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)
