WILL ISRAEL JOIN THE MARCH OF FOLLY / THE NEW YORK TIMES OP EDITORIAL ( VERY HIGHLY RECOMMENDED READING )

March 11, 2010

I.H.T. Op-Ed Contributor

Will Israel Join the March of Folly?

By URI DROMI

Barbara Tuchman, in her classic book “March of Folly,” examined four cases in history when governments acted contrary to their own best interests: the Trojans who let the Greeks bring the fatal horse into their midst; the papacy, which allowed and even brought about the Protestant secession; the British who lost America, and America, which lost the war in Vietnam.

When I heard that during Vice President Joseph Biden’s visit to Israel the government had approved the construction of 1,600 new homes in East Jerusalem, I was reminded of Tuchman’s book.

Beside the blunder of rubbing it in the face of your best friend and ally, there lies a much more substantial error: By expanding settlements instead of separating from the Palestinians while we still can, we Israelis are dooming ourselves to lose the Jewish and democratic state that has been won with so much sacrifice. In other words, we are immersed in our own march of folly. And we are doing it with our eyes open.

Ehud Barak, Israel’s defense minister, should know. More than 20 years ago, when he was a general in uniform and I was the head of the Israeli Defense Forces’ publishing house, he urged me to translate military history books. “We need to learn from history,” he told me.

Knowing for sure that Mr. Barak had read “March of Folly,” I started wondering why he kept mute about the direction Israel is taking toward a binational state. At last, at a conference in Tel Aviv on Jan. 25, he spoke out: “The lack of a solution to the problem of border demarcation within the historic Land of Israel — and not an Iranian bomb — is the most serious threat to Israel’s future.”

Exactly. Except that every day border demarcation becomes more difficult to accomplish. It may be reasonable to assume that if and when the land is finally divided, the big settlements close to the pre-1967 line will stay within Israel, with a land swap in return.

However, it is the small settlements located in the middle of heavily populated Palestinian areas that make such separation difficult, if not impossible.

If the Israeli government were to borrow a page from Tuchman’s book, it would announce that in a given time — say in three years — Israel will pull out of most of the West Bank, waiting for the Palestinians to get their act together. An international peacekeeping force would be deployed there to maintain a reasonable level of security until a viable Palestinian state was established.

What about the Jews in these small settlements, those located within a future Palestinian state? They would have to choose whether to return to Israel proper, or stay and become law-abiding citizens of the Palestinian state.

Alas, in today’s Israel this is only a daydream. While people talk about the danger of Israel becoming a binational state, the government seems incapable or unwilling to do anything to prevent this from happening.

Let me state that I’m attached to every part of the Land of Israel, especially to Jerusalem. However, in our case, the choice is not between good and bad, but between bad and worse. Keeping all of the land could prove disastrous.

Today we are in limbo, and the situation only gets worse. If dividing the land in the West bank is difficult, in Jerusalem it’s almost impossible. Yet there is a constant drive to settle Jews in Arab neighborhoods of the city, most recently in Sheikh Jarrah. The fact that these Jews have legal property rights doesn’t help us in the long run — what happens if Palestinians start claiming their own property rights?

Consider the following scenario: The Palestinians decide to do nothing, just wait patiently until there is no way to divide the land anymore. The country just becomes one, binational state.

Then, assuming that the Israelis wouldn’t dare or wouldn’t be allowed by the rest of the world to run the country as an apartheid state, the Palestinians start voting in elections and running for Parliament.

The next step is that the Palestinians, through their higher birth rate, become a majority, and they manage to pass a law in Parliament allowing everybody to return to their former homes. Few Jews would then settle legally in Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem or in the middle of Hebron. At the same time, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians would be allowed to return to the homes they left in 1948, in Haifa, Jaffa, Jerusalem and elsewhere.

Will the Israelis, who for decades had been fighting the Palestinian claim of “the right of return,” consciously let in this Trojan Horse, thus digging with their own hands the grave of the Jewish state? Or will they wake up before they join Tuchman’s “March of Folly”?

Uri Dromi was spokesman for the Rabin and Peres governments from 1992 to 1996.