What do you mean when you say 'no'?
Publisher: Haaretz
Date of publication: 11/19/2007
A festive day for peace: Israel is planning to announce a freeze on construction in the settlements as compensation for refusing to discuss the core issues. The Palestinians are ecstatic at all the good-will gestures Israel is throwing their way. First came the release of prisoners, now a freeze on construction, and the prime minister has already spoken with the settler leaders and informed them of the decision. They said it was a "difficult meeting," as it always is, winking at each other deviously.
Undoubtedly, Israel wants peace. But a tiny detail seems to have been forgotten: Israel has signed a series of binding agreements to freeze settlement activity, which it never intended to fulfill. Of the 40 years of occupation, only during three has construction been stopped despite all the agreements and promises to do so. There is no reason to believe that Israel will behave differently this time.
Of all Israel's iniquities in the occupied territories - the brutality, the assassinations, the siege, the hunger, the blackouts, the checkpoints and the mass arrests - nothing serves as witness to its real intentions than the settlements. Certainly for the future. Every home built in the territories, every light pole and every road are like a thousand witnesses: Israel does not want peace; Israel wants occupation. Whoever is serious about peace and a Palestinian state does not put up even a shed.
From Oslo through Camp David and on to the road map, Israel has not put an end to the most criminal enterprise in its history. A short memory refresher: In article 7 of the Oslo Accords, Israel promised that "no party would undertake unilateral steps to alter the situation on the ground, prior to the completion of negotiations for the final status." That really made an impression on Israel.During the 10 years that followed, the number of settlers doubled. What about the heroic peace efforts of Ehud Barak as prime minister? During the 18 months of his government, Israel began the construction of 6,045 residential units in the territories.
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DECONSTRUCTION
In this dogma driven piece, replete with ranting and polemics, Gideon Levy provides the reader a perfect example of Israel’s pseudo progressive left and specifically, its trend of radical self-excoriation. In “What do you mean when you say 'no'?”, one cannot expect to observe any notions of accountability regarding the Palestinian, and one quickly realizes that in Levy’s above description of the conflict, the Palestinian side doesn’t really exist. For, in Levy's view, they are deemed simply irrelevant, and there is no conflict for the simple reason that conflict implies two parties that are equally vested within the process of a struggle. Criticism, in Levy’s account of the conflict, can only be directed at one actor, Israel, or more precisely the settler population.
They are, as we read in the above article, “soiled by iniquity and felony”; Levy regards the mere existence of a Jewish inhabitance on the land as the real and absolute problem, for him a future Palestinian State must be Jew free. Moreover his accusations leveled at the settler population are backed up by invalid source information, his use of a controversial Peace Now report, "According to Peace Now, based on Civil Administration data that have been kept hidden for years, about 40 percent of the settlements were built on privately owned land of Palestinians helpless to safeguard what is in most cases their sole property that was robbed in broad daylight by an occupying state."
This has since been proven in a indepth CAMERA study to be grossly innacurate. With a shocking disregard for the massive failure of the Oslo process, Levy unabashedly peddles his historical distortions despite these overwhelming facts. His total disregard for the massive Palestinian terror machine upgrade, and expansion of its terror capabilities under the cover of a hand extended in peace, is outrageous.
His myopic perspective that cynically refuses to incorporate the 1500+ Israeli’s that have been murdered since Arafat’s refusal in Camp David and Taba only furthers the depth of moral confusion found within this article. Levy makes no mention of these victims, but seems to adequately capture the Palestinian misfortune “the brutality, the assassinations, the siege, the hunger, the blackouts, the checkpoints and the mass arrests”. From the Left’s ivory tower, he defends the Palestinian plight, but in the same stroke refuses to honor the voices these victims of terror testify to regarding the machinations of deceptive Palestinian diplomacy. This article silences these injustices that in any reasonable commentary would affect and temper the accusations made against Israel in this vicious conflict.
Furthermore, Levy's total acceptance of the cynical Arab occupation narrative, his use of erroneous data, all at the cost of historical accuracy is too convenient for comfort, whereas verifiable history provides the Jews the justifications to in fact not be defined as a foreign colonizer, Levy in his duplicitous history reaches a point where Jews settling the land of their ancestors is in his words, “the most criminal enterprise in its history.” His inability to provide the relevant historical context is the final metaphorical straw for this reader, where his sentences are less an analysis of current events, but rather a narrow perspective cloaked in provocative language.
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