," I don't mean within the next 20 years, when Arabs may outnumber Jews this side of the Jordan river, or the next 20 months, after Israel withdraws from Gaza and Iran becomes a nuclear power. I mean the next two months, once Israel starts in on the construction of a bridge neighborhood between Jerusalem and its principal eastern suburb on the West Bank, Ma'aleh Adumim.

What is so uniquely dangerous about this new settlement? Writing in Thursday's Washington Post, Jerusalem lawyer Daniel Seidemann explains that the envisaged neighborhood would "cut East Jerusalem off from its environs in the West Bank [and] dismember the West Bank into two cantons, with no natural connection between them." This would "create a critical mass of facts on the ground that will render nearly impossible the creation of a sustainable Palestinian state...." And that, in turn, "leaves only one default option: the one-state, bi-national solution that signifies the end of Israel as the home of the Jewish people."

How alarming. Then again, throughout the Cold War the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists kept posting dire warnings, by way of its famous clock, that it was seven, or five, or two minutes to midnight, reflecting the editors' sense of the imminence of doom. The clock was first set in 1947, at seven minutes to midnight. Fifty-seven years later, it is again at seven minutes to midnight.

As propaganda tools go, the clock was a stroke of genius: It bespoke inevitability to generate a sense of urgency – with all the authority of "The Atomic Scientists." Yet the clock was always silly, tendentious and even dangerous. Silly, because a clock that tells the same time after nearly six decades is plainly broken; tendentious, because the clock moved backwards only when there was "progress" in arms-limitation talks, which is a rather one-sided view of how best to advance the cause of peace; and dangerous, because it promoted global hysteria and potentially rash decision making.

Here in Israel, we also mark time with doomsday clocks. On the Right, there is the view that the clock started ticking with the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, which could only move in the direction of a Palestinian state and the catastrophic risks such a state was said to pose. On the Left, the belief is that the clock started ticking in 1967, when Israel swallowed an alien population that sooner or later would become a majority, forcing the state to choose between its Jewish and democratic identities, or otherwise expel that population en masse. Thus the building of a new settlement may either be seen as moving the clock back a bit (if you're on the Right), or moving it forward (if you're on the Left). What Israelis of both stripes seem to agree, however, is that we're on the road to hell.

This is rubbish. Both Left and Right posit the same argument, which is that the future is inevitable – unless we do something about it. But either the future is inevitable or it is not. If the clock is ticking toward the apocalypse, then the apocalypse will come – and precisely on schedule – no matter what our leaders do. If the coming of the apocalypse is contingent on whether our leaders do this or that, then there is no clock. A dozen more settlements could go up tomorrow and still Israel could negotiate its way toward a two-state solution. Alternatively, Israel could unilaterally concede the entire Gaza Strip and West Bank to a hostile Palestinian state, and still survive and thrive.

Of course, this isn't really the argument of a Siedemann or his ideological opposites. When they speak of "inevitability," they in fact mean "increased probability." For a Leftist, more settlements mean an increased probability that Israel won't be able to extricate itself from the settlement enterprise before Palestinians swamp Israel demographically, or the world ostracizes Israel diplomatically. For a Rightist, each concession or withdrawal means an increased probability that Israel will make another concession or withdrawal, past the point of what's prudent and all the way to national suicide. The Right oppose the removal of 7500 settlers from Gaza now because they are convinced it prefigures the removal of 275,000 settlers later. The Left oppose the construction of any new settlement now because they are convinced it prefigures the construction of settlements forever.

Still, the fact remains that even if the ideologues of Left and Right mean increased probability when they say inevitability, they still say inevitability. This was the language adopted by the proponents of Oslo, particularly Yossi Beilin, in the early '90s, when they spoke of the process as "irreversible." This was more than just a rhetorical posture (or imposture); it was a handy tool for shutting down debate. Like the Marxists of yesteryear, Beilin and his cohorts had seen not only where history should go, but where it was going anyway. Why debate the merits of Oslo? To do so, they implied, would be as idiotic as debating the merits of death.

In other words, the Left was not propounding a vision for the future, which would have been a legitimate thing for it to do, and would have required the usual tools of democratic persuasion. Rather, it was prophesying the future and presenting itself to the public as the future's humble servant. But if the future was inevitable, or if the process the Left had initiated was irreversible, why then did the Left go about so much of its business in secret, presenting the public with one fait accompli after another? And how did the public manage to reverse this irreversible process leading to an inevitable future?

To its credit, the Israeli Right tends not to indulge talk about inevitability, at least on certain subjects. For instance, to those who say it's inevitable that Arabs will shortly constitute a majority in the land of Israel, the Right responds that demographic predictions are notoriously inaccurate, and besides, who knows what the future might bring? Nobody predicted the million-strong Russian aliya, but here they are. Perhaps 600,000 French Jews will soon make their own appearance. Perhaps another million Jews will come from the United States.

Such thinking is refreshingly hopeful and open to the possibility of changing circumstances. But it is also problematic, in that it answers a serious contention of the Left (and, increasingly, of many people on the Right) by saying, in effect, that God will surely see His people through. But the larger problem lies with the Right's widely held attitude that anything less than national maximalism leads ineluctably to minimalism; that is, that the choice for Israel is between occupying all the land or being driven into the sea. That's why the Right has reacted with such alarm to Sharon's disengagement plan: They see it as a prelude to Beilin's Geneva Accord, not as a compromise alternative between two extremes.

But why should this be? Few Israelis regard the Gaza outpost of Netzarim the way they regard the Jerusalem neighborhood of French Hill (or Maleh Adumim or Ariel), though Palestinians and the United Nations claim they're all settlements on occupied land and therefore all illegal under international law. Similarly, Palestinians and the UN consider the security fence illegal. Yet the overwhelming majority of Israelis, including Ehud Barak and the notoriously Leftish Israeli Supreme Court, do not concur. When the Israeli Left argues for withdrawal from most or all of the territories, it is nearly always with a view to preserving the Jewish character of the state. This argument comes with its own set of problems, but there's no gainsaying that it's a Zionist one.

There's a third relevant context in which the notion of inevitability ought to be examined, and that's to do with the prospect of a Palestinian state. Seidemann argues that unless a Palestinian state has "geographical integrity" and is "sustainable," it will inevitably lead to the "one default option," which is a one-state, binational solution. But again, why? There are many states that do not have geographical integrity and yet are eminently sustainable: one such state is the non-contiguous United States. There are also states that have nothing going for them in terms of territory or resources – think Singapore – and are doing just fine. I'll discuss this at greater length in my next column.

In modern philosophical discourse, the idea of historical inevitability belongs first to Georg Hegel, then to Karl Marx. For the most part, it has been a discourse of fools, deceivers and tyrants. Nothing in this world is inevitable – except death and perhaps taxes – and those who speak in this vein should be heard with skepticism.
__________________