Reflecting Reality

"In a Dove’s Flight and Descent, an Israeli Story"
WK4, Sunday, 11/02/08
By Ethan Bronner

The Times’ Ethan Bronner marked the occasion of Yossi Beilin’s political departure by offering a tribute to the architect of the dance known as the peace process.

Bronner, perhaps out of deference to Beilin or due to his own blind spots, neglects to report the overriding mood today among mainstream Israelis – the peace process was a failure, and the Palestinians are to blame. Bronner needn’t agree with this feeling to mention it.

Actually, he opens the door to this point, but doesn’t walk through, noting that both Shimon Peres and Beilin have abandoned Labor, “whose own fortunes have been sinking steadily.” Why have they sunk? Anyone following recent Israeli politics understands that Labor has been largely discredited after Oslo and Camp David 2000.

Last week Beilin said, according to Bronner, that he was “leaving in triumph, since his support for an end to occupation of Palestinian territories and the creation of a Palestinian state, once radical positions, are today mainstream.”

While these positions have entered the Israeli mainstream, they’re not currently rooted in a belief in Palestinian moderation, in which Beilin has never stopped believing. Though the creation of a Palestinian state is indeed a mainstream concept in Israel, the urgency in its establishment is mitigated by the harsh reality of Palestinian rejection. This is where Beilin veers from the mainstream.

While he affirms Beilin’s assertion that he mainstreamed these twin ideas – ending the occupation and creating an independent Palestinian state – Bronner writes that it’s “impossible not to see [his departure] also as a defeat…of his goals, with no Palestinian state on the horizon.”

Bronner’s view on Beilin’s departure as a defeat falls short. It’s not simply because a Palestinian state is not “on the horizon,” but because Beilin grossly miscalculated Palestinian intentions, and continues to do so.

Beilin himself recognizes that he miscalculated. Bronner points out that Beilin “said he felt betrayed by the Palestinians but that Israel had mishandled things as well.” That Bronner allows such trite equivocation is a sign of insufficient reporting.

Bronner cannot substantiate his claim that Kadima’s “outlook today seems hard to distinguish from” Beilin’s. Although Kadima speaks of the need to withdraw from the West Bank, it does so based more on the demographic factor – the need to secure a Jewish democratic state, and much less on any real faith in Palestinian compromise, to which Beilin still clings. Furthermore, Kadima was elected on a platform of unilateral withdrawal, a concept not embraced by Beilin. In short, Bronner attempts to validate Beilin’s claim that his worldview has gone mainstream. It has not.