For Israel, losing the battle for hearts and minds is worse than failing to defeat Hamas

 

Screenshot of The Economist’s 23 March 2024 cover

By James M. Dorsey

Thank you for joining me today. I am grateful to those who have become paid subscribers. I need some more to enable me to continue cutting through the fog of kinetic and information wars and offer fact-based analysis. No doubt, you will have noticed that The Turbulent World has no sponsors and no advertisers. This guarantees the column and podcast’s independence. Instead, The Turbulent World depends on the support of its readers and listeners to cover the cost of producing the column and podcast. You can contribute by clicking on Substack on the subscription button at http://jamesmdorsey.substack.com and choosing one of the subscription options. 

 

To watch a video version of this story  or listen to an audio podcast click here. 

 

Thank you for your support and loyalty. 

 

Israel hasn’t just lost the battle for hearts and minds in much of the world, including significant constituencies in Western countries.

 

It has scored a significant own goal that has rendered it all but impossible to achieve a key element of Israel’s quest for Middle Eastern and Muslim recognition.

For much of its history, Israel has sought recognition not only of its existence as anchored in international law but of the Jewish state’s ‘right to exist,’ a concept non-existent in the legalities governing diplomacy and inter-state relations.

Recognition of Israel’s right to exist rather than its de jure existence means endorsement of the narrative that Jews are the legitimate claimants to historic Palestine, even if they have not constituted a majority of the territory’s population for at least 1,600 years.

Moreover, Israel’s quest rejects the legitimacy of competing national narratives as part of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, with the Palestinian state expressing the national aspirations of a displaced people.

By demanding recognition of Israel’s right to exist, Israel wants Palestinians to abandon their claims to the land and legitimise their displacement in the 1948 and 1967 Middle East wars.

US House of Representatives recognizes Israel’s right to exist in November 2023 vote

The 1993 Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) that led to the creation of the internationally recognised Palestine Authority fudged the issue by framing it as Israel’s “right to exist in peace and security” rather than its “right to exist” as a matter of principle.

Yet even that could prove a difficult sell in future negotiations without a significant degree of reciprocity.

Given Israel’s Gaza war conduct, the tens of thousands of Palestinian deaths, the devastation of the Strip’s infrastructure, and the blood-curdling language that has gone mainstream in official and public Israeli discourse, Palestinians will demand an equal right to “exist in peace and security.”

To be sure, Hamas’ October 7 attack that killed some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, sparked the Gaza war. Throughout the war, the group has made statements and acted with equally blood-curdling disregard for innocent lives, whether Palestinian or Israeli and a lack of empathy for the plight of their own or the other.

A comparison of war-related mass Israeli anti-government protests in 1982 and today tells the story of hardening positions.

In September 1982, 400,000 protesters in Tel Aviv called for a state commission of inquiry into the Sabra and Chatila massacre. Credit: GPO

In 1982, some 400,000 Israelis took to the streets to protest the slaughter by a Lebanese Christian militia of at least 800 Palestinians in Beirut’s Sabra and Shatila refugee camps under the watchful eyes of the invading Israeli military.

This weekend’s protests in Israel, the largest in Israeli history with 750,000 people pouring into the streets of Tel Aviv and other Israeli cities, were about the lives of Hamas-held hostages with little if any reference to the high number of the war’s Palestinian casualties.

To be fair, there were no hostages in Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon.

Moreover, the most recent Israeli public opinion poll suggested that a majority of Israelis had no confidence in Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and Defence Minister Yoav Gallant’s management of the war but would not be opposed to the war if hostage lives were not at stake.

Credit: Anadolu Ajansi

Even so, the weekly protests constitute a public recognition that negotiations and a ceasefire rather than military action are likely to bring hostages home alive.

Hamas’ summary execution earlier this month of six hostages before Israeli troops could rescue them drove the point home.

As a result, Mr. Netanyahu’s insistence on military action and willingness to sabotage US-Qatar-Egypt-mediated ceasefire talks is as much designed to ensure the continuation of the war as it is to thwart the notion that what applies to the hostages is equally valid for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

For now, many Israelis and Jews have yet to connect the dots. To prevent that, Mr. Netanyahu and his cohorts have worked hard to paint a picture of a global environment populated by anti-Semites in which Israel is surrounded by forces seeking its destruction.

“We are surrounded by a murderous ideology led by Iran’s axis of evil. In recent days, despicable terrorists have murdered six of our hostages in cold blood and three Israeli police officers. The murderers do not distinguish between us;  they want to murder us all, until the very last one — right and left, secular and religious, Jews and non-Jews,” Mr. Netanyahu said in response to Sunday’s killing of three Israelis in a secure zone of the King Hussein / Allenby Bridge, one of three border crossings linking Jordan and the West Bank.

Screenshot poster of The Temple Emmanue/ Steicker Cultural Center

French Jewish intellectual Bernard-Henri Levy echoed Mr. Netanyahu’s view of a hostile world in which Jews and Israel stand alone. It’s a worldview that exists in a vacuum. It fails to recognise that refusing to grant others the dignity and rights one claims for oneself bears risks.

Echoing Mr. Netanyahu, Mr. Levy recently told The Wall Street Journal that the world’s response to Hamas’ October 7 attack “was a very big surprise. I expected at least a moment of real solidarity in the face of this enormous crime.”

Instead, the perpetrators were “blessed, excused, and praised.” The victims were “accused, cursed and held responsible for their fates…. A big part of the world was longing for something like Oct. 7, dreaming of it,” Mr. Levy said.

To be sure, anti-Semitism has long been on the rise even before Hamas’ October 7 attack and the Gaza war fueled by far-right politicians and groups with histories of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia.

From left to right: France’s Marine Le Pen, Binyamin Netanyahu, Hungary’s Victor Orban, Donald J. Trump, and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni. Credit: The Economist

Interestingly, these are forces Mr. Netanyahu and his ultra-nationalist cohorts often feel closest to.

By the same token, nothing, including Israel’s 17-year-long siege of Gaza, creeping de facto annexation of the West Bank, and humiliating repression of expressions of Palestinian national identity, justifies Hamas’ October 7 killing of innocent civilians.

Similarly, Hamas’ stubborn resistance in Gaza, the burgeoning armed resistance in the West Bank, and this weekend’s King Hussein Bridge attack suggest that disproportionate collective punishment neither solves Israel’s security problems nor enhances Israel’s international standing.

Worse than that, Mr. Netanyahu and Mr. Levy’s vision of a conspiratorial world that is out to get the Jews and Israel in which Palestinians with equally legitimate aspirations are non-existent threatens to lead Israel, Israelis, and Jews down a dangerous path and potentially towards a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Dr. James M. Dorsey is an Adjunct Senior Fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies, and the author of the syndicated column and podcast, The Turbulent World with James M. Dorsey.