Don Futterman : The Palestinians Are Not ISIS
In the wake of the ISIS attacks on Paris, Israel’s top leadership, from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on down, has been equating ISIS with Palestinian terror, and calling on the west to repudiate both with equal fervor, and in the process, renounce the causes they claim to represent.
But it is
in Israel’s existential interest to insist on the exact opposite: that
there is a clear difference between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and
the battle between ISIS and the West.
While we
in Israel are also victims of murderous, extremist Islam, the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict is ultimately resolvable. It is not a clash
of civilizations, as the confrontation with ISIS has been framed, not
least by ISIS itself; it is a turf war over territory, control of that
territory and the possible division of that territory, to which Islamic
extremism has appended itself, first in its Palestinian forms, and more
recently in its global incarnations.
Instead
of reminding the world of this critical distinction, our leaders have
been flailing about to exploit the ISIS attacks on innocent Parisians to
garner international support for Israeli settlements.
"In
Israel, as in France, terrorism is terrorism,” Netanyahu wrote on his
Facebook page in response to the ISIS attack. “It is the terrorists who
are to blame for terrorism.” Indeed, every human being has agency, and
must be responsible for his or her decision to try to advance a cause
through violence, no matter how misguided. And as much as I have
sympathy for Palestinian aspirations for statehood, terrorism is never
justified.
But the
claim that terrorism’s “motivation is radical Islam and a desire for
destruction,” only applies in some cases in the local context, since
Palestinian terror is not exclusively linked to Islam, and never has
been.
Terrorists are often glorified, an appalling practice, and one directly linked to the dearth of heroes in Palestinian society, but terror is not seen by all Palestinians as part of a cosmic battle leading to Armageddon, but rather as an instrumental means to an end. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, for example, collaborated with Israel to clamp down on Palestinian terror after witnessing the damage wrought by the Second Intifada to his own cause, which led to the deaths of far more Palestinians than Israeli Jews, and harmed Palestinian standing in the world.
Terrorists are often glorified, an appalling practice, and one directly linked to the dearth of heroes in Palestinian society, but terror is not seen by all Palestinians as part of a cosmic battle leading to Armageddon, but rather as an instrumental means to an end. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, for example, collaborated with Israel to clamp down on Palestinian terror after witnessing the damage wrought by the Second Intifada to his own cause, which led to the deaths of far more Palestinians than Israeli Jews, and harmed Palestinian standing in the world.
But
the real thrust of Israel’s efforts to promote solidarity in victimhood
between Israel and France is the claim that it “is not the territories,
not the settlements and not any other thing,” that causes terrorism, or
as Deputy Foreign Minister Tzipi Hotovely put it: “Settlements were never the issue.” This
argument, which is intended to reduce the international pressure on
Israel to stop settlement building, and to remove the issue of
settlements from the political debate about how to resolve the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict, persuades no one outside of Israeli right
wing circles.
For more
than two decades, the Palestinians themselves, and the Israeli,
Palestinian and American or European partners to our intermittent
negotiations, have told us that settlements, along with the status of
Jerusalem and Palestinian refugees, have been the major obstacles to
peace. There are specific issues that have appeared intractable,
although a few times it seemed they were almost resolved: a recent
Israeli television documentary revealed just this month how close
Israelis and Palestinians were during Ehud Olmert's tenure as PM to
resolving these supposedly insurmountable disagreements.
With ISIS
on our northern and southern borders, Hamas running Gaza and Hezbollah
in Lebanon, Israel is surrounded by Islamic extremists who would like to
destroy the Jewish state. But neither Hamas nor Hezbollah is ISIS. We
may abhor them but we negotiate with them. While we are attacked by
Islamic extremists, and while ISIS may be making inroads among desperate
young Palestinians, Palestinian society is still predominantly Western
and deeply ambivalent about jihadi ideology, with large sectors opposing
it.
Western
leaders don’t condone Palestinian terror, but they also don’t put
Israel-Palestine in the same category as the ISIS fantasy of supplanting
the West by murdering or enslaving Christians, Shia Moslems, Sunni
Moslems who don’t join them, Yazidis, Jews and anybody else who gets in
their way. They have been unresponsive to Israeli government calls for
sympathy and unity, because like most Israelis, they know the conflicts
are different. Of course it doesn’t help that our leaders have been
mocking European leaders and spurning their overtures to stop settlement
building and advance the peace process for years.
Without
justifying terror or absolving terrorists of their absolute
responsibility, we know Israeli policy contributes to the conditions in
which Palestinian children answer the sickening call to murder Jews and
martyr themselves; witness the Netanyahu-led chorus telling
Palestinians that they will never have their own state, or the
increasingly frequent closures of the Temple Mount, and pilgrimages by
Jewish nutcases who want to build the Third Temple in the company of
government officials and Knesset members, not to mention the daily
abuses of the Occupation.
Why would
any responsible Israeli leader reject the framing of the conflict in
terms that are resolvable rather than those that lead only to war and
bloodshed without end? The real framing of the conflict is that Israel
should be trying to resolve hard, thorny disagreements with the
Palestinians that will require painful concessions, rather than a
framing inspired by ISIS: that Israel is at war with radical Islam in a
battle to the death of one of the competing civilizations.
No friend
of Israel should adopt this apocalyptic and suicidal worldview, and
certainly not to advance the settlement enterprise.
Don
Futterman is the Program Director for Israel for the Moriah Fund, a
private American Foundation, which works to strengthen democracy and
civil society in Israel. He can be heard weekly on The Promised Podcast.
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