The Peace Processors Turn Against Peace

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The Israeli Right won Israel’s November 1 elections. The four parties in incoming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu‘s ruling right-wing coalition won 64 seats in Israel’s 120-member Knesset. Although the polls were close, the Right’s clear-cut victory is easy to understand. Israel’s electorate is center-right, by a large margin. Israel’s three-year electoral paralysis owed to the presence of splinter right-wing parties that refused to serve in a Netanyahu-led government for personal reasons. A year and a half under the government cobbled together from the splinter Right, the radical Left, and the Muslim Brotherhood sufficed to sour most of the center-right voters on their splinter representatives’ anti-Netanyahu obsession. These voters then voted for one of the four parties that were indisputably members of the Likud-led right-wing bloc, thus ending the stalemate.

Netanyahu and his coalition partners have taken their time putting together their governing coalition. Most observers now expect the new government to be sworn into power by December 10. But opponents of the incoming government at home and abroad—particularly in the U.S.—have rushed to preemptively demonize it and delegitimize the policies the victorious parties championed before their election.

Slanderous allegations that Netanyahu and his coalition partners are racist, homophobic, extremist, fascist, misogynist, and xenophobic are nothing new. For the past 25 years, every time an Israeli government has refused to kowtow to the Washington foreign policy establishment’s demands for unilateral concessions to the terror-sponsoring Palestinians, it has been castigated in similar terms. Two things, though, are unique about the current round of demonization. First, until now, the threats and attacks were made “in the name of peace.” Israel was told to come to heel to facilitate a peaceful resolution of the Palestinians’ conflict with Israel. But today, the slanders fly without reference to peace.

The current demonization efforts are also unique because they are preemptive. Netanyahu hasn’t even finalized the coalition deals with his various partners, and his government still hasn’t been sworn in. So while the attacks tell us nothing about the incoming Israeli government, they tell us a lot about the foreign policy establishment attacking it.

The attacks are nearly identical, but one stands out both because it effectively calls for an end of the U.S. alliance with its most powerful and loyal ally in the Middle East, and because of the identity of its co-authors. Last Wednesday, The Washington Post published an op-ed by two of the most prominent and long-standing U.S. “experts” on Middle East “peace.” Former Middle East peace mediator Aaron David Miller and former U.S. Ambassador to Israel Dan Kurtzer have been actively involved in the so-called “peace process” between Israel and the Palestinians since 1990, when they served as Arabists in then-President George H.W. Bush‘s State Department.

Under the headline, “Biden should respond boldly to a radical Netanyahu government,” the two architects of the U.S. foreign policy establishment’s “Middle East peace” policies ditched the peace line, focused on pure demonization, and then moved to their preferred policy prescriptions.

Operating on the assumption that the incoming Netanyahu government will carry through on its members’ campaign pledges to secure Israel’s national and strategic interests in Judea and Samaria, protect Israeli property and civil rights in the disputed areas, and promote religious freedom in Jerusalem for Jews as well as for Muslims and Christians, Miller and Kurtzer called on the Biden administration to preemptively sanction Israel. Resonating calls by members of the antisemitic BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) campaign against Israel, they urged Biden and his advisors to embargo the sale of “offensive weapons” to the Jewish state. They wrote that the administration should throw Israel to the jackals in the reflexively anti-Israel (and anti-American) United Nations and the International Criminal Court. And President Joe Biden and his advisors should warn Israel that they “will be on the alert for Israeli actions that deserve to be called out and condemned.”

To obfuscate their anti-Israel positions, the two added a pro forma call for the Palestinian Authority (PA)—which hasn’t held elections in 17 years, and has sponsored terrorism without interruption for nearly 30 years—to democratize and to fight terrorism. But whereas their calls to preemptively sanction Israel were detailed and angry, their call for the Palestinians amounted to mere throat-clearing. There were no hints of red lines the Palestinians might cross for the U.S. to finally stop its massive funding and diplomatic support for the PA.

The purportedly “pro-peace” diplomats’ most revealing recommendation related to Israel’s Abraham Accords peace partners.

“The Biden administration,” they wrote, “needs to inform the Abraham Accord countries—the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan—that their evident lack of interest in the plight of the Palestinians will undermine their relationship with Israel and damage their credibility in advancing other regional objectives with the United States.”

So to advance their anti-Israel agenda, the two men who built their careers through their supposed efforts to build Middle East peace, call for scuppering Middle East peace.

This tells us something very basic about the true nature of their work—and that of their like-minded colleagues—across the decades, and still today. It was never peace that they were after. “Peace,” for them, was a fig leaf behind which they hid their true goal. That goal is clear, given that their noxious policy prescriptions are the same today as they have always been.

In the name of the vaunted “peace process,” for more than 30 years Miller, Kurtzer, and their colleagues in the Washington foreign policy establishment pressured Israel to appease the Palestinians despite their anti-Jewish bigotry and terrorism. “In the interest of peace,” they threatened and coerced Israel to concede its national and strategic interests in unified Jerusalem and Judea and Samaria. The goal wasn’t peace. The goal was to get the U.S. to implement anti-Israel policies.

Likewise, they aren’t demonizing Israel’s incoming government because they actually believe that any of the terrible things they attribute to Netanyahu and his colleagues are true. They are demonizing them because the utter failure of the “peace process” they helped orchestrate and oversee is now indisputable. They, like their friends in the Biden administration, openly admit the “peace process” is “moribund.”

The intense demonization of Israel is the new fig leaf. It is also a way to justify capsizing actual Arab-Israel peace. If Israel is evil because it elected a fascist, racist, homophobic government, then everyone who supports Israel or lives in peace with it is also evil, fascist, racist, etc.

The Miller/Kurtzer op-ed is a conclusive demonstration that the so-called “peace process,” which never led to peace, was a complete sham. They knew it all along, and they didn’t care.

Peace is not the goal of the “peace processors.” It never was. Their singular aim, for the past generation of fake “peace processing,” has been to undermine and end the U.S.-Israel alliance and replace it with a set of hostile policies toward Israel. The natural end of their policies has always been clear: to promote Arab wars on Israel, delegitimize the Jewish state, and legitimize the Palestinian terrorists that seek its destruction. Their demonization of Israel’s yet-to-be-sworn-in government is both instrumental and as insincere as their former love for “peace.” Without the guise of a “peace process,” the Washington poobahs have fabricated a new failing of Israel to serve as a new fig leaf. Supporters of the U.S.-Israel alliance should be wary of falling for their cynical act.

Originally published in Newsweek.com.

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