What Liberals Still Don't Get

Benjamin Kerstein is a Senior Writer for The New Ledger.

Unsurprisingly, this is manifestly not what Clinton actually said. She simply pointed out, quite accurately, that the issue of the settlements has never been a precondition for negotiations. As she rather clearly put it, "There has never been a precondition. It's always been an issue within the negotiations." Still, it really isn't all that difficult to figure out that this is something of a climbdown, and one which should not have been unexpected to anyone who knows what they're talking about when it comes to the Middle East. Obama's attempt to overturn precedent and turn the settlements into a precondition has been a clear failure for awhile now, and he seems to have finally processed the fact that his attempt at leaping over the difficult preliminaries of any peace process by sheer force of his magnificent personality has only made the Palestinians more intransigent and the Israelis more mistrustful of any concessions whatsoever.

In keeping with the hysterical tendencies of his generation of liberal establishmentarians, however, Ackerman uses this rather innocuous statement of the obvious from the secretary of state as his cue to leap straight off the cliff. "Does the Obama administration get how precarious a moment this is for the Palestinian leadership?" he demands to know.

"Some very smart and very moderate Palestinians - people who want peace, two states and nonviolence - recently explained to me that they get their legs cut out under them if they negotiate while Israel expands the settlements. Abbas said he wouldn't do it. Now he's expected to, thanks to Obama, from a position of greater popular weakness? What's the U.S. giving to Abbas? Netanyahu knows what he's doing. He's pressuring an Obama administration that, as Gideon Levy writes in Ha'aretz, coddles Israeli intransigence in the naive hope of getting to negotiations, to create the conditions where negotiations are a non-starter; to say nothing of the nightmare that will befall the Palestinian people caught in between the occupation and the looming fanatical horror of Hamas government in the West Bank."

One doesn't know where to begin with this kind of thing, which is not so much commentary as gurgling. Nonetheless, it is not too strenuous to point out that the Palestinians had an ostensibly smart and moderate leadership for years during the Oslo Process, which was presented with a compromise that would not only stop expanding settlements but remove them completely. This smart and moderate leadership's response to this was a terrorist war. To the extent their legs have been cut out from under them, it is they who performed the amputation. Abbas, for his part, has been in a position of "popular weakness" for years, and is only getting weaker as theocratic Islamic continues to replace secular nationalism as the primary vehicle for Palestinian politics and political violence. It should also be noted that this theocratic Islam, in the form of Hamas, was freely chosen by and remains popular among the Palestinians, and many of them do not regard it as a "looming fanatical horror" or a "nightmare" but as an accurate representative of their political sentiments; which, I fear, it quite often is.

Nor is it at all clear how Netanyahu is "pressuring" the United States and, indeed, Ackerman never bothers to explain this point, I imagine because it is so transparently ludicrous. America may be in somewhat dire economic straits, but it remains the most powerful country in the world and is pressured by no one. If anything is pressuring Obama, it is the fallout from his own incompetence, which is probably why his young acolytes are rushing to blame it all on Netanyahu and his extraordinary powers of manipulation. "Netanyahu," we are assured, "knows what he's doing," which means nothing but says a great deal about the conspiratorial mindset embraced by ostensibly mainstream (and ostensibly sensible) liberal commentators.

Every conspiracy theory, French philosopher Alain Finkielkraut once remarked, ends with the Elders of Zion; and indeed, the main purpose of Ackerman's missive appears to be whipping his liberal readers into a state of seething frustration and hatred toward Israel, while giving due deference to popular leftwing fantasies about Israeli omnipotence. This is probably why he approvingly links to Gideon Levy, something that points both to Ackerman's own sentiments toward Israel and his total ignorance of this country's media and culture. Levy, a longtime columnist for the Israeli daily Haaretz, occupies a place in Israeli culture not dissimilar to that of Noam Chomsky or Gore Vidal in American culture. His main purpose in life is spewing out vaguely coherent pseudo-moralistic rants that rely on the power of defamatory rhetoric and emotional blackmail to make up for their intellectual emptiness. In one recent missive, for example, he spat out several paragraphs accusing secular Israelis of racism because of their attitude toward religious Jews; blissfully unaware, apparently, of the fact that "racism" self-evidently refers to race and not religion.

It must be said, however, that Levy's article does give us a good insight into the worldview of the young establishmentarians. It appears to involve a bitter and violent contempt for Israel which is part fantasy and part desperation. "Before no other country on the planet," Levy writes, "does the United States kneel and plead like this."

"Israel of 2009 is a spoiled country, arrogant and condescending, convinced that it deserves everything and that it has the power to make a fool of America and the world. The United States has engendered this situation, which endangers the entire Mideast and Israel itself. That is why there needs to be a turning point in the coming year - Washington needs to finally say no to Israel and the occupation. An unambiguous, presidential no."

What Levy, and most liberals along with him, ignores is that Israel has already said no to the occupation. It was the Palestinians who said yes to it by saying no to an end to the conflict. And in saying no, they also said yes to war, yes to terrorism, yes to hatred; yes, in fact, to everything that liberals ostensibly deplore. It is this fact, that the endgame of the Oslo Process with all its messianic hopes was an absolute and incontrovertible no from the Palestinians is likely what drives Levy, Ackerman, and others like them to fantasies of Israeli malfeasance that violate even the most commonsense observations of the way the world actually works.

The idea, which even they embrace (usually disapprovingly) when not dealing with Israel, that the United States is a massively powerful country that can do more or less whatever it wants to; or the fact that every development in Palestinian politics over the last decade has indicated a preference for war and not a readiness for peace; disappears behind the belief - as unshakable as a catechism - that the no never happened, because to acknowledge that it did happen would involve some terrifying soul-searching, and no religion (political or otherwise) likes to contemplate such a thing.

So, in the end, we are left with shibboleths: The Palestinians want peace and a state of their own, the Israelis are intransigent and unreasonable, the settlements are the primary cause of the failure of negotiations, and Israel has the power to coerce the United States into doing its will. That these beliefs run the gamut from dubious to deranged demands that the establishment that clings to them ensure their constant invocation, in hopes that repetition may ultimately triumph over reality. American liberalism has proven remarkably adept at manufacturing an echo chamber for itself, particularly on these subjects. That this also involves the promotion of petulant mediocrities is a price we must all unhappily pay.

By Benjamin Kerstein:
Reprinted with permission from The New Ledger.