My Amazon Review of Micah Goodman's "Catch 67: The Left, the Right and the Legacy of the Six-Day War"

 

Shrinking the Conflict

 

Shalom Hartman scholar Micah Goodman has offered up an important history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict from the points of view of the Israeli Right and Left and the Palestinians going back to Ben Gurion and Jabotinsky. He argues the positions of the Israeli Right and Left better than they do themselves. He knows all of the arguments and how they evolved over time. For example, the Left has moved from peace to the evils of occupation and lead a security crisis caused by a rising relative Palestinian population and the Right has moved from biblical maximalism to the physical security needed to protect Israel proper. The Jordan Valley the hills of Judea and Samaria are of great strategic importance. Thus, both sides argue from a security posture.

 

He also realizes that Israel will never compromise on security and that the Palestinians will never compromise on the right of return. The crux of the problem is that at its core the Palestinians real quarrel is not with 1967, but rather with 1948 that brought with it the Israeli state. Thus, the issue for them is far more than the occupation brought about by the 6-Day War in 1967. Importantly Goodman notes that the Palestinians are an occupied people, rather than the Palestinians living on occupied territory. That territory was never theirs to begin with because Israel conquered it from Jordan after Jordan attacked in 1967. To Goodman the territories should rightly be characterized as “disputed.”

 

Meanwhile history has passed this 2017 book by with the growing diplomatic recognition of Israel by several Arab states. Simply put the Sunni-Shia rivalry, not the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, has become the critical variable in today’s middle east.  

 

This makes Goodman’s idea of shrinking the conflict far more practical. His idea is to increase the autonomy of the Palestinians by connecting all of their communities with roads thereby avoiding roadblocks and increasing their ability to control development within their boundaries. Of course, the Israeli Defense Forces would continue to be responsible for security. If, and that is a big if, acceptable to the Palestinians his ideas would certainly remove some of the rough edges around the conflict. This would also enable greater foreign investment in the Palestinian zones.

 

Goodman leaves out two important issues. One, the Palestinian government is a kleptocracy and two, there is no discussion about Gaza which is ruled by the iron and corrupt hand of Hamas, certainly not a good example.

 

Nevertheless, Goodman takes us away from the Right’s status quo argument of “managing the conflict” and the Left’s “solving the conflict.” His solution is sensibly to shrink the conflict over time.

For the full Amazon URL see: Shrinking the Conflict (amazon.com)