CKNW Editorial
for December 17, 2001

One of the things I most resent is the argument that, if for example you criticize the Nisga’a Treaty, you are racist or if you say something unkind about the State of Israel you are anti-Semitic. Those are unworthy arguments because they are evil but perhaps more importantly, they have the effect of stifling debate. This was certainly true with Nisga’a - I even had colleagues suggesting I was racist because I took the view that a race based fishery was a bad idea, because a race based society was a bad idea and because a constitutional amendment through the back door creating such a political entity was a bad idea.

I have also, from time to time, taken the lash from the Canadian Jewish Congress for making statements critical of the State of Israel with the only possible inference to be drawn that I am anti-Semitic. I need not tell you that I utterly reject the suggestion that I am either racist or anti-Semitic.

Having made that plain, I hope, let me say that anyone who opposes native settlements or a policy of the state of Israel will find himself surrounded, most unwillingly, by racists and anti-Semites. And there are lots of them. We have a man calling the show from time to time who has never in the last 15 years or so, had a single positive thing to say about Israel. Everything they do is evil, according to him, and whatever the Palestinians do is just fine. So evil is Israel, in fact, that there can be no criticism of suicide bombers in marketplaces and similar acts of terror. Only he and his ilk know if they are anti-Semitic but their steady outpourings against Israel without the slightest semblance of balance make it difficult not to use the "if it waddles like a duck" analogy.

This attitude of utter intransigence is particularly unhelpful in these times. For the logical extension of their arguments – indeed one sometime columnist made this clear to me in writing – is that the State of Israel has no right to survive. If that is the reverse side of the argument that says Israel must make concessions to the Palestinians it’s not hard to understand why a hawk like Ariel Sharon is in power and supported by men who have sometimes been seen as doves. You cannot possibly have a debate of any sort if the position of one side is that the other can, and indeed must be driven into the sea.

This is the argument of the Ayatollahs in Iran … this is the Bin Laden position. And it is a position which precludes discussion much less settlement.

For Israel the cornerstone of any settlement must be her unqualified right to exist as a nation. There cannot be any ifs, ands or buts about that. Moreover – and this seems to be a sticking point - that must be understood not as part of the peace process but as a condition precedent to that process.

A debate of the merits of each side’s arguments over the past 50 years could occupy half the world’s savants for their collective lifetimes. And there have been atrocities on both sides but that doesn’t mean one’s as bad as another. War is hell and war has its casualties and cruelties but the suicide bombings and wanton killing of civilians by Hamas and others are in a category by themselves.

There is a factor that Israel sometimes recognizes and sometimes doesn’t. Yasser Arafat simply does not have the political clout to make a deal. Israel, when it holds Arafat personally accountable for violence, ignores that truth but I think we all, very much including Presidents of the United States going back to Jerry Ford have ignored it too. As Samuel Johnson said of a second marriage, making deals with Arafat is a triumph of faith over experience.

I certainly do not take the position that Israel doesn’t have much to answer for because it does. If nothing else, the Israeli settlements in the occupied territories have been a huge and ongoing provocation of the worst kind. It’s hard to imagine anything more calculated to provoke an attitude of intransigence than for one side to begin to permanently occupy lands that are under dispute. To say, as Norman Spector does, that Israelis have as much right to settle there as he does to own a home in Victoria is the sort of specious non sequitur that is, to put it mildly, unhelpful.

These are the most dangerous of times in that region. Would that Yasser Arafat in what is not a particularly democratic government had the same ability so speak for his people as does a Prime Minister of a democratic Israel. But he doesn’t. And despite what his apologists say, I believe that the reason Arafat could not bring off the last Camp David agreement is because the expectations of his people, in large raised or at least abetted by Arafat himself, are such that no agreement is presently possible. For the sticking point is really the demand of Palestinians to return to their pre 1947 lands or have full compensation in lieu thereof. This is never going to happen. The consequence of such an agreement would be that Israel would no longer be a Jewish state which is tantamount, in the eye of Israelis, to national suicide.

Compensation is an option but, again, full compensation is beyond anyone’s ability to pay.

And this brings us to the harsh reality that some powers of the  world won’t face – the disputed territories were won in wars, most of which, not all, but most of which were started by friends of the Palestinians. That doesn’t mean that Israel shouldn’t give them back. But it does mean in the real world that she is not going to until her right to exist is secure both legally and militarily.

Unhappily it doesn’t seem that any bargain satisfying those two critical points is within the grasp of Yasser Arafat to make. Even worse, given the state of expectations of Palestinians, it may not be within the grasp of any future Palestinian leader to make either.